The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  The room spun around William. He retched, but his stomach had nothing to fling at the insane Puppet. William coughed from the bottom of watery lungs, pain stabbing behind his sternum. He spit blood and phlegm. Their ideas were violations. He’d never before believed that evil existed.

  The Puppet troopers came. He panicked against metal-fingered hands. He couldn’t stop coughing. They tied his hands behind him. His coughing speckled the floor and wall with blood, leaving fire in his chest. His head throbbed. Sweat slicked him.

  “I’ve convinced about half of the Conclave that you are the messiah, the harbinger of the Second Coming of the Numen, one who will bring us into a new relationship with divinity. Although not in the way you thought, you made a sacrifice to come here. Sacrifice hallows you. You might take away the sins of the Puppets.”

  Chapter Sixty

  THE SCARECROW TRAVELLED across the Puppet Axis in the executive cabin of a special Puppet transport into the zero g of Port Blackmore with two of Majeur Bareilles’s lieutenants. During the transit, he reviewed the intelligence Bareilles’s researchers had pulled on the Anglo-Spanish experiment of the Homo quantus. It wasn’t much and smacked of overblown misinformation, yet given some of the things he was discovering, might have been deadly accurate.

  Investors and Banks of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy had been downgrading the stock value of the Homo quantus project for years. The venture was either quixotic or too ambitious to credit. If even half of the objectives in the stock briefings had succeeded, the Homo quantus were dangerous. And yet, there were no reports of success, or reports pointed to such limited success as to fail to meet investor expectations.

  Might this be deliberate misinformation? Some investors lost money, but the project might continue in peace and without suspicion. The project aroused so little suspicion in fact that the Congregate had never planted even a single spy among the Homo quantus. Much would become clearer when the Scarecrow got his hands on Arjona and the other one, Mejía. Its reflections were interrupted. Their emergence into the space at Port Blackmore was met with alarms.

  “What is happening?” the Scarecrow said to the Puppet pilots through the intercom.

  “Alarms!” one Puppet said.

  “Port Blackmore is under attack,” the other pilot said. “Our instructions are to move away from the Axis.”

  Puppet transports had no windows. The Scarecrow could have penetrated the relatively low security systems of the transport to access the sensors, but they would no doubt be crude, just enough to ferry passengers and cargo back and forth across a small portion of space over and over. Was Arjona’s plan already underway?

  “Dock,” the Scarecrow said.

  “We have no authorization,” the pilot said.

  “I am the Epsilon Indi Scarecrow. Dock the transport immediately or I will break into the cockpit and dock it myself after killing you.”

  The intercom went silent for a time, but after thirty-two seconds, he felt acceleration. The Puppets docked the transport in record time, despite the lack of authorizations. The automatic umbilical connected. The two lieutenants carried the Scarecrow into the port in a coffin-sized cargo container so that he could pass in relative anonymity. They were heading to rendezvous with other Congregate agents.

  The Scarecrow had crossed to Port Blackmore because Bareilles’s teams at the Puppet Free City had confirmed what Del Casal had told them. Arjona had been sighted crossing the Puppet Axis with his team. No matter what was happening, there was nowhere Arjona could run on the other side of the Puppet Axis. The system around the Stubbs Pulsar was a dead end in the Axis Mundi network, a frontier wilderness sparsely covered by intelligence operatives.

  As they made their way though Port Blackmore, he felt the anxiety and the pace of activity through the sensor feeds in the exterior of the box. Puppets, often sedate, lazy or dangerous with inscrutable madnesses, were moving on cables and ropes, carrying, fixing, hauling while alarms continued to sound.

  Puppet scents were on the air too. The Puppets did not secrete pheremonal signals like their divinities, but they had other scents in their sweat, some of which had been deciphered by the Congregate Ministry of Intelligence. The Puppets were in low panic.

  The two lieutenants continued moving him to industrial areas where many prospecting companies were headquartered. Here, in a secure warehouse labelled Restrepo & Daughters Mapping, Spectroscopy and Metallurgy, the Scarecrow was uncrated. The room was a zero g observatory set into the outer wall of the complicated, twisted, forever half-built set of habitats and gantries and bridges that was called Port Blackmore. The Scarecrow quickly noted the double layered windows to prevent laser-listening and the press of electricity around the whole warehouse, acting as a Faraday field. The telescopes could nonetheless survey the asteroid field and observe the traffic of ships.

  The eponymous Restropo and his daughters were all Congregate intelligence operatives, and saluted the Scarecrow. Lieutenant Marceline Faribault, the eldest ‘daughter,’ was the detachment commander. She opaqued the windows and turned on a holographic display.

  “What’s happening?” the Scarecrow asked.

  “An unknown force is attacking Port Blackmore,” Faribault said. Her French was beautiful: français 8.15, the construction and pacing of Venusian French, but accented by one of the courts of the Congregate provincial capitals. “The defenses at Fort Hinkley seem to have stopped the attack, although the main batteries of Port Blackmore are still firing.”

  The holographic display showed telescopic views of Fort Hinkley, a lumpy asteroid co-orbiting with the port. Shining in the image were tiny ships, magnified to the point of blurry pixilation, and weapons fire and silent explosions in space.

  “Union ships?” he demanded. “Have you sent news back through the Axis?”

  “We paid off a Puppet fast courier who was dispatched by the Bishop of Port Blackmore as soon as the attack started,” Faribault said. “That Puppet will send a message to your office expecting payment.”

  That was typical of their dealings with the Puppets. Pliable and cooperative until their divinities were discussed. The Scarecrow downloaded the raw telescopic data. The attacking ships were shown in overlapping frequency profiles. The didn’t look like any ships he knew. Not Union, not Middle Kingdom, not Anglo-Spanish. Strange hollow ships. Why hollow? They weren’t slow ships, but where were the engines? Blisters on the sides corresponded somewhat to the design of old Congregate cruiser weapons placements, but there were as many dissimilarities.

  “What are they?” the Scarecrow asked.

  “The length-diameter dimensions strongly suggest a vessel designed to cross worm-holes,” Faribault said. On the holographic display, she indicated structures on what seemed to be the bow. “These could contain extendable coils to induce wormholes.”

  “Who are they?” the Scarecrow asked.

  Faribault shook her head.

  “We don’t know, monsieur.”

  “And where did they come from?” the Scarecrow said. “We always thought the Stubbs Pulsar was a dead end to the Axis Mundi, but what if the Anglo-Spanish or the Middle Kingdom or even the Ummah found a new wormhole that links to this system? The Puppets will have enemies on both sides and their Axis will fall. We have to be in place to claim it.”

  “Those ships don’t look like anything from any of the patron nations, monsieur,” Faribault mused.

  “No,” the Scarecrow agreed.

  “And Arjona has joined them. During the first part of the attack,” Faribault said, “we sighted Arjona boarding a tugboat with a number of others, including a woman matching your office’s description of Major Iekanjika. As per your instructions, we did not move to detain or arrest. Another is Marie Simone Laurette Phocas, an ex-special ops NCO and recent escaped convict.”

  The Scarecrow filed that information and modified his assessment of Arjona. Intelligence work was not just what information was reliable. It was how information connected. They’d had Arjona tied to
the Major Iekanjika. Now they had more: Arjona connected to ships of unknown design perpetrating an attack on the Puppet fortifications. Too much of this information was needed back on the other side of the Axis. Urgently.

  “This visit was shorter than I would have liked,” the Scarecrow said, downloading all the data the telescopes had captured. “I need to meet with the admiralty. Something is at play and they’ll need what we’ve learned here. Monitor the attack. If you can arrest Arjona and the false major, do it. Bring them to me immediately.”

  Chapter Sixty-One

  "ONLY HALF THE Puppet fortifications went down,” Saint Matthew said disconsolately.

  Cassandra clung to a railing in a docking slip near the rented tug, beside Bel. She was feeling increasingly shy around him. He was revealing more of his layers, some she couldn’t trust and some impenetrable, and some disarmingly earnest. She’d kissed him to try to take away his pain, but something else had been there for her too. The madness of what they were doing was part of the kiss, as if old hurts didn’t matter and as if life’s rules and roads were melting. She was in this con. He said he’d told her everything, and if he could be believed, only he and she knew the whole con. Nerves ate at her insides.

  Iekanjika was on the other side of Bel. Their faces were inscrutable. Marie was on a lower gantry, shoving Stills’ chamber into the hold of the tug. They’d unpacked Saint Matthew once they’d claimed the tug they’d put in freight, and Gates-15 had snuck out of the main town area to join them.

  The AI was projecting a schematic of Port Stubbs. Outlined in yellow light, the mouth of the Puppet Axis lay in the middle of a three-dimensional web of struts, gantries, platforms, habitats and weapons. Many of the cannon batteries blinked lazily in red. Most glowed solid green. Also solid green were three dozen ships of the Puppet navy.

  “What went wrong?” Bel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Saint Matthew said. “The virus should have penetrated further.”

  “The Puppets must suspect something,” Bel said. “They have more than half their fleet here, even though they’ve got a dreadnought hanging over the Free City.”

  Cassandra studied him, trying to see any cracks in his fabricated emotion. She couldn’t tell when he told the truth or when he was making something up. Or maybe he really was indeterminate—ghostly, nothing but superimposed possibilities.

  “What do we do now?” Cassandra asked. This was her line. Her one line.

  Major Iekanjika was stone-faced.

  “Major,” Bel said, “we won’t get a better chance than now, even if we were hoping for better conditions. We should start to move before more Puppet forces arrive.”

  Iekanjika nodded reluctantly. Saint Matthew extinguished his display. Gates-15 looked morose.

  “Gates-15,” Bel said, “we have to even the odds some more. Get the virus into other secondary systems. It might make a difference.”

  “It’s dangerous for me, Arjona,” Gates-15 said. “I’m watched. They don’t open the door for me anymore now that they’re busy talking with William.”

  “Try,” Bel said. “This is show time.”

  “I’ll see you back on the other side of the Axis,” the Puppet said, trying a brave smile. He headed back into the main complex of Port Stubbs, arm over arm on the ropes. Cassandra watched him for a while, until Bel touched her sleeve. They boarded the tug. In the cockpit, Bel held out one of his special buttons to Iekanjika.

  “Would you care to do the honors, Major?”

  “How do they work?” she asked.

  “Squeeze it,” he said. “On the Mutapa, its entangled twin will emit photons, triggering your go-ahead to Major-General Rudo.”

  Iekanjika flexed her long fingers around the button and squeezed. When she opened her hand again, the button had changed color.

  The tug lurched. “Get ready for departure,” Saint Matthew said from Bel’s wrist.

  They strapped themselves in as they receded from the gantries on cold jets. It took fifteen minutes to get far enough from the slips to ignite the main engines.

  “The Port Authorities are signalling a general alarm,” the AI said.

  The tension of weeks and months of work now made a painful fist in Cassandra’s stomach. Her face felt hot and her hands ice cold.

  “It didn’t take your people long to get here,” Bel said to Iekanjika.

  “We’ve been preparing for this for a generation,” she said.

  “I’ve got feeds from some parts of the defensive net,” Saint Matthew said.

  The display changed, showing the space traffic control area of the port, within concentric spheres of the defensive perimeter. The outer sphere flashed red. It showed a half-dozen unknown signals converging over the asteroid Hinkley. Bel adjusted the controls to get a better telescopic view of the fortification.

  Pockets of light flashed from Hinkley. Nuclear explosions silhouetted the length of the potato-shaped asteroid. The old particle cannons and lasers mounted on Port Stubbs fired at targets around Hinkley. Marie came up from the holds and strapped in.

  “We’re going to get blown to pieces, by one side or the other,” Saint Matthew grumbled.

  “Make for Hinkley,” Bel said. “Transmit our identification to the Union.”

  “We’ll be trapped with them,” Saint Matthew said. “We can’t make it to the mouth of the Axis now. We’ve somehow been betrayed.”

  “Of course we were betrayed,” Bel said, unpacking a fugue suit from a box and passing it to Cassandra. “Gates-15 was our inside man, but he was informing on us from day one.”

  “But he’s one of their exiles!” Saint Matthew said.

  “Nothing was wrong with him,” Bel said. “Del Casal didn’t do anything to him except insert the nanotubules so that he could inject the virus into the Puppet systems. He reacted to William entirely on his own.”

  “Does William know Gates-15 is a spy?” Marie asked.

  “He might by now. I couldn’t risk telling him. Hopefully he took the suicide pill already.”

  “But the virus didn’t work!” Saint Matthew said.

  “They likely had him insert it into isolated systems at Port Stubbs,” Bel said, “and the Puppets shut off their own systems to pretend the virus worked.”

  “Why?” Saint Matthew demanded.

  “The Puppets are trying to make us think our plan worked.”

  “This is terrible!” Saint Matthew said. “They’ve set a trap!”

  “No,” Cassandra said slowly. Everyone watched her. She understood some of the thrill Bel must feel deep in a confidence scheme. Bel had constructed a situation for the Puppets, and their belief in its truth made it real. “This is perfect,” she said.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  THE THRUST WAS steady enough that Marie risked unsnapping herself and moving through the door into the hold. Most of the hold was in dark vacuum. A section had been partitioned and pressurized with an atmosphere for Stills’ chamber. Marie leaned over it and knocked on the window. Stills’ electronic voice sounded.

  “What do you want, malparida?”

  “I’m sorry I hacked into your system,” she said. “I thought it would be funny.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Is that the normal fuck off you give everybody, or is that one special ’cause you hate my guts?”

  “I honest as fuck can’t understand how you ever lasted in the Congregate Navy.”

  “To be fair, I wasn’t very good.”

  “Weren’t you a sergeant?”

  “Until I made corporal. And then private. I feel my career plateaued when they put me in jail.”

  “I get your superiors.”

  “I was going to get a bad performance report. My lieutenant offered to improve it for consideration.”

  “You got a stellar handjob appraisal?”

  “Non. I punched him in the balls.”

  “With your augmented muscles?”

  “No, with my foot. Over and over. Then I messed up his quarte
rs.”

  “Big shit.”

  “I made the mess with explosives.”

  “Now you’re pissing off the quantum whisperer?”

  “He’s got a lot of patience. He is a contemplative, after all.”

  “Feel free to go back to bothering him.”

  “I brought a peace offering,” she said. “Gossip. Gates-15 is a double-agent. I knew we couldn’t trust that little bugger.”

  “Is it blowin’ the job?” Stills asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it. Sounds like Bel changed his plan when he found out.”

  “I’ll be pissed off if I don’t get paid.”

  “You know what I’m getting tired of?”

  “Why the fuck would I care what you’re tired of?”

  “I’m glad you asked. I’m bored of trying to help Bel with his love problem and Matt with his god complex.”

  “They’ll shit sunshine when they hear you’re going to stop helping them.”

  “I decided to help you.”

  “You can start by washing my ass.”

  “I’m figuring you out. You’re one of those dish-it-out types but you’re not interested in taking it.”

  “Are you a mongrel whisperer now?”

  “Let’s say I am. I think the whole Way of the Mongrel code is this big defensive screen, putting yourselves down before someone else does.”

  “Are you going somewhere with this, Phocas?”

  “I’m surprised Bel hasn’t seen it. The whole of the Way of the Mongrel is a kind of con. The tough don’t-fuck-with-me shell is what the world sees, and then you let the world imagine that it’s overcompensation for deep insecurities. But!” she said. “The but is very important.”

  “My butt is important,” Stills said.