Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  She lay on her heather bed, churning over her thoughts for the thousandth time. Whatever was going on in orbit was far more than a simple observation mission. Joao had tracked satellites in orbits far and extreme, but their orbits crisscrossed most heavily above Europe. It could hardly be a coincidence that the university had instructed her team to focus on the same region.

  The plague had visited lands farther east, but Europe was being hit hardest right now. It was the most vulnerable. The easiest to influence.

  That wasn’t all. More gateways had opened on the dark side of this world’s moon. Joao had registered the neutrino static of gateways opening, but he had no way to tell what was happening there.

  All she wanted was someone to talk to. She and Joao compared notes every day, but Habidah hadn’t shared any of her conclusions with him. She couldn’t trust him. She couldn’t trust any of the rest of her team, for that matter. Niccoluccio was the only person she could be sure wasn’t involved.

  She’d hoped he would have called before now. She’d gotten a blip the other night, an instant’s buzz in her bones, but it had stopped the moment she’d gotten it, like the signal had cut or redirected. He’d probably started subvocalizing without realizing it.

  She was tempted to call him herself, but she didn’t want to add to his troubles. And no doubt everything she told him was monitored.

  There was someone on her team who could tell her exactly what the amalgamates were doing here. Poring through her data, she was pretty sure she knew who it was.

  The numbing wind deadened what was left of her nerves as she stepped outside. An ice-fringed moon limed the flat expanse of the sea. The smell got worse. The only wind in Marseilles came from the harbor, which the city also used for sewage runoff. It must have been bad enough before the plague. Now the harbor had been chained. The quarantined ships were full of the dead, and their catch rotted in their holds.

  By contrast with Habidah’s other cities, Marseilles had all but fallen apart. Unlike Genoa, Marseilles had no neighbors suffering from the plague, no experiences of this severity to draw from. When the plague had arrived, it had quickly metamorphosed into the more deadly pneumonic form. Even with many of its people having fled to the country, Habidah estimated that Marseilles would lose two-thirds of its population.

  In many ways, Marseilles reminded Habidah of the first planes to be struck by the onierophage. Many people refused to believe that there was a disease that the amalgamates couldn’t cure, and carried on about their business. When the truth struck, they panicked. Transplanar trade all but halted. Whole worlds quarantined themselves. There, as here, people killed their neighbors if they thought it would save them from the plague. Or, more often, for mundane reasons. Marseilles may have had fewer mouths to feed, but famine was coming. The municipal grain stores wouldn’t last all winter.

  She startled at a jolt from her demiorganics. Another message. She hoped that it would be Niccoluccio, but no such luck. Feliks.

  “I’m worried about Joao,” he sent. “I think he may be like me. Infected.”

  Habidah swallowed. “Have you told him?”

  “No. I’m not sure, but I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.”

  “Symptoms?”

  “Lethargy, lack of appetite, increased thirst. It could be a reaction to stress, but I doubt it. He must have noticed but he hasn’t said anything.”

  According to the transmission’s tags, Feliks was still in the field base. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Dresden?”

  A pause. “I don’t have the strength anymore. I’m sorry.”

  She swallowed her curse before she could inadvertently subvocalize it. “You should have told me before I made you board the shuttle–”

  “I’ll get back out the moment a trip to my quarters and back doesn’t leave me flat on my back. That could still happen.”

  Habidah sat heavily on a freezing stone doorstep. The satellite linking her with Feliks would only be overhead for another three minutes. After that, it would be another twenty-five minutes before the next. He’d chosen the timing deliberately. It wasn’t like him to be avoidant.

  “I’m so sorry, Feliks.”

  “We’re not going to get anything done telling each other that, are we?”

  “Kacienta is still available, isn’t she? I’ll send her out in your place.”

  “I’ve already voiced the idea to her. She doesn’t want to disrupt her own work. She’s busy compiling our reports.”

  “That’s too fucking bad for her,” Habidah said, before she could help herself. “Send her to Dresden. Do whatever parts of her work you feel capable of.”

  Feliks knew when to put up a fight, and when not to. “If that’s what you think is best.”

  “It’s not as though it’ll make much of a difference. Not with whatever the amalgamates are up to.” Listening in on this conversation. “I don’t know why they haven’t packed us back home yet. There’s got to be a reason we can’t see.”

  “The amalgamates are powerful, but they can’t do everything themselves. That’s why they have agents. They need intermediaries.”

  “You think we’re their intermediaries?”

  “Why else would the amalgamates have us here?”

  “If it was that simple, why the false premises? Why not just tell us?”

  Feliks couldn’t answer that, of course. He asked, “Do the people of this plane matter to you?”

  One minute left. “They don’t deserve to suffer this.” Another reason she wished she’d heard from Niccoluccio. She couldn’t tell if she’d made things better or worse.

  “They matter to me, too. I’m living through the same nightmare they are.”

  “If the amalgamates have long-term goals for this world, why don’t they cure its plague? From the start, they specifically barred us from that. They have the capability. They could do it in a month.”

  “I don’t think anyone here could tell you the answer to that.”

  No. There was at least one person who could. “Just spitting questions into the wind.”

  “Speaking of wind, you need to keep on your feet. I’m getting some warnings about your body temperature. You can’t just have your demiorganics keep you from feeling the cold.”

  “You worry about yourself. I’ll take care of me.”

  She’d timed it perfectly. Their satellite fell beyond the horizon.

  She grunted as she forced herself to pace on her cold-stiffened knees. While she’d talked with Feliks, reports from programs she’d left at the field base had reached her. Their results sluiced through her memory.

  The communications gateway remained the key. It remained the only method of transplanar communication on this plane. The satellites had come through temporary gateways. Those had closed. If the spy wanted to talk to his or her masters, he or she would still have to use the field base’s gateway.

  Habidah had kept an eye on communications traffic and on everyone’s sleep schedules. Since they only needed to sleep a few hours a day, it had taken time. With careful monitoring, she’d discovered several messages to Felicity Core had been sent while Feliks and Kacienta were sleeping.

  Finally, last night, Habidah had ordered the communications gateway closed, and told everyone but Meloku. She’d revoked everyone’s permission to open it. Sure enough, an hour ago the gateway had opened without her instructions. NAI had no explanation. It had no record of any command instructing it to do so.

  Meloku hadn’t even bothered to hide. She had been the only one making use of the survey team’s communications satellites at the time. She must have been as tired of hiding as Habidah was of hunting her.

  The corner of Habidah’s lips twitched. She swallowed, pushed down the rising rage.

  The next time a communications satellite rose over the horizon, she had NAI prep the shuttle for flight. Habidah marched out of the city. She had two hours of night left. Marseilles and Avignon were so near that it would be a very short flight.

&nbs
p; The shuttle waited for her in a grove a kilometer from the city. Its edges glowed red from the speed of its transit. She could have confronted Meloku remotely, but that would have just afforded Meloku an extra opportunity to evade her. If Meloku wanted to run away, it wouldn’t be as simple as closing a communications channel.

  Before long, Avignon was an infrared flare on the horizon, a tower of firelight and smoke. Habidah arced around it. The heart of the city, around the papal palace, shone brightly in both visible and infrared. People were awake and fires were lit. It was the last district Habidah expected to see active so early. Papal bureaucrats weren’t farmers. More than anyone else, they had license to sleep in.

  Meloku had fought to get here. That left Habidah with an unsettling idea. This was the administrative center of the religion that dominated this continent. The power the papacy wielded was more tenuous than secular sovereigns, but only the courts of the Mongol khans were more far-reaching.

  And Meloku had demanded to be here.

  Habidah brought the shuttle to a low hover near one of the mass graves. No one was around to see her disembark. Before long, the shuttle wouldn’t have enough concealment for its camouflage to function. She instructed the shuttle to leave her here and head back to the field base.

  The Palais des Papes obscured the approaching dawn. According to the satellites, Meloku’s last signal had come from a house nearby. A large one, certainly not the kind of unobtrusive inn or rental that the anthropologists were supposed to pick. Habidah picked up her pace. A household servant stood just inside the door. From his infrared shadow’s stance, he looked like he was waiting for someone.

  Habidah clomped up the front steps, making no secret of her arrival. The servant opened the door just before Habidah reached it. He was bald and reedy, and his eyes were wide. He stepped back. Though he’d been waiting, he seemed startled to see her.

  “Madam Akropolites is expecting you,” he said, and bowed his head.

  Habidah wished she had the presence of mind to say something in return.

  Meloku was waiting in the third-floor bedroom, next to a wide window with embroidered curtains, and a lacy hanging sheet to shade the bed. The perfumes couldn’t hide the scent of sweat and sex from Habidah’s augmented senses. Meloku was dressed as if to bed a king, in a layered, multihued dress that drooped across the floor. It made her look twice as big as she was. Habidah could hardly keep herself from laughing.

  Meloku asked, “Always have to be inconvenient, don’t you?”

  The temptation to laugh vanished. “What the fuck are you trying to pull?”

  “Do you think I know?”

  Habidah opened her mouth, but had nothing to say. Meloku said, “The amalgamates don’t share their secrets with everyone. Most times, with anyone. I find out what they’ll have me do only when it’s time to do it.”

  “You knew I was coming.”

  “The shuttle is easy enough to track. I think you scared my poor doorman. He didn’t believe me when I told him I had a premonition that a stranger would be visiting at this hour.”

  “What are you doing here? Why would you – why would the amalgamates – need all this? A manor. A doorman. How could any of this possibly give the amalgamates anything that they don’t already have?”

  Meloku was like a queen, completely in control. She folded her arms. “You could have come nearly any other night. I’m missing a very important rendezvous because of you.”

  Habidah flicked her eyes to the bed. “Seems like you already had it.”

  “Not that. You care enough about these people that you’re not going to leave when they can see you. I suppose that means you’re planning on staying here all day.”

  “I’m not leaving until I’ve gotten answers.”

  “You don’t matter as much as you think you do.”

  “Then why am I even here?” Habidah exploded. “Why are any of us? Why the anthropological assignment, the false pretenses, if we’re irrelevant?”

  “To do exactly as you were told to. Your reports haven’t been censored. They’ve been sent home as you were told they would be. Worlds across the Unity are reading them and many others to develop a social response to the onierophage.”

  “You can’t expect me to believe that us being here, and everything going on in orbit, is a coincidence.”

  “You’re right. I doubt it’s a coincidence. After this morning, we both might know a little more.”

  Habidah sat on the bed and rested her face in her hands.

  Meloku was starting to look satisfied. “Do your work, or not. It doesn’t make any difference to me. Or to the amalgamates.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Habidah said. “If we didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have needed to infiltrate us. You could have just come here on your own. The only reason to hide this is that you knew we wouldn’t go along if we found out. We haven’t exhausted our usefulness.”

  Meloku shrugged. “You might as well shuttle out after sunrise. It won’t matter if the locals see you. They’re already expecting strange things in the sky.”

  Habidah looked up sharply. “Why?”

  “Because I told them to. I have a record of being right about these things.”

  It was all Habidah could do to keep herself from leaping up and throttling Meloku. But the amalgamates didn’t leave their agents defenseless. Meloku would have beaten her.

  Meloku said, “Most of the papal district is up, watching the sky. I would be out there with them if I hadn’t heard the shuttle was on its way.”

  Aggravating as it was, Meloku’s smugness had its virtues. She had said more than she’d probably meant to. Earlier, she said the shuttle had been easy to track. Now she’d heard that Habidah had been coming to Avignon. Someone had told her. Another agent, or NAI. “Who else are you working with?”

  Meloku strode to her window, pushed back her curtain and opened her shutters. Habidah crinkled her nose. The smell of one of the mass graves carried right in.

  Meloku said, “I’ll show you.”

  Habidah made herself get up. As soon as she was close enough, Meloku clapped her arm around Habidah’s shoulder, and came just short of pushing Habidah out the window. Before Habidah could gasp, Meloku held her chin and tilted her head upward.

  Several stars still shone above the graying horizon. A wavering light, like a reflection seen through water, rippled across them. The hazy glow of a comet’s tail lingered behind it, moving much too fast for something so far away.

  Habidah’s demiorganics trilled a dozen alarms through her bones. She was receiving calls from the field base’s NAI, from Joao, from her observation satellites. It was all too chaotic to understand.

  The cloudy light shimmered. She could just make out an impression of motion along it. Even with her augmented vision, she couldn’t discern more than shifting darkness, stars disappearing as something moved across them.

  Habidah answered the call from Joao. “Planar gateway in high orbit,” he blurted. “Larger than the others. Larger than any I’ve ever seen.”

  Joao didn’t have to say what was coming through. He already knew. Just from the sheer scale of the rimy line ripped across the sky, so did Habidah.

  She tapped into a view from one of her observation satellites to confirm it.

  At first, the satellite’s view looked no different from hers from the ground, only clearer. The atmosphere no longer blurred the sky. A lightning-bright rent in space tore the arched horizon. The satellite had sharper senses, though, and after a moment she saw an occlusion of stars, a shape, sliding, emerging.

  Light spilled out of the tear. For flickers of a moment, that light shone across interconnected gunmetal gray platforms. The platforms were interconnected, studded with needle-slender cannons, stubby factories, and docked craft. One platform was shrouded by gas, a hazy atmosphere bound by containment fields, wrapped around a vast parkland.

  A short distance away, darkness glommed onto the object. Considering the light the gateway pro
duced, that was a half-hearted attempt to hide. Nor would they ever fool people like Habidah, who knew exactly what they were looking at.

  A planarship. Habidah had never seen one herself, but she recognized it.

  “Ways and Means,” Meloku said, contentedly. “Here.”

  The same planarship from which Osia had called. Habidah breathed, “Why?”

  “To take control for us,” Meloku said. Habidah repeated her question, and Meloku answered, “What else do the amalgamates do?”

  Only then did Habidah decide that Meloku didn’t know anything else.

  19

  At the breakfast table, Dioneo’s surviving children couldn’t stop talking about something that had happened in the skies early this morning. They hadn’t seen it themselves, but they had heard the story from their housekeeper. Shortly after the last of the stars had disappeared, a white streak had ripped across the sky, as if the firmament could be split like the skin of a fruit.

  By the time Niccoluccio had woken, it had long since disappeared. According to the people who had seen it, it had been like a comet’s tail. Comets always heralded disaster.

  Dioneo’s children were struggling to determine what could be worse than the pestilence. Finally, they turned to Niccoluccio. “Is this the end of days, uncle?” the oldest boy asked. He sounded as though he were asking if there would be fruit after breakfast.

  “Never believe that,” Niccoluccio said.

  He ate the rest of his bread in silence while his nephew at once disregarded him. He’d hardly had to think about his answer. He didn’t know what other people had seen, but he knew the end of days wouldn’t look like that. He could have conjured a thousand theological reasons, but none of those would have been the reason he’d answered as he had. He couldn’t have even explained it to Brother Rinieri.

  He knew how small his experiences were, and how ill-equipped they left him to explain anything. His experience with Habidah had served to remind him how tiny he was underneath the heavens. Habidah had seemed like an angel. After her, he’d had no idea what an angel might look like, and had given up trying to conceive of one.