How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge

by K. Eason

  But, but, there was another panel directly across from this one, which from the backside proved responsive to a hard push. Rory entertained a moment’s hesitation. There is a saying, better the devil you know, which is trotted out whenever the speaker wishes to counsel conservative action. Rory considered that the devils she knew, in this instance, were shooting bolt ’slingers and whitefire rifles at each other, and that she was unarmed and unarmored, and—

  Hello, new devil. Pleased to make your acquaintance.

  —she shoved herself through the bulkhead and out the far side.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The new devil appeared to be unoccupied. Rory tried to reseal the panel, but no, of course she’d broken it. She tried for what felt like a hundred times (five, her brain corrected) before she gave up and propped the panel against the bulkhead as close to in place as she could manage. It would not survive close examination from either side, but a cursory glance might not reveal it. Flashes of plasma and ’slinger-fire flickered in the corridor behind her, accompanied by the whine of weapon discharge and the bang of the occasional ricocheting bolt. With luck, the Tadeshi and Protectorate would be too busy killing each other to wonder where she’d gone. Rory prodded the darkness with her headlamp. Empty deck gleamed under the beam to its limits, even when she panned up. Her experience of cargo holds and storage spaces consisted of high stacks and narrow aisles and a sense of compression. This much openness seemed inefficient. She stood cautiously, one hand on the bulkhead for comfort rather than balance, and took an arms-length step into the dark, granting her headlamp another half-meter or so of range. She found several somethings, dark and bulky-looking, squatting in the dark, separated from each other by a reasonable aisle. Rory recognized within another three steps what she was looking at. She was familiar with cryostasis units and their many variations, particularly those designed for carrying persons. These appeared to be the vakari versions: a little longer than a vakar, a little wider, and almost perfectly, seamlessly cylindrical. Oddly enough, they were elevated above the deck by perhaps a meter, and lined up in aisles. And there was another oddness: that might be a seam there, at the top, beside the radium-blue not-quite-glow that she assumed must be a control panel.

  She took another step and revised her hypothesis on two counts. She could see script on the panel, rather than buttons or switches or keys. Maybe a label? Then her headlamp found and pierced a transparent portion, which appeared to be most of (perhaps all of) the top surface of the unit. Inside was a vakar still wearing an armored hardsuit, complete with a visored helmet, with one of those plasma rifles lying alongside. Neither face nor visor was intact. There was a neat hole through both that appeared to have been made by a ’slinger bolt, and on the jagged edges of the visor, a dull gleam of what must be dried vakari blood.

  Rory was not inclined to screaming when she was startled, but she recoiled, and in so doing retreated rapidly and without direction until she backed into the neighboring unit, at which point she whipped around and found herself staring at another deceased vakar, this one possessed of neither a helmet nor, in fact, any head whatsoever about the jawline, and another massive hole in the mid-torso. She withdrew to a position precisely between the two cryostasis units, and while cold sweat prickled the back of her neck, swept her headlamp around the room. More identical units appeared under the beam’s sweep, rows and columns of them.

  Coffins. She was surrounded by coffins. A part of her mind registered satisfaction (this was where the dead from G. Stein had gone). The remainder of it behaved exactly as one might suppose, upon realizing the place in which one has taken refuge is, in fact, the ship’s morgue. The twelfth fairy had conferred upon Rory courage, but that gift had in no way shielded her from shock or its close cousin, dread.

  She vanquished those herself after a few moments of deep breaths. Dead vakari posed no threat. It was the living—of any species, at this point—that presented the greater peril. Nevertheless, as she navigated through the neatly arranged corpses, she did not touch any more of the units, nor gaze at all at their contents. The transparent panel seemed obscene, somehow, since it left the dead so exposed, still wearing the armor in which they had died. Perhaps, to the vakari, it was a mark of respect, or, or—Rory cast her gaze along the bulkhead, looking for some clue, and also for some distraction: because however firmly she intended not to look into the coffins, she found her gaze drawn there, and her HUD was quite alarmed now at the speed and force of her heart rate when she did so.

  She found instead panels hanging face down from the overhead, suspended by meter-long lengths of cord, as if the dead in their coffins were the intended viewers. Rory could make little sense of what she was seeing. Columns and rows of characters which Rory took to be words, clearly hand-created by the application of pigment to a coarse, porous surface. Perhaps a sacred text. The monarchs of Thorne had long since embraced the certainty of alchemy and arithmancy over belief in the possibility of a greater authority than themselves, and so Rory had not been raised in religious custom. But Rory’s mother, Samur, had been raised in one of the several Kreshti sects, so she was at least familiar with the concept. She set the helmet’s video recorder to work. When she got out of there, when she returned to safety, she could examine the texts. She could try to understand. She could—

  You could what? demanded the voice. It sounded a bit like a chorus of Grytt, Zhang, and Thorsdottir (which is to say, the people Rory thought of as most practical). Understand vakari death-rituals? Stop this conflict? Befriend the vakari? Perhaps we should begin with getting off this ship alive, hmm?

  Rory sighed and looked at the main doors, which were directly across the morgue from the bulkhead where she had come through. That meant the battle was behind her, quite literally, and that she had another convolution of corridors as a buffer. She might be able to get out those doors and—

  And do what, exactly?

  The fact was, there was a firefight between hostile human boarders and hostile vakari crew ongoing and her own means of escape was no longer at its aetherlock (let that mean Zhang had escaped, and not that Vagabond had been vaporized). She was effectively trapped and surrounded by enemies with weapons or better arithmancy or both.

  Rory was not given to despair or to profanity, but she had had a very trying last several hours already. She crouched down right where she was, in an aisle between coffins, and cradled her helmet in her hands, and indulged herself in both. And so it was, when the doors to the morgue slid apart, and the red emergency lights bled inside a moment before a large, armored shape began carving shadows into it, Rory was not immediately visible.

  She let out one more yip of profanity under her breath, banished her despair, and shut off her headlamp. A quick check of arithmantic probability told her that if she remained unmoving, she had a small but not infinitesimal chance of remaining undetected.

  That, obviously, was preferable. But also not probable, and so—Rory reordered her thoughts with grim practicality. She would not surrender. She just needed some manner of resistance, some plan, for when she was discovered.

  Rory examined the morgue from her new vantage. The coffins rested on semi-solid platforms, metal arms and bracing crosspieces and slim, metal legs which, from this vantage, were obviously meant to fold up into the bottom. At the moment, those legs were fastened to the floor, socketed into shafts so that they would not move during any failures of inertial hexes. Rory spent a frantic heartbeat or seven pondering how one would detach the coffin and maneuver it, if there were suspensors or some in-built propulsion system, some source of power she could cannibalize and repurpose into a weapon or a distraction.

  No, said the chorus of practical voices in her head. This is not an e-vid. And also, you don’t have time. The invaders had paused on the threshold such that the doors could not close, and the light from the corridor continued to poke its red, slender fingers into the dark, interrupted or redirected when one of th
e armored folk moved. Their headlamps dragged fat blue-white fingers over all the surfaces, lingering in the same places Rory had.

  From that she surmised they must be Tadeshi. Surely no Protectorate trooper would pause in the doorway of their own morgue. Her fear wrestled briefly with her need to confirm their numbers, until they moved and solved her conundrum. Now she could clearly see that yes, those were two human-shaped hardsuits, and that their wearers carried heavy ’slingers out and ready for use. It was at that moment that Rory saw the mecha, one aisle over, tucked down below the horizon of coffins. It was a multi-limbed, low-bodied model, vaguely arachnid (did the vakari have more than one world, and did any of those have spiders? File that away for later investigation), with several ominous-looking appendages, long and multi-jointed, at the apex of its domed back.

  It was also waking up. She heard the hum of machinery first, the click of its limbs on the deck. She managed to remain motionless, somehow, with her heart trying to climb out of her throat. The mecha had not reacted when she’d come in. Perhaps it had not noticed. Perhaps it only noticed if people came through the conventional door. Its eight limbs unfolded and extended and, as it stood level with the coffins, it uttered a high-pitched sequence of sounds that Rory recognized as machine-distorted vakari speech. Probably a query of some kind, or a greeting. Can I help you or who is dead now or whatever a morgue-mecha would say.

  The foremost Tadeshi trooper promptly shot it.

  The wounded mecha staggered into a coffin platform with a terrible metallic shriek and collapsed in a knot of half-extended legs. Smoke curled from its back where at least three of the five bolts had struck.

  Rory knew the typical load of a ’slinger, and realized that the soldier had emptied half a clip, if he’d begun with a full complement of bolts. His response must be surprise, verging on panic, rather than deliberate hostility. Had Rory been able to hack into the Tadeshi comm channels, she might have heard an epic rebuke involving the second trooper’s assessment of the first trooper’s parentage and capacity for intellect.

  Instead, she noticed that one of those dorsal appendages on the mecha was a plasma cutter, and that it appeared to be intact and, because the mecha had listed laterally during its collapse, she could probably reach it without revealing herself.

  The chorus of practical voices repeated their earlier admonitions: she was not some fictional hero who would win her way out of a desperate situation simply because genre convention demanded it.

  Rory reached for the mecha anyway, carefully, steadily, making certain to keep her movements beneath the coffin’s level and thus out of the Tadeshi hardsuit’s likely horizon of motion detection. She hooked her fingers around the nearest mecha limb and pulled. The entire mecha itself was too heavy to move, but the arm unfolded obligingly. Rory wished she dared employ her headlamp; it was too dark to see whether or not there was a way to detach that plasma cutter, and if she did manage, whether it carried its own power supply.

  She tugged on the cutter, then twisted it. It seemed disinclined to detach. Heat prickled her cheeks, embarrassment and anger and a rising frustration. This wasn’t going to work. She pulled harder, causing the mecha to shift slightly. Not much of a noise, even less of a movement, but enough.

  A Tadeshi headlamp—they used a type of particularly piercing blue-white tesla—lanced over the mecha’s bulk. Rory jerked her hand back just as the beam crawled over the mecha, lingering on the outstretched appendage, then intensifying as the soldier came closer.

  Rory thought several Grytt-worthy phrases and withdrew further under the coffin platform, reeling in fingers and elbows and a recalcitrant knee just ahead of the beam’s nosy probing.

  The beam swept up onto the coffin. Rory held her breath, rather unnecessarily, and watched the second soldier’s booted feet, which had remained comfortingly near the morgue’s threshold, move to follow the first. A second headlamp lit the bulkheads on the other side of the room and stabbed at the corners. And then, finally, that which she had dreaded came to pass: both soldiers began moving in tandem, separated by a row of coffins.

  Rory’s own experience of military maneuvers was limited to secondhand reports, video representations, and the simulations she’d played in Duty Calls, but it did not take expertise to predict that they were looking to clear the room of enemies, and that they were expecting vakari troopers, and that, inevitably, they would find her instead.

  Her heart commenced crawling up the back of her throat, where it lodged, fluttering, competing with her breath. Surrender would buy her—high probability, the arithmancy was conclusive on that matter—an arrest and an escort to whatever vessel had launched the attack, which would put her in royalist hands. (There, the probabilities broke into branches of possibilities she chose not to follow; none of them ended well.) Or she could attempt a futile act of aggression or resistance right now, and get shot, and—high probability—die right here, in a vakari morgue.

  There was a symmetry to that. An irony that Messer Rupert might appreciate, if he ever found out, which he wouldn’t because she’d be too dead to tell him. Rory squeezed her eyes closed on an entirely different sort of hot prickling.

  The boots came closer. The Tadeshi were not perfectly abreast, in their separate aisles. The one coming on her left, mecha-side, was perhaps a meter ahead of the other. She scooted sideways as far as she dared. When he drew even with her coffin, she would lunge sidelong and try to strike his knees and upend him. Then, if that worked, she would try to take his ’slinger, disable both soldiers, and make her escape.

  The closer soldier stepped into the same row as her coffin. Two more steps, perhaps, to bring him within striking range. She kept a metaphorical one eye on the aether, while the probabilities lined up and she got her very best chance.

  Three. Two. One.

  Rory lunged, but she miscalculated the height of the platform, scraping against it and scrubbing away her momentum. She staggered gracelessly into the aisle, well short of her target. The soldier promptly backed up a step and prepared to fire. Rory threw herself at his midline, intending to strike his ’slinger aside, and perhaps grab it.

  She missed a second time.

  The soldier, startled, jerked back, raised his weapon, and fired as soon as he attained sufficient range. He had not, however, waited for a target-lock from his suit and so he, too, missed. Rory surged forward again, and this time she hit what she aimed for. Both hands closed around the ’slinger’s barrel, and for a sickening moment she found herself staring into the muzzle’s unblinking black eye. Then she ducked a shoulder and, at the same time, pushed up with both hands and twisted just as the soldier fired. His bolt howled past her, and she found herself visor-to-visor with her opponent, close enough she could see his face and his wide, startled stare as he recognized her—if not as Rory Thorne, at least as another human being in a ship full of vakari.

  It was, ironically, that moment of species-recognition that saved Rory, because it was at that moment, just before the soldier would have wrested his ’slinger out of her grasp and shot her with it, that blue-white lightning crackled over his hardsuit, jabbing forked fingers over the horizons of his shoulders and up the sides of his helmet. It looked like plasma, but it acted like lightning, filling the crevices of the suit, blasting the battle-hexes inscribed on the surfaces into sharp visibility before reducing them to a greyish slag. A glowing, red-edged hole appeared at the center of his chest, exactly as if something very hot had bored a hole through him from the back, which of course it had.

  The soldier’s fingers spasmed and he released his weapon before Rory had quite processed what was happening, which left her in possession of her original goal—a ’slinger—as he toppled sideways. There came a second flash, this one aiming to Rory’s right, and she knew without looking that it had struck the other Tadeshi and, presumably, rendered him as dead as her adversary. She glanced sidelong, and discovered that he had fallen so that
she could see his face behind the visor. Smoke curled from his eyes, and—no. He was very much dead.

  Rory blinked hard, and looked up, and found herself staring at the business end of a vakari weapon, the tip of which throbbed redly from residual heat. She dropped her newly acquired ’slinger—which she was holding by the wrong end anyway—and raised her empty hands.

  The vakar’s visor retracted. Sub-Commander Koto-rek lowered her weapon. Her nostrils pinched to slits and her cheeks washed a muddy violet.

  “Rory Thorne,” she said, like a curse. Then she stepped around Rory as if she were an errant mecha, pausing to examine the coffins that had been jostled in the firefight. Then, gently—so gently that Rory had to blink to be sure she was seeing truly—Koto-rek touched the coffins, and whispered something. Vakari syllables, slithering and clicking over each other in a reverent murmur. Rory’s familiarity with prayer was secondhand, but she was certain that was what she was witnessing here.

  Rory considered taking advantage of Koto-rek’s distraction to make a dash for the corridor, but the sheer physical improbability of her success aside, she was not sure Koto-rek counted as enemy. There were Tadeshi out there, after all, and they had already tried to shoot her. Koto-rek had not. That seemed like an important distinction. She glanced past Koto-rek. There should be more vakari, shouldn’t there? A sub-commander should not be running around alone on a ship in the middle of battle. But the corridor did not disgorge any escort, and in fact appeared empty.

  Then there came an ominous hum from the rear of the morgue, like a weapon powering up. Koto-rek’s weapon. She must have reconsidered the whole shooting business.

  Rory, still riding the tattered coattails of her last adrenaline rush, could not summon the necessary panic to spin around. It would make little difference—front or back, her hardsuit would not withstand a shot. She did not need to stare down the business end of another hostile weapon before she died. She stared instead at the Tadeshi soldier dead on the deck in front of her, and at the deck which was visible through the rather macabre porthole Koto-rek had burned through his back, and supposed she would have a matching wound soon enough.