“You think I can’t avoid a causal paradox?” Rudo demanded. “We found a fucking time machine! Every order, every op, every bit of research is scrutinized to make sure we don’t mess up.”
“I don’t see a time ethics committee around here. Unless he’s it,” Belisarius said, gesturing to the private, “but he doesn’t look that smart.”
This time he saw the signal, but his numb arm couldn’t do much. The private’s boot snapped something. Belisarius vomited. It froze into a concrete-hard greenish pancake on the floor. Belisarius struggled to his feet, leaning against the wall.
He gave the private the finger.
“Mister Arjona!” Saint Matthew said in his ear.
The man’s fist slammed into his cheek. His head rebounded from the wall. Pain exploded behind his eyes, amid a fireworks of false images that his brain graphed and subjected to regression analysis in the time it took to taste the blood in his mouth. The private smiled in his helmet, but this wasn’t over.
Belisarius was Homo quantus. His brain had been engineered to run on multiple channels at once, any of which could be isolated at need. His mind was already split multiple ways, with a whole intellect running in one partition. He rerouted the pain signals to the objectivity running in his brain. The objectivity wasn’t conscious. Belisarius’ pain wasn’t pain to the objectivity, just data, and uninteresting data at that, quickly erased.
“You don’t even believe we’re from the future, do you?” Belisarius said in perfect Shona, like he’d been speaking it all his life, a quality of Shona that wouldn’t exist for another decade or more in the Sixth Expeditionary Force. “That’s half of what this is about, isn’t it?”
Rudo’s assured expression wavered in the face of a foreigner speaking with perfect authenticity the old language the Expeditionary Force nursed in intensive care. She was surely aching to be sure about something and here he stood before her, an impossible data point.
She signaled the private again. The fist darted forward like a striking snake. Belisarius’ brain had already calculated weight, acceleration, and corrected for the weak gravity. His own hand was in motion; to them, Belisarius’ reflexes might look supernatural.
His fingertips described a trajectory arching under the man’s arm, brushing gently as one hundred milliamps of current at three hundred volts burned from fingertip to suit. The ice under the man’s feet was only weakly conductive, but the full current arced from him to the airlock. The private’s momentum carried him, convulsing, past Belisarius and to the floor, hard enough to crack his faceplate. The back of his suit was scorched.
Rudo stared wide-eyed at Belisarius for a split second before acting. He’d been counting on more than a split-second, but her physical and psychological reflexes were fast. And he was slower than he wanted. He’d probably broken a rib. His organs throbbed. He watched her draw her pistol. The muzzle cleared the holster as he touched the metal seal between her sleeve and glove.
She’d been stepping back, right against the wall. The current shot up her arm, cooking through the internal wiring used to heat the suit, and then into the grounded metal frame of the hut. She cried out and fell, holding her arm. Belisarius stepped on her pistol.
He took the charred and flaming bandages off his fingers with the slightly burnt fingertips of his other hand. Surging current through his fingertips usually just made shallow burns, but anytime they were covered, the current charred the material, which did far more harm.
“I thought you cared about the Expeditionary Force,” he said to her in perfect Shona.
“I do,” she said, body still trembling, though her voice remained stridently forceful.
“Could have fooled me,” he said. “Somebody smarter than you came from the future with a mission that will make or break everything, and you’re messing it up instead of helping.”
“If you’re from the future, you could be on my side or you could be an enemy faction.”
“There are no factions in the future.”
Belisarius kicked her sidearm away and then started slipping his gloves on gingerly.
“Are you getting us the equipment and permits, or are you just using Iekanjika to settle some scores here?” he asked.
“I want information.”
“You either believe us or you don’t. If you do, you’re helping yourself in the future.”
“And consultants too?”
He winced, snapping one wrist seal tight.
“My interests are broadly aligned with yours,” he said. “It’s not a perfect fit. Iekanjika would admit that. But for now, we live or die together.”
“You sound like an enemy.”
He snapped the second wrist seal tight.
“Why are you here?” she demanded. “Who brought you?”
He maneuvered the helmet over his head and sealed the neck.
“Who brought you?” she said.
“You did.”
She rose shakily.
“I did? I hired you? I sent you both back? Who am I in the future?”
“You’re more of a team player, that’s for sure,” he said, picking up his own pistol and sliding it into his holster. He spun the airlock handle. “A lot of lives are riding on how fast you become that person. Hurry up.”
He cycled out into the dark. By partitioning some of the pain, he could limp away from the hut well enough. He couldn’t go back to his bunk for another couple of hours. He needed to find something to do to look inconspicuous, somewhere he could lay low.
He hobbled to a tool shed four hundred meters away. No one was in it. Among many other things, he found metal detectors, seismic sensing equipment, and heavy picks for breaking ice possessing the hardness of concrete. He took the lightest metal detector, strapped it on, and wandered along the edges of the higher plant growth, slowly swinging the detector back and forth without even turning it on. Instead, he studied the magnetic interference patterns in the faint field from the time gates and kept the pain routed to the intellect that couldn’t feel pain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
(Translated from français 7.1)
To: Chairman
Congregate Presidium
Security Committee
Venus
10 May, 2499
Subject: Recruitment Report R312HBR21
1.Pursuant to article 106, clauses (a) and (d) of the Official Secrets Act, the Ministry of Intelligence reports on the recruitment of the thirty-first Scarecrow. Petrification subject is intelligence operative 1D446 (personnel files, medical and psychological tests, and field assessments annexed).
2. 1D446 has led an exemplary career as an operative, and was instrumental in operations O417TCH34 and O414TCL98. His loyalty was tested using standard (see psychological reports R616BGV13 and R616BGV66) and uncommon (see psychological report R616BGV79) methods, yielding the combination of results considered highly attractive for potential recruitment to the Scarecrow corps.
3. 1D446 was gravely injured in an operation (eyes-only classified in report R419JJY01), which even with prosthetics, would render him unserviceable for any other intelligence service objectives.
4. Exercising authority under clause 106, C-I Ops Commanding Officer initiated the petrification and vitrification procedures to begin the Scarecrow process. The process is expected to take 10 months. 1D446 will be kept under sedation for the entirety of the process, and then woken to see if consciousness has survived and is suitable for arming and training.
5. 1D446’s new status will trigger an upgrade in reporting procedures and oversight by this office to the Security Committee and ought to be added as a standing agenda item to briefings and testimony by the Commanding Officer and senior C-I staff to fulfill the requirements of article 106.
General Pierre Audet
Commanding Officer
Counter-Insurgency Operations, 1st Division
Ministry of Intelligence
Venus
CHAPTER THIRTY
IEKANJIKA LAY ON th
e ice on the north arc of the surface base. A major trunk of comms wiring ran to a series of communication dishes. The radio and microwaves could be intense, so a full two kilometers separated them from the base. The cabling laying on the ice at a hundred below zero superconducted without any special effort on their part, other than keeping it buried.
Even at that, the tiny heat it gave off mimicked what the local plants could absorb from the brown dwarf. Plants constantly tried to grow over the cable. Normal maintenance procedures included clearing the icy growths. Normal maintenance did not include whatever devices Nabwire and one of his techs were clipping to the trunk.
Iekanjika had covered herself in old plant fragments in a shadowed area between lights to mask her temperature. The distance was at the effective range of her pistol, and she had no worries of missing; she was a good shot.
She recognized the unauthorized devices they were installing. Nabwire and one of his crew were bugging the comms trunk. Whatever Captain Rudo had thought Nabwire was up to, he’d started. That didn’t make her feel better. Whatever he was doing offended her as a colonel. She was required and empowered as an officer to arrest anyone involved in a crime. She’d been trained for it. She’d done it.
But she wasn’t empowered here in the past.
She had only her ethics and honor.
And a pistol.
It would be simple. One shot. The rest of Nabwire’s crew would scatter, and in the confusion she would make her way back through a series of sensor blind spots Lieutenant-General Rudo had given her. Nabwire would be at extreme range for another thirty or forty seconds.
Simple, but not right.
But did right have a place in these stakes? Or was it all just mechanical? However uncomfortable she might be playing a part in that mechanical process, she had no real choice. Lieutenant Nabwire, whoever he was, whatever his loyalties, was dead in her time. She’d never met him, never heard of him. All the struggles of whether he would live or die had ended long ago.
In the past she was now inhabiting.
Lieutenant-General Rudo never would have ordered her to kill another officer. The Expeditionary Force had lived under the rule of law for as long as Iekanjika could remember. And yet the Lieutenant-General knew the past, knew that Captain Rudo would give this order to her, make the murder of Lieutenant Nabwire a condition of help. And the Lieutenant-General had said nothing about it. Why?
Was the lieutenant-general proud of the captain she’d been?
Maybe Rudo had been preparing Iekanjika for this mission all her life, not going into the past to recover a core sample, but to save Rudo from herself. Iekanjika had been considering Captain Rudo’s reactions to a visitor from the future in terms of the overwhelming intellectual blow of the travel itself, not as a moral shock.
Iekanjika had trouble sometimes thinking about herself in terms of being important to Lieutenant-General Rudo, of trying to put her staff officer position and political marriage into context. Iekanjika never considered herself worthy of those things. And the knowledge that Captain Rudo had known her in the past had deepened her doubts. But what if she was more important to Lieutenant-General Rudo than she let herself believe? What if meeting Colonel Iekanjika had changed not just events, but Captain Rudo the person? It was hard to swallow, and perhaps wishful thinking. Wishful thinking was dangerous to any op.
But if Rudo the person had changed, was it a vision or faith in the future, or was it just foreknowledge? Iekanjika had always tried to emulate Rudo’s unflinching resolve, the commander’s conviction that they would get home. Rudo’s faith had given Iekanjika faith, had given unbreakable faith to the entire Sixth Expeditionary Force: faith they’d needed four hundred light years from home. But maybe Rudo had no faith. Rudo had met the people from the future, had known that she had a hand in the Expeditionary Force’s success.
Lieutenant Nabwire rose, having finished whatever illicit things he’d been doing to the comms trunk. His heart beat in the sights of a single trigger finger. He was leaving. Now was the time to clear up this one problem of the past. This was Iekanjika’s own proof of faith. Nabwire stood there for a few seconds, talking to the crewman.
Iekanjika laid her pistol back onto the ice.
Nabwire would pay for his crimes through a court martial convened under the authority of the Code of Service Discipline, not through the skill of an assassin. She waited until Nabwire and the crewman had moved far enough out of sight and then rose from the tinkling pile of fine ice fragments.
Her feet dragged her towards ground HQ. It didn’t feel like history anymore. The awe of walking at the true birth of the Sub-Saharan Union, what they sometimes called the seed born in the garden, was gone. Nyanga was no garden. It was just dark and cold and mean.
At ground HQ, she presented her service band at the airlock and cycled in. She hung up her helmet in the cold air, but didn’t take off her suit. She wouldn’t be here long. She retraced her steps deeper into the icy warren of offices and work spaces. She had to knock twice before the door opened. Captain Rudo looked around Iekanjika into the hallway and then ushered her in with a jerk of her head.
“What are you doing here?” Captain Rudo demanded after she’d locked the door. “People will see you! There’s no reason your cover identity would see or know me!”
“I need to talk to you,” Iekanjika said.
Iekanjika’s voice was level. She needed to accept that she was older and more experienced. She was talking to a captain, not a general.
“You don’t talk to me!” Rudo said, leveling a finger at her. “Meetings create questions.”
“As many as having a man killed?”
Rudo’s eyes narrowed. “Are you blackmailing me?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m not an assassin, and you shouldn’t be either. This is no example you’re setting. There’s no honor in any of this, nothing that will make people follow you.”
“I don’t need people to follow me,” Rudo said.
“The Rudo I know wouldn’t dishonor herself like that.”
Rudo looked honestly baffled, like she couldn’t grasp the argument Iekanjika was trying to make.
“And what are you?” Rudo said. “And that Arjona? I’ve never seen augments like that before.”
“What augments?”
“The hand-mounted shockers. Whatever you’re carrying.”
“What did Arjona do?”
“Get out!” Rudo said. “I never want to see you again! I think they’re monitoring my channels now.”
“Get us the equipment and the permits, or I’ll be in here a whole lot. Everything you want in life is waiting for you in the future,” Iekanjika said, “except one missing piece. I can’t get it without your help. If you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot, do me a favor and do it now. Maybe the timeline will rewrite itself with someone else stepping up to do their job.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
BELISARIUS FORCED DOWN the bland food and collapsed on his recently-liberated bunk in Barracks D. He didn’t wash and instead lay shivering under his covers. A few minutes before the lights were to go out for his sleep shift, Iekanjika appeared and knelt beside him.
“Oh, hi,” he said in a low, conversational voice. “Did you finish your chore?”
“What did you do?” she asked in a light tone, keeping her eyes on the other bunks.
Belisarius shifted and winced. “Before or after her goon jumped me?”
Her face was impassive, but Belisarius had mixed the art of the confidence scheme with Homo quantus observational powers. The degree of tension in the forty-three facial muscles and some of the larger neck muscles revealed the simmering frustration beneath the surface, even though her body language didn’t shift.
“I didn’t do it,” she said.
A wave of relief washed through him, out of proportion to how little they trusted one another. He could overlook his differences with a soldier, bu
t he really hadn’t wanted Iekanjika to be a murderer. In hushed tones, he told Iekanjika everything that had happened, and after a pause, she told him of her weird meeting with Captain Rudo. They both quieted, digesting. Unlike the colonel, Belisarius could think many thoughts at once, but it didn’t help him. His brain could see no pattern in any of this.
“Is she authorizing the work?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
The lights went out. Quiet conversations around them faltered.
Belisarius held his breath.
“Do you have a Plan B?” he asked.
“I have several, but there are reasons they aren’t Plan A.”
“She’s not the same person,” he said.
“No.”
Belisarius would have liked to have comforted her, and by extension himself. He would have liked to have said that some of this had to work itself out, that the future waited for them, but that reasoning didn’t hold. Lieutenant-General Rudo remembered meeting Iekanjika and him in the past. If they hadn’t come back in time, they would have triggered a grandfather paradox. But that was the only causally necessary part of all these events. Iekanjika and Belisarius could both die or fail in the past without affecting the timeline.
“When do we go to plan B?” he asked.
“When plan A fails,” she said. After a moment, she added, “Even if she started today, it will take several days for authorizations to collect the right signatures.”
Irrational as it was considering time travel, delays still felt urgent, perilous. He couldn’t just sit around, like all the Homo quantus sitting in the Red, Blue, and Green. They needed him to hurry.
“Tomorrow I’m talking to the vegetable intelligences,” he said.
“Why?” She frowned.
“We have to do something on the surface. The Expeditionary Force might have been the first to discover real intelligent aliens anywhere.”
The Quantum Garden Page 16
