by Ian McDonald
“Shining Path. The way is open but the destination unseen. Do you know where you's goin' to? The sun blinds us.”
Sen reached across the table and slid Shining Path off the final card. Everett snapped it face up.
Season of the Wolf.
By pure reflex, Everett reached out to turn it face down again. Captain Anastasia's hand stayed his.
The sun, the planets, in the jaws of an all-devouring wolf. The eater of worlds. The season of darkness falls. The bad guys win. He had seen this card before. Captain Anastasia had turned it up when she'd called on Sen to summon the Everness tarot before the battle of Goodwin Sands. The bad guys who won had not been the Bromleys. They were not the bad guys. Charlotte Villiers and the Order, they were the ultimate bad guys, and they had blown Tejendra—the real Tejendra, Everett's dad—into a random parallel universe and had turned Everett and the crew of Everness into exiles and refugees, fleeing across alternate universes. And the season of darkness still reigned. But the light would come. That was the promise of the Shining Path card. The storm-struck bird was like Everness. Light would come and light would guide them home.
Sen hadn't given an interpretation, Everett realized. She'd given the name of the card and its individual meanings but she'd never read the spread. The cards were the words, but she had never formed them into sentences. That's for each of us to do, Everett thought. Each of us finds his or her meanings and fortunes in the combinations of the cards.
And what is your meaning, Everett Singh?
Don't do that, Everett. It's like a tiny wave on a beach that undermines the edge of the fantastic sandcastle, crumbling the whole edifice. But what I believe about reality is not built of sand. My beliefs test themselves against reality at every point, and where they are weak, where they can be undermined, the testing makes them stronger. The universe is rational, even when it seems that it is not. There are rules. But then, Everett thought, there are people. People don't obey the rules. And the futures hidden in the cards did seem to come true, in ways no one could predict.
“You see what you want to see. We make our own luck here,” Captain Anastasia had said as they went into battle against Ma Bromley on her flagship.
Bubbles of Earth. Andromeda Heights. The Jaunter. Spiderbabies. Shining Path. Season of the Wolf. The cards lay on the table for a long moment. Every crewperson read her or his future into them. Then Everett gathered the cards together and squared the deck. Sen stowed it next to her heart.
“We're over West London,” Captain Anastasia said. “To your posts. Clear for action.”
“Captain.”
Captain Anastasia hung back a moment as the rest of the crew went down the spiral staircase to the bridge and to engineering.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything, Everett.”
Everett pressed his hands and forehead against the cold window. His breath formed a misty circle, trickling condensation. The outer edges of dead London lay under a veil of light snow. Reduced to white and black, the lines and shapes that people had put on the land showed clearly: the roads, the abandoned rail tracks, the rows of houses, the boundaries of gardens turning to jungle. He could almost believe humans still owned this city.
“Captain, when you challenged Ma Bromley…”
“The right of single satisfaction.”
Captain Anastasia had never spoken of what happened between the moment she walked out across the air bridge to Arthur P and the one when Everett had seen her climbing the spire of the capsized airship. The bruises had faded; she had patched up the torn ear and balanced it by putting more rings in the other one. She had never replaced the lost coat. And she had never said a word about what she had done on the Arthur P with her enemies all around her.
“Yes. When you went on your own, with all the Bromleys facing you…were you scared?”
Captain Anastasia answered without hesitation.
“Yes I was. I was very scared. Not for me. For the ship, for you all. I was scared for what could happen to you.”
Everett looked at the black-on-white cityscape, like a pencil drawing, slipping away under the hull.
“I have to go.”
“Don't go Everett.”
“I need to see it.”
“Your da…Dr. Singh will know what to look for.”
“I need to know it will work with the Infundibulum. I'll know if it does. He won't because he doesn't know the Infundibulum. I have to be there.”
Lieutenant Kastinidis had briefed the crew on what to expect when they went down into what remained of Imperial University. It was not if the Nahn would come. It was when.
“I mean, when we fought the Bromleys, I wasn't scared, not really. It was exciting. Really. And when we went to rescue my dad, when Charlotte Villiers jumped us, it was too quick, too fast, too much going on to be scared. Even when I was fighting that other me in the cemetery, it was like playing in a football match; it was all look, understand, react, like that, bang bang bang, no time to think about it, no time to be scared. But I can see this coming, I could see this getting closer all the way from Oxford, and now here we are and it's only a few minutes away and I can't turn the ship around and I can't stop it and they will come, the Nahn, they will come. Dr. Singh told me about them. The eyes are the last to go. I can see that. I can imagine that. I can think about what that's like. Sometimes it's not good to think so much. When you think, that's when you get scared. And I'm scared, Captain.”
“Of course you are. Only a fool wouldn't be. Being brave isn't about never being scared. It's about what you do with being scared. And that's why it's not bad to think. Thinking doesn't always make you scared. Thinking's the only way through being scared.”
“Yeah. I thought it would be something like that. Thank you, Captain.”
“Annie. You'll know when you're allowed to call me that.” She opened the High Mess door on to the spiral staircase. “Your post Mr. Singh. Everness will have need of every hand.”
“Yes ma'am.”
The Nahn storm was on him. It rolled over the bare treetops like a wave and broke into a swirling flock of dark, screeching winged things.
Everett M pushed his thought into his weapon systems. The circuitry of the Thryn battle suit meshed with the Thryn circuitry inside his body. And his arms opened. He was one with the battle suit, the skin suit, the Thryn systems beneath his skin. Right down to the heart of the stuff they had put into him. Missile racks unfolded. Each branch of the rack carried ten nano-missiles.
“Go,” Everett M whispered. The missiles launched. The recoil jerked his arms backward and upward, but the missiles had their own target-seeking systems. He watched the rocket trails fan out across the face of the howling Nahn wave.
Now.
Everett M brought his hands together in a power-armored clap.
The EM pulse blinded him for a moment. The radio shriek had stabbed each eardrum so high and hard that he thought for a moment that he was bleeding into the helmet.
Conventional explosive missiles were useless against the Nahn, Charles Villiers had said. They would simply reprogram themselves and re-form. EM pulse missiles would burn out their software.
“What about the battle suit?” Everett M had asked. “Doesn't that have software? Doesn't every bit of it—and me—run on software?”
“We trust Madam Moon,” Charles Villiers had said.
The battle suit stood at the edge of a black-speckled field of white snow. The Nahn had dropped in a precise line that marked where the massive EM pulse of sixty nano-missiles detonating at once had knocked it straight out of the sky. Black snow. It ran as far to left and right as Everett M could see. The density dropped off the further from the front line the dead Nahn had fallen. The sky was clear. The destruction was total. Everett M surveyed his work. He took a step forward to grind the body of the closest Nahn—a four winged headless bird thing with two tiny human-like arms—beneath his white battle boot.
Targeting circle
s appeared in his vision. Everett M didn't want to think too hard about how Madam Moon was hooked into his eyeballs, but the HUD displays were spinning circles, like something in a first-person-shooter video game, where on-screen graphics showed which character you were meant to be watching. Five contacts, low and fast. There. In the trees. Coming.
With a thought Everett M powered up the finger lasers. His fingertips were fused with the armor's fingertips. He didn't want to think too much about how that worked either.
Five hounds of hell. They had too many legs. Black as oil, teeth white as death. Five flicks of the fingers. The five Nahn hounds fell, slashed into pieces. There was no blood; no bone; no soft, swollen stuff inside. Already the Nahn assemblers were in motion, flowing toward unity.
Charles Villiers had told him this would happen. Everett M held the palms of his hands out. Circular ports opened in each palm. It took a few seconds for the EM pulsers to power up. The lasers took them down. The pulsers took them out. There was nothing to see, not even some video-game sound effect to hear. He simply turned his hand palm out at the scrabbling half hounds and they instantly fell apart into seeping black liquid.
Everett M clenched his fists, closed the pulser ports, and let the circuits recharge. He felt like Iron Man. Tony Stark, the billionaire space explorer whose private-enterprise rocket had crashed on the Moon. Tony Stark had been rebuilt by the Thryn into a battle-suited superhero—Iron Man—who fought the forces of evil. Everett M's Thryn sense sparkled with multiple contacts. They had him encircled. The battle suit moved as easily and lightly as his own skin. Everett M spun, firing off two scythes of laser beams. Smoking chunks of hellhound cartwheeled through the air. Everett M's HUD chimed. Pulsers recharged. It was like a beautiful martial art: turn, target, hold up one hand, and fire while the other tracked the next Nahn hound hauling itself up from the trampled snow. Then they were all down and Everett M stood at the center of a circle of black splashes, like ink on paper.
Contacts. More and more. A circle beyond the first circle, and beyond that a third, racing toward him. Where were they coming from? How many reinforcements could the Nahn throw at him? The first wave exploded in a hurricane of laser fire and EM blasts. The second broke on him. At the last moment, the HUD chimed: pulsers online. But beyond that wave was the third, the largest yet. Here they came, racing on their six legs over the splattered remains of their colleagues. One down, three, five. Close, closer than anything. Everett M took out two in midleap, each with a full-power pulser blast. Pulsers offline, the HUD flashed at him. One final contact, directly behind him. God, it was fast. Everett M whirled. The hellhound was in midair. Too close to risk lasers. Jaws gaped and teeth gnashed in Everett M's faceplate, then it struck hard, turned to liquid, and smeared itself all over the chest plate of his battle armor. The Nahn stuff crawled across him, trying to find some chink, some flaw in the Thryn technology. Everett M grabbed the edge of the sheet of Nahn stuff and peeled it away from him. The Nahn flexed and coiled, trying to lock on to his hand. Everett flicked his hand and flung the Nahn away from him. It spun in midair, trying to find its hellhound shape again. Everett M stabbed his left hand forward and blew it to sludge with a pulser blast. New contacts sparkled on his HUD. Nahn. Dozens of them.
“How long until the airship gets here?”
I estimate forty minutes. The battle suit's words formed inside his head. Everett M did not like them there. They were too close. At least the suit did not speak in Madam Moon's calm, reasonable, maddening voice.
“I'm safer in the sky.” He could hide out on the rooftops, among the chimneys and aerials and air conditioners and water tanks of Mayfair, swoop in stealthily onto the back of the airship and cling there like a flea on an elephant while he planted the tracking device. And once the tracking device was in place, Charles Villiers could lock on to him, open the Heisenberg Gate, and get him off this hideous world.
His hedgehopper bobbed at the end of its tether to the lamp post. Twenty steps would take him to it.
Something tugged at Everett M's right foot. He looked down. Black tendrils had burst from the ground and wrapped themselves around his boot. Everett M tugged. The tendrils stretched. He willed a touch more power into the battle suit and swung his right leg forward. The tendrils snapped, fell to the snow, dissolved through it back into the ground again.
Now his left leg was snagged. Black glossy tentacles snared him up to the calf. He heaved. The tentacles heaved back. New tendrils burst from the ground and coiled up over his knees. Within seconds he was entangled to the thighs. Everett M fed full power to the battle suit and strode forward. Tentacles strained, stretched, snapped. He almost sprawled headlong. Seventeen steps. But now his left leg was caught again, tendrils boiling out of the ground, coiling around his leg like snakes. Everett M held out his hands and opened the pulsers in his palms. But the hellhounds were closing again, hard and very, very fast. And his right leg was snared again. Everett M heaved. The tendrils stretched but did not yield. He heaved again. The tendrils heaved back. They pulled his foot back down to the ground and held it there. The ground exploded. Tentacles swarmed up Everett M's legs. Within seconds he was snared to the waist. The hedgehopper hovered at the end of its line, seventeen steps away. Seventeen steps he could never take.
Pulsers online, the HUD said. Everett M aimed his palms at his feet. Fry, you evil death tentacles. But what would happen to the battle suit's circuitry at so close a range? He closed up the pulsers and grabbed handfuls of black Nahn stuff. The tendrils coiled tighter around his thighs. Everett flexed his battle-suit muscles. Tendrils stretched, tendrils sheared. But here they came, out of the trees: the hellhounds. A wall of them. So many, so fast. Everett M blasted the first wave to slime with snap bursts from the pulsers. The second wave broke on him. Three he slashed into smoking chunks with his finger lasers, two he punched into flying blobs of Nahn stuff, a third he grabbed and tore to pieces. Pulsers recharged. Everett M aimed at his feet. He had to make those seventeen steps, let the hedgehopper lift him away from this. He staggered to a heavy blow to his back.
I have been impacted by a Nahn unit, the battle suit said.
The tentacles were tightening around his waist now. And here came the third wave of hellhounds. Lasers seared the air, pulsers splashed dead Nahn stuff across the snow. But there were too many, and they came too fast. White teeth snapped Everett M's face and covered him with crawling Nahn stuff again and again and again. And the tendrils spiraled higher and higher, to his waist, his chest, over his shoulders, snaking down his arms. He couldn't aim. He couldn't target. Black splashed across his visor like ink. Splash by splash, splat by splat, the Nahn tech shut out the light. He couldn't see. He was blind, deaf, paralyzed.
Sensor webs are compromised, the battle suit said. Alone in the dark, Everett felt the soft thuds of more and more Nahn hounds splattering over him. We are encased in approximately one meter of Nahn substrate.
Entombed in rogue nanotech. From the outside he would look like one of the mummy cases he had seen in the British Museum, a rounded coffin with a head. Black. All shiny black. And more Nahn piling on top of him every moment.
Software security has not been compromised, the suit said.
“Meaning?” Everett asked.
I can maintain basic life support.
“How long?”
Until the power packs decay.
“How long?”
In this state, several months.
Everett M screamed then. He screamed long, he screamed hard, he screamed his throat raw. The blackness took the screams and gave nothing back. He tried to move, to kick, to punch, to even move a toe. Muscles balled. He focused power into his enhanced Thryn strength until he felt his muscles would tear sinew from bone. Nothing. He could not move, he could not see, and all he could hear was the voice of the suit and his breath and the beating of his heart. Trapped inside Madam Moon. A metal and plastic coffin.
“Everett?”
A voice. Not the suit voice. N
ot his voice. No: his voice. His voice from somewhere else.
“What am I hearing?”
I am picking up a series of vibrations through the Nahn material and converting them into audible signals.
“It sounds like a voice. My voice.”
Yes it does, Everett M. Singh.
The blackness lightened. Everett M's vision turned grey.
The Nahn material is clearing from the helmet visor, the suit said as tendrils of black crept back from his field of vision
Everett M blinked in the white. A shape, between him and the light. An oval shape filling most of his field of vision, blocking out the light from the winter sky. His vision cleared slowly. The spots and soft dandelion bursts in his eyes faded. He was looking into a face.
His face.
“Hello Everett,” his face said.
Him. It was him. Standing there on the snow, among the dead Nahn things, dressed in the same battle-suit liner. His own height, his own weight, his own legs and arms and body. His own hands and feet. His own face. The eyes. That was where it fell down. The eyes were not his. They were made up of dozens of tiny black cells, like insect eyes. They caught the light and reflected it back in rainbow colors, like a dragonfly.
“Can he hear me outside?” Everett M asked the battle suit.
Yes. Now.
“Who are you?” Everett M asked. The double gave an embarrassed smile, turning his head away. Everett M would have done that. How much did it know about it?
“In a sense, I'm you—but it might freak you out talking to a double, so I won't call myself Everett.”
But I have met my double, Everett M thought. And it didn't freak me. I was cool and calm and completely rational. And you don't know. And that's one tiny advantage to me.
“Call me what I am,” the Everett M double said. “Call me Nahn.”
“You look like me.”
“It's more than just look, Everett. In a very real sense, I am you. We found we had your DNA in our database and used it to program this avatar. We thought you might be less hostile to something that looked and acted—and sounded—like you. We have your DNA, yet here you are before us. This puzzles us.”