The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (27 page)

And the Sobornost is coming.

What have they done?

The nova of her anger surprises her. She pushes herself off Prometheus on her suit’s thrusters. The raions and nanomissiles will be coming soon. She launches autonomous q-dots in a sphere around her to form a defensive perimeter. Something drops a metacloak near her and triggers them almost immediately.

A ship. In quicktime, she has a brief flash of its shape, a blue, elongated droplet of smartmatter, like the petal of a flower. She fires her cannon at it.

The newcomer’s EM field grabs her, hard. The 20G acceleration shakes her like a leaf in a hurricane. Prometheus becomes a pinpoint in an instant.
What is it doing
? Through the acceleration strain, she tries to scan the ship, target something she can hurt with the tiny antimatter payload in her cannon. It is pulling her in.

Wait. Wait.
She tries to keep her weapon steady. The EM field pulls her closer. Her gogols are making sense of the ship’s structure now, a strange zoku-Sobornost hybrid, high-end picotech and a micro-singularity somewhere inside.
Well, this should at least hurt.
She gets ready to fire the antimatter pellet, targets it to burrow into the ship’s core. If the Hawking radiation containment breaks, it will take them both, but the fire in Mieli’s mind wants something to burn.

Just before she presses the mind-trigger, a qupt comes.

Hello, Mieli. There is something familiar about this. Except this time, you were the one in a prison.

She hesitates for an instant. The EM field pulls her in, and the midnight skin of the ship swallows her.

16

THE THIEF AND MIELI

Mieli appears in the pilot’s cabin of the
Leblanc
, just like she does in my fondest memories: wearing a furious expression.

‘
You
,’ she hisses. She is how I remember her from
Perhonen
, a compact woman in a black toga, her only ornament the jewelled chain around her ankle, a gift from an Oortian lover. The sudden rush of familiarity almost makes me embrace her. Still, I keep my distance: we may be in a Realm under my control, and I was prudent enough to delete her weapons when qupting her into the virtual space inside the ship, but Mieli is still one of the most dangerous individuals I know.

I grin. ‘Me. Welcome aboard the
Leblanc.
As you have probably figured out by now, I didn’t come here to steal Saturn’s ring. I came here to steal
you.
I have a small Great Game jewel, and managed to slip some ideas into the zoku volition, so I could make sure you were somewhere I could find you. In case you had any ideas from someone called Lenormand, that was me. I had a strangelet bomb set up on Pandora as a distraction. Turns out I didn’t have to use it, thanks to the exceedingly well-timed Sobornost invasion. Tell me, how does it feel to be free?’

Her hands clench and unclench. Then she moves faster than I can react. A silver filigreed blade shimmers into being in her hand, and then its point is inches away from my eyeball, her other hand firmly around my throat.
Of course. Zoku enhancements. Adapt to Realms. How silly of me to overlook that.

‘Wait,’ I gasp.

‘What makes you think I want to hear what you have to say? Get me back out there. Right now. I have a war to fight.’

This is going better than I thought. At least I still have a tongue.

‘What did they tell you? That you would be free to leave any time? They lie about that, you know. I had to help you. The only way to do it was to break the whole system, to give you back your free will.’ My eyes widen. ‘Or … don’t tell me you are still working for the pellegrini? I didn’t see
that
one coming. What happened to the copy in your head, by the way?’

She throws me to the floor. I sit up slowly, massaging my throat.

‘She is gone,’ Mieli hisses. ‘Just like the entire Supra City will be soon. What in the Dark Man’s name did you do to the volition system?’

I smile sadly. ‘The Spooky-zoku and the Great Game have known about this for some time, but they have worked very hard to keep it a secret. It’s the reason why they destroyed Mars. I’ll give you the crib notes: the Collapse was caused by quantum mechanics breaking down. It turns out there is a bound for the size of entangled quantum states: create anything bigger than that, and things get even more crazy than usual. The whole zoku quantum jewel system has been teetering close to the boundary a while. So I just gave it a little push.

‘You may have noticed that there has been an increase in the number of spam zokus recently. I have been generating them algorithmically, with Sobornost-derived gogol minds. It’s amazing what you can do if you look past ideological differences and combine technologies in creative ways.’

I stagger upright. Mieli is standing with her back turned to me, still opening and closing the fingers of one hand, rotating the Realm-knife in the other.

‘As I said, I did not anticipate the invasion. But Mieli, it will be fine, the zoku have dealt with Sobornost before, this is some power move in the civil war, Joséphine getting desperate since her scheme with the jewel went wrong, surely. The zoku are always at their best when pushed into a corner. And what do you care, anyway? Have you gone native? Don’t tell me you have. I was going to take you home. They’ve done too good a job on you, Mieli. We are on our way to Oort, I thought that’s what you wanted,
Perhonen
said you missed it.’ My voice breaks.

‘Shut up, Jean. Don’t you
dare
to speak my ship’s name,’ she says in a thin voice, without turning around. ‘And it’s not some expeditionary force from a civil war, you idiot. It’s the
entire Sobornost.
It’s your All-Defector, controlling all of them. It has come for the Kaminari jewel. And you have just served the prize on a platter.’

I feel hollow and fragile, as if I was made of glass. Somewhere, I can hear my other self from the Gallery, laughing.
We are not that different.

Mieli turns to look at me.

‘Why couldn’t you die with
her
, you bastard!’

My head spins.
The All-Defector.
I was wondering what Joséphine’s backup plan was. I remember facing it in the glass cell of the Dilemma Prison.
The thing that never cooperates
and gets away with it.
An anomaly forged in the crucible of endless Dilemma iterations, something the Archons never expected, not so much a gogol as a viral algorithm. It pretended to me, and I trusted it. In a
guberniya
, it would go through Sobornost minds like a scythe through wheat.
And it wants the Kaminari jewel?

My mistake is so deep I can’t even see the bottom.

The Sobornost is going to wipe out Supra City. I took away their only advantage.
I remember Sirr, blue and golden, freshly reborn on the Irem Plate. I remember kissing the sisters’ hands, how they smelled of henna and perfume.
I betrayed them, again. I broke my promise.

Am I going to destroy everything I touch?

‘No, this not my fault, it must have done something to me, planted an idea about the Wei bound.’ I know it’s nonsense, but the words come out, and I can’t stop. ‘It planned everything, ever since we met in the Prison, I could see it in its eyes, like a thinking mirror, it knew I would try to free you.’

The words bounce and shatter in my head, and for the first time in my life I know what it is like to want for the silence and the black that only truedeath brings.

She slaps me. Even in the Realm, it stings. I lean on the control organ of the ship to keep upright. The knife gleams in her other hand, like a promise.

‘That’s a Realm-knife, Mieli,’ I whisper. ‘It will work even here. It will hurt me. Why don’t you just do it? I deserve it. Come on. It was my fault
Perhonen
died.’

She drops the knife. It bounces off the crystal of the round observation window and makes a tinkling sound.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It was mine.’

*

Mieli stares at the thief. He is pale and shaking. There is grief in his eyes, and a death wish. She has seen that look before, in the mirror.

‘I could have stopped all this,’ she says slowly. ‘If I had let you and the pellegrini go ahead.’

‘I doubt it,’ the thief says. ‘And you were right. We need to draw lines somewhere. The jewel was a fake, and I think All-D would have gotten out anyway. You did the only thing you could.’ He sighs. ‘Matjek is here. The child chen gogol from the desert. If we survive this, maybe you’d like to meet him.’

She closes her eyes. ‘Maybe. I only wish I could have been there, with her, in the end.’

The thief takes a faltering step forward. ‘This was the last thing I saw,’ he says. ‘Please don’t kill me yet. She sent you this.’

He kisses her forehead. She sees butterflies, burning, swirling in the form of a face, the ship’s face she only saw in the
alinen. Tell her that I love her. Look after her. For me. Promise.

There is a memory of a kiss on her lips. It tastes of fire and ashes. And then there is only black.

It is the first time I see Mieli cry. I don’t dare to touch her. I sit with my hands in my lap.

The abyss in me is still hungry, but at least for a moment, I manage to hang on to its edge.

I summon the cat avatar of the ship and tell it to start decelerating. It’s going to take a while: I’ve engaged the ship’s Hawking drive, and we are already well out of Saturnian space. Then I qupt a self-destruct order to my zoku botnet. It may be too late to form a new war zoku, but it won’t hurt. Finally, I order the cat to start gathering all the sensory data and chatter it can from the ongoing battle around Saturn.

When I’m done, I realise that Mieli is quiet again.

‘We are on our way back,’ I say. ‘And once my signal gets there, the volition system should be coming back online, too. It will take time: I just hope it’s not too late.’ I pause. ‘I guess we both know what she would say about this.’
That we are both fools. And we need to fix the mistakes we have made.

Mieli nods and gets up.

‘Come on,’ I say and offer her my hand. ‘We can’t do anything more right now. I have a fast-time Realm, so we are not in a hurry. And I think we could both use a drink.’

The thief takes Mieli through a silver gate to a Realm that is a ship – a real ship, an ancient, sea-going vessel, with people in elaborate, heavy clothing. It is the first time she has been in an ocean-going vessel. Usually, planetary surfaces disturb her, but the fresh sea air clears her head a little, and the sound of the sea is soothing. She looks at the foamy line the ship draws in the dark surface of the sea. It is night, and the ship’s lights make blurry reflections in the dark water, mirroring the round yellow moon in the velvety sky.

They sit in deck chairs by the railing in the bow of the ship. A man in a white uniform brings them two glasses.

‘The best single malt in the Universe, or so I’m told,’ the thief says. ‘To your health.’ His hand is still shaking. He downs half of his drink with one gulp and closes his eyes. Mieli tastes hers carefully. At first, it’s just liquor with a smoky overtone, but as she holds it in her mouth, it blooms into something warm, soft and gentle, with a final endnote of a spice she does not recognise.

It mingles with the lingering taste of
Perhonen’s
last kiss.

They drink in silence for a while.

Only an echo of Mieli’s anger remains. She feels tired and helpless. She grits her teeth. The thief was right. Supra City may be fighting, but why should she care? She fought the zoku herself, in the past. Surely, it is just the tugging of the quantum chains of the zoku jewels, wrapped around her mind. She sips the strange liquor again.

Zinda didn’t have to tell me the truth. But she did. Everyone else has always lied to me.

‘So, is this who Jean le Flambeur is, now?’ she says aloud, just to brush away the thought. She pauses. ‘Did you really truekill someone to steal this ship?’

‘What? No! You have been listening to Barbicane, haven’t you? There may have been some property damage, but that’s all. It was
he
who did it, to protect his cover. He’s a callous bastard. I’ve never been very fond of killing, true or temporary. It’s not very elegant.’ He looks at Mieli curiously. ‘You
have
been busy.’

Mieli shrugs.

‘To be honest, I have been thinking of retiring,’ the thief says. ‘For real, this time. Getting you out was going to be my last job. But it sounds like we are going to have to think of something else now.’ He leans forward in his chair. ‘What about you? What have you been doing since you fed me to the Hunter?’

Between careful tastes of her drink, Mieli tells the thief her story. When she describes her encounter with the All-Defector and Joséphine’s sacrifice, the thief’s eyes widen.

‘Why would she do that? I know her pretty well, and I would have thought she considers you more expendable than even a low-level gogol of herself.’ He looks at Mieli. ‘But if she was more afraid of you being taken by All-D than of a copydeath—’ He squeezes the bridge of his nose.

‘
Perhonen
did tell me your story, you know. No offence, but to me, there was always something strange about the way Sydän led you to Venus, and how you found the pellegrini. As if it was
meant
to happen.

‘You see, Joséphine doesn’t just find people, she
makes
them. She did that to me, when I was young. She needed an agent she could trust, so she got me out of Santé Prison and moulded me into one.’ He looks at the sky and smiles at a distant memory. ‘Of course, it did not exactly work out like that, but that’s how it started, between us.

‘I recently … learned a little about the Kaminari jewel. To get it to accept you, you need to wish for something altruistic
and
something that is constant across your possible future selves. A singular drive, perhaps. Something all-consuming. Like saving someone from a black hole’s event horizon.’ The thief looks at Mieli. His eyes are bright.