How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge

by K. Eason

  Thorsdottir leaned closer to the screen, as if that would help resolve the images, and watched.

  They came around the not-quite-really-a-corner in a blur of speed and unfamiliar proportions. Five of them, taller than human, upright, roughly bipedal, though they seemed more stretched out and thinner in the limbs. They wore hardsuits or armor, slick-looking, with triangular protrusions—what were those, fins?—jutting out at the joints (too many joints). Their weapons were familiar enough, long-barreled and held in both hands, some kind of rifle. But what came out of its barrel looked like something from an imagined future were there were energy weapons instead of projectiles.

  The same imagined future, Thorsdottir thought grimly, where monstrous xenos attacked human soldiers.

  The helmet-cam jolted. Its point of view toppled back, pointed up and at an angle. The fighting raged on the edges, while the suit-indicators on the HUD went out, one by one.

  A xeno paused over the fallen marine. Thorsdottir got a clear look at the shape of its visor, which was frustratingly opaque. The head inside that helmet wouldn’t be much larger than a human’s, but it would be longer in the jaw, flatter overall. The xeno paused, head cocked as if listening. Then they moved out of frame, liquid and alien and not at all like a human would move. Thorsdottir’s stomach, having exhausted its knot-tying skills, began to sink.

  The skirmish continued in the top two frames, moving from right to left as the xeno invaders pushed the defenders back. The Tadeshi did some damage—Thorsdottir saw at least one xeno fall—but they were overmatched. The xeno beam weapons cut through bulkhead and armor.

  There was no sound on the recording. That was the worst part. There should have been sirens, and alarms, and human voices shouting on the comms. Instead the Tadeshi fell in silence, one by one, and the xenos pressed forward. The battle passed through the left-side camera frame, the remaining Tadeshi falling back from the xeno advance toward the C-152a intersection, the first image Rose had shown her.

  Then, suddenly, those seals irised closed, leaving that camera staring at two hatches squeezed shut like eyes against greater horror.

  Thorsdottir imagined what had happened on the other side of that seal. The Tadeshi soldiers pinned against the steel and safety-hex, dying there as the xenos came down that passage and found them trapped. Who or whatever had triggered the seals had condemned those soldiers to death.

  A ship’s turing could’ve done it. The bridge crew, the captain, making a decision to protect a bioweapon from hostile seizure and theft.

  Thorsdottir glanced between the screen and the cryo-tube. Perhaps the same entity that had hacked her suit—working hypothesis, Rose—had condemned those soldiers to die. She wanted to ask that question, along with what the xenos were, who, where they’d gone. Instead, she took a breath and asked the questions to which she suspected she had answers already.

  “Are they, the xenos, the ones you’re afraid of?”

  yes

  Sensible. “Well, they’re gone. You’re safe.”

  no coming

  “What, now?”

  yes

  Wonderful. Thorsdottir’s grasp of celestial motion was somewhat vague, but she knew void was a very big thing, even in something as mapped out as a planetary system, and that ships did not just cross the vast swaths of emptiness in an instant (except by tesser-hex, and that took special buoys and gates). There had been no sign of any ships in the vicinity of G. Stein. There were places that ships could conceal themselves in a system—convenient moons, asteroid belts, planetary rings—but the actual getting from there to here, the sort done with plasma core engines and physics, took time. There were physical laws.

  Those were the same laws that said nanomecha could not fuse with flora to create a sentient, living weapon. Perhaps there were new laws. Or perhaps the multiverse had just decided to make things up as it went along. But it made sense the xenos would return. The roses were a bioweapon. Xenos could see the value in such a thing. That made them the nasty sort of xenos, but then, perfectly human Tadeshi had been responsible for creating the rosebushes in the first place, or commissioning their creation, with intent to use them on fellow humans, so no one had a prime claim to nastiness. But the xenos had known about Rose, somehow. That was alarming, although why Thorsdottir thought xenos, motives unknown, in possession of lethal rosebushes were more frightening than Tadeshi, motives very clear, she was not sure. At least the xenos had not found Rose, probably because they were looking for a bomb or something weaponish, and not a bunch of flowers.

  coming, Rose repeated. coming coming

  “Show me.”

  The screen offered a new image. This time, the hardsuits were recognizably human-shaped. The humans inside those suits were also recognizable, because one of them was carrying her helmet under one arm. Jaed had his helmet on, but his visor was up. Even with such poor resolution, Thorsdottir could see that his face was not happy. Rory wore that expression Thorsdottir knew very well from their months of imprisonment on Urse: scared and angry and intending to enact reprisals for both conditions.

  Thorsdottir was so happy to see both of them she almost forgot to breathe. Then she recalled that Rose was unhappy about their approach, and that an unhappy Rose could be extremely dangerous. “Those are not xenos. They’re human. They’re my friends. They’re not a threat to you.”

  The screen blanked.

  no

  That response was both emphatic and ambiguous. Then help reappeared and hung there, looking lonely and plaintive, to be joined by a flashing coming.

  What the big, oddly jointed xenos with their plasma rifles had in common with Rory and Jaed in Rose’s mind (minds?), Thorsdottir had no idea. It seemed logical that, if Rose could differentiate among hardsuited humans well enough to select Thorsdottir and exclude Rory and Jaed, that Rose could also tell that Rory and Jaed were not xenos.

  Rose was also clearly afraid of them, and it had some kind of control over ship seals, which meant ship systems, and for some reason both Rory and Jaed had broken their hardsuits’ integrity. She could imagine a great many things that could go very, very wrong. Vented corridors. Violent evacuation of oxygen.

  “Let me talk to my friends.” Thorsdottir struck the side of her helmet, open-palmed, to eliminate ambiguity. “Turn the comms back on.”

  The comms remained silent.

  “Please. Let me talk to them.”

  Nothing. Thorsdottir waited until she was sure that Rose was ignoring her or, more worrying, up to some lethal mischief. The camera feed showed Rory and Jaed rounding a curve of corridor. Thorsdottir thought the sign on the bulkhead behind them said C-152, which would put them on this level and thus between seals. If Rose was going to react badly, it would have to be soon.

  Thorsdottir whipped around and ran to the set of doors that opened into the corridor. She hit the controls and was pleasantly surprised when they worked. As the door labored apart, she wrenched the panel off those same controls, reached into the tangle of wires, hoped her hardsuit was shielded against electrical shocks, and pulled.

  The doors squealed to a stop halfway. Wide enough, she judged, for Jaed and Rory to get through. Good enough. If Rose needed her help, then Rose needed her alive, which meant they couldn’t turn off life support or depressurize that corridor now without killing her, too.

  Thorsdottir took a deep breath, and held it, and then, over the flashing advisement of danger from her HUD, opened her visor.

  Her comms let out a squeal that sounded like a despairing wail.

  Thorsdottir pitched her voice louder. “Rose, stop it! Let me talk to them.”

  The machine wailing stopped. Another yelling entirely filled Thorsdottir’s helmet, slipped out her open visor, and began echoing in the cargo bay.

  “Thorsdottir!” Zhang was, in fact, yelling. “Do you copy?”

  “Yes!” Thorsdottir matched Zha
ng for volume.

  “I have Thorsdottir,” said Zhang, still shouting. “Rory, Jaed, do you copy? I have her.”

  It took a few confusing moments of cross-talk—it is easy to interrupt on comms, if one is not following the etiquette of saying copy and over—before it was established that yes, Thorsdottir could hear everyone and yes, everyone could hear Thorsdottir and also that everyone was fine and oh yes! Rory and Jaed had almost arrived at cargo bay C-152a.

  Thorsdottir poked her head under the door, trusting that Rose would not, in a fit of panic or pique, slam it shut, just in time to see Jaed rounding the curve of the corridor with Rory half a step behind him.

  She saw immediately that their reports of fine had been an exaggeration.

  The part of Thorsdottir that had been, and still was, professionally and personally invested in Rory’s (in Jaed’s, in everyone’s) well-being flared into brief heat. There were smears of dried blood on Rory’s face, and on Jaed’s, that meant there had been arithmancy and hexes traded, and that Rory and Jaed had lost at least one exchange.

  “Thorsdottir?” Jaed had never been particularly pigmented, but he was whiter than usual. “What happened? Where have you been?”

  “I got hacked,” she said. “What happened to you?”

  “Someone attacked us with arithmancy.” Rory was looking around the cargo bay, narrow-eyed, as though she expected someone or something to come leaping out.

  Thorsdottir shot an accusing glare at the turing screen. All communication, video evidence, and documentation had vanished. A complicated fractal drew and redrew itself in the center of the screen in perpetual, pixelated motion.

  “Not the same someones who killed the bridge crew, though,” said Jaed. “After we lost you, we climbed up to the bridge through the maintenance shafts. Everyone there was dead. Looked like sudden decompression, but no one had gotten to their suits. No sign of a breach, either, and the main turing was dead. Some kind of super sophisticated battle-hex. If someone’d hit us with that, well. We’d be dead.”

  “Ah,” said Thorsdottir. Some things were beginning to make sense. Some things were not. “The bridge crew was decompressed? Not shot or, ah, torn apart?”

  Jaed flinched, and somehow managed to turn even whiter. “Not on the bridge. But we found some of that in the lower decks. How did you know?”

  “Because—oh, look here. Rory, you should see this, too.” Thorsdottir went to the turing console. She stripped off her glove and laid it down beside the keyboard. “I’m going to show battle footage,” she said, and stabbed a sequence into the keyboard. She had no idea how to recall the recording. Rose knew. And if Rose decided not to play along—

  The screen divided itself again, and the recording began to play. Thorsdottir let her breath out.

  “Look,” she said, mostly for Zhang’s benefit. “Some kind of unknown xeno species boarded G. Stein. They’re bipedal, too many joints on the limbs. Some kind of fins on the armor, maybe? And plasma beam weapons.”

  “Well,” said Rory, “now we know what can rip Tadeshi armor apart. And what can burn through a ship’s hull, if they have those weapons on a larger scale. I’m more curious why they attacked in the first place. Was this first contact, or just the latest in a series of conflicts with the royalists?”

  “I don’t know about that last part, but as to why they attacked—well. I think they wanted this. Look. There’s a manifest. It’s, ah. Just look.” Thorsdottir reached past Rory, and with a few keystrokes and Rose’s invisible collusion, recalled the shipping manifest and the associated documentation.

  Rory peered at the screen. Then she jerked her face back as if she expected the turing screen to throw sparks at her. Thorsdottir recognized the expression, and her stomach dropped into her boots. When Rory got a look like that, she toppled dictatorships and upended years of careful treaties. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “That’s the second time today you’ve said that,” Jaed said, and added, when Thorsdottir looked at him, “When we saw what’d happened to the turing on the bridge. The battle-hexes that took this ship down, Rory said, were—what did you say?—amazing, I think.”

  “Mm. I did. Zhang said it was an act of war. And this is, too, both of those things. Clearly someone’s solved the technical problems of nanomecha. And of course they’ve been weaponized.”

  Jaed, for once, was not watching Rory. He glared instead at Thorsdottir. “So if the xenos came for the weapons, why leave without them? They breached the hull, they boarded, they killed a lot of people, and then they just, what, left?”

  “How should I know? I don’t think we chased them away. If I had to guess, I’d say they didn’t know to look for murder-flowers. Maybe they don’t even know what’s in here. But I think they’ll be coming back, maybe soon.”

  “I’m more interested in who’s still on board,” said Rory. She was still reading the document, level-eyed, level-voiced, projecting a dispassion Thorsdottir in no way believed genuine. “Jaed and I were attacked in the corridor by a type of arithmancy I haven’t seen before. I would’ve said it was a hex left behind as a trap, but it didn’t act like a trap. And it didn’t look at all like the sophisticated hexwork I saw on the bridge, so now I don’t think it was a product of these xenos. You can tell. Arithmancy has markers. What attacked us felt like a novice with a few good hexes and not much strategy.”

  Thorsdottir looked from the dried blood on Rory’s face to the dried blood on Jaed’s and decided not to remark on the irony.

  Jaed did not share Thorsdottir’s restraint. “Really, Rory? We didn’t win. We’re both sitting here breathing ship atmosphere. If we’d been attacked in void, we’d be dead. We got lucky.”

  Rory took her eyes off the turing screen long enough to skewer him on a stare. “It was not luck.”

  Thorsdottir lacked any fairy gifts for detecting lies, but she knew wounded pride when she heard it. “I think I know who did it. Same person who hacked my rig.”

  Rory stared at her. Jaed stared at her. Thorsdottir supposed Rose might be staring at her, too.

  “I think it’s Rose.” Thorsdottir waved a hand at the screen with the classified documentation. “Somehow. The seal closed me off from you, and the emergency teslas lit me a path here—”

  “Did you just give the weapon a name?” Rory interrupted.

  “That’s what they call themself. I don’t know if they’re one plant or all of them. Or all the nanomecha collectively. Anyway. We had a, uh, conversation before you arrived. Kind of. That’s how I found the footage of the xenos in the first place. Rose showed them to me, when they asked for help. Rose is afraid of them.”

  “Fear is for sentients,” Rory said drily. “At best, I’m guessing the nanomecha in those roses is networking to increase their processing power, with some rudimentary arithmantic defensive hexes programmed in.”

  “Rose is a person. Look.” Thorsdottir pointed at the screen. “Let’s talk to them. Rose. Did you bring me here?”

  yes

  Rory’s face blanked in an appropriate expression of shock just barely contained by years of diplomacy. Thorsdottir hoped her own expression of told you so was similarly contained.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  help

  Thorsdottir looked at Rory and raised both eyebrows. “See?”

  Rory pursed her lips in an expression eerily reminiscent of the Vizier, which indicated an unwillingness to pursue the current line of conversation. “If your Rose is concerned about the xenos, they’ve got reason. The battle-hex that decompressed the bridge and killed the turing was highly sophisticated. The fighting in the corridors was devastating. I mean, they have handheld plasma weapons, which means they’ve solved the Sendarin-Wu constant problem. Arithmancers of that caliber would have nothing to fear from, well, anyone, except the k’bal, and they are pacifists. They would be able to destroy these
roses easily.”

  Jaed scoffed. “They still left without Rose, so maybe they’re not as amazing as you seem to think.”

  “I don’t think they’re amazing. I just. How can you not admire that level of arithmantic expertise?”

  “Because they ripped people apart,” Jaed said flatly. “Because they decompressed a whole bridge. Or doesn’t it count if it’s Tadeshi they killed?”

  Thorsdottir cleared her throat. “We all agree that something made the xenos leave. So either they weren’t after Rose at all, or they didn’t know what to look for, or something here scared them off. Rose hacked all our hardsuits. Maybe they can do that to the xenos, too. And we don’t even know if they, the xenos, breathe oxygen. A suit breach for them might be lethal.”

  “Maybe.” Rory frowned down at her helmet, which she had set on the console beside the keyboard. “Maybe you’re right, Jaed. Maybe we got lucky.”

  Jaed looked surprised. He side-eyed Thorsdottir, as if checking that she’d heard the same admission. “Oh. Well. So how do we bring these roses back with us? I don’t think these tubes are going to fit on Vagabond.”

  “We don’t.” Rory’s face was composed again. “The roses are genocide-flowers. Anyone who gets them will want to use them. Therefore, no one can have them, and that means we’ve got to destroy them.”

  Thorsdottir opened her mouth to protest, but Jaed was faster. “Come on, Rory. You don’t just—you can’t mean that!”