Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  “I need to contact Ways and Means,” Meloku said. “Go after them if I can’t.”

  “The shuttle’s gone. We can’t get into contact with it.”

  “I’ll use the communications gateway,” Meloku said. “I’ll send myself through if I have to.”

  “But that’s impossible…!”

  Meloku snapped, “Obviously it’s not impossible. You saw it.”

  After a moment, she calmed enough to say, “Nor was it ever intended to be impossible. No one besides the amalgamates and their agents is meant to know, but a micrometer communications gateway aperture can be widened this far. The method is intended to be used only in emergencies. It doesn’t require ‘gods’ or powers. Just an understanding of transplanar theory behind what the amalgamates have chosen to make public.”

  Kacienta peered through the fissure. “But all the destruction–”

  “Didn’t destroy the gateway mechanism. The mechanism stayed intact while the stresses destroyed everything around it. As it was designed to.”

  Kacienta set her hand on the twisted wall, as if to lean on it. “We thought that we were seeing a miracle.”

  “Whoever wanted you to think that it was some kind of mystical power was tricking you. There was nothing magical about what happened here. The only mystery is where the extra power came from, but there must be an explanation for that, too.”

  The needle-like projectors tapered to invisibility. There seemed to be space for a gateway, at most, a few micrometers wide. All deception. Multiple layers of folded space had already cut right through them without displacing them. It was one of the contradictions possible only at so high an understanding of transplanar physics.

  “I’m going to need your help to reactivate these. You and Joao both.”

  “What can we do?”

  “My demiorganics are nonfunctional.” Meloku paused to gauge Kacienta’s reaction. When she saw nothing, she said, “I need you and Joao to restart the gateway, and to program some very specific instructions.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m going to open a gateway directly aboard Ways and Means, and contact it through that.” A gateway opening in the middle of its hull would definitely get the amalgamate’s attention.

  Kacienta stared a moment, her mouth slack, and then nodded.

  She fetched Joao, who had gotten Galien tucked away into Feliks’ old quarters. While Meloku told them what they needed to do next, they alternated between telling her everything that had happened.

  Joao said, “She lied to us. She must have set up her plan with Niccoluccio hours beforehand. She’s a psychopath, a walking disaster. I should have known this was coming.”

  “You should have,” Meloku said.

  Meloku got a breathless earful of Niccoluccio’s stories of the world beyond the gateway. There was certainly some powerful force behind all of this, that much was certain. But their talk about gods was a native mode of thinking. Someone was trying to pull a very thick wrapping over their eyes. It was impossible to tell whether Habidah knew more, or if she had been just as duped as Kacienta and Joao.

  Meloku said, “I need one of you to find Ways and Means’ current position and velocity. If you can’t get in contact with your satellites, then just plot its orbit from the last time you saw it.”

  Calculate an orbit. She might as well have told them to spoon her food. Without her demiorganics, Meloku couldn’t do much but direct.

  While Joao tracked Ways and Means, Kacienta programmed the gateway mechanism as Meloku directed. Meloku was relieved to discover that most of her work had already been done for her. Whoever had last reconfigured the gateway hadn’t bothered to undo their alterations.

  She returned her attention to the gateway mechanism. Opening a transplanar gateway was difficult enough. It was paradoxically much more difficult to gate between two points on the same plane. It might have been better to travel directly to the Core Worlds. But no, Ways and Means was in immediate danger. No matter what she thought of Kacienta and Joao’s ramblings of gods, she couldn’t underestimate her opposition. If Habidah and Niccoluccio got aboard Ways and Means, they might lose it. The Unity had never lost an amalgamate.

  While Joao worked, he said, “We still can’t contact Ways and Means directly. Whatever’s in control of this base won’t let us. NAI isn’t answering our questions. I suppose it could have taken our demiorganics, like it did yours, but it didn’t.”

  Meloku didn’t answer. At least her enemy had been more afraid of her than these two.

  Joao asks, “I still have to use base systems. What makes you think NAI’s going to allow what we’re doing now?”

  She was forced to admit, “Nothing. I have to try.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  She had to hope that her enemy had turned its attention away. If she couldn’t alert Ways and Means, she wouldn’t be able to do anything else, either.

  As the adrenaline rush faded, pain soaked through her legs, seeping up her abdomen like water through a sponge. She no longer had the technology to disguise her exhaustion. Nor sort out her brain chemistry. Despair crashed down on her in big, heady waves. She tried to force it out, or, when that didn’t work, ignore it. Anxiety shouldn’t matter. Exhaustion and depression shouldn’t matter. It was all foolish chemicals.

  She asked, “Joao, if Habidah could have saved the Unity, do you think she would have?”

  Joao seemed lost in the haze of data. “Excuse me?”

  “Her character profile said that she was never as attached to her home plane, or any other, as she was to the planes she studied. If she had to choose between attacking one or the other, which do you think it would be?”

  “I suppose she chose to attack the Unity. I mean, she must have.”

  “Would you?”

  Joao gave her a sharp glance. “Of course not.”

  “What did you and Kacienta think when you discovered what the amalgamates were doing here?”

  Kacienta said, “Well, we weren’t pleased, but–”

  “But you cared about what happened to this plane. That’s more than most people in the Unity.”

  Joao said, “If you’re implying that we would betray the Unity, you can fuck right back off the way you came.”

  Meloku said, “Whatever force is controlling the monk targeted you all for a reason. You were more susceptible to turning.”

  Kacienta said, “We didn’t.”

  “I believe you.” Meloku waited a moment before adding, “Since you’re helping me.”

  Kacienta pursed her lips. Joao glanced at her, but couldn’t bring himself to look at Meloku. He closed his eyes to focus on his demiorganics. They both looked miserable, but they knew they were being watched.

  She was finally starting to feel like herself again. It made her just as miserable as they were. But she’d found out what she’d needed to, why her enemy had targeted her old teammates. And she’d made it clear to them that they were being watched.

  After a certain point, there were no more directions she could give. Kacienta and Joao had to handle this on their own. Anxiety clawed up her throat. She cupped her hands and breathed into them.

  Companion wouldn’t have been able to allay her fears. Its cold foresight would have just informed her of another half dozen ways it could all go wrong. Still, just hearing its voice again would have been a comfort, like going home again. Like closing her eyes was right now.

  Kacienta reported, “The microaperature gateway is open.”

  Meloku’s eyes snapped open. She bolted upright. The sleep vanished from her system. The adrenaline was back, and, for now, that was all that mattered.

  “Signal Ways and Means,” she said.

  It took so damned long to hear the answers rather than receive them directly. Kacienta said, “Static.”

  “There are thousands of radio signals coming through,” Joao said. “I can’t sort through them. It’s a babble. All kinds of chaos.”

  “Spectroscopy,”
Meloku snapped.

  After another excruciating pause, Kacienta said, “Nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, et cetera, on the other side.” The gateway had opened in a breathable atmosphere. “Traces of all kinds of other compounds.”

  “Name some.”

  “Mono, di, and tricresyl phosphates, nitrous oxides, ozone.”

  All industrial contaminants Meloku would expect to find almost-but-not-quite scrubbed from a planarship’s air. She’d found the right place. Ways and Means was on the other side. It should have detected the gateway opening in an instant.

  If it hadn’t responded to that, something was terribly wrong.

  She looked to Joao. “In all those thousands of radio signals, is there anything at all that sounds familiar?”

  Joao bit his lip. His eyes flicked back and forth as data poured through him. Meloku would have given her legs to see what he was reading.

  Finally, he said, “Habidah is there. I recognize her demiorganics’ fingerprint.”

  Meloku said, “Reopen the gateway closer to her. Load the other instructions I gave you. You and Joao will want to clear out.”

  Joao said, “You can’t possibly think you’ll survive. You saw the wreckage left the last time someone widened the gateway.”

  “Compared to what I went through to get here, that will be easy.”

  Joao shook his head, but he and Kacienta did as they were told. After they stepped out, Meloku stood and faced the gateway.

  She could perceive no change in either the needles or the infinitesimal space between them. She stretched her fingers, an activity Companion had taught her to clear her mind. To survive this, she needed to be limber, like she was making ready to survive a crash.

  But she couldn’t help herself. Rage poured through her head, boiling, fulminating, seeking any release it could find. It dampened the pain in her legs.

  She knew she ought not to feel clear-headed. That was an illusion, a trick of brain chemistry. Her judgment was probably more impaired than it had ever been in her life. Everything inside her was a mess.

  But she liked this mess. All the fury and fear compressed her pain, crystallized it into an urge to attack. If, when, she found something on the other side of the gateway, she didn’t know what she was going to do, but it was going to be something. That was more than Kacienta or Joao would have.

  Maybe she’d always been a mess, and needed Companion and the amalgamates to temper her. They’d known that, too. And they’d still chosen her.

  Light flickered between the needles.

  Meloku preemptively raised her hand to shield her eyes from the lightning storm to come. When she stepped through, the last thing she needed was to stumble blindly while her vision adjusted. She would be stumbling enough already. But better that than stopping.

  38

  The moment Niccoluccio’s eyes closed, the lights flickered.

  It happened so suddenly that Habidah nearly thought she’d blacked out. The pressure sealing her feet to the deck released, but only briefly. The lights returned exactly as they had: focusing on Niccoluccio, who slept.

  Osia and her comrades floated lifelessly, their arms splaying out. Only their feet held them anchored to the deck.

  A flood of data crashed into Habidah. Voices overlapped each other. So much of it was an unintelligible tangle, coded messages. The rest were cries for help, urgent requests for information, demands to stay calm. Voices from all over the planarship surged through her, too loud to drown out. She couldn’t think. She instinctively blocked signals from more than a hundred meters away.

  She stepped past Osia and the others, approached Niccoluccio’s table. Steady breathing, gentle pulse. She tried to convince herself that she didn’t know what had happened, but she couldn’t manage it. The battle had taken place in a flash of milliseconds, before she realized it had started. The amalgamate had cut power to this chamber, an emergency attempt to stem the tide of data flowing out of Niccoluccio’s mind.

  Then the power had returned. Either Ways and Means had restored it, or something else had.

  Before Habidah could get any closer, a jet-black hand grabbed her wrist.

  Habidah gave a gasp of surprise. Osia stood next to her, recovered from her fugue. Her grip tightened, painfully. “What did you do?”

  She blinked, pretending – without having to try hard – to be at a loss for words. The strength of Osia’s fingers couldn’t hide their tremble. Habidah hadn’t realized anything could threaten her control. But she and her companions had never left her. They’d gone limp only while trying to figure out what was happening, putting their physical selves behind them.

  Osia said, “Ways and Means isn’t answering me. Or anyone aboard.” She looked to Niccoluccio. “It happened a few milliseconds after the memory root began. There was some kind of virus inside him. And you brought it aboard.”

  Osia watched her closely. Her face was expressionless. It was like staring into the dead eyes of a statue. She had to be scanning Habidah in multiple spectra, studying her reactions, the things she couldn’t help but give away.

  She must have found what she was looking for, because her second hand snapped up and seized Habidah by the neck. Habidah choked from the surprise, but Osia wasn’t squeezing hard enough to restrict her airflow. Yet. Habidah tried to step backward, wheeled her free arm in a futile instinct to keep her balance. After a moment, she spat into the air because she couldn’t swallow and would have choked otherwise.

  Habidah said, “And now you’ll have to kill me just to be certain I’m not part of it.”

  “I’m already certain.”

  One of the other crewmembers stepped to Niccoluccio, arm raised like a club. The crewmember moved in a blur, too fast to be human. Habidah didn’t want to see what happened next, but didn’t have the composure to look away

  At once a sheet of lightning crashed down from the ceiling, intersected the crewmember’s arm. The crewmember took a few steps backward, knuckles glowing cherry-hot.

  “Field-protected,” the crewmember transmitted, not bothering to encrypt the signal. A masculine voice. Had he been human, his skin would have been seared off his hand.

  Osia answered, “He must still be important to whatever’s attacking.”

  The third crewmember transmitted, “It must be in complete control of this chamber. It could kill us all with hardly any effort.” Also masculine.

  Habidah tried to fight Osia’s hand off, but it was like hitting polished marble. Habidah couldn’t keep from scrabbling at Osia’s wrist. For several long seconds, she was sure that this would be the last thing she ever saw. But Osia’s grip held steady.

  The deck lurched. Osia remained rooted to the deck, but Habidah’s legs wheeled through the air. Even Osia tilted sideways with Habidah’s momentum.

  A second later, though, Osia recovered enough to plant Habidah onto the deck. The first crewman reported, “Dorsal deck crews report thrusters firing.”

  Without Ways and Means’ communications systems, its crew had formed an impromptu relay chain to help important messages break through the chatter. Anyone in a position to observe something swiftly reported their news to their neighbors, who sent it on. Habidah tentatively widened the distance from which she allowed her demiorganics to receive transmissions.

  Ways and Means’ stealth fields had shut off. All of its antimatter generators were spinning to life. Its aft drive was waking. And power was being shunted to its gateway generator.

  All of which meant the planarship was making ready to slip between the waves of the multiverse.

  A force the likes of which had taken out Ways and Means could probably have taken out its crew as well. Yet it had left them alive. It saw Ways and Means’ crew as beneath its attention. The crew had figured this out. Still, the paramount order among them was to cut off contact with the planarship’s mind. Any virus that disabled the amalgamate so quickly would transmit easily among them.

  More scattered reports said that all the intern
al gateways and transport platforms had shut down. The crew was stuck where they were. Their assailant cared that much, at least.

  Osia told Habidah, “You knew this would happen.”

  Habidah said, “Better to say that I didn’t try to stop it.”

  Another signal broke through all the others. It was a voice, a woman’s, amplified by the relays. Someone was at last trying to organize. She ordered everyone near a power conduit or generator to destroy it, to sabotage the planarship from the inside.

  The crewman to Osia’s left sent, “There’s a power junction two hundred forty-three meters down the corridor. We’re the only ones mid-deck. We’ll need cutting tools and all of us working to get through the bulkheads in time.”

  “I know,” Osia said, tightly.

  Osia carried Habidah ahead, still holding her by the neck. Habidah choked, beat on Osia’s hand. She was deprived of air for only a moment, though, before Osia deposited her on one of the acceleration couches.

  The moment her arm touched the cushion, it snapped there, held in place by invisible bands. The fields had a little give, just enough to keep from breaking her bones, but she couldn’t even bend her elbow.

  She shot Osia a look of burning contempt. Osia gave no sign of registering it. She and her companions left via the chamber’s only exit portal.

  Habidah looked to the center of the chamber.

  Niccoluccio lay unmoving but for the steady rhythm of breathing. The burst of acceleration had splayed his hair sideways. His tonsure shone wan under the lights. “Niccoluccio,” she said.

  For once, she figured they weren’t being listened to. Without Ways and Means functioning, she doubted Osia could spy through the chamber’s cameras. “Niccoluccio,” she tried again.

  Still no change. She leaned as far as the restraining field allowed, which wasn’t much. Niccoluccio’s chest rose and sank every two seconds, as a person in deep sleep. His cheeks had lost their color. His eyelids flickered nervously, too fast for dreaming.

  He wasn’t so much unconscious as somewhere else.

  “Wake up,” she hissed.

  She tested her restraints again. She knew of no weaknesses to exploit, no way to tell if the fields were working properly, no way to even make this more comfortable. The fields dug into her skin. It was impossible to restrain her reflex to fight to escape. More out of fury than hope, she wrenched her wrist against the fields.