“We can offer your people asylum here,” Rudo said. “It’s possible we have things to offer each other. Your feats of...” she waved her hand lazily, “magic were impressive. If your people can do this too...”
“I don’t think you or I consider Bachwezi safe,” Belisarius said. “And I’m thinking further afield than a quick alliance. I’ve found a way to locate the mouths of the Axis Mundi through the time gates.”
“That makes the Homo quantus incredibly valuable and incredibly dangerous,” Rudo said, “and your theft that much more bitter.”
“It’s not anything that your people could do. Nor most of mine. My people are introspective, reclusive, mostly inept, in need of protection,” Belisarius said.
“You’re not like that,” Iekanjika said.
“Cassandra and I are outliers, and the two of us can’t protect the Homo quantus. I intend to hide my people three or four nodes out in the Axis Mundi network where no one will threaten them.”
“So do it,” Rudo said.
“I can’t yet. The time gates can show me other Axes, but there’s no scale. My view isn’t calibrated. We found the fifth Axis in Epsilon Indi because we oriented our measurements to the four known wormholes. But we can’t do that elsewhere. I can tell that the Bachwezi system contains five mouths of the Axis Mundi, but without calibrating, I can’t tell you where they are.”
“What do you need?” Rudo asked.
“You found the time gates on a planetoid,” Belisarius said. “You took core drillings. What data do you have on those?”
“What do you know about those?” Iekanjika said heatedly.
“We don’t have the cores or the data anymore, Mister Arjona,” Rudo said.
“So there’s no deal then?” Iekanjika said.
Rudo smiled coldly. “Mister Arjona didn’t come here expecting us to carry core samples across forty years in the wilderness. He has another plan. Don’t you?”
“You already know what it is?” Belisarius asked, as a tickle of unease snuck up his spine.
Rudo nodded slowly.
“And I think you know why,” Rudo said.
The unease became gooseflesh up his neck and down his arms.
Iekanjika looked from Rudo to Belisarius, trying to understand what they meant. She couldn’t possibly guess. Rudo signaled the MPs to leave. They frowned, holstered their sidearms. They looked pointedly at Iekanjika for some signal to stay or for acknowledgment that she was assuming the protection of Rudo. The hatch closed behind them. He, Iekanjika and Rudo were alone. Fear slithered in his stomach.
“We’re going to make a deal with Mister Arjona,” Rudo said to Iekanjika. The colonel schooled her expressions inexpertly.
“He robbed us once, ma’am,” Iekanjika said, tamping her anger as much as she could.
“Mister Arjona can do more than find wormholes with the time gates,” Rudo said. “He can go back in time with them.”
“Eleven years?” Iekanjika said.
“Thirty-nine years,” Rudo said.
Hackles rose on Belisarius’ neck.
“Do you have me at a disadvantage, General?” he asked.
“I’m sure I do,” Rudo said. “We didn’t meet four months ago, Mister Arjona. You and I met thirty-nine years ago, on Nyanga, the planetoid where we found the time gates.”
“What?” Iekanjika blurted.
“Where did the idea to use Mister Arjona come from?” Rudo asked the colonel slowly.
“Babedi,” Iekanjika said, from behind a guarded expression.
“I had instructed Brigadier Wakikonda to discreetly suggest Mister Arjona’s name to Mister Babedi,” Rudo said.
“You knew him,” Iekanjika said.
“The fact that I met him and you thirty-nine years ago meant that I knew he would get us across the Puppet Axis.”
Belisarius felt played, on a scale he found hard to swallow. He’d played everyone in the room to get the Sixth Expeditionary Force to Epsilon Indi. He’d been smarter than everyone else. But now he didn’t feel that smart.
“Me?” Iekanjika asked. Her anger seemed to have faded. Her voice had the same tone of creeping fear as his.
“We know enough about avoiding paradoxes to know that Mister Arjona has to go back,” Rudo said, “and so do you.”
“We came to you for help?” Belisarius said.
“Yes,” the lieutenant-general said.
“Something must have kept you from shooting us when we spoke to you,” Belisarius said.
A flicker of pain crossed Rudo’s face.
“Yes,” she said, “something convinced me you came with the blessing of my future self.”
“What?” Iekanjika asked.
Rudo stared at her fingers for long seconds. The air vents hummed.
“My name isn’t really Kudzanai Rudo.”
“What?” Iekanjika said in astonishment.
“I was born with the name Vimbiso Tangwerai in Murombedzi,” Rudo said quietly, “one of the teeming millions looking to get out of the political chaos of the Sub-Saharan Union. I knew Kudzanai Rudo, and that she’d been selected to go to the Union Academy at Harare. Forty-five years ago, I killed her. I falsified her genetic records. I took her identity. I became Officer Cadet Kudzanai Rudo.”
Iekanjika gaped.
“No one has ever known this,” Rudo said. “Now only the two of you know. If you’re smart, you’ll take this secret to your graves.”
“You’re not Rudo,” Iekanjika said in a daze, looking like a tent pole had been removed from her life.
“I am Lieutenant-General Rudo,” the older woman said. “I lived every part of this military career, from the first day at the academy, through the forty years of the Sixth Expeditionary Force, through the break-out, until now. The late Miss Rudo’s only contributions to this career were her political connections to get into the academy. The rest is just a label. I have been Kudzanai Rudo longer than either of you have been alive, and longer than the original.”
“Why did we go to you in the past?” Belisarius asked. “Because we could tell you the truth or because you could get us where we needed to be?”
“You wouldn’t have lasted a day on Nyanga without inside help,” Rudo said. “It was a dark time for the Sixth Expeditionary Force. We’d captured or killed all of the political officers, and most of the Congregate sleeper agents infiltrating the Expeditionary Force, but we could never be sure. We were paranoid, but not just against the Congregate. Political factions in the Expeditionary Force moved against each other for control of the Force and the time gates.”
“You know when we arrive in the past,” Belisarius said.
“Your window isn’t large,” Rudo said. “We found the surface of Nyanga pristine, so you couldn’t go back before the arrival of the Expeditionary Force to take a sample. And then we left with the time gates just ahead of stellar flares from the brown dwarf primary. The only time you and the colonel could get onto the surface for a sample was while the Force was there, with all the players watching all the other players for signs of betrayal. To get onto the surface, you need identities and covers. I was a young captain back then, but in internal affairs we had disproportionately high security clearances.”
Iekanjika breathed, looking straight ahead, still deflating. “We’re not going back in time because Arjona wants to, or even because we want to,” she said numbly. “We’re going back because we have to.”
“To avoid a grandfather paradox,” Belisarius said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
STILLS FLEW BELISARIUS back to the rendezvous point and left him floating in space. Fifteen minutes later, Saint Matthew arrived with The Calculated Risk. As expected, Belisarius found three transmitters in his vacuum suit. This slowed them down as he removed the bugs and left them drifting off on misleading paths. He didn’t begrudge the time though. He didn’t really want to face any of the Homo quantus.
Belisarius hadn’t seen a lot of suffering in his life, not real suffering. The
orbital pathway of his existence had been designed to avoid emotional content. Love. Hate. Passion. He already had too much passion in his engineered addiction to curiosity. He’d only succeeded in fighting that instinct by living a quiet life deprived of mathematical and scientific stimulation. The other Homo quantus didn’t need to hide from their curiosity. Theirs were not as strong as his. They could indulge their other emotions too, as he did not. Anguish. Loss. Depression.
Saint Matthew flew him to the fifth Axis and through it. Then, it was a short voyage at high acceleration across the system to the orbit where they’d set the freighters: ugly boxes of abraded metal with lumpy engines and small cockpits. They were not made for long-term life support. They’d improvised radiation shielding, but at some point atmospheric integrity would go. The four thousand Homo quantus had two thousand emergency vacuum suits and only a few hundred standard ones. Perhaps worst of all, the inelegant lines of the ships resisted modeling in any deterministic or non-determination geometric system.
They were cobbled together as a poor optimization of cost and functionality, distracting patches of color, without even rudimentary colored lights inside or out. They’d gone from living in a bright green garden full of quiet life to a series of creaking steel and aluminum boxes.
Belisarius was both the cause of this suffering and the only one they could turn to with their anger and need for reassurance. His people were dead-eyed, haunted, and turned away as he passed the stacks and stacks of cubicles.
Belisarius averted his eyes, not looking at the people watching him. At the bridge of Red, he met with Cassie and told her of his conversation with Rudo. Then, they messaged Nicola Samper.
Samper was one of the more pragmatic councilors, aged twenty-nine years, eleventh generation of the Homo quantus like Belisarius and Cassandra, although she wasn’t capable of entering the fugue. She’d taken a number of roles in managing the Garret and one day might have naturally expected to reach the unwanted pinnacle of administrative responsibility: the mayoralty. She arrived six point four minutes later and strapped warily into a chair. The stars beyond the scratched cockpit window moved with lazy, linear precision.
“I need you to be deputy mayor,” Cassie said.
Samper eyed her with growing suspicion. “I thought Belisarius was deputy mayor.”
“He has to go with me,” Cassie said.
“You’re leaving us?”
“I need to find a safe place for the Homo quantus. I need Bel’s help. It may be just for a week.”
“You’re abandoning us!”
Belisarius leaned in, conspiratorially, trusting, using body language the way he’d learned in confidence schemes. “I’ve got a line on a place, where no one will find the Homo quantus. We’ll be able to live in peace and quiet for centuries.”
“If you know the place, why not just take us there?” Samper asked, puzzled.
“I don’t have the information, but I know where to get it.”
Samper frowned. “Is this another trick? You shoot off with your fast ship and your time travel wormholes and leave us stranded here?”
“No trick!” Belisarius said. “We have to work out the way to get where we’re going, but I don’t have all the information.”
“This doesn’t sound very good for us.”
“We’ll be gone three, four days,” Cassie said. “But if we’re not back after that time, you have some choices to make.”
“If you’re not back?” Samper asked. “You are leaving us!”
“Getting the information might be dangerous,” Belisarius said. “If we’re not back in four days, we’re probably dead. In that case, everyone in civilization will still be after the Homo quantus. Your safest bet is probably coming back to Epsilon Indi and inducing wormholes all the way to Alhambra. There, turn yourselves over to the Banks. I’m not sure how free you’ll be, but they’ll protect you.”
Samper swallowed. “This is rotten. I knew we couldn’t trust you.”
A sadness seeped through Belisarius, swallowing him piece by piece.
“I’m not running,” he said. “I’m getting what we need to ensure our future. This will make us safe.”
Samper unstrapped herself and maneuvered to the door.
“I wish I believed you,” she said.
She spun the door latch, heaved it open on squeaking hinges, and left Belisarius and Cassie in the ugly cockpit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
BELISARIUS, CASSIE AND Saint Matthew rendezvoused with Iekanjika and Stills’ cargo much the same way Belisarius had been picked up last time: floating in space. It took Iekanjika and Belisarius twenty minutes to transfer Stills in his unwieldy tank into the lower hold of The Calculated Risk and hook him into the racer’s systems. They’d added a third acceleration chamber to the cockpit for Iekanjika, making it even more cramped than before. Iekanjika handed Belisarius a data wafer.
“These are all the security codes and procedures we still had on record,” she said. “These are not the kinds of things we keep for forty years, but they were backed up in auditing records. They won’t cover the entire base, nor even all paths completely through the base, but they’ll get us started.”
“You guys are fuckin’ insane,” Stills offered through the comms system.
“This is the only way,” Belisarius said.
“Walking into a Union base in disguise, in the past, seems beyond the risks even I’d take,” Stills said. “I don’t know shit about time travel, but it seems to me that if some cocksucker sneezes wrong, history puts our huevos in the cutter.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Belisarius observed Cassie. She was tense, anxious. She agreed with Stills. For that matter, he agreed with Stills. But there wasn’t another way, or even a better way to measure the time difference across the gates and how that difference had changed over geological time. She smiled at him encouragingly despite her reservations.
“Many theories say the past we know is established and robust,” Cassie said to Stills. “The past happened and the Union came back to civilization. That shouldn’t change.”
She didn’t add what happens to Bel, Iekanjika and Saint Matthew in the past is another question, but the thought sort of hung between them.
“We’ll be careful,” Belisarius said. “Interact as little as possible. But you’ll both have to be as careful.”
Cassie shrugged.
“Fuck that,” Stills said. “We’re just the getaway car.”
“Waiting in twenty-two dimensional space-time,” Belisarius said.
“Number of dimensions don’t matter shit if we’re just parking.”
“Once we’re inside,” Belisarius said to Iekanjika, “you’ll see why no one but the Homo quantus could navigate the interior.”
“I’m more concerned with you successfully passing as a member of the Expeditionary Force,” Iekanjika said.
She unpacked two uniforms and two standard-issue vac suits from four decades ago. He started putting his on. His skin had already darkened significantly. He’d been taking cosmetic supplements to stimulate his skin into producing more melanin, darkening it from the Afro-Colombian brown he’d been born with to something closer to the typical skin color of the citizens of the Sub-Saharan Union. He’d also learned the accent and idiosyncrasies of the Union French of forty years ago and the entirety of the Shona language.
“Antiques?” Belisarius asked.
“Refurbished,” she said. “They’ll look good enough for us to move around.”
Belisarius thumbed the raised ridge of the rank insignia on the uniform she’d gotten him. “Private. I’m honored.”
“The people you meet won’t expect much from a private.”
“What rank did you give yourself?” Stills asked.
“Corporal,” she said.
“A workin’ man,” Stills growled in electrical approval. “It’ll show you how the better half lives. Don’t say anything fancy in the enlisted mess. We fuckin’ hate that and you’ll be m
arked as somebody needin’ to be taken down a peg. Especially you, quantum boy.”
“I’ll keep him quiet,” Iekanjika said with no irony Belisarius could detect.
“Approaching target,” Saint Matthew said.
The AI had already turned the racer stern-first to decelerate at one gravity. The holographic display showed a bi-lobed asteroid. Each lobe was about two kilometers in diameter, joined at the waist by a deep pile of rubble. Although the asteroid seemed to be a gently-formed contact binary, one lobe had ancient fracture lines which ran dozens of meters deep. Saint Matthew stopped the racer, and then matched the asteroid’s ponderous rotation.
“Nice pad,” Stills said. “Fix it up yourself?”
“While we go into the past, we need to leave the time gates somewhere safe,” Belisarius said. “No one would ever accuse Epsilon Indi of being asteroid-poor, so hiding the time gates in a crevasse for a while is a safe bet.”
“You keep them here?” Stills said.
The racer vibrated as the doors of the hold opened into space. Belisarius switched on the bay view in the cabin.
“He carried them around with him,” Iekanjika said with a touch of bitterness.
“That’s it?” Stills said. “I thought you said they were wormholes. Those are tiny.”
“Fifteen meters wide, ten meters high,” Belisarius said. “Small enough to fit in the hold with a bit of bending.”
Stills might have had a quip or something insulting to say, maybe along the lines of ‘You fucking bent a wormhole?’ but maybe a sliver of awe could wiggle its way even through his layers of blubber and muscle.
Saint Matthew’s robotic spidery automata unloaded the time gates and propelled them into a deep crevasse twenty meters wide and blanketed in shadow. A holographic schematic appeared, showing the walls of the crevasse, the entire contact asteroid structure and the time gates.
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