The Fractal Prince

5 THE THIEF AND THE HUNTER

Mieli floats in the spimescape, a ghost within the ghost of the ship. It is a representation of the worldlines all smartmatter leaves behind, from every nut and bolt of Perhonen to the System-wide machinery of the Highway. Reality overlaid with interpretation and explanation, cold physics caught in a cobweb of meaning.

Even when she is not piloting, she likes it here. The ship is made from her words, and here, she can see them. With a thought, she can look through walls, zoom in to the pseudo-living sapphire nanomachinery of the ship – or grow into a giant and hold the impossibly complex clockwork of the System in the palm of her hand. She can even turn back and look at her own body as if from some strange afterlife.

Except now: the central cabin of the ship is closed to her spime vision. She has been banished here like an ancestor spirit, while the pellegrini plays with the thief. At least the dreamy feel of the spimescape makes the disgust easier to bear.

‘Don’t worry,’ Perhonen says. ‘As far as I can tell, they are just talking this time.’

‘I don’t want to know,’ Mieli says. ‘In any case, we have better things to do. She said something is coming.’

She interrogates the gogols in the ship’s sensor array who spend their bodiless existence watching the ship’s ghost imagers, neutrino detectors and other sensors. They are on one of the lesser Highway branches, engineered by Sobornost to provide pathways for their thoughtwisp traffic. Apart from old, scattered zoku routers – remnants of the Protocol War – and relativistic worldlines of the wisps, there is not much within millions of kilometres of the ship.

Still, just to be sure, she tells the ship to start activating the hidden Sobornost technology in its hull. Like Mieli, the ship is an uneasy amalgam of Oortian and Sobornost, remade on Venus, hidden weapons and quantum armour and virs and gogols and antimatter, embedded in väki smartcoral like diamond insects in amber.

‘I was wondering,’ Perhonen says. Its voice is different here, not just coming from a butterfly avatar but from everywhere, even from within Mieli herself. ‘Are you going to tell him about the gogol you gave to the pellegrini?’

‘No,’ Mieli says.

‘I think it might help him. He doesn’t really understand you.’

‘That’s his problem,’ Mieli says. It feels safe to be here, among the stars and inside the ship, inside a song. She wants to forget about the thief and the pellegrini and wars and gods and quests. Maybe she could even forget about Sydän. Why does the ship has to spoil it?

‘I have been thinking,’ the ship says. ‘He could help us. He wants to be free, too. If you told him the truth—’

‘There is nothing to tell,’ Mieli says.

‘But don’t you see what the pellegrini is doing to you? Promises and vows and servitude, and where did that ever get us? Why should we—’

‘Enough,’ Mieli says. ‘You have no right to question her. I am her servant, and I am no traitor. Don’t make me regret making you.’ Here, without the steady breath of meditation or candlelight to anchor her, the words and anger come out easily. ‘I am not your child. I am your maker. You have no idea what—’

And then, neutrino rain, gentle as a breeze. Anomalous.

She stops. The ship says nothing. The spimescape is silent.

Mieli scans the sky again. Synthbio seeds, thoughtwisp shells, and much further away, a lonely Sobornost raion in the main vein of this Highway branch. Still, her neck bristles.

Maybe I should apologise, she thinks. Perhonen is trying its best to watch over her. That’s what it has been doing ever since she brought its spirit up from the alinen—

A bright line splits the spimescape in two like lightning. The ship and her words vanish in white noise. The scape goes down.

Mieli comes back to her body with a force like a thunderclap. Around her, Perhonen rings like a bell. A ragged tear in the hull shows blackness and stars. Air rushes out.

In the middle of the cabin, there is a bright, dancing dot. White beams flash from it in all directions, like from a lighthouse gone mad. The bonsai trees next to Mieli burst into flame.

Never pray to the Dark Man, Mieli thinks.

It takes me a long, long time to come back from the memory of the arrest.

There is blood in my mouth. I have been biting my tongue, and it hurts. The taste of failure is worse. I spit. Droplets of spittle and blood float in front of me like a string of glistening pearls, white and dark red.

It was dangerous to play the pellegrini like that. A high roller’s luck. She had to be in Mieli’s body, like last time. Sobornost gogols get confused in the flesh, easy to read, easy to manipulate, no matter how godlike they are in the virs. She gave me exactly what I needed. The door in the memory castle is open. I remember Earth. I remember the prince in the jannah. And in spite of the pain, the plan is now whole in my head.

And that’s when the diamond policeman from space hits me in the face.

Mieli is still holding the coral drinking bulb in her hand when the beam sweeps over her. The liquid inside boils, and the bulb shatters with a mournful note, swallowed by the roar of the vacuum. For a moment, the heat is almost gentle, welcome after the chill of the spimescape. Then it comes down on her like the fiercest löyly steam in an Oortian sauna.

Her metacortex reacts. Her subdermal smartmatter armour kicks in. Third-degree burns become damage statistics. Quicktime freezes the world into a slideshow of still frames.

In the combat autism, the world always makes sense.

Zoom in.

In the heart of whiteness, there is a machine, a fraction of a millimetre long: a sleek thing like a dagger, with delicate petals protruding from its hilt. Faces, carved around the needlelike tip. A Sobornost device—

The knife-flower moves. Even in quicktime, it is like a wasp, dancing a deadly dance amongst Perhonen’s butterfly avatars. Its strobing beam sweeps along the cabin’s wall, dancing in a random pattern, leaving behind a fiery scrawl. It turns towards Mieli.

Perhonen slams a q-dot bubble around it and pumps the binding energies of the artificial atoms up. The mirrored sphere bounces around the cabin and starts to glow.

Lasers, Mieli thinks at the ship, arming her own weapons. Get ready to throw it out and burn it. She positions herself between the knife-thing and the thief, who is floating motionless, eyes closed, puts up another q-dot wall to keep him safe.

Tactical gogols feed analysis results into her metacortex. The thing’s beam is scanning, like an aggressive version of a zoku Realmgate, capturing information but destroying the source, sending the results to someone. The heat is bandwidth.

Killing it all, letting the gods sort it out.

‘Mieli,’ the ship says. ‘It’s not going to—’

The bubble shatters. The thing comes straight at Mieli like a bullet. She fires her ghostgun at it, a thick cloud of nanomissiles, but already knows she is too slow. The thing is a bright serpent, dodging the tiny projectiles.

Its scanning beam rakes across Mieli’s torso like a claw. Her armour goes mad and deploys active countermeasures. Her skin erupts in tiny fireworks. It doesn’t do much good. Her intestines boil and burst – pressures and temperatures and recovery times – and the beam comes up, towards her head, swinging from side to side to a staccato rhythm of damage reports.

She expected a kind of detachment from the battle, with the knowledge that another Mieli will survive her death. Instead, a keen edge of fear presses down on her mind even through the blanket of combat autism.

She welcomes it.

The knife from the void changes direction, brushes her cheekbone, swings around her, towards the helpless thief. The metacortex Nash engine gives her three options, all of them bad.

Mieli ignores them and lets the thief loose from his chains.

Between one eyeblink and the next, just before the diamond thing hits, I become a god. A small god, but still: with an omniscient awareness of the contents of my smartmatter shell that pretends to be a human body, and the raion computer that is its brain.

It is only the second time that I have had root access to it. I wonder at the intricacies of its synthbio cells in a diamonoid frame, the fusion power source at the base of the spine and the nifty q-dot emitters. I get lost in the brain for a while. My mind is a tiny thing in its vast labyrinth, and for a time, it is good just to wander through the cool corridors of logic and to think. The plan that the pellegrini unwittingly gave me is there, too, a mosaic of interlocking pieces. I study it from every angle, humming to myself. Something is missing.

Then I hear the zoku jewel, an eager receptacle for thought and desire. I tell it what I need and it makes itself into something that completes the pattern, clicking into place. A part of me says that it is wrong, that I should feel guilty, but it fits too well. Surely there can be no harm in something so beautiful?

I feel like a little boy who has found pretty rocks on a beach. I hum to myself. I could happily stay inside my mind forever.

Except that there is a distant voice shouting that my flesh is boiling away and the bright, bright light weaving back and forth in front of me like a hypnotist’s watch has something to do with it.

I start moving. It feels like I’m wearing an oversized robot costume, huge and clumsy and slow. My mind is racing much faster than the body can react. My left hand disappears in white flame: fake skin, bones and flesh, consumed. The metaself informs me calmly how long it will take to grow it back. It puts together a picture of the tiny machine that is burning me alive: a hungry Sobornost creation, with a zigzag trajectory through the wreckage of Perhonen’s central cabin, now aimed straight at my brain.

Cops. No matter how much things change, they always stay the same.

And then it happens. I’m not much of a chess player, but there is an aspect of the game that I find fascinating. After a while, you can almost see lines of force between the pieces. Areas of danger where it is physically impossible to move pieces into. Clouds of possibility, forbidden zones.

That’s what it’s like, watching the diamond cop. Suddenly, it is as if there is a mirror image of the thing inside me, full of single-mindedness and purpose—

Good hunter fast hunter nice hunter if you find it there will be a treat—

That’s it. Mirrors. Silently, I shout commands at my alien body. It obeys.

The q-dot layer beneath my burning skin turns into metamaterials. An improvised invisibility cloak. I become a quicksilver statue. The hungry white light is bent around me. It takes out a set of tribal statues in Mieli’s gallery of comet ice. The cop keeps blasting, confused, stationary just long enough for me to tell Perhonen what to do—

A q-dot bubble blinks into being around it, a shiny billiard ball that shows a distorted reflection of my face. Sudden electromagnetic fields make my skin tingle. And then Perhonen blasts the intruder into space along the cabin’s axis like a bullet from a gun, leaving a streak of ionized air behind.

The ship’s lasers flash. There is a blinding antimatter explosion in the distance. A torrent of gamma rays and pions gives me a headache.

The locks of my Sobornost body snap back to place. Mieli floats next to me, tendrils of black blood around her like Medusa’s hair. Then the pain of the hand comes, and I scream.

Mieli takes care of the thief’s hand as the fires die away and the ship seals the tears in the hull. The cabin is full of the sickly sweet smell of burnt synthbio flesh, mixed with ozone and smoke and ashes from the bonsai trees. A bubble of liquorice tea floats near Mieli like a grey, stinking ghost.

‘That hurt,’ says the thief, looking at his stump with distaste as the tissue seals itself. ‘What the hell was that? It was not made by gogols who deal with cuddly slowtime monkey people.’

He is a miserable sight. The left side of his face is a red ruin, and burn craters make his upper torso look like a planetary surface. Mieli does not feel much better. She is drenched in sweat and her stomach and head throb as the repair nanites of her body work overtime. Except for her brain, her biological parts are almost redundant, but they are a part of her, and she’s not going to let them rot.

‘Whatever it was,’ Perhonen says, ‘I’m afraid there is more. It dumped a lot of bandwidth. I traced the vector. There is something else out there. Something that does not follow the Highway protocols. Something big. A whole swarm of the little bastard’s brothers, thousands of them, and by the looks of it they plan to intercept us.’

‘How long?’ the thief asks.

‘A day or two, maybe three if we really push it,’ Perhonen says. ‘They are fast.’

‘Damn,’ Mieli whispers. ‘The pellegrini warned me. I need to talk to her.’ She reaches for the goddess in her mind, but finds nothing.

The thief looks at her with his one good eye.

‘My guess is that she is going to be hiding until we get rid of our tail,’ he says. ‘This is big, bigger than either of us. Maybe even bigger than I used to be. To be completely honest, if I were you, I’d be looking for another line of work. It’s going to get ugly.’

Mieli raises an eyebrow. They both look like broken dolls. Her garment is in tatters and stained in blood. The thief’s face is still red and raw. Only clumps of white medfoam excreted by his body’s repair systems hide the terrible burns on his torso, legs and arms.

‘Well, uglier,’ the thief says. The undamaged side of his face grows serious. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. I know who your boss is, and what she wants. The stakes are high enough for the Founders and Primes to take notice. This whole affair – it’s part of some conflict between them. And we are right in the middle of it.’

‘Thanks to you,’ Mieli says.

‘Touché,’ the thief says. ‘So. Can we run?’

The damage from the battle with the knife-flower is superficial, and Perhonen is already fixing it. But she knows exactly what her ship can and cannot do. The fear needles of the battle are still in her belly. She finds herself clinging on to their sting.

‘No,’ she says. ‘But we can fight.’ Perhaps this will be a good way to end things. Fight an unbeatable enemy, hope for a honourable death.

The thief looks at her incredulously. ‘As much as I have come to respect your ability to kill things,’ he says, ‘I’m starting to wonder if Oortian schools teach basic mathematics. Just one of these things nearly killed us. Are you sure fighting a few thousand is a good idea?’

‘This is my ship,’ Mieli says. The jewelled chain around her leg feels like it’s burning. Sydän. Could it not be another me who gets her back? She closes her eyes. ‘It’s my decision.’

Mieli, whispers Perhonen. That was really tough sobortech. I expended a lot of weaponry on Mars. We are good, but we are not that good. What are you doing?

‘Mieli?’ the thief says. ‘Are you all right?’

Mieli takes a deep breath of the stinking air. She opens her eyes. The thief is staring at her with a look of concern. ‘Come on,’ he says with a soft voice. ‘Let’s think about this. There is always a way out.’

‘Fine,’ Mieli says finally. ‘What do you suggest?’

The thief is quiet for a moment. ‘It seemed to want me pretty badly,’ he says. ‘Maybe we can use that.’

‘Make a gogol of you and sacrifice it?’ Mieli says in disgust.

A cloud passes over the thief’s face. ‘No, that’s not possible. Looks like Joséphine does not want more than one of me running around. There must be something else—’ His good eye flashes. ‘Of course. I’m an idiot. That’s what it’s for. If the cop thing wants me, I need to become someone else. I need a new face.’ The thief tries to scratch the red ruin with his missing hand, then looks at the stump in dismay.

‘Not to mention some other bits and pieces. But I think I know where to find one. If Perhonen is right, we have less than two days to open the Box.’

‘And how are we going to do that?’ Mieli asks.

‘How is anything really important ever done? With smoke and mirrors.’

‘No games, Jean. Please.’

The thief gives her a broken smile and takes out a small amber egg from his pocket. A zoku jewel.

‘How quickly can you find us a zoku router?’