Undertow (26 page)

No more than thirty seconds passed before Closs glanced up, connection cut, and said, “Is it worse than thousands dead and downed communications?”

“No,” André answered. “But it’s not
much
better.”

“Thirty seconds,” Closs said flatly, André’s heart bloomed with joy that he had never developed a reputation for melodrama.

“Jefferson Greene is going to provoke a ranid uprising, if he hasn’t already. He destroyed one village that I know of. Took captives.”

Closs tipped his head back and let it loll for a moment, then took one deep breath and reassembled his facade. “I know,” he said. “How do
you
?”

André thumped his cane on the deck. “You sent me into the middle of his damned massacre. Hunting your renegade. He’s out of control, Tim.”

There was a pause. Then Closs said, “Thanks. It’s going to have to wait. Look, why don’t you ride out the storm here? There’s a skeleton staff in the galley. Go down, get fed. Are you armed?”

A loaded question. “Never without,” André answered.

Closs half smiled, then glanced away. It was a dismissal. André turned for the door—

—and almost walked into Maurice, who had a mug of coffee in each hand. He dodged André neatly, making André feel like a lumbering beast on his cane, and set one cup on Closs’s desk. The major, focused on the voices in his head, nodded thanks.

It seemed to be his only delivery, because—the other cup still steaming in his left hand—he followed André back out, without a word until the door was closed behind them. Then he said, “Going to the mess?”

“If I can find it.”

Maurice sipped his coffee left-handed. “I’ll show you the way. Maurice Sadowski.” He held out the right hand.

“André Deschênes,” André said, and took it. He was expecting the handoff then, but he pulled his hand back empty.

“Come on. We’d better eat before it gets too rough.”

André hesitated a half-step, and Maurice hurried to walk beside him. They made idle conversation through the corridor and down the lift.

The mess wasn’t busy, but a few crew and employees ate with haste and concentration at small tables. “Who would I see to volunteer?” André asked. They queued for food, André stumping awkwardly on his cane.

Maurice gave it an eloquent glance.

“I didn’t mean as a deckhand,” André snapped. Maurice grinned, and dropped a packet of chocolate pudding on his tray.

“It’s full of calcium,” he said, as André was about to lift it and replace it on the rack. But it was a glimpse of a black glossy data chit underneath that made André return it to the tray.

“Do you always mother strangers?”

“Always,” Maurice said. André snorted, and they flashed their cards at the cash register on the way out, pausing a moment to let it total the food. Maurice led André to an empty table. It rocked slightly when André set his food down: on gimbals. He’d have to watch his knees if they hit any discernable chop.

André palmed the chit and slipped it into a pocket as he moved the pudding off his tray. “I was raised right the first time.” He heard the glib words roll off his tongue and stopped speaking abruptly.

A perfect piece of luck, it turned out. Because he heard the flutter in the background noise of the mess, and started to his feet before he consciously registered the source of the problem. He dropped his fork on the tray, where it clinked dully, and let his hand drop to hover beside the butt of the short arm concealed under the hem of his tunic.

There were five Rimmers near the main entrance, and three more at the back door, all uniformed. They didn’t look hungry.

“André?”

He didn’t need to answer. Maurice had turned to follow his gaze, and as two members of the first team came forward, he lunged to his feet. The table rocked, creaking on its gimbals. He glanced over his shoulder. André, aware of their surroundings, already knew what he would see. There were two more armed women and a man behind them, blocking escape through the kitchens.

Should have seen it coming
. Should have seen it coming when Closs asked him if he was armed, if he’d been operating at anything resembling normal capacity.

The one André took for a leader stepped forward and indicated his ID. “Dayvid Kountché,” he said. “Please come with us quietly, and you’ll be treated well.”

“Certainly, Officer,” André said, but what he tight-beamed Maurice was: “Well, I guess the time for subtlety is over.”

Maurice just gave him a wide-eyed stare. Brave enough in his own way, but not exactly an action hero. It was on André.

And then Maurice cocked his head, a funny sideways kind of gesture like acquiescence. André was cc’d on the message Maurice snap-sent Cricket:
Fisher, now would not be a bad time.

Cricket’s agreement flashed green over both of them, and as Maurice shouted—squalled, really—and grabbed the edge of the table, snapping it up hard, the ship’s lights and engine sizzled and died. A split second’s silence broke on a startled scream; the dinner trays went up and out and over, and whatever had been on them spattered Kountché and the floor around him.

The link was still up. “André,
go,
” Maurice called down it, and threw himself at Kountché. They went sprawling, elbows and fists and grunting, a shot that ricocheted at least once. One shot, and then a woman shouting at whomever to put the gun up.

At least one of the Rimmers had a brain. There was one of André and one of Maurice, and eleven of them, and a couple dozen bystanders. The odds were not in the cops’ favor.

Nor were they in Maurice’s. And there wasn’t a damned thing André could do to help him. Harder choice than he would have expected, but he dove for the darkened galley, his pistol in his hand. André had an advantage: the only person in the room he minded shooting was lying on the floor.

His augments at least let him see where the tables were in the dark. But the Rimmers had that, too, and the ones by the galley must have seen him moving, because one stepped in and dealt him a stunning blow on the point of the shoulder with the butt of her gun.

So they wanted him alive.

André had no such scruples; without turning, he leveled his pistol in her face point-blank and pulled the trigger. The pistol took caseless ammo; he had a good thirty rounds. Her jerk backward was more dying reflex than recoil; her blood and bone still splattered him. The smell of iron made his gorge rise, acid stinging his sinuses.
Shit
.

The second one was also too close to control him with a gun. It kept her alive; André broke her forearm with his cane as he went by. The third would have shot him, but André heard the
tap tap
of a jamming gun.

He could run on the cast, after a fashion, swinging himself along with the cane. But it wasn’t pretty, and it wouldn’t help him long.

Skeleton staff, Closs had said. He hoped to hell there was a ladder up to the main deck in the back of the galley. They had to bring food in somehow, right? So, logically…

He laid down two shots over his shoulder to discourage pursuit. Something crunched. It sounded like bone. “Maurice?”

“Go!”
said the voice in his head, and then a burst of pain and static ended the transmission hard. He winced. Maurice might have been knocked unconscious.

But in André’s professional opinion that wasn’t the case.

And the shocking thing—as he found the damned ladder, broke the security lock, ducked a badly aimed shot, and hot-wired the box—was that it hurt.

It wasn’t supposed to hurt. Maurice wasn’t anybody. Wasn’t anybody to André, and also wasn’t anybody in particular.

And he’d died so André could get out.

Fucking waste of a man’s life, was what that was.

He paused inside the door at the top of the ladder—you called it a ladder on a ship, but it was really a flight of stairs—and listened hard. Somebody out there, yes. And noise like the outside.

Lucky breaks, bad and good. His own luck; tonight, there was nobody pulling his chain.

Waste of a man’s life, to trade it for somebody like André.

Except André had nothing to do with it, did he? He could have been a paper airplane, flying from hand to hand. All that mattered was the information written on his wings.

André zorched the lock, was ready when the door snapped open. The Rimmers on the other side were not.

André shot them both.

Nonfatally.

They were just doing their jobs.

There was no way he was getting the scoot unloaded. He was going to have to jump, and swim for it until he could hijack a small craft from somebody.

Through choppy wake-slashed seas, in the teeth of an onrushing storm. Weighed down with his walking cast.

A thump of thunder rattled his teeth, so close he felt it as a blow.

Okay, so maybe he was paying for that luck after all.

Maurice spoke; Cricket snapped the Rim ship’s breakers and sent her into darkness, drifting. And into real, immediate danger of collision with the escaping vessels on either side of her and behind. And then Cricket had to duck, hard and fast, as Rim’s security protocols found her and grabbed, hard. She dumped herself out of the system, flicked a trailing edge of code out of their grasp like a coattail, and hoped like hell they hadn’t gotten a trace on her. There was transmitted pain, buffered by dampers; someone hit him, hard, again and again and again.

“Maurice?”

Sharp silence, and nothing. He might have dropped the connect, but it felt open—open, with nothing on the other side. His absence pushed over her like a buffeting wave, knocked her under, dragged her down. Not again, not again, not again.

The tail. Oh, hell, there it was. A trace on her signal, like phosphorescence curling in a wake. She dropped channel fast, and, oh God, Maurice. Maurice!

Mouth open, she spasmed, gasped, expecting lungs full of weighty pain, blackness, and dark water. The warm night air—her own continued existence—shocked her as much as brightness would have if she’d been drowning, and somehow kicked herself into daylight again before the black water could suck her down.

She lay on the couch and gasped, chest heaving, lank hair stuck across her face. Two minutes at least before she could move, before she could think of anything more than air in, air out, heaving as if she’d beached. Then elbows against the back of the sofa, hands on the lip, shoving herself to her feet.

“Jean!” Two more breaths, sucked deep enough to hurt, a stitch in her side as if she’d been running. “Jean! Nouel!” Scrambling barefoot over rug and parawood deck. They’d come for Maurice and André. That meant, that meant—

“They’re on to us, they’re—”

She burst through the hatch yelling and drew up so short she went to her knees. Hard on the wooden decking, toes bent under. The pain washed her vision, but couldn’t eradicate what she’d seen.

Jean and Nouel lay facedown on the deck, hands on their necks, legs spread wide. A man in Charter Trade green stood over each, both four steps back with their rifles nestled to their shoulders and angled down to cover the prone men.

Cricket herself stared down the barrels of two more leveled guns.

On her knees seemed like a safe place to stay. Slowly, she raised her hands. Jean’s head was turned; he looked right at her. She didn’t meet his eyes, and saw by the flinch along his jaw that he understood why.

At least she had the comfort of knowing she’d been wrong to suspect Maurice.

Maurice.

She would have pressed her fists against her teeth if she’d dared lower her hands. No more. Please no more people dying in my head.

“Cricket Earl Murphy,” said a fifth man, who held only a handgun and who wasn’t pointing it at anyone, “you are under arrest for sedition, terrorism, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, data trespass—”

In a moment, she thought with outlandish slow-motion lucidity, he would order her down on her stomach and kick her legs wide to make it difficult for her to rise. Then he would either handcuff all three of them and bring them in for a show trial, or he would order his men to fire two bullets into the back of each of their heads and leave their bodies on the drifting barge. The storm would handle the cleanup; sometimes people—and boats—didn’t make it back when the city ran before a storm.

“Please lie down,” the officer said. In the silence of a cocking rifle, the salt storm-wind lifting her hair, Cricket breathed a prayer. Along the horizon, rising clouds walked on insect legs of lightning. The crack that followed might have been gunfire, or thunder.

16

IMAGINE A SINGLE PHOTON, THE SMALLEST INDEX OF LIGHT.

The human eye is an optical instrument sensitive enough to detect that single photon. It is attuned to the subatomic level. But if we could register that sensitivity consciously, the flash and flicker, the background noise of the cosmos, would render our visual acuity useless. It would drown out more vital stimuli—such as the presence of a hungry leopard.

So our nervous systems take care of it. Neural filters prevent our conscious minds from responding to single-photon events. We can see the subatomic but we are prevented from noticing it.

There exists a classic experiment in which a point-source light projected through a pair of slits forms an interference pattern on a screen set behind them. The existence of this pattern would indicate that the light travels in a wave. Except in that it persists even when the light is emitted in single quanta, one photon at a time.

If either slit is covered, the light—whether it is projected as a beam or as individual photons—will pass through the remaining slit, and the backstop will show only a single bright peak with areas of increasing shadow on the sides, rather than the contrasting light and dark bars of the first stage of the experiment.

Even when emitted as a single particle, in other words, light also behaves as a wave. The cat is both dead and alive.

But if a detector is placed at each of the two slits, so that the experimenter is aware through which slit it has passed, then no interference pattern emerges. The bars of light and dark vanish.

Until the particle is detected, it isn’t
perhaps
everywhere—it
is
everywhere. When it may pass through either slit, it passes through both. The wave propagates both ways.

But if a method exists, the wave—collapses. The universe is forced to choose.

Unlike the infamous cat in the box, this is not a thought-problem.

This is experimental fact.

The speculation arises when we consider why. According to Bohr and Heisenberg’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, the individual photon passes through both slits simultaneously and produces the striped pattern by interfering with itself. In other words, it simultaneously follows both possible paths. The “many worlds” formulation additionally suggests that the particle not only travels through both slits, but that it takes every possible path to get there, and that it is detected at every possible destination—in mutually unobservable worlds. But as long as no one notices where it’s going, and how it gets there—the fork heals itself again.

Until the box is opened, the cat
is
both dead and alive.

And no matter how the photon gets where it gets, in each particular instance, we see all the outcomes at once.

A bullet splashed Jean Kroc’s skull open on the deck. A Rim security officer fell like a toppled tree as Jean twisted impossibly and shattered his right knee. The bullet missed; the bullet severed Jean’s spine. Jean went quietly, head lowered. Jean went for the rail. Jean took a rifle-butt in the ribs. Jean ripped a weapon from the hands of the guard who stooped to handcuff him. There was no shot.

There were three.

Lightning struck the superstructure of Nouel’s barge. There was no spark. Cricket lunged from a runner’s crouch between the riflemen. She went down on her face and awaited the twist of the cuffs. She jumped backward and out, over the rail with a kick-slither, plunged along the side of the boat feetfirst, headfirst, executing a gainer. She tangled on the rail and dashed her brains on the lip of the deck as she fell. She slid on wet wood and hit the bay flat, broke her spine, and drowned. The water closed over her.

They cuffed her and pushed her to her feet.

The forward edge of the rain—thin still, barely misting—washed Jean’s and Nouel’s blood down the deck, minicurrents rippling around and over chips of bone.
Ogod, ogod, ogod.

Jean, shoulders drawn back by the cuffs, had half a second to turn and catch her eye, lift his chin in disdain of their captors before they herded him away. Cricket, neck snapped in the fall, was drowning, her flaccid body swung against the side of the boat by the lapping waves.

Nouel ran for it. Nouel ran below. Nouel got shot trying. Nouel, wincing, on his stomach, wiped his data and prayed.

André—got lucky.

Freakishly, unnaturally lucky. There were no more Rimmers. There were two. There were four. He walked between bullets like a wire-dancer; he shot one opponent and disarmed the other with a swing of his heavy cane; he danced across the deck and lifted himself over the rail.

He slid in blood and landed hard on his casted leg.

Even luck has its limits.

And anything that can go wrong—

—already has.

He screamed; they were far enough from the disintegrating remains of Novo Haven that the storm claxon was not loud enough to cover the sound. He gritted his teeth and made no sound at all. The cane had gone flying, and so he crawled. The cane lay by his hand, and he levered himself to his feet, his knee grinding sweet agony when he tried it with his weight.

As he was dragging himself to the rail, as he was lifting himself to his feet, as he was bleeding from a wound to the chest, the thigh, the throat—

—all the ranids in the world came frothing over the rail.

Jean smacked hard and sharp into the water between barges, headfirst, dove deep. Was cut by a propeller, was broken by the fall. Knifed to the surface and kicked. Snorted water that tasted of oil, that he imagined tasted of Cricket’s blood. Of course, it did not—she was not bleeding, she bled on the deck he had left, she surfaced ten feet off, she surfaced beside him and a sniper blew her white face red.

Then he tasted blood for real.

Down, down, only a few feet of water would shred a hypersonic bullet like soft cheese. Down, kick, down, die, down, live, down, swim,
swim
.

André could have shot at the frogs, but in no set of choices did he do so.

He never raised the pistol; he lowered it again; he tasted violet ranid blood thick in his mouth and gagged, his steady gun-hand shivering. He could have shot.

He could have.

He remembered Gourami and Tetra sinking their dead, remembered them searching the fallen for Caetei.

He lowered the gun, he turned it and surrendered it to the nearest ranid, he slipped it into his holster. And sometimes they killed him—what was one more strange human in the dark?—and sometimes they didn’t. But he never pulled the trigger.

He walked in among them; he limped; he stumped; he helped them drag him. There followed silence; there followed screaming.

The ranids made no sound.

There was a craft—a scoot, a dinghy, a flashboat. Sometimes, corporations being what they were, its codes were still set to one of the factory standards. There was a froggie, a pair of frogs. He knew this frog, one of the frogs, knew its worried eyes and its long vague mouth, though it seemed teardrop-shaped and fat under the bandoleers. “Ziyi Zhou,” he said to Gourami, over and over again, a thousand voices, one choice. “I have to get to Zhou.”

For Timothy Closs, it was a long and shattered night. The barge drifted broadside into shipping and met an outbound ferry full of evacuees amidships; the engineers restarted the engines in time; an electrical fire started in the machine room and she burned to the waterline while the fleeing city parted around her in two floodlit streams.

The saboteurs—including Deschênes, including
Maurice,
fuck,
fuck
—were captured. They escaped. They were killed, singly or in combination. They waves broke in interference patterns, the probabilities greater or lesser, bright bars and dark, fuzzing at the edges. Some futures grew almost inescapable, some diverged on random looping paths from a single freakish chance. A barge exploded, Jefferson Greene’s chopper crashed in the storm, one of the lighters overshot the landing zone in the storm and crashed through two dozen still-moored barges.

The ranid army arrived, and arrived, and arrived. All Rim’s defenders fell. They drove back the boarders with few casualties. Rim held the center of the ship by force of arms; staff escaped in helicopters; staff went to ground to wait out the battle.

Sometimes, Closs was one of the ones that made it out.

There were times for subtlety and concealment. For the Jean Krocs who escaped the raid on Nouel’s boat, this was not the time for either. A transfinite number tried sneaking; an insignificantly smaller transfinite number failed. The few who succeeded were too late.

But some of the Jeans chose to run, to steal fast boats moored alongside fleeing barges or knock a pilot from an idling flashboat. They put their heads down and the throttle on full; they cut the night with roaring engines and wakes that rose like shimmering curtains on either side and fell behind. They died on the bay and they died in the bayou—in collisions, in malfunctions, when their roaring boats hit snags, when they missed a turn of the narrow channel and were crushed under a somersaulting craft.

But some of them won through. And of those, some did not break a leg or an arm or their neck clambering through trees with no moonlight to aid them, as the storm sealed up the brilliant night.

Every single one that made it into the humming embrace of the hollow tree remembered to lock the door.

And then there was no choice. Because half a glance at his instruments told him that his intent—to shut the system down and hunker until nature took its course—might be a worse disaster than anything else. Here in the calm, shut away from the storm and the cascading effects of other’s choices, he could think. Could even experiment, one of him risking, the others observing.

There wasn’t time, he all thought, for much of that.

The world was trapped midchoice. Stuck.

Middecision. Midfork. He would have to push it through. Have to fix it, observe it, make it real. Lock down the path that the world would follow.

There was a problem with that.
He
was probably safe. He was the observer now. But he wasn’t the only one who had died that night.

Or who hadn’t.

He sat down in his chair. He pulled the virtual-reality helmet over his head, positioned the keyboards, worked his hands into the gloves by feel. He flexed his fingers and the interface lit up, sharp relief.

The timestreams normally ran through his interface in a smooth braided strand, like weavable water. Loops might curve off, but they arched back, and the whole had a kind of flowing inevitability.

What he saw now was a cataract. Loops and coils and rivulets bounced wildly, intersecting, splashing. Some were fatter—more probable timestreams—and some were bare hair-threads, finely shining wires.

Jean just paused for a moment and blinked, boggled. And then he took a deep breath—the VR mask pushed against his nose—and assumed his avatar.

He wore a ten-legged spider for this work. Not a biological spider, but a delicate creature of silver and cobalt glass, its legs adorned with pinchers and combs and feather-fine barbs. He scampered across the surface of the virtual timestreams, testing them with palps and toetips, the movements of the spider controlled by the fine twitches of his gloved hands.

Normally, he was meticulous and hesitant over this work. He’d dip a limb in the timestream, let it flow over the sensing hair, sample and test and inspect weave after weave for the intersection of most advantage.

Now, he plunged and grabbed and shoved. He moved through a storm of time like a dancer dodging whirling blades, captured renegade threads that slithered, slick and willful, through his grasp. The thicker streams were muscular as snakes, the thinner sharp as wire. And they could dissolve into water, or fork into a fistful of writhing medusa strands, at a touch.

He chose the thickest one, the hardest to bend, and bestrode it. His legs darted about him, three or four shaping and sustaining that base timeline, the rest snagging any stream that wandered close and edging it back into the channel. He tried to pick—to snip the threads that ended in disaster and reinforce the ones that led to tolerable futures. But he didn’t know, half the time, what he was grabbing, and there was so much—

He juggled cold silver fire. It tasted of death and diesel and explosions, of spilled blood and the salt of storm. It sang to him like flicked crystal.

He bound and wound and twisted tight, sharp, and sweet.

Winning.

And tried not to wince each time he grabbed one thread and integrated it, and watched another one snuff out, vanished to a fading afterimage of silver, and the one he’d chosen smelled of char.

André dragged himself from the cockpit of the flashboat, or he walked, or the froggies helped him up the ladder. Ziyi Zhou sometimes came out to meet him, and sometimes helped him up the ladder. André’s cast was soaked and dripping, inflated plastic squishing water out the top of the boot with each pained step. Sometimes, Zhou even turned him away.

“I can’t reach him,” she said, or “Not in this storm,” as he commended the data Maurice and Lucienne had died for into her hands. Or she raised a disapproving eyebrow at him as he retained it, unwilling to let the chit out of his hands. Or she said, “Come with me,” and took his elbow, and supported him inside.

There were locks and codes and pass-pads, and a concealed space in the bow of her barge. And a small soothingly lit compartment with a plain virtual interface, just a helmet and a touchpad. Very stark, calm light on brushed steel, a screen on the wall above the panel that showed a soothing abstract seascape, moving gently.

André felt a faint misgiving as she seated herself and smoothed her hair back, or he felt nothing but the euphoria of adrenaline, or nothing but drained and tired. “Someone brought down the transfer station,” some of her said. “I heard it’s an alien invasion.”

“Aliens.” or “That can’t be true.” or just numb silence.

And whatever he said, some of her answered, “We have to do it on the ham radio.”