“Go back out with your squadron,” Iekanjika said. “Set me up a meeting with Arjona.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE SCARECROW PORED over the database backups from the Garret. There was more here than, and more to the Homo quantus than first glance might suggest. The intellectual capacities and memories of the Homo quantus, even from a young age, were considerable. Their memories in fact were reportedly as perfectly crystalline at a Scarecrow’s, no small feat.
Many people remember back to the age of four and sometimes three, but not all memories survive the processes of petrification and vitrification involved in making the Scarecrow brains. The furthest the Scarecrow could remember was of being a twelve-year old on Sillery, one of the big floating towns of Venus.
Sillery was, still is, a globe of carbon, glass and diamond suspended in perfect buoyancy forty-two kilometers above the surface of Venus, below the lowest cloud deck, but still within the haze. As a factory town, automated engines of manufacturing provided ballast, extracting carbon from the atmosphere to produce building materials as varied as multi-fullerene fibers and acid-resistant diamond. Robots ran the industries and farmed the crops, leaving the four thousand inhabitants free to think and create. Sillery, like many Congregate towns, was not only a hotbed of political discourse and analysis of foreign threats, but a major seat of artistic expression.
But that wasn’t what the Scarecrow remembered. That was just tone and background to the twelve-year old. The boys and girls were neither political analysts nor foreign policy afficionados. Instead, they wore survival suits and leapt into the acid clouds, the engines on their stubby wings shrieking as they played tag at a hundred kilometers per hour, darting through patches of mist, looping, spiralling, climbing, stalling, diving, laughing.
Since becoming a Scarecrow, he remembered nearly every moment, like the Homo quantus. Butmost of what lay earlier was gone; except for a brother, the Scarecrow couldn’t remember the names of the friends. Petrification preserved attitudes more than events, feelings more than people. But he remembered the laughing shrieking of his brother Adéodat, the thrilling joy of winging through the hot clouds, the simple happiness of childhood. His petrified brain of silicate semi-conductors and atomic-scale metal threading preserved the feeling. Few of the blows and slings of the world could matter to the Scarecrow as long as Venus lay protected and safe from her enemies and that feeling existed somewhere, redeemable in her encircling clouds.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IEKANJIKA SLIPPED INTO the oxygel acceleration tank and plugged the neural feed into the jack behind her ear. The gel pressed against her ears and eyes, slithered into her throat and lungs. Long practice could only do so much against the instinctual fear of drowning, but she forced her body to breathe and go limp.
Inhale gel, exhale air. Inhale gel, exhale air.
Stills flew them out of the Nhialic.
The Lieutenant-General had been hard to read. Iekanjika was more than her Chief-of-Staff; she was Lieutenant-General Rudo’s junior spouse. Iekanjika carried political and social importance far beyond her rank and position. The Lieutenant-General didn’t have many people she could trust completely. That was why Iekanjika had been sent out to find Arjona in the first place, to hire him to get the lost Sixth Expeditionary Force across the Puppet Axis. Their middle spouse, Major-General Wakikonda effectively commanded all the defenses of the Bachwezi system and had no time to spare for anything else. Iekanjika had been the Lieutenant-General’s eyes and ears before. Now the Lieutenant-General was sending out her eyes and ears and voice to speak with Arjona again, after he’d betrayed them.
Stills had set up the rendezvous. Iekanjika and Stills had wanted something relatively close to the Freyja Axis, somewhere they could pull in reinforcements and catch him. She’d expected Stills to have to negotiate for this, something she wasn’t sure he knew how to do. But Arjona had accepted Stills’ first proposal.
They reached the rendezvous point forty minutes of hard acceleration later. The Congregate didn’t have enough ships yet to set up a tight picket, nor were their ships fast enough to catch a fighter. The Union had a few weeks before overwhelming Congregate firepower would neutralize the Union’s technological advantage. That fact loomed over all her thinking.
“He’s a tricky little fuck,” Stills said, “with dog-sized cojones.”
“You can’t pull too many tricks in open space,” Iekanjika said. “The laws of physics are the laws of physics.”
“Yeah,” Stills said with a robotic tone of dubiousness. “I ain’t got a signal though. I’m pinging directional radar, but fuck all is comin’ back.”
Stills brought them to a stop relative to the distant Freyja Axis and the Union fortifications. Space was naked around them. “No Arjona,” Stills said. “Maybe he smells a trap.”
Maybe. The neural jack fed her customized scans of the fighter’s systems and sensor data. Nothing anywhere responded to their pings. Arjona wasn’t within a light second of them.
“Arjona to Iekanjika,” came through the comms system.
Clearly.
“Where is he?” she asked Stills.
“Radar’s givin’ me nothin’,” he said. “Comms thinks it’s comin’ from dead ahead.”
“Find him,” she said, before transmitting. “Arjona, this is Iekanjika. Where are you?”
There was a delay. Seven seconds.
“I get that you’re angry, Colonel,” Arjona said. “I stole something from you. Trust me when I say that I can do things with it that can only be done by the Homo quantus.”
“I want it back,” she said.
Stills drifted the fighter forward on cold jets and Arjona’s signal started fading. It should have gotten stronger, not weaker. Stills drifted back to the exact position Arjona had given them.
“Let me put it this way,” Arjona said after a delay. “Would you rather have the small gates I took from you that you can barely send signals through, or do you want the locations of ten mouths of the Axis Mundi?”
Stills drifted the command fighter solar southward, and the signal weakened again. When he gently reversed course on cold jets, the same happened. No matter which direction they went, the signal strength dropped. Still nothing on radar. No nearby transmitter. He couldn’t understand it.
“That isn’t my decision to make,” she said, “nor do I see it as an either-or proposition.”
“Is this Rudo’s decision?” Arjona said after a slight delay.
“Lieutenant-General Rudo. Yes.” She switched to Stills’ channel. “Where the hell is he?”
“Then perhaps I should speak with her again,” Arjona said.
“Cunning little fucker,” Stills said appreciatively.
“What?” Iekanjika demanded of the mongrel.
“Cunning little cock-sucker!” Stills said in tonally-flat wonder. “We ain’t gonna catch him. He’s light-seconds from here.”
“How?”
“I’m no big head, but prancy-pants is a Homo quantus. He probably pisses quantum interference patterns.”
“I don’t follow,” Iekanjika said.
“There’s only one way our signal strength could drop off in every direction. The signal we’re getting is a standing wave, localized right fucking here. The only way you get a standing wave is by mixing together a bunch of other waves. Arjona’s split up his signal wherever the hell he is, and he’s beaming it by different paths, probably reflecting it off of micro-satellites, and it gets recreated right here, right where we are, by constructive interference.”
“Who has that technology?” Iekanjika said.
“Fucked if I know. Maybe he’s doin’ it with his own head. Fuck, he’s tricky!”
“How did you guess that?” she demanded.
“Most people know wave theory,” Stills said, “but when you grow up in an ocean, you don’t call it wave theory. You call it hearing.”
She’d underestimated Arjona before. And now she’d underestimated Stills. She
had dangerous blind spots.
She switched on the transmitter. “We’d be delighted to host,” she said.
“I’ll be alone. The time gates will remain hidden and I won’t know where they are,” Arjona said. “And I’m aware of the political history of the Union. Torture won’t work on the Homo quantus. If need be, I can mentally activate a suicide switch and then you’ll have neither the gates nor the Axes I’m offering.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Level III Top Secret – Navy Commander’s Eyes Only
Log, Commander Sixth Expeditionary Force, 17 August 2475
FOR MY FINAL log entry, I wish to comment upon my actions, which must be reviewed posthumously by the general staff. This may not occur for three or four years while the Force hides, puzzling out our prize and weaponizing it, but every officer has an opportunity to make a statement during a review and time won’t change mine.
I take personal responsibility for violating the Congregate-Union Patron Accord. Many other officers were involved in executing my orders, but the decision was mine. As soon as we found the conjoined wormholes, I chose not to request new orders from the Senior Congregate Political Commissar as required by article 41(1) of the Patron Accord. I was the one who ordered the arrest of all Political Commissars, as well as the detention of engineering crews. I authorized summary trials of the commissars and sympathizers, including sentences of long-term confinement and death.
Hundreds have died and many thousands may die, but I do not regret my choices. The key to Union independence fell into my hands and I am a patriot. I only regret that I am not strong enough to finish what I began. My cancer has advanced quickly. At headquarters it might have been treatable. The Force medical officers can only slow it, so I’ve refused treatment. It’s better to have a new Commander installed quickly than to suffer the instability of an acting commander. I will be promoting Brigadier Takatafare to Major-General at midnight and transferring command to her. This is not an ideal choice, but there is nothing for it.
Brigadier Takatafare and Brigadier Iekanjika are both flawed officers, lacking the seasoning for a long term command of this size, and so much moreso for leading a rebellion. The political tensions between these two officers and others have also been apparent from the beginning.
Takatafare’s alliances and marriage connections make her popular among Rozvi Party sympathizers, and even among my own Korekore adherents. She is pitiless to her political enemies, making it difficult for some cruiser commanders to trust her. I’ve done what I can to limit her power, but I expect her to begin positioning her own people into positions of greater power and to reduce the influence of anyone outside of the Rozvi alliance. Brigadier Iekanjika is talented, skilled at manipulation, and a forceful organizer. Although the Makoni Party is smaller, Iekanjika is more highly placed as the junior wife of the Justice Minister. Several cruisers carry her rabid supporters and I do not see her taking well the elevation of Rozvi sympathizers around her.
I had hoped that my Korekore Party members might have continued to act as a buffer, but the stupidity of Colonel Bantya has discredited us, and my own death will leave Korekore with no senior leadership. Soon, in days or weeks, Rozvi and Makoni party activists will be grinding against each other. Iekanjika remains powerful enough to challenge Takatafare, regardless of my wishes. And Takatafare may yet drive her to it.
While this was just a ten-month mission, these tensions were under control. But we are far from home and the political stakes are high. Whoever brings back the conjoined wormholes to the Union will be in a position to dictate terms and probably choose the party that holds the prime ministership. And yet whoever brings them back will also precipitate a war with our Congregate patrons.
We don’t have the Congregate’s numbers, nor their industrial strength, so we will have to take our independence on some other field. We will have to remain hidden from civilization until we can pry from our discovery that key to victory.
The victors will scrutinize each of us, judging what we did for our independence.
I set us on this road.
Major-General Kutenda Nandoro
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BELISARIUS EMERGED FROM the airlock of the inflaton racer into open space. The weightlessness was vast. The sound of his slow breathing and the crinkle of his suit sounded hollow in his helmet. The Calculated Risk, holding Saint Matthew, Cassie and the time gates sped away. In moments it was gone.
Blackness all around. Nothing above him. Nothing beneath. Emptiness, with only Epsilon Indi’s faint magnetosphere pressing lightly against every muscle cell. His heart slowed. Guilt receded. He existed alone in the void, without obligations or moral concerns, referent-free.
Except that wasn’t entirely true. His capacity for denial was pulling a con on his guilt, playing on his own desperation. People fell for cons because they wanted a quick fix, a magic bullet, something to shortcut slow suffering. He wanted to be conned, but he knew he couldn’t. He had to take responsibility for all that he’d done, intentional or not. He didn’t know if he could. He felt like he might crumble when he thought too much about what he’d done and what he had to do.
A big Union fighter appeared in the darkness. He felt it magnetically before he saw it, but barely. The inflaton drives emitted no EM and the running lights were extinguished. It pulled alongside him and neutralized their relative movement. The near side of the hull had an airlock. Belisarius approached on cold jets and cycled through. The interior was dark, but the EM from the inner wiring and control systems pressed on his magnetosomes faintly.
“Stills?” he said into his helmet microphone.
“Take the pilot seat, Arjona,” Stills’ false voice said in his ear. “I ain’t gonna go fast unless the Congregate decides to keep us company.”
Belisarius went to the front and strapped himself in. “Thanks for working this out,” he said.
“No sweat on me. You got your own problems with Iekanjika and her people.”
“Yeah.” Two gravities of acceleration pressed Belisarius against the pilot seat. He groaned.
“You swiped something pretty important?” Stills asked.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t care either way, but shouldn’t part of your plan have been to never again see the people you stole from, or am I missing something?”
“That was the plan.”
“You fucked the dog on that one,” Stills said.
“The Congregate blew up the Garret.”
“Shitty. How many survived? None?”
“All of them.”
“How the fuck do you do this? You really are a fucking magician.”
“They’re not safe. I might find them a safe place to stay if I can make a deal with Rudo.”
Talking about it congealed the worry in his stomach. Think of other things. Think of other things. But he couldn’t. His brain stuttered in the face of so much terror, so much guilt, pushing his thoughts off their path every few seconds. He stopped fighting it. Taking responsibility meant feeling the paralyzing enormity of the stakes. Taking responsibility meant just suffering and wishing for it to end.
Stills rotated the fighter and began decelerating twenty minutes later. The countdown to arrival finally gave Belisarius something emotions couldn’t derail. Time. Metronomic and precise and mildly numbing.
Stills flew through the Freyja Axis. They emerged seventy-five light years away in the Bachwezi system. A series of half-constructed fortifications surrounded the Axis mouth, spotted with the mid-sized Union battle cruisers and the small battleship Mutapa. He couldn’t tell more than that because the controls in front of him were all off.
The Mutapa sharpened in detail as Stills edged them towards the flagship. Laser scars striped its hull like talon marks dragged hundreds of meters over the plating. New shielding made a patchwork of color tones across the hull, from blasted black to shiny unblemished steel. Sentry craft accompanied them and turret cannons turned slowly, so that Belisarius could star
e down their dark lengths the whole approach. Stills nuzzled the big fighter into a cradle under the flagship. They weren’t even letting them enter a bay. How dangerous did they think Belisarius was?
A pair of military police met him at the top of the umbilical. In the zero-g they removed his survival suit right there, down to naked skin, and sealed his equipment in a locker. They deep and shallow scanned him before giving him a pair of loose pants and a plain sweater. Finally they brought him through discolored plastic corridors to a state room where, four months and about four hundred light years away, he’d first met Kudzanai Rudo.
Rudo still appeared remarkably short, surrounded by the towering men and women of her crews, but she had hard, cunning eyes, and her officers floated in obvious awe of her. She’d seen battle. New scars had overwritten older ones on her face and neck and fingers. A wicked burn scar still ran from the front to the back of her scalp, even though plastic surgery could have fixed it relatively easily.
Scars were better than medals to soldiers, but in her case, it might not matter. In capturing the Freyja Axis, she’d made military history. She sat stone-faced across the table from him, strapped to her chair. Iekanjika sat near her. Two military police in body armor and magnetized boots stood with pistols drawn on either side of the two officers.
Warm welcome.
He strapped himself into one of the seats.
“You found the new Axis?” Belisarius asked.
“We don’t consider that payment for what you stole,” Rudo said.
“As long as you don’t think you’re getting back what I took, this conversation can go on,” he said. Rudo stared back at him.
“What do you think this conversation is, Mister Arjona?” she asked finally.
“My employment with the Union has been costly,” he said. “The Congregate and the Banks are after the Homo quantus. The Congregate blew up the Garret. I barely had time to get my people out. Now they’re in hiding. I need to find a place to hide them permanently, otherwise they’re all dead.”
The Quantum Garden Page 9
