The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  Fuck it.

  It wouldn’t be settled here.

  He surged forward, dragging the last bale with him, into the breathing currents of Blackmore’s crusty nostril.

  Fuck with me and I sting you, Blackmore.

  The current sucked him upward, into a wide, fast-moving channel, carrying along his last bale of experimental explosives. Booming sounds cracked at his skull, trailed by echoing bangs and whines, all shit-useless for mapping the blur-fast world. He electrified his magnetosomes, making a compass of himself. The current threw him onward as Oler’s magnetic field told him where the Free City was, but sweet fuck all else.

  Suddenly, he smashed into a rounded outcrop of ice. He careened into a smooth wall and the current pushed him, carried him, faster and faster. His shoulder stung, but he could still swim. If he’d been built of less blubber, the outcrop would have broken bones. And if it had been sharp, he’d have been a filet.

  Then, a hollow emptiness cupped him, sucking the world away as his speed tripled.

  Breath left him.

  Pressure drop.

  Merde. Merde. Merde.

  Vision tunneled. Spots. Going to pass out. Bones ached. Daggers shafted joints.

  This was the way mongrels died, by mistake and on purpose. Decompression. The bends.

  Blinding aching. Gas bubbled out of his blood, out of his muscle, out of his nerves.

  Suffocating. He was suffocating in the hell of the ocean. He hated the ocean.

  He’d wanted to die among the stars. Instead, black stars spattered his vision here.

  You were born dead under the tomb of an ocean. It’s never going to get any better.

  He flexed his flukes hard, shooting agony into his joints. He ran with the current.

  He gulped water, but every mouthful washing over gills sucked oxygen from him.

  The tunnel branched. Narrower tubes.

  He shot faster. Moments from blacking out.

  His harness yanked him painfully to a stop.

  The current slowed around him. Pressure increased. Not enough. It hurt like maybe five hundred atmospheres. Pain still stabbed at everything. He sucked at the bitter, dilute ammonia ocean like a gasping fish, his gills stealing the thin oxygen.

  He unfastened his harness and sank limply downward to shine a pale light on the explosives. Shiny, half-invisible ice lay slick around him. The doughy explosive had wedged itself into the narrow channel, blocking the current perfectly.

  He must be pretty near the top of the iceberg that had nostril-boned Blackmore.

  Not that the explosives were going anywhere.

  He turned off the light and felt at the magnetic field of Oler. He wasn’t that far from where he needed to be. The placement of the explosive might not do much damage here, but the other three would, and this one would at least distract the Puppets.

  Stills pulled a detonator from his pouch and stabbed its two prongs into the cold putty. Vaya con dios.

  He didn’t know how close he was to where Arjona wanted his little button. He leapt from the shelter. His joints ached like someone had injected steel flakes into them.

  The current ran slower here, increasing pressure and widening through many gaps. The magnetic field of the Free City strengthened until he emerged into a wide dark space, the inner portion of this lobe of Blackmore Bay. The silt and water attenuated light, so no light of the Free City reached here, but its electrical activity pressed against his magnetosomes.

  Sharp pains froze him. Internal injuries. No doubt about it.

  Shooting the channels might have exposed him to moments as low as three hundred atmospheres. Dissolved gasses bubbling out of his blood did a lot of damage, no matter how tough he was. Verses of the Way of the Mongrel like you’re fucked sometimes made it easy to lie down and die when it was time, but he’d shit himself if anyone thought he couldn’t get this done.

  Wipe their noses in it.

  He flexed, shooting forward, pain screaming in his joints.

  Piss on the leg of everyone you can.

  He expanded his magnetic field, making it more sensitive as he swam along the wall of ice that, farther up, formed one of the bay-facing walls of the Free City.

  Everything ached.

  But it wouldn’t be long. He was close.

  Arjona princey-pants wanted each one of these buttons in exactly the right spot. Stills had no idea what sort of comms signal the quantum man had for these detonators. Signals other than sound and electricity travelled like shit underwater, and even those two weakened so quickly that they might as well be using cans on a string.

  When he was less cranky, or less injured, he had more patience for moronic orders. Sometimes the world and jobs made more sense when he didn’t understand everything. The world made a lot of sense when it was clear that the people giving the orders couldn’t find their asses any better than the mongrels could. Arjona’s certainty was a bit much to take, especially when he also didn’t tell everybody everything they needed to know.

  Stills found the spot. Knife pain ran through his marrows. He touched the ice, hand trembling. His little laser melted a cock-sized hole into the ice, through thin layers of quiescent, starving sulfur and ammonia-living bacteria. Warm water flowed out of his cutting, briefly shielding his fingers from the relentless chill of the ocean. His fingers fumbled with the flap of his pouch. One last stupid button to bury in the ice forever.

  Stills didn’t know why prancy-pants wanted the buttons here, or how much damage the explosives could do, or why Arjona wanted them detonated. Arjona didn’t trust everyone on the crew. Stills hoped Arjona was gonna make shit sure that any mole ended up as the fuckee and not the fucker.

  Stills slipped the button into the tiny channel, packed it with anhydrous salts and stabbed the packaging. Slush formed in the channel, hardening to ice. Now to get the back to Phocas before any of her explosives turned out to be less stable than she thought.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  THE ELEVATOR DINGED, and the big doors slowly opened, revealing six Puppets, four in blue uniforms with yellow piping and tricorn hats bearing the coat-of-arms of the Grand Creston Hotel. The other two wore red maintenance coveralls. None topped eighty-five centimeters tall, and they were old Caucasian pale, like Marie. They squinted out of the lit elevator into the dark of the penthouse.

  “Stay where you are,” Marie commanded in français 8.1 from the darkness. A surgical mask muffled her voice. In one hand, she squished thirty-five grams of explosive putty. In the other, she held a detonator control. “I’ve hidden the Congregate officials and the visiting diplomatic officials, but you still can’t come in.”

  One of the constables, a female Puppet, stepped to the edge of the elevator door uncertainly. She had her hand on a nightstick. In the other, she had a sensor. Probably a barometer. And Marie bet that the constable was packing more than a nightstick.

  Four to one.

  “We do not wish to disturb you, ma’am,” the Puppet said. “We’re only here verify that there are no structural problems in your suites.”

  “The problem is that the dignitaries in these suites have not been vaccinated against local pathogens,” Marie said. “If antibodies for Olerian viral and bacterial strains were ever found in any of these officials, the political implications would be severe, for them and for the Grand Creston.”

  “Ma’am, please,” the Puppet said. “Seismometer readings showed a breach somewhere beneath kilometer seventeen. We’re coming in.”

  “If you’re not willing to listen to reason, then the management of the Grand Creston is certainly going to be hearing from the Gouverneur at Saguenay Station, and probably from the head of a foreign government. In the meantime, I can’t let you risk their health. I have to disinfect you.”

  Marie pressed the detonator and four nozzles newly affixed to the frame of the elevator doors sprayed a heavy mist onto the six Puppets. They coughed and wiped at their eyes and faces. The Puppet sergeant reached for a small radio on
her belt.

  “Don’t touch that, constable,” Marie said. “I’ve just sprayed you with an aerosolized explosive. This detonator,” she said, “will put a static charge through the room when I press this button. The explosive now soaking your clothes will then go off.”

  The Puppets stared at her, horrified. Two started stripping off their Grand Creston Constabulary tunics.

  “Stop moving now,” Marie said, stepping farther into the light and holding the detonator high, thumb quite obviously on the button. “Don’t believe me?” She threw the small piece of putty at the wall separating the room from one of the bedrooms. The bang and flash filled the room, leaving a sixty centimeter hole in the wall.

  She stepped closer.

  “You,” she said, pointing at the lead constable, “will get on your radio and tell your bosses that you’ve examined the suites, that everything is fine, and that you’re going to go up to the next levels of suites. You follow?”

  The Puppet nodded, wide-eyed. She pulled free her radio with shaking hands. Marie stilled her with a finger. “Deep breaths,” Marie said. “Sound calm, or my finger won’t be.”

  The Puppet’s eyes widened and the others shrank from Marie. The Puppet brought the radio up and gave the message, exactly as Marie had said. Then, she slowly let her hand come down.

  “Good,” Marie said. “Now leave your weapons and radios on the floor of the elevator and then come inside. Have a seat on the couch. You all look terrible. You’re not going to get hurt, but I can’t let you leave until the ambassadors have left.”

  Nightsticks, small pistols, radios and tool boxes settled on the floor of the elevator before, one by one, the Puppets entered the suite fearfully, with drooping eyes.

  “Sit down before you fall down,” Marie said. “You really aren’t used to stress, are you?”

  They shook their heads sheepishly. Their heads drooped.

  “Go to sleep if you want. It’s better if your eyes are closed when they go by,” Marie said.

  They didn’t need more prompting. Two of the constables were already slumped on the couch. Two closed their eyes and were gone too. Only the lead constable and one other fought it, but not long. They fell onto the floor. The surgical anaesthetic in the gas would last quite a while.

  Yup, Bel didn’t need to know about this.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  ON THE SURFACE of Oler, Del Casal lifted off in the yacht. He did not set a course for the asteroid belt as they had planned, or even open the seals on his vacuum suit. He made a small hop to one of the smaller micro-states of the Federation of Puppet Theocracies and touched down at a cargo port dotted with embargo-breaking freighters.

  A tiny trace of fear tickled at Del Casal’s spine, but he stepped onto the surface. Under bright starlight, he walked the four hundred meters between automated loaders, to a big freighter with an open loading hatch. At the back of the freighter’s yawning bay, another space-suited figure met him. The figure scanned him with practiced precision for weapons and communications devices, and then motioned him through the airlock.

  His hands shook as if he had not eaten in days. He schooled his features and his body. On the other side of the airlock, a woman with pale skin and artful acid scars on her face met him. She wore no uniform, but was quite obviously a member of one of the Congregate’s intelligence services.

  “Par içi, s’il vous plaît,”she said.

  Del Casal removed the faceplate and cowl of his vacuum suit as she led him into an office with a holographic projection desk and a few chairs. The room felt heavy, centering as it did on a hulking figure beside the desk.

  Del Casal tamped down his momentary hesitation in the face of the Scarecrow. Flexible steel cloth formed its lumpy shirt. Shapeless pants were tied at waist and ankle. Carbon fibre gloves and shoes emerged from thickets of raw nanotubule wiring. Its head was a sack of carbon cloth with painted features, tied at the neck. Small whirring sounds, focusing camera lenses, microphones, speakers, or weapons, moved the lumpy suit, like mice in a bag, inviting an observer to worry about what lay beneath in a wholly illogical and visceral way. Del Casal was not given to illogic, nor was he particularly sensitive to his viscera. He had induced fear himself in his time.

  “You took your time getting here,” the Scarecrow said in last century’s low-house French. The voice was deliberately mechanical, but contained a petulance that suggested entirely dangerous human weaknesses.

  “Their plan is in action now, and they are careful,” Del Casal said in French. “This was my first chance to move unobserved.”

  “So share your information,” the Scarecrow said.

  “Price first, information second,” Del Casal said.

  “I wouldn’t be in the business I’m in if I didn’t pay well for good information, Señor Del Casal, and I wouldn’t have the budget I have if I spent it sight unseen.”

  The machine-like face was inscrutable, but was probably telling the truth. With unaccustomed halting that embarrassed him, Del Casal told the Scarecrow of Arjona’s mad plan, of the crew, of their Union employers and of his own assessment of it. The machine before him had no human reactions, nothing to read. The Venusian woman beside Del Casal was as inscrutable as a machine herself, except when she prodded for details with surgically clipped questions. The Scarecrow only stared with glass eyes. Del Casal had begun to suspect that the entire interview was to be conducted by the Scarecrow’s subordinate, so when the machine spoke, it startled him.

  “Say more of this Arjona and his abilities and this damaged AI,” the Scarecrow said.

  Del Casal did not appreciate his own reactions, nor how they seemed to be forced out of him by the cheap symbolism and contrivance in the Scarecrow design. They were equals. He and this woman. And he and this machine. He could control his reactions. He spoke as he would to an equal.

  “Belisarius Arjona is a fallen Homo quantus,” he said,“apparently not able to do much with his birthright, so he has recruited another Homo quantus to assist him in his calculations. I do not know much of the AI. It seems only capable of interfacing with us in the persona of some religious figure. This may be an act, but it is quite capable.”

  The Scarecrow continued its low clicking and whirring. Del Casal guessed its movements were actually silent piezo-electric contractions of layers of carbon nanotubules. The small sounds would be designed for an audience, something to psychologically emphasize the inhumanity of the Scarecrow. Games and flash.

  “Do you know where this Major Iekanjika comes from?” the Scarecrow asked.

  “She says she is attached to the Sixth Expeditionary Force.”

  “There is no such force.”

  “There was, forty years ago.”

  “Did you see evidence of this supposed advanced drive system?”

  “No. But Arjona thinks that with their new weapons and the right conditions in the Theocracy, the Expeditionary Force can force their way to the mouth of the Axis at Port Stubbs.”

  “Will they succeed?”

  Del Casal shook his head. “Arjona is confident of success, and they have perhaps effectively used counter-intelligence on the Puppets, but forcing the Axis will be hard.”

  “I have just transferred forty thousand francs to an anonymous account for you,” the Scarecrow said. Del Casal began to protest, but the Scarecrow continued speaking. “Should this information prove to be more valuable upon further investigation, I am prepared to add to that amount accordingly.”

  “Then that will do for now, Scarecrow.”

  “You go back to this crew of misfits?”

  Del Casal shook his head.

  “I am beginning a contract in the Puppet Free City.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  WAY OF THE Mongrel, verse three, You’re fucked, was best served cold with a side of verse two, It’s never going to get any better.

  Stills followed the edge of a great eddy, moving deeper whenever the plug of icebergs allowed, looking for a way out of this lobe
of Blackmore Bay. Water that flowed into this lobe kilometers back had to flow out somewhere. Most of where he looked, it squealed away through tiny gaps around thousands of tightly jammed icebergs.

  He reached the deepest levels of the Free City without finding a way back to the ocean, except for a single small channel. The combination of turbulence and other outflows resulted in a slow current moving through the narrow way, at maybe a thousand atmospheres. Squeezy, but not killy.

  The slow moan of the moving ocean echoed its way up the long narrow tube. The channel was wide enough to fit him for maybe a hundred meters. But it pinched to just a dozen centimeters for the section in the middle before opening up once again. Shit.

  He was stuck in Blackmore’s damn nose until some of the ice shifted.

  He could breathe the ammonia piss of this ocean for a while longer, but it would poison him in a few days, and by then, the explosives would detonate. And he had nothing but energy bars to eat. He also didn’t trust Phocas to wait around too long for him, or not to get herself into shit on her own.

  One way out, poorly designed.

  He swam away hard, pain knifing his joints, back across four kilometers of black water to where he’d come in. It took him longer than he expected; he was hurt more than he thought. Lucky no one was here to see it.

  He found the way he’d come in. The current blew into the Blackmore’s nostril hard, and he had to fight his way through it like a salmon looking to spawn. Finally, aching and breathless, he floated in exhausted agony in the sheltered area where the last bale of explosives was jammed like a constipated sideways shit in a sphincter, waiting patiently to rip Blackmore a new one.

  Stills dug his fingers into the hard putty and pulled free an armful. He also took the cord and harness he’d used to drag the bales and flexed back out into the current again.

  He hated oceans.

  Everything ached and he gulped for oxygen with his wide mouth and gills. He swam as fast as the anoxic water let him. He had aggressive hemoglobins, blood stuffed with red cells, and muscles designed to process and store lactic acid for a long time, but none of it really mattered if the ocean had almost no oxygen.