by Ian McDonald
“You could just send me into their Heisenberg Gate.”
“They locked the gates.”
“You can unlock them. You're the Order.”
Charles Villiers's long, hard, silent look had chilled even the cold place in Everett M's heart. In that look was all the cold and ambition of his alter. They were one soul in two bodies.
“Some things are impossible even for the Order. Earth 1's Heisenberg Gates have an automatic override. Dial in or out and you will be redirected into the heart of the sun.”
Now Everett M kept a cold silence.
“Tottenham's fine.”
“I thought so. Now, I want to test that new anti-Nahn weaponry again.”
Everett M touched the ground as light as a creature from a dream. He pushed up his goggles, hit the harness release, and tethered the hedgehopper to a lamp post, half overgrown with grass and climbing plants. On every side rose the towers of London. Everett M was utterly alone. He stretched his arms out and spun three-sixty. He roared out his great shout of existence. “I am! In this dead city, I am! Everett Singh!” Birds exploded from the trees. Everett's breath hung in steaming clouds.
Madam Moon touched down beside him. She hardly seemed to bend a blade of grass. She did not react to Everett's great cry of himself. She did not react to anything.
The birds circled, slowly settling to their roosts. If they were truly birds. The Nahn could take many shapes, could slip inside and wear bodies like suits of clothes. Nothing could be trusted on this world. The Villiers alters had been right. The truth was much worse than any of the legends that had blown around Bourne Green Community School.
The dark tower was made up of the faces of the people it had assimilated. Everett M did not need to see that to know that those faces would visit him in his dreams for a long time to come. In a flicker of fear and doubt he went from King of London to alone and afraid and very, very cold.
“Have you the power packs? Give them to me. I want out of here.”
Madam Moon did not move. Everett M was about to ask a second time, with impatience, when her head jerked, a tiny motion, a bird-like turn of the neck.
“They're coming.”
Everett M felt very, very small and very, very alone.
“Who? What?”
“The airship. I have it on long-range scan. Strange. I am having difficulty obtaining a precise fix. It is as if something is interfering with my sensors. Like a cloud between myself and the airship. A moving cloud. But not a cloud, more like…snow. Particles. Insects. No. Not insects. Everett Singh! Everett Singh! Defend yourself. The Nahn is coming.”
The argument could be heard on the bridge. No words, but two distinct voices, shouting. One was a woman's, high-pitched but hard. The other was low and full of Glasgow growling. Mchynlyth.
Everett was on Captain Anastasia's heel as she strode from the bridge. Sen was one step beside him.
“Bona! A barney!”
“Mchynlyth has what we call anger management issues,” Everett said.
“Mchynlyth has what we call, so,” Sen said.
From the central catwalk Everett could see the ring of soldiers on the cargo deck and the two figures at its center. One wore the close-fitting outfit of an Agistry soldier. Camouflage patterns flowed across it. The other wore a leather flight jacket pulled over orange hi-visibility coveralls. They stood face to face, eyeball to eyeball. The kind of distance at which you could taste your opponent's breath. Veins bulged on Mchynlyth's neck and forehead. Elena Kastinidis stood like sculpted ice, cold, nothing moving. Her eyes did not flicker away from Mchynlyth's. Her fists were balled.
Heads looked up as Captain Anastasia clattered down the spiral staircase to the cargo deck.
“Mr. Mchynlyth, what is the meaning of this?”
The soldiers parted as Captain Anastasia strode through their circle. Her boot heels rang like pistol shots. Everett could imagine how wide and blazing her eyes must be. She came as close to Mchynlyth and the lieutenant as they were to each other. Their breath hung in clouds. Mchynlyth did not look away from the lieutenant.
“That wee girl is stealing my power.”
“Ma'am, with respect, your crewman cut off the power to the battle suits in midcharge,” Lieutenant Kastinidis said.
“Two pieces of information for you, wee girl.” Mchynlyth said. “I am not a crewman. I am an engineer. Engineer First Class, time served on His Majesty's Airship Royal Oak. And the second piece of the information is similar: I am a crewman. You are a passenger on my ship.”
Everett felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked around. Sharkey stood beside him.
“You forgot something.” Sharkey slipped Dr. Quantum out from under his coattails. “‘I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.’ After all the trouble I had getting it off that cove, I'd hate to see you just leave it lying around.”
“It's all right, my da—”
“But he's not your dad. And I wouldn't put it past them to engineer a little diversion.”
“They still need me for the password.”
“I'm sure these gentlemen are quite capable of slipping something into your comptator to log your password,” Sharkey said darkly.
“Would they do that?”
“I would.”
Everett tucked the tablet under his arm, squeezed it tight against him.
“Captain!” The Brigadier's parade-ground voice boomed out from the upper catwalk. “I have twenty soldiers that need their battle suits powered up and operational before we hit London.”
“I hates that omi,” Sen hissed to Everett. “I would knife him if I could.” The thin, pure hatred in her voice made Everett certain she would, given the opportunity. Her passions and hatreds were very strange and troubling to Everett. They came from a place very far from the educated, middle-class, cool Singh-Braiden family. He remembered the glee with which Sen had watched the fist fight outside the Knights of the Air pub, when Mchynlyth and Sharkey had gone up against the Bromleys. She had called out for blood.
“Aye, powered up with our power,” Mchynlyth spat. “Power I need to run my ship.”
“Power you took from us,” the lieutenant said.
“Power you gave us. Aye, give with one hand and take it back with the other.”
Everett could not see the captain's face but he could imagine all too well the bottled-up rage and humiliation behind the tight jaw, the flared nostrils, the wide eyes, the tense shoulders. He had caught the edge of her wrath before, when he had questioned the captain on her own bridge the time she had taken Everness to the ancestral Airish dueling grounds of Goodwin. She had been made to look like an amateur on her own cargo deck.
“And a piece of information for you, Mr. Mchynlyth,” Captain Anastasia said. “This is my ship. You are welcome aboard Everness, Lieutenant Kastinidis, and your unit. Take what you need to equip yourselves. My chief engineer will accommodate you. Hospitality to strangers and the needy is our way.”
Everett smiled at the little barb. Unit 27 had EM pulse guns and nanotech scanners and powered armor that could blend into the background or even make itself invisible to Nahn senses, but they had no air transport. They were cargo. The Agistry clung to the remains of a once-mighty technology, reengineering and fixing and bodging it up when it went wrong or needed to do something different, but the foundations of that technology had been undermined by the Nahn. There were too few humans. There were no new ideas. The battle suits, glowing and golden like bronze samurai, were patched and scarred with rivets and welds and mismatched spare parts. Dr. Singh had been evacuated on a tilt jet, but for aircraft like that you needed engineers and tech guys and liquid fuel. There were so few humans left. They were so widely scattered. They were driven so far to the edges on their islands and highlands.
The fight hadn't been about electricity or asking permission. It had been about fear. The soldiers were scared. Mchynlyth was scared. Everett was scared. Even Captain Anastasia was scar
ed. Every second drove Everness closer to the heart of Nahn-possessed London.
Mchynlyth and the lieutenant faced off for a moment then stepped back. Jaws tightened. Nostrils flared.
“Mr. Mchynlyth, with me,” Captain Anastasia ordered. “Ship's company, High Mess. Divano.”
Everett M froze. The cold inside reached out and paralyzed him. He could not move. His muscles were locked. His body would not answer, and he did not know what to do. The Nahn was coming.
Had he heard fear in Madam Moon's voice?
Don't freeze. Never freeze. Freeze and you end up a screaming face in the spire of souls. You do what you were trained to do. Everett M pulled off his gloves, threw off his fleecy flight jacket, kicked off his flight boots, slipped off the cold weather pants. Last of all, the hat, the goggles. The skin suit beneath was exactly what its name implied. It was thin, skin-clingy, and covered in what looked like tattooed circuitry.
“I'm not wearing that,” he'd said in the ready room on the dark side of the Moon.
Charles Villiers's patience was thin and ragged now.
“Oh, for God's sake, just bloody wear it.”
Once on, it did look and feel a bit like a plug-suit from the animated series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Exposed to the cold wind and swirling snow of Hyde park, the fabric was warmer than it looked—the Thryn were as clever with textiles as they were with any other technology—but the melted snow was soaking up from his feet.
“Help me, Madam Moon.”
And Madam Moon came apart.
She split down the front. From the top of her head to the lowest point of her torso, and along her legs and inner arms dark lines appeared. Light shone out of them. Madam Moon spasmed and unfolded. Her features melted and flowed, changing from mild-faced old woman to pure anime power armor. Her inside hollowed out, Thryn machinery rearranging itself, making space, a human-sized space. An Everett M-sized space. There was now no Madam Moon. A battle suit stood on the snow-dusted grass of Hyde park, whiter than the white ground. The armor stood open, like the shell of some undersea creature. Thryn circuitry sparkled with power. The printed patterns on Everett M's skin suit glowed in reply. But he hesitated to step inside and give himself to the battle suit. On the Moon, it had been the coolest of cool manga stuff. Here, it was a boy and his alien. Madam Moon used the same technology—nanotechnology—and was made of the same stuff as the Nahn. Nothing else could make machinery flow like water, change shape and purpose, reengineer itself from little old lady to killer battle bot. When he put his head inside that helmet and it closed around him, was there any difference between his face behind that featureless mask and his face trapped beneath the black glaze of the Soul Spire? The Thryn did not eat you from the inside. They said. It's our nanotech. But was it? He and Madam Moon were the sole objects from Earth 4. This was a whole new world for both of them. What did anyone really know about the Thryn? Everyone knew the Thryn kept secrets up on their half of the Moon. The full impact of their technology would have shattered Earth society. Too much, too fast. Did they lie as well? Was the theory that the Thryn Sentiency wasn't really aware and conscious of itself just a marvelous machine, another one of their constructions? Were they clever enough to pretend not to be sentient?
Charles Villiers had strung their technology through every part of his body. How could Everett M trust that his thoughts were his own and not Thryn thinking? He had been given a word that would override the suit programming, shut down the combat systems, unlock the armor and let him step free. If that helmet closed, would it make him forget that word? Would it ever open again?
Contact with the Nahn in three minutes.
Everett M could see the edge of the nanotech like a storm front, blowing in from the northwest across the park. With a thought he could have dialed up magnification of his advanced vision. He didn't want to do that.
You're all alone in the face of a perfect storm of lethal rogue nanotechnology and your only ally is a shapeshifting alien battle robot.
Put like that, the decision was not so hard to make.
He stepped into Madam Moon. She closed around him gently but completely. Everett M had seen Venus flytrap plants in the biology lab and like every young male had been fascinated by their slow horror. That was how the Thryn combat armor closed around his body. Boots locked into place, calves and thighs sealed. The seam up the belly plate melted away. Everett M gasped in sharp pain as the skin suit meshed with the armor and his implants. The ends of his fingers grew into and fused with the fingertips of the suit gloves. Missile ports along the armor's forearms meshed with the ports in his skin. The suit was inside him. The suit was him. He fought momentary panic as the helmet sealed around his face like a fist closing. For a moment he was blind and deaf, then the sensors linked with the Thryn circuitry in his nervous system and he could see and hear as clearly and freely as if he stood in his own skin. Power blazed along his nerves and muscles. With a thought he could clear those trees in one leap. With his next thought he could level all of Park Lane.
His feet were still wet.
The eastern sky was black with flying nanotech. Everett M did not need his Thryn vision to see the birds, and things that looked like birds, and things that changed shape from birds into things that could never, should never exist, let alone fly. Everett M threw his arms open to the hurtling Nahn storm.
“Bring it!”
“Two divanos in the same day,” Everett said as he settled into the seat he now thought of as his own at the conference table. “Must be a new ship's record.”
The cold looks froze the next smart line on his lips. He had no right to joke about the ship's history and traditions. He was crew, not a passenger, but he was not yet so. He might never truly be so.
“Sen, the cards,” Captain Anastasia ordered. This was why she had called the divano. It was an Everness ritual, not for the eyes of passengers. Not for the eyes of smart Oxford folk, rational folk, scientific folk, who might sneer at what they saw and consider it a barbarous superstition.
Very slowly, Sen drew the Everness tarot from its place next to her heart. She kissed the deck. She whispered something to it that Everett could not hear. She shuffled it one-handed and set it on the table in front of Captain Anastasia. The Captain shook her head and slid the deck across the conference table to Everett.
Suddenly Everett was very scared. He was one of those rational folk, those scientific folk. He hesitated to pick up the Everness tarot. He didn't believe in magic. But he did believe in power.
He was scared, but pride glowed inside him. He had been given the Everness tarot. He wasn't Airish born and Airish blood, but he wasn't a ground-pounder, a load of cargo in the hold. He was from two worlds. He was the Planesrunner. He was so. He knew the rules and traditions of the cards. Cut the pack three times. Lay out the top six cards in a cross. Lay the final card across the card at the center of the cross. The cards held their faces to the polished nanocarbon.
“It's not magic,” Sen had said, that first time, when she had used the cards on the night train to Hackney Great Port to try and trick Dr. Quantum from him. It was looking a little up the ways, a little down the ways, a little out to the sides. It was seeing things how they really were, deep down, under everything. Yet Everett held his breath as he turned up the first card.
A struggling man entombed in rock, his arms raised over his head, battling his way through the Earth. He might have miles or millimeters to go to break free to the surface. The man trapped in the Earth couldn't know.
“Bubbles of Earth,” Sen said. “Enemies press close and there is no clear way to victory. Something is born, or reborn. Blind hope. Next card.”
A skyscraper in the classic Manhattan Empire State-style, stepping back level upon level to a sharp pinnacle. Perched on that pinnacle, a single eye, ringed with fire, inside a triangle. Very much like Tolkien's Eye of Sauron.
“Andromeda Heights.” Sen did not give any of the card's possible meanings. The image was too recent in their memo
ries: the dark tower full of eyes and faces. The endlessly screaming tower of the Isle of Dogs.
Everett knew these cards. He had turned them up before, on the greasy upholstery of a London Transportation Authority el-train looping around St. Paul's. The same cards would inevitably turn up in any deck, but was the magic at work here the kind he believed in? Sen was sharp with cards—he had seen the way she shuffled. Had she manipulated the deck? Did the turn of the cards mirror her own hopes and fears? Was it that her emotions shaped the cards and the cards shaped the emotions of the people around her? Was she not a magician, but rather a conjurer?
The next card. Here was something he had not seen before. A man sitting on the roof of a train. He looked out of the card, grinning. A glass of wine was held high in a toast in one hand, in the other a whole leg of ham. What he could not see, over his shoulder, was that the train was entering a dark tunnel.
“The Jaunter,” Sen said. “The bona times won't last forever. But neither will the meese times. Do you know where you're going to? Another card, Everett Singh.”
Babies hung in cocoons like fruit in an orchard. Women in eighteenth-century dresses harvested the babies and collected them in baskets on their backs. Looking closely, Everett saw that the cocoons were spun from spider silk, and the babies had insect eyes and little claws—eight little claws—that pressed through the wrapping.
Sen gave a small gasp. “Spiderbabies. Who can you trust? Love turns into something weird. A bijou seed grows into a strange deed.”
There were only two cards now, the ones lying over each other at the center of the cross.
A stormy sea and a single bird taking off from the top of a breaking wave. Its feet scatter the storm spray. A vast beam of light fans out from over the horizon, so bright it seems to burn out of the dark, scratchy ink drawing. It was a white void. The card did not show where the light shone from—a beacon, a lighthouse, the sun, something bigger and more powerful than any of those—but the bird was following it home.