How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge

by K. Eason

  “Yeah. But this isn’t burn damage. This is tearing damage.”

  “So they’re stronger than we are, too.” This was the sort of information that Leadership (capital-L, which meant Dame Maggie and the Confederation parliament on Lanscot) needed to know. It was not something she wanted to examine in greater detail in the pitiless glare of the overhead teslas.

  Rory stood up, perhaps too quickly. For a moment her vision sparked before it steadied, on a long inhale.

  “Breathe,” Jaed muttered. Rory was unsure if he meant that advice for himself, or for her. She took it anyway. It seemed hotter in her suit than it had on the bridge.

  Jaed was still talking, something about the concentration of bodies, making a stand. Chatter, clearly, to hide his own discomfort. She wished he would shut up. She opened her mouth to say so—her kindness fully exhausted, along with her patience—and barely got her mouth shut in time, as bile surged up the back of her throat.

  She closed her eyes and leaned against the inside of her helmet. Breathe, get her stomach settled, she was—had been—a princess, she was Rory Thorne, she would not throw up in a hardsuit.

  She gasped. Her lungs burned.

  “Rory?” Jaed’s voice sounded thin, tinny.

  Like a voice might sound in minimal atmosphere. She couldn’t breathe because there really wasn’t enough oxygen.

  Several thoughts chased themselves through her head in the interval between heartbeats. The first was that there must be a crack in her suit, somehow, leaking her air. The second was that her HUD had advised no such thing, which meant there was oxygen and the suit had malfunctioned. The third was that her suit was lying to her, which it would not do unless it had been hacked.

  She was sure she would have noticed a hacking attempt, but she was even more sure that she could not breathe, and the need was becoming acute. Her HUD said that there was atmosphere in the ship, and whether or not it was safe, it was her only option.

  She slapped at the seals on her helmet, then grabbed and twisted. The suit resisted, or seemed to. She clawed at her helmet.

  Jaed’s face appeared, square in her faceplate. His mouth was moving in what appeared to be repetitions of her name, and the perfectly logical what’s wrong, and probably you can’t just break the suit seal like that, who knows what’s in the air.

  But then he grabbed the sides of her head, pushing her flapping hands aside, and twisted. The seals broke with a hiss, and then canned ship atmosphere, cold and dry and smelling of burned metal, burned meat, and blood, rushed into her suit.

  Rory gasped, and sucked it into her lungs, and thought it was the best breath she’d ever drawn.

  Then she collapsed into coughing. She hardly noticed when Jaed pulled her helmet off with more speed than accuracy, snagging her ear and sending a bolt of pain through the side of her head. Ears could be replaced, or sewn back on, and were not, in any case, as important as breathing.

  Jaed held both her shoulders and somehow refrained from asking her anything. When she blinked the cough-inspired tears out of her eyes, she saw that his mouth was moving, and though his eyes were firmly fixed on her, she suspected he was talking to Zhang on his comms.

  “Thank you,” she said, when she could speak at all.

  “What happened?” His voice echoed through his ex-comm speaker.

  “My—I couldn’t breathe. My suit had no air.”

  Jaed’s eyes, which had been wide and horrified, narrowed, and at the same time, unfocused. He was probably checking her aura, which was a gauge of honesty but also of physical condition: a dying body’s aura was more faint, or sometimes discolored, depending on the cause.

  “Am I,” she began to ask, but then Jaed’s expression shifted to another one with which she was familiar.

  It was the look of an arithmancer who has seen something both unexpected and unwelcome, and, judging from the sudden scattering of sparks across the skin of Jaed’s hardsuit, hostile.

  Rory recalled her own recent battle with impossibly numerous, tiny hexes, and shifted her awareness accordingly. It wasn’t a particularly good idea; a mind focused on arithmancy tended to assume that its body was handling basic functions, and her body was not entirely recovered from interruptions to essential services. Nevertheless, she needed to see.

  The trouble seemed to be the same as before, the mirror-flash shards of miniscule hexes, separate and uncountable and still moving and hexing together like a school of malevolent fish. They had already scored a hit on Jaed; the equations along the seams of his faceplate were blackened and smeared, which Rory assumed to be an attack on the seal integrity. As she watched, Jaed worked a counter-hex. The smeared edges of the equation sharpened, then flared a bright plasma blue which cooled into steely perfection.

  Good, thought Rory: a teacher’s pride in her student. But that pride proved short-lived. The school of hex-shards was collecting for another attack. She marveled that she could see them at all, or their movements. It was as if they were some kind of arithmantic disruption, or on some level, animated arithmancy.

  Jaed, meanwhile, was preparing his own retaliatory strike. His arithmancy was flashier, or, as the less charitable might say, unrefined. He was attempting to eject the attackers from this layer of aether. It was a bold effort, made bolder by Jaed’s unfortunately vivid hexes. If they survived this, she would need to teach him about subtlety.

  And if he failed, well—he had a very good idea, and one she might also attempt. Rendering a layer of aether impassible to an arithmancer required a fairly sophisticated hex, and it was something she had tried only in practice, rather than practical application, same as Jaed. But she was feeling inspired. These shards appeared to work in conjunction. Perhaps that was both their strength and their strategy. Rory meant to make it their weakness, as well.

  The shards drew together, clustering in a glittering cloud. They hovered for a moment, twisting back and forth, as if making a decision about who was the greater danger. Then they speared toward Jaed and swarmed over his hardsuit. From this in-aether perspective, it appeared as if they became a single, molten entity. Their underlying equations—what made them real—were still imperceptible to Rory in this layer of aether. In order to make her hex work, she’d need to see them. She hoped Jaed could withstand them for a moment or two. Time moved at different rates in the different aetheric layers. His moments would be minutes to her. And still, she had to hurry.

  She sank one layer deeper, and then a third. Now she could see the hex-shards’ code. It was extremely tiny, and very intricate, knotted around itself in dizzying equations that seemed to shift as Rory observed them. There were also a great many of them and, from a cursory look, they appeared to be identical. They also looked like nothing Rory had ever seen, not a turing, nor even a sophisticated array of battle-hexes. There was a helical shape to their arranging that was reminiscent of something alive, and suggested some truly innovative arithmancy.

  A pity she’d have to destroy them.

  Rory finished assembling her hex and released it. For a moment the alphanumeric string hung there, floating, stiff as a stick in a river. Then it wobbled toward the shard-code, which was beginning to flex and do something ominous, and probably awful, to Jaed. If Rory had been hacking a turing on this layer of aether, she would have expected some reaction, some security hex to come storming out to challenge the incoming code. But the hex-shards seemed oblivious, as if they had no reason to suspect an attack on this aetheric level. Or perhaps they were entirely busy dismantling Jaed’s hardsuit.

  Rory waited long enough to see her hex infiltrate the outer layer of the hex-shards’ code. Then she withdrew, as fast as was prudent (perhaps a little bit faster) to find Jaed leaning against a bulkhead, suit steaming at the seams, visor raised. He was coughing savagely.

  Rory winced in sympathy. But at least he was still standing, not choking.

  “Jaed?”
<
br />   He slid a glance at her. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed, which made his irises a startling, plasma blue. “They ran. For lack of a better word. Disengaged and went that way.” He waved fingers down the corridor.

  It was the same direction she and Jaed had been heading. Of course.

  “What happened?” Zhang’s voice seeped out of Jaed’s comms. Her tone was so calm, so quiet, that Rory guessed she’d asked that same question, without response, several times already.

  “Arithmantic resistance,” said Rory. “We handled it. We’re continuing to Thorsdottir’s last location.”

  Zhang hesitated. There were a dozen questions in that silence. But because she was Zhang, all she said was, “Copy. I have not been able to reach her.”

  “Right,” said Jaed. “What the hell was that? Or . . . those? What just hit us?”

  “Arithmantic resistance,” Rory repeated, a little more firmly. “Clearly not the same caliber of hexwork we saw on the bridge, or our suits would’ve—I don’t know. Combusted. But it was some kind of battle-hex.”

  “Except it looked like a million little tiny separate hexes all working together. It was coordinated. How does that happen?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ve seen them before. At the seal. When I tried to open the hatch, they attacked.”

  “And you didn’t see fit to tell me?”

  “Tell you what? That what looks like a bunch of tiny little hexes just ganged up and threw me out of the aether?”

  “Yes! Exactly that! Not oh, it’s just a battle-hex, I handled it.” Jaed’s lips razored white.

  “I—uh. Sorry.” Rory frowned.

  “Is it that you didn’t think I needed to know? Or that you didn’t want to admit you didn’t know something? Oh, never mind.” Jaed pushed off the bulkhead and staggered, weaving down the corridor.

  Rory started after him, still frowning. “What did they do to you?”

  “Jacked the environmentals in my suit. Temperature regulation. Nothing permanently damaged. Damn it.” There came the unmistakable sound of a gloved fist hitting metal. “The seal’s still down.”

  An unwelcome pressure built in Rory’s chest, one she had not felt since her imprisonment on Urse. “I thought manual reset should’ve opened everything.”

  “It would have, unless this was some kind emergency seal. Fire. Hull breach.” He wheeled to face her. Behind him, she could see the tightly irised hatch. Emergency teslas, the same abused red as Jaed’s eyes, glared from the perimeter. “We know the xeno attackers didn’t dock at the aetherlock and board the way we did. Maybe this is where they punched through. Or maybe the little arithmancers locked it to slow us down. We’ll have to go around.”

  “But there is an around?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and pushed past her, moving more or less steadily. “We’re going to have to walk back through some of the bodies, though.”

  Rory did not want to ask how far it might be, or how much delay they might suffer. She also decided not to comment on arithmancers, in the plural, even as she heard Zhang’s audible, unhappy inhale on Jaed’s ex-comm.

  Not nearly as unhappy as the arithmancer(s) would be, Rory thought, when she caught up to them. Especially if something had happened to Thorsdottir. She took a deep breath, tugged her helmet back over her head, and followed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Thorsdottir glanced from the document on the screen to the cryostasis tubes with their frosted portholes. If the royalists were willing to ruin a biosphere and kill everyone in it, they were not interested in reclaiming that territory, but in making an example. The Tadeshi royalists were getting desperate, which meant the Confederation was winning. That was good. But if the royalists turned this into a tactic, sacrificing whole worlds on the altar of intimidation, the Confederation would crumble. This bioweapon effectively escalated the war to a level that would be unsustainable, and probably contagious as well; both the Merchants League and the Consortium would want their own version, so that everyone could mutually assure the destruction of everyone else.

  Thorsdottir looked at the turing, having no better place to direct her questions. “Why are you telling me this?”

  The screen continued to display the document. No whispers were forthcoming in her helmet. It was, in fact, profoundly silent, of the embarrassed sort that accompanies unanticipated or unwelcome questions.

  “Because you know I have to do something about it, right? These roses. This plan to, what, wipe out a whole biosphere?”

  The silence took on another layer, more thoughtful. Then the screen split itself into two windows, banishing the document to the right side. A blank, black column appeared on the left, along with a flashing cursor.

  Thorsdottir waited, counting the blinks, until the screen spelled out help in slow letters, as if the typist was especially reluctant.

  Help, in Thorsdottir’s experience, came in two categories. The first required an obvious response. Extinguishing fires, or opening doors for the overburdened, and the like. The second category had more ambiguous solutions, particularly when the requester was also an anonymous arithmancer who had nearly cut her in half, forcibly separated her from Rory and Jaed, and hacked her hardsuit.

  “If you want me to help you,” she said, “you need to tell me who you are. And where you are. I need some honesty, here.”

  The screen remained, if not silent, then at least unresponsive. The help remained where it was. The cursor blinked. Then, rose and here appeared in rapid succession, the letters tripping over themselves in their haste.

  The answer made sense, but only in an improbable, e-vid drama sort of way. Thorsdottir assumed Rose was answering her questions in the order she’d asked them; that meant the lethal roses—alchemically altered, in cryostasis and infused with nanomecha—were somewhere on the sentience scale.

  Perhaps she should believe in invisible xenos, too, or ghosts, or, or magic.

  Or. Thorsdottir frowned. When one is surrounded by evidence of the impossible, one might need to redefine one’s understanding of the term.

  The cryostasis tubes appeared to be intact, under her headlamp’s beam. All the teslas were lit that should be, and in the appropriate color. She ran her gloved hands over the seams that she could not see, feeling for gaps, wishing she dared break her suit seal so she could get actual hands into the investigation. Her HUD said there was atmosphere in the cargo hold, but if one of those tubes had cracked, there could be also contamination from the roses. Maybe. Or something.

  If the roses (the nanomecha in the roses? Was there a difference?) were talking to her already, clearly the stasis wasn’t working. They had already hacked her hardsuit’s comm system. They had also asked for her help.

  She returned to the turing console.

  “All right, Rose. I’m going to ask again: why me? There were three of us who boarded. Rory would’ve been a better choice, I think.”

  The turing screen blanked completely.

  Thorsdottir stared at it for an offended moment. Then she balled up her left fist and thumped the screen’s frame. When that produced no results, she said a very privateer-ish word under her breath. It was only then that she noticed the entire cargo hold had gone dark, and that her headlamp was the sole source of illumination. Even the emergency teslas were out.

  The next word she meant to say—a variation on the last—dried up on her tongue.

  A faint and wordless keening swirled through her helmet. Thorsdottir checked her HUD, but there was no indication of any network, no magical reconnection to Vagabond or Rory and Jaed. The sound must be coming from Rose, and they were panicking.

  Fantastic, she thought. I have been hijacked by a rosebush afraid of the dark.

  Thorsdottir frowned and shook her head and, after a moment’s consideration, thumped the side of the helmet with her fist.

  “Stop that.”


  The keening stopped.

  The deck under her boots shivered. The cargo-bay teslas, and the turing, flared back to life.

  The shipping manifest, with its damning declaration of murderous flora, had vanished. In the middle of the screen hung one word:

  coming

  repeated until the entire screen was a tapestry of those six letters.

  Thorsdottir knew hysterics when she saw them.

  “Calm down,” she said, in her best voice of authority. “Who’s coming?”

  The screen flickered, resolving into a grainy, colorless image, of the sort produced by security ’bots. The view was set high, with a distorted bubble-eyed view of two corridors. A squad of Tadeshi royalist marines in their angular black hardsuits trotted down one of the corridors in neat, high-speed formation. Their visors were down, opaque and intimidating, their ’slingers in hand. As they moved through the intersection and out of frame, Thorsdottir noted that the timestamp was from twenty-three hours ago, rounding up, and the alphanumerics on the bulkhead they passed were C-151.

  The seal that had nearly bisected her had been at the C-152b intersection. This recording had happened one corridor away, though she did not know exactly how far, or where. She found herself wishing either for a ship’s diagram (she looked: there was not one conveniently painted on the bulkhead, with an X to mark you are here) or for Jaed Moss to explain the design to her.

  Her stomach knotted. She did not examine the cause—that she wished for Jaed, that she had not first thought of Rory—because the turing screen divided its image again. The now-empty intersection of C-151 remained on one half. On the second, another high-angle image showed more Tadeshi marines—or perhaps the same unit—approaching. They took up defensive positions.

  Thorsdottir wished she could see what the Tadeshi did; this angle, this camera, was entirely insufficient.

  As if she’d spoken aloud her request, the screen rearranged itself again. The first two images shrank to even quarters; the bottom half filled with a new vantage. This image had clearly come from one of the Tadeshi hardsuits. There were readings overlaid in a faded grey that would have been green on an actual HUD, which showed other linked suits. Thorsdottir supposed it was a unit commander’s cam she was seeing. The knots in her stomach drew tighter. She already knew how this story ended. Vagabond’s scans had found no one alive on G. Stein. The helmet-cam’s frame faced a curve in the corridor, just past the ridged line of a section seal. There was no cover. The helmet-bearer sank down, apparently kneeling. A target’s crosshairs appeared on the HUD.