The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  What if something was in the way on the other side?

  Too late.

  Their momentum threw them into starlight, past the Congregate fortifications, an orbiting Congregate frigate, patrol fighters and defensive pickets.

  Particle beams lanced after them.

  Stills began booting his inflaton drive. The Nhialic and the Gbudue must be doing the same.

  What the fuck were they doing? Their rear flanks were completely open, like an invitation to a good probing. Particle beams and even good lasers could mess them up.

  The Congregate fortifications alarmed like a cluster of wasp nests.

  Stills punched at his controls, trying to get the stupid propulsion system online faster.

  Suddenly, two more Union warships shot from the Axis, stern-first, their bows facing the Axis: the Juba and the Batembuzi.

  The Congregate fortifications, already alert, began to fire.

  Stills’ inflaton detector screamed. The Juba and Batembuzi drives were hot! They’d run the Axis without shutting the drives down, without knowing whether they would destroy the ships or even the Axis itself. They were fucking crazy!

  Before Congregate missile and particle beam could write death on them, the Juba and the Batembuzi fired their inflaton lensing weapons. The fortifications wrenched in space, expanding and shrinking in a hail of torn metal that ignited as nuclear fuels blew. The lensing crumpled the starboard side of the Congregate frigate before it was showered in the shrapnel storm that had been the fortifications.

  Mierda.

  Still sailing backwards at attack speed, the Juba and the Batembuzi launched missiles at the shocked Congregate assets around the Axis.

  Stills’ inflaton drive came on. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be bringing the fucking racer to the rest of the crew back at the Epsilon Indi system. He couldn’t fly back. What if he collided with more incoming warships?

  The habitable world called Bachwezi became visible as a tiny crescent, as well as the habitat moon Kitara. The Nhialic and the Gbudue raced onward, towards Backwezi at full speed, with Stills riding in their wake.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  How the fuck do I get out of this?

  Focus. Stay alive. Get paid.

  No one paid attention to him, neither the Union ship nor the remaining Congregate forces. A swarm of missiles took flight from the gun platform in high orbit over Bachwezi. All of the missiles came at the two warships. None targeted the Union planet or its moon.

  It wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of missiles to seriously fuck up Bachwezi or Kitara. That’s why they called the missiles moon-busters. But the Congregate must not recognize these ships. They didn’t know this was a rebellion. And maybe that wasn’t so illogical. When the fuck would the Union have had the time and space to invent a propulsion and weapons system so far ahead of everything else in civilization?

  But how long would this hold?

  Even small nukes would still blow the middle guts out of both Bachwezi and Kitara.

  Particle beams scored across the Nhialic, burning the hull and blowing great chunks of steel and carbon plastic into space. Stills spun the racer solar northward as fragments of superstructure clawed the vacuum where he’d just been.

  In his displays, the hard sound of the Nhialic’s inflaton drive went echo-soft.

  Holy shit.

  The bridge superstructure was still in place, as were many of the bays and weapons blisters, but the Nhialic’s starboard flank was torn from bow to stern, all the way through to the inner wall of the inflaton drive in some places. The sound of the Nhialic’s inflaton drive started hardening in his displays again.

  Tough fucking ship. They’re going to get it going.

  Then, he saw the four casse à face missiles.

  The Nhialic unloaded small and medium particle cannons on them, but those fuckers were designed not to be hit; predator-algorithmed AI avoidance systems steered casse à face missiles. The four evaded the particle fire and bore onward.

  If Stills had been flying a tonnère fighter, he might have been able to take out one, even two on a good day. In the racer, he might even have been able to do something, but the air-suckers had deliberately paid them in unarmed ships.

  It wasn’t fair. Stills didn’t like them. Not any of them. Not the Congregate. Not the Union. The air-suckers and ass-lickers would as soon spit on the mongrels as give them the time of day. But of all the air-suckers he’d met, these Union cocksuckers were the closest he’d ever seen to the mongrels. Their rebellion was stupid. A victory today would just bring the full force of the Congregate onto them. They were fucked. Just like the tribe.

  It was as if the crews of the Expeditionary Force had read parts of the Way of the Mongrel. If they don’t respect you, make them fear you. Respect strength as long as you have to; then, fuck them up bad. Wipe their noses in it.

  Fuck.

  He was thinking ideas. Bad ideas that didn’t fit into the Way of the Mongrel. Get paid and get out was the Way. Piss on legs. Poke the air-suckers. No help for free. Unless you’re doing the fucking, you’re the one getting fucked.

  Câlice.

  Stills rammed up his inflaton drive to forty gravities, so high that he could feel it hard, even cocooned in water and shell. He darted far ahead of the cruisers, along the line between missiles and Nhialic. The quartet of missiles did not react, and he raced past them before rotating, braking on fifty gravities and leaving the drive on high, shooting after them.

  The missiles accelerated at ten gravities. It took some touchy flying to match velocity and acceleration, especially in this ugly, over-powered cargo shuttle they were calling a racer. About four kilometers separated the missiles, a space that exhaled and inhaled with their evasive maneuvering around the lines of hot steel lunging at them from the Nhialic. Stills rolled the racer, following a missile, in the most dangerous maneuver he’d ever thought up.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. I get paid a hell of a lot of francs to go into less dangerous situations.

  But he also did deep dives for nothing. To prove his balls, his big, blessed cojones. Lick my balls, he thought as he brought the nose of the racer close enough to the tail of a missile to set off temperature alarms. Only meters separated carbon-steel-reinforced ceramic from light, hot metal.

  He twitched the accelerator, giving a burst of twenty-gravity acceleration for a quarter of a second. The bow of the racer mashed the thruster housing and nozzles, and the missile streaked away in a corkscrew spin.

  I said lick ’em, motherfuckers!

  He swooped at the next-closest missile. It evaded, ducking and weaving in a patternless track, but it was constrained by its goal of blowing the shit out of the Nhialic. He followed it, testing his reflexes against computer algorithms. He got closer and closer. And then tipped the nose of the racer into the thin metal of the thruster.

  A shower of hot gas and radioactive fuel sprayed into the cockpit of the racer. Alarms went off. Not the internal racer alarms. The external ones. The missile was going to detonate. Stills jerked the acceleration to fifty gravities and pulled straight to solar north.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  Two seconds. Fifteen hundred meters.

  Three seconds. Three kilometers. He didn’t have to just get away from the damaged casse à face. If one went off, it would take the others with it.

  Four seconds. Five kilometers.

  Boom.

  The casse à face burned around him, moon-busting light searing into the cockpit and even into the porthole of his chamber. The external telemetry staticked up like an electrical short.

  Fiveseconds. Seven and a half kilometers.

  The blast was big. Another casse à face blew.

  Six seconds. Ten kilometers. The light was bad, but the shockwave of heat and radioactive particles would expand and disperse before it licked its balls.

  Seven seconds. His own weight crushed him. Fourteen kilometers. Telemetry cleaned up. The last casse à f
ace had gotten lost in the blast. It was off by ten degrees and rocketed past the Nhialic. The scarred warship sailed through the expanding blast zone, racing past Stills. His displays showed its inflaton drive coming online.

  The Gbudue drew a shitload of the fire. It flew without a bridge superstructure. Burnt craters had replaced its bays and weapons blisters. Yet it still raced ahead, inflaton drive on fifteen gravities, giving the Congregate gun platform commander over Bachwezi no time to think about aiming at anything else.

  Crazy, brave, dangerous fuckers, with the cojones to stare down a casse à face point blank.

  Point blank.

  They weren’t proving a point.

  They were protecting their pack.

  What magnificent cojones.

  And then, from within the rain of metal and hot particles and missiles, the Gbudue fired whatever the fuck their weapon was. Space warped out of shape, all along the warship’s trajectory, swallowing and spitting out everything in its path, twisted and broken. The gun platform showered into small pieces.

  Stills turned away, setting a high-g course back to the Axis Mundi.

  At mid-high accelerations, he was about four minutes from the Axis. He was small, wounded, and no one was paying attention to him. The Congregate forces were making the Union victory costly, but the Juba and the Batembuzi were still blasting the shit out of any Congregate asset that wiggled, including the few remaining tonnère fighters. Stills’ people. With some satisfaction, he saw the mongrel pilots carve slivers of flesh from the warships, even as they were shredded.

  The Congregate wouldn’t be shedding any tears over those mongrels. They’d just hire more.

  Stills cut his drive and shot into the Axis.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  CASSANDRA SUCKED BREATH unevenly, floating in the sickbay, trembling. Her feverish skin felt like it radiated heat. She moved out of the sickbay and shut the door behind her. She could see her route in geometric clarity, against a schematic of the ship her savant brain had constructed. Each movement of her aching body took into account linear and angular momentum.

  Six point six meters, turn ninety degrees left, ten point one degrees down. Fifteen meters, following curve of the ship around the inflaton drive. Count, measure, picture, calculate, to keep from being sick, to keep from slowing down, to keep from being afraid of being captured and not being able to share the data she’d gathered.

  The ship throbbed. Cold jets positioned the ship to thrust, probably with its inflaton drive, to carry the time gates away from the Puppet fortifications. If she didn’t hurry, she was about to take a long ride with the Limpopo.

  She reached the service airlock. No alarms sounded. No one had come after her, but orange lights lit the corridor, a shipboard signal to secure positions for acceleration. She hit the floor lightly as the cold maneuvering jets pushed the Limpopo away from Hinkley.

  She threw the hood over her head and face and sealed her suit. Fugue suits were not made for long forays in vacuum, but she only needed a few minutes.

  She tapped the override code for the airlock. A green light and the door hissed open. She swung-stepped inside in the uncertain acceleration of the maneuvering jets and shut the door. She hammered the cycle button.

  Cycle! Hurry!

  Air sucked out of the airlock, too slow. Acceleration was more constant now. Any second the Limpopo would activate its inflaton drive. Cassandra opened the emergency release switch and a small hatch opened in the middle of the external door, evacuating the last air explosively. She spun the wheel and pushed the door open.

  Beneath her yawned beautiful open space, a receding asteroid, dark and haloed in debris. And just beneath the Limpopo, only dozens of meters beneath her, the tug. Cassandra leapt as the Limpopo began accelerating.

  She tumbled. But she was still in savant. She measured her rotational speed and angular momentum against the stars, solving the differential equations to know how to extend her arms and legs to spin without precessing. She closed her eyes, only opening them for a portion of each rotation, so that she could see the tug approaching in strobe.

  The tug slowed, then stopped, letting Cassandra approach with her own momentum.

  Cassandra’s savant brain calculated and timed the moment of contact and hit the tug with flat hands, stopping her spin. She moved along handholds to the lock and cycled in. Once the outer lock was closed, the inner lock pressed against her as the tug accelerated away from Hinkley and the Limpopo. Her mushy arms and legs were listless. She slumped, panting in her helmet. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead. She had data.

  Air hissed into the airlock. The door vibrated and boomed against her ear and then opened. Bel was there. Relief washed into her. He really had told her the truth. All of it. He’d lied to everyone else, but not to her. She was proud and giddy and overwhelmed. She felt like laughing, but her body hurt too much.

  Bel hugged her, checked for injuries, and hugged her again. He opened the clasp of her helmet and pulled it gently away. He knelt with her, pressing his hand against her hair, not stroking. Low stim. He knew what the fugue hangover was like. He had dimmed the lights and then slowly pressed a bulb of cool water to her lips. She drank.

  She burned, but she was with Bel, and she’d learned something. Something immense. The years between them had washed away. They were young again. Learning together.

  “I’m a mess,” she croaked.

  “Me too.”

  “I saw it all, Bel,” she whispered. “I saw across three hundred and twenty light years, all at once. And the insides of the Puppet Axis. I saw it all.”

  “What was it like?” he asked.

  “It was everything. Everything that we wanted.”

  “I saw it too,” he said.

  “You entered the fugue?” she asked, and she didn’t hear pride in her voice. She heard concern. What if he’d died? The thought of not having him, now that she’d found him again, terrified her.

  “Yes. I travelled through the time gates, into the past, through raw hyperspace.”

  She stared at him disbelievingly.

  “There’s more,” he whispered, “even bigger than that, if you can believe it.”

  He slipped little pills into her mouth: sedatives and anti-stims. His fingers briefly pressed against her lips. Despite her aches, and the overstimulation from carrying the quantum objectivity for so long without spotters or doctors, she reached up and touched his cheek. He was sweaty too. Not as cool as he should have been.

  “The data,” she whispered. “How much did you keep?”

  “A lot.” He smiled.

  Her mouth was dry. “I have data too,” she whispered, pulling his head down, pressing his fevered lips to her fevered ones. They lingered for long seconds.

  “Are we going to get killed?” she whispered.

  “Saint Matthew is piloting. He’s keeping us in the sectors of the Limpopo’s sensors he tampered with. They’ll know what we did, probably in less than an hour. By then, we’ll have vanished.”

  “Like a magician?”

  He smiled. “A little bit.”

  From his pocket, he pulled a pair of buttons that looked like all the others she had seen. He held them between his fingers. He looked like he was going to cry.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Stills? Marie?”

  Bel shook his head. “William is still alive.”

  “With the Puppets,” she said. “With Gates-15.”

  He nodded.

  “Can we save him?”

  Bel shook his head. “We knew there was no chance of him getting out once he’d gone in. But if he’s still alive, he didn’t bite on the poison pill yet, or it didn’t work.”

  “I’m sorry, Bel,” she said, hugging him despite the ache in every bone.

  “I implanted a medical device in William so that if he was still alive after we’d finished, I could help him die from far away. That way, he could escape. And he knew I would only do it if we’d succeeded. He could die knowing
Kate was getting his stake.”

  A heavy sadness sank into her bones, like they were waterlogged. And then a cool chill crept inward, made of slow dawning and disbelief, and a tiny frisson of horror.

  “You have to kill your friend?” she asked.

  “It’s either that or leave him among the Puppets.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, with a quiver in his voice.

  Dizziness slithered behind her eyes. Without thinking, she slipped a gloved hand over his, so that they both held the button.

  “What do we have to do?” she whispered.

  Her ear was against his neck and his swallow was loud.

  “We just press,” he said wistfully. His eyes were wet. Hers were too.

  “Say goodbye, Bel.”

  “Goodbye, William,” he said in a trembling voice. “I’ll make sure Kate’s okay. Thanks for everything.”

  They both squeezed the button, her fingers clumsily wrapped around his, until it changed color.

  Bel took a long breath and let it out. The button sank slowly to the floor. She hugged him for long minutes and they both stared ahead, to the front cabin, where the stars winked in the front window.

  “Did you get it?” she asked quietly.

  He nodded slowly. “Are you well enough to see it?”

  “I have to see it.”

  He helped her up. Even though they weighed only a tenth of their mass at the moment, they both needed help. He brought her through a doorway at the back of the cabin, to a small mess and rack area, and through that to a windowed doorway looking into the storage bay. In the dim light, Saint Matthew’s spider-automata skittered on the floor and walls, affixed wires and cables and padding around a dimly shimmering oval.

  A pair of wormholes.

  She swallowed. No words could encompass the feeling surging in her chest. Her cheeks were wet. She turned. Tears trickled down Bel’s face too. She wiped at them in wonder and looked back at the time gates.

  “All the answers to the cosmos are in there, Bel,” she said.

  He nodded happily. She wound her gloved fingers into his and squeezed tightly.