The Quantum Thief

19. THE DETECTIVE AND THE RING

Mieli’s skin tingles from the gevulot locks. But she feels light and weightless again, and Perhonen’s cockpit is the closest thing to a home she has left. The sense of safety and comfort is almost enough to drown out the raging voice of the pellegrini inside her head.

It’s good to have you back, Perhonen says. The ship’s butterfly avatars dancing around Mieli’s head. I felt like a piece of me was missing.

‘Me too,’ Mieli says, delighting in the familiar tickle of wings fluttering against her skin. ‘A big piece.’

‘How soon can you get back down there?’ demands the pellegrini. The goddess has been Mieli’s constant companion ever since the immigration Quiet delivered her back to the ship and woke her up. Her mouth is a cold red line. ‘This is intolerable. He will have to be punished. Punished.’ She seems to taste the word. ‘Yes, punished.’

‘There is a problem with his biot feed,’ Mieli says. She feels an odd sensation of absence. Can I actually be missing his feed? The poisons you get addicted to.

Just go ahead and admit that you are actually worried, Perhonen says. Don’t tell anyone, but so am I.

‘The last thing that registered is severe damage. And we can’t go down for thirty days, not legally at least.’

‘What is that boy doing?’ the pellegrini mutters.

The Oubliette orbital control is telling us to get a Highway approach vector, Perhonen says. And they are turning all visitors away from the beanstalk station. There is something happening down in the city.

‘Can we see anything?’ Mieli asks.

The ship’s butterfly avatars open a fan of moving images across various wavelengths in front of her. They show the city, a dark lenticular shape in the orange bowl of the Hellas Basin, blurred by its gevulot cloud.

Something is seriously wrong down there, Perhonen says. It has stopped moving.

There is something else in the images as well. A black fuzzy mass, pouring down from the rims of the impact crater towards the city.

Perhonen ramps up the magnification, and Mieli finds herself looking at a vision from hell.

Those? the ship says. Those are phoboi.

‘What should we do?’ Mieli asks the pellegrini.

‘Nothing,’ the goddess says. ‘We wait. Jean wanted to play games down there: let him play. We wait until he is done.’

‘With all due respect,’ Mieli says, ‘that means the mission is a failure. Are there any remaining agents on the ground who could be used? Gogol pirates?’

‘Do you presume to tell me what to do?’

Mieli flinches.

‘The answer is no. I cannot leave any signs of my presence here. It is time to cut our losses.’

‘We are going to abandon him?’

‘It is a pity, of course. I was a little sentimental about him: it has been a pleasant experience, for the most part. His little betrayal even added some spice. But nothing is irreplaceable. If the cryptarch emerges victorious, perhaps he will be easier to bargain with.’ The pellegrini smiles wistfully. ‘Perhaps not as entertaining, though.’

Whatever problems the city is having, I think they are spreading, Perhonen says. The Quiet fleet is in disorder. In case you are interested, the phoboi will hit the city’s ramparts in approximately thirty minutes.

‘Mistress,’ Mieli says. ‘I have given up everything to serve you. My mind, my body; much of my honour. But the thief has been my koto brother these last few weeks, however reluctantly. I cannot leave him behind and face my ancestors. Let me have that much.’

The pellegrini raises her eyebrows. ‘So, he got through to you in the end, did he? But no, you are far too valuable to risk. We will wait.’

Mieli pauses, looking at the unmoving city in the images. He is not worth it, she thinks. He is a thief, a liar.

But he made me sing again. Even if it was a trick.

‘Mistress,’ Mieli says. ‘Grant me this, and I’m willing to renegotiate our bargain. You can have a gogol of me. If I don’t return, you can resurrect me as you wish.’

Mieli, don’t do this, the ship whispers. You can never go back on that.

That’s the only thing I have left, apart from honour, Mieli says. And it is worth less.

The pellegrini narrows her eyes. ‘Well, that is interesting. All that for him?’

Mieli nods.

‘Very well,’ the goddess says. ‘I accept your offer. With the condition that if anything goes wrong, Perhonen will use the strangelet device on the city: you still carry me inside you, and I cannot be found.’ She smiles. ‘Now, close your eyes and pray to me.’

It only takes minutes to get past the disorganised Quiet sentry fleet. Mieli does not feel like being subtle and burns the ship’s antimatter engines hard. The ship is a sleek diamond dart, slicing through the troposphere, down towards the Hellas Basin.

Show me the phoboi.

Nightmare things race across the Basin. There are millions of them, in endless variations, all packed closely together in a mass that moves like a coherent organism. Swarms of transparent insects that form hulking, walking shapes. Clumps of bulbuous sacks full of chemicals that move by pulsing and flowing. Humanoids with glasslike bodies and disturbingly realistic faces – apparently some of their ancestors have found that human countenances slow the reflexes of the warrior Quiet a small fraction.

The phoboi are hybrid biot/biological weapons, breeding themselves through billions of virtual generations and then modifying their own design accordingly. The Oubliette has been at war with them for centuries. And when the Moving City does not move, they can smell blood.

Mieli assesses their weaponry. Her countermeasure gogols are tailored to be used against zokus, not likely to do well against the phoboi’s simple chemical brains. So brute force appears to be a more realistic option: q-dots, antimatter, lasers, and – if it comes to that – the remaining strangelet: although she is worried about what the latter would do to Mars itself.

All right, Mieli says. The plan is simple. You slow them down. I go get the thief. You pick us up. Just like last time.

Understood, the ship says. Be careful.

You always say that, Mieli says. Even when you are about to drop me on a dying city.

I mean it every time, the ship says. Then it wraps Mieli in a q-dot bubble, grabs her with an EM field and fires her at Mars.

Metacortex fully active, Mieli steers with her wings, aiming towards one of the Persistent Avenue agoras. She fires nano-missiles at the city at a considerable fraction of c. She wears armour and carries an external weapon this time, a Sobornost multipurpose cannon – a sleek cylinder full of destruction. The missiles send back fragmented imagery before evaporating: the gevulot system is not fast enough to stop them from transmitting. Her metacortex pieces them together into a coherent picture of the city below.

Bloody faces, stains on white uniforms. Gogol pirates with their upload tendrils out, attacking anything that moves. Young and old Martians locked in battle, wielding makeshift weapons. Military Quiet, cordoning off streets. Tzaddikim, fighting Quiet and humans both, blocking gunfire with utility fog shields. The zoku colony under a q-dot bubble, surrounded by particularly heavy fighting. There, in the centre of the Maze, a black needle that was not there before. And almost directly below her-

The Gentleman is fighting in the Place of Lost Time, harried by a flock of assault Quiet. Her foglet shapes crackle under heavy fire.

Mieli takes the Quiet out with autonomous missiles with a quark-gluon plasma payload. They sweep half the square in an arc of nova-bright flame, illuminating the invisible foglet shapes momentarily: they look like exotic coral, blooming out from the Gentleman.

Phoboi report? Mieli asks Perhonen. The ship shares its senses with her. It is dancing above the seething mass, lobbing microton AM warheads at the phoboi. The sky of the city blinks in synchrony with them, like impossibly bright lightning flashes; the booms follow seconds later.

Not good, the ship says. We really need a viral weapon of some kind. I’m slowing them down, but pincer number two is going to hit the city any minute now.

Mieli slows the descent with her wings but still hits the ground hard. Stone cracks beneath her q-armoured feet. As she gets up from the small crater, she sees Raymonde. A cloud of foglet blades hovers around her, ready to strike.

‘Which one are you?’ she asks. ‘Mieli or the other one?’

‘The one who tells you that you are going to have a phoboi problem in a few minutes,’ Mieli says.

‘Oh, hell,’ Raymonde mutters.

Mieli looks around at the destruction. There is more gunfire down the Avenue, and a distant explosion. ‘Is this supposed to be a revolution?’

‘It went bad an hour ago,’ Raymonde says. ‘The cryptarch-controlled started executing everyone who had the co-memory infection, and then they brought in the military Quiet as well from the ramparts. We have been arming the survivors. As long as the resurrection system survives, we can bring everybody back. But at the moment we are losing. And the real problem is that.’ She points at the needle above the Maze.

‘What is it?’

‘That’s what Jean made,’ Raymonde says. ‘He is inside. With the cryptarch.’

‘The phoboi are coming,’ Mieli says. ‘We need to get this under control now or you are all going to find out what permanent death feels like. You need to get the city moving again. I take it the zoku is not doing anything?’

‘No,’ Raymonde says. ‘I can’t reach them anymore.’

‘Typical,’ Mieli says. ‘All right. You need to get inside that thing, get the cryptarch out and make him stop the fighting so we can deal with the phoboi. I am coming to get the thief out. So it looks like we are going to the same direction.’

Mieli spreads her wings. The tzaddik takes to the air next to her. They fly over the burning city, towards the black needle.

‘You were the ones who disrupted things,’ Isidore says. ‘You have to help us. We are going to have a civil war unless the cryptarch is stopped. The tzaddikim cannot do it alone.’

‘No. Our first loyalty is to ourselves. We have healed; we are strong again. It is time for us to go.’ Around them, the treasure chamber is almost empty: only the silver portals remain.

‘You are running away,’ Isidore says.

‘Merely optimising the use of resources,’ the Eldest says. ‘You are free to come with us, although you will find that your current form will not be appropriate.’

‘I’m staying here,’ Isidore says. ‘This is my home.’

A part of the Eldest’s shimmer forms a miniature city. The streets are full of tiny people. There are flashes of light and flames. Isidore sees the conflict between the cryptarch-controlled and the memory-inoculated. He tastes blood and realises he is biting his tongue. And near the ramparts, white waves, crashing against them, lapping at the legs of the city. Phoboi.

‘You may wish to reconsider your decision,’ the Eldest says.

Isidore closes his eyes. It is a shape that is different from a mystery, rapidly changing, shifting, not static like a snowflake that can be examined from different angles and understood.

‘The cryptarchs,’ he says. ‘The cryptarchs could still end this. They could get the city moving again, stop the fighting. Raymonde thought they were going to go there, with the thief-’ He points at the needle in the miniature city, sticking up like an arrow in its heart.

‘The ring,’ he says. ‘The thief stole my entanglement ring. Pixil, that ghost thing you did, would it work inside that?’

‘Maybe, depending on what that is,’ Pixil says. ‘We just need a Realmgate to find out.’ She starts towards the nearest silver arc.

‘The zoku will not allow this,’ the Eldest says.

‘Just get me through it,’ Isidore says. ‘That’s all I ask. I can’t just stand here and watch.’

Pixil touches the zoku jewel at the base of her throat. She squeezes her eyes shut. For a moment, her face twists in pain. The jewel comes off, like a small creature being born. She holds it up with bloody fingers. ‘The freedom we always have left,’ she says, ‘is the freedom to leave. I’m out. I was born here. I’m staying.’

She takes Isidore’s hand. ‘Let’s go.’

‘What are you doing?’ the Eldest says.

Pixil touches the gate. Honey-coloured daylight pours out. ‘The right thing,’ she says. Then she steps through, pulling Isidore in after her.