“What are you going to do?”
“Get your samples through,” she said. “Find our Axes. And don’t double-cross us on this one.”
Then she walked away from him, and he stood alone on the slick black of the surface he’d rendered lonely.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“WHAT ARE WE doing?” the AI said into the implant in her ear. “I was safer with Mister Arjona, wasn’t I?”
“History as I know it,” she said as she stalked towards the maintenance HQ, “has been changed by our arrival. Rudo was never meant to be arrested. And the plot on Brigadier Iekanjika’s life has been foiled. Those major events will undo my history and the history of the Union.”
“We don’t know what will happen to the future now that it’s changed,” the AI said. “Rudo is a Congregate sleeper agent. And your mother will live. You’ll be raised by her.”
“You’re not going to argue to save the timeline? What of your future?”
“What is my future? I’m an Apostle. Who knows if this isn’t God’s way to lead me to some revelation. I don’t fear the future. His ends will have out.”
“You’re mad, AI.”
“We might all be mad, waiting on a moment of spiritual epiphany.”
“We all have to struggle with the ambiguities life gives us,” she said. They’d reached the airlock to the Maintenance HQ. “Now I need to plant evidence that will show Rudo is innocent.”
“She’s not innocent,” the AI said as the airlock cycled.
“No. No one is.”
“Aren’t you?”
“This is my deal with the devil.”
They emerged into the large storage area, the server banks and smoking crew.
“What evidence are you planning to plant?” the AI said into her implant.
She took a seat far in the back by shaking a private awake. “Sleep somewhere else,” she said. The private walked away sullenly. She sat and glared down the curious looks sent her way.
“Can you make Munyaradzi’s secret files look like Rudo has never accessed them?” she asked the AI quietly. “Better yet, could you make the files look like they’ve been used by someone else to frame Rudo?”
“Probably, but that won’t undo what the military police have already found.”
“We need to make it look like a good attempt to frame Rudo by someone who is continuing Munyaradzi’s work, someone who’s attempting to assassinate Brigadier Iekanjika.”
“That would also free her three co-conspirators,” the AI said. “Is that what happened in the real history? You would be releasing at least one Congregate sleeper agent and some of her helpers into the Expeditionary Force. With complete cover.”
“One thing at a time. Do you need me to decide how to make it look like a frame-up on Rudo?”
“Sadly, I’ve spent so much time with Mister Arjona that I probably know the way,” the AI said. Iekanjika sat back and scanned the maintenance HQ. Only the private she’d manhandled was still staring at her. She held his gaze until he looked away. The rest minded their own business.
She pulled a last cigarette from a hard pocket and lit it.
Happy birthday. February 34th. The day everything changes. New context. New reality. New her.
She’d come on this mission as Colonel Iekanjika with orders; a mission and scope to adapt. These were the walls and roof of the soldier’s life. But she’d walked so far beyond that structure that she no longer had the authority for any action. She’d gone from bringing a specialist on a sample reconnaissance to trying to protect the history of the Expeditionary Force four decades in the depths of space.
In what way could she legitimately consider herself to be Colonel Iekanjika on a military mission? She had no superiors, no backup, no legal or military authority. Hiding her discoveries from the responsible authorities, even here, was a crime. The Government of the Sub-Saharan Union hadn’t even authorized this mission because Rudo didn’t trust them. But who was it who withheld her trust in the government? Rudo the patriot or Rudo the sleeper agent?
She exhaled a cloud of smoke, the acrid bite of the synthetic tobacco stinging her throat. Everything was smoke. Ayen Iekanjika didn’t trust Kudzanai Rudo—captain or lieutenant-general. Maybe the theorists were wrong and a grandfather paradox would sort itself out in some other way. Maybe all she needed to do was to leave things and get the hell out with the samples. Rudo the Congregate sleeper agent would face a court martial. That was the purest thing to do, an isolated moral choice divorced of cost.
And she might return to a different world, a different set of memories filling the last thirty-nine years. The Ayen Iekanjika she was now would be smoke, drifting away on the faintest of drafts, lost in time like pollen. Some other Ayen would exist; perhaps a colonel still, perhaps a warship commander, or perhaps a general officer already, propelled by her mother’s influence.
But the Expeditionary Force wouldn’t be on the other side of the Puppet Axis. Maybe the Expeditionary Force wouldn’t have even survived that long. Even in a rewritten future Major-General Takatafare and Brigadier Iekanjika still didn’t trust each other and in another history might have destroyed each other, or fractured the Force.
Where did trust come from? Rudo trusted Ayen to preserve the timeline. Ayen trusted Rudo for the next thirty-nine years because she didn’t know all the secrets buried in the past. People were frozen into decades-long actions and pathways. Knowledge of the future ensnared them in something very much like fate. She wiped at the dampness in her eyes.
“I’ve modified Munyaradzi’s files and work,” the AI said. “It will now look like the secret communications in Rudo’s virtual office were an effort to frame her and three others.”
“I’ll need this to be discovered in about ten to twelve hours.”
“I can modify the power usage profiles of the system, as if it’s glitching. The sub-AIs in military security will detect the anomaly quickly.”
“Thank you.”
“So we’ve saved Rudo and we can go?” the AI asked.
“That was just the start.”
She struggled to prevent her voice cracking. That she was an officer no longer mattered. No officer was trained for this. No one was really responsible for history.
“I need you to get me into the surface headquarters.”
“I can’t do that!” the AI said in her implant. “That’s the most secure part of the base. Military Security, the MPs and the brig are all there. We don’t have the codes. The security forces aren’t relying on just pass-codes and electronic authorizations. They’ll carry out visual inspections and check biodata.”
“This isn’t your first time in this situation, is it?” she said. “You accompanied Arjona onto the Mutapa when he stole the time gates. He didn’t overcome the security on the flagship. You did, didn’t you?”
The AI offered a pause all the more significant because he thought so much faster than she did.
“I came to help you with Rudo, but getting into the headquarters is a different story, a different level of danger,” he said.
“Rudo isn’t safe, not yet, nor is the timeline. And I have no intention of leaving until the future of the Expeditionary Force is assured. If that means missing my departure time with Arjona, so be it. I’m a soldier.”
“I’m not!”
“Your god is guiding you,” she said quietly. “If you’re not certain he intends you to be captured by the Expeditionary Force decades before you were invented, then you’d best help me. I need you to use whatever methods you used on the Mutapa to get me into the surface headquarters.”
The AI made no answer. She waited.
Who was she? Was she Colonel Iekanjika, protégé of Lieutenant-General Rudo? Was she Ayen, the daughter of a politicking Brigadier? Or was she neither? Ayen alone had no identity, no purpose. If she stood in neither shadow, she was utterly, terrifyingly free, with only the consequences of her choices to deal with. Millions of lives depended on what she chose next.
“Alright,” the AI said. “No wonder He never reveals his plan to me. I’m unworthy of grace.”
“We’re all unworthy of grace,” she said, rising.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
THE STREAM OF anti-matter cut too damn close to the racer; some of the particles, probably anti-protons, sizzled against the hull. Goddamn Princess Cassandra had a plan. She had a plan, and Stills wished she’d stop shit-grinning and come out with it. He was pulling hard enough on the stomach-twisting turns and bone-bending accelerations that they even tickled his cock. He hoped he hadn’t knocked the princess out.
“Vincent,” she finally said. “I haven’t had you rotate around the r-axis or the u-axis.”
“You collecting the alphabet, darlin’?” Stills said. “Never mind. I don’t give a shit. Just tell me your plan.”
“After the next maneuver, come to a stop, rotate one hundred and eighty degrees around the r-axis and then one hundred and eighty degrees around the u-axis.”
“The Scarecrow has followed us through every rotation and acceleration so far,” Stills said, gunning the racer through her contortions. “I bet he’s close to as smart as your batshit crazy AI.”
“He won’t want to follow us on this one, or even understand where we went.”
Stills grunted, pushing harder on the next set of maneuvers—twenty gravities of acceleration.
“You still conscious?” he said. Some people couldn’t take the acceleration, even in shock gel.
“I’m... okay,” she finally answered. “I can do it.”
“You know Arjona talks this cocky.” He decelerated off their last maneuver so fast that the racer creaked. Full stop.
“I’m not cocky,” she said. “I’m scared out of my mind.”
“Not what I’m lookin’ to hear! Puta!”
They rotated into a full view of the Scarecrow missile, bow to bow with only half a click of space between them. Point blank and nothing to shoot but his cock. A stream of particles glanced off The Calculated Risk’s cockpit from high behind them.
“What the fuck?” Stills demanded, looking through his sensors and even the rearward cameras. Nothing behind them.
The particles bouncing off their cockpit ricocheted straight at the casse à face missile, shooting into a cannon barrel poking out the front, clean as a whistle, not a single particle scattering over the half kilometer. Then, the Scarecrow’s missile rotated away and vanished.
“What the fuck?” Stills yelled. “Where did he go? Why did he go? What the fuck was that shit shooting into his guns? What did you do?”
He hadn’t asked so many questions at once since he’d woken up deep in the ocean under Claudius, hammered out of his skull, floating in a tangle of sleeping mongrels, two pressure-crushed Congregate officers, a half-eaten Claudian tuna and a weird ache in his ass. He hoped this was gonna be easier to explain.
“We rotated through two dimensions I’d been avoiding,” Cassandra said a little dreamily. “We reversed our parity and time.”
“What did I reverse?”
“Vincent,” she said, like he ought to have known this, “the conservation laws of the universe apply everywhere, whether in eleven dimensions or just the four we were born in. Time, charge and parity are three qualities conserved together. We rotated across a temporal axis to reverse our arrow of time, and we rotated across a spacial axis to change left to right. Because of conservation laws, doing those two things automatically also reversed the charge on every particle in us and the racer, in the Scarecrow’s point of view.”
Stills’ brain worked overtime trying to keep up with her craziness. She was talking one hundred percent cock-eyed nonsense. But he couldn’t explain what had happened with the Scarecrow, with or without her explanation.
“Okay, big brain, I give up. I don’t understand a single piece of shit comin’ out of your mouth.”
“We’re anti-matter now, Vincent,” she said, “mirror images of ourselves, moving backwards in time.”
For long seconds, Stills tried to process that.
Mirror image. Charge reversed. Moving backwards in time.
“Osti de tabarnak de câlice!” he said.
“Are you okay, Vincent?”
Was she on drugs? Her voice was completely normal, like she was asking about altitude or flight speed. In what fucking reality was any of this okay? He felt a shiver of fear, the first he’d felt in a long time. But he tamped it down. He wasn’t going to be weirded out by anything a Homo quantus girl could do. If she could go there, so could he.
“I’m... anti-Stills?” he asked slowly.
“Yes,” she said. She paused. On the camera image, she was smiling. “Maybe this means you’ll be more polite?”
“Fuuuuuuuck,” he said slowly. “We really must be anti-us if you just cracked a joke.”
He took it slow; trying to see if slow would let the whole of it sink into his skull. He was made of anti-matter. He was literally Anti-Stills. She was Anti-Cassandra. They were in their Anti-ship. And they were living backwards in time.
Nope.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
Puta.
Puta. Puta. Puta.
These shit-eating, pretentious, wordy, contemplatives were... What the fuck were the Homo quantus?
He increased the oxygen mix in his tank and dropped the temperature. Deep, cool breaths washed over his gills. Icy, rinsing, refreshing. And it all felt normal. And it couldn’t be that she was shitting him. He’d seen the Scarecrow living in reverse. Deep breaths.
“So if we touch shit,” he finally said, “we annihilate ourselves?”
“We won’t notice anything different in ourselves, but the rest of the universe will look pretty different.”
“I’m left-handed Stills,” he said, swishing his thick, blubber-covered fingers through the water. They didn’t feel different.
“Left everything,” she said, “down to the chirality of every amino acid and nucleotide in your body.”
“And when the Scarecrow shot anti-matter at us...” Stills said hesitantly.
“It didn’t do anything,” she said, like a know-it-all. “We’re made of anti-matter, so his anti-matter just bounced off the hull like dust. And we’re time-reversed. To us, it looked like a video running backwards.”
“What?”
Princess two-legs started explaining again, repeating the exact words, but slower, like he was an idiot. Maybe he was, but calvaire!
“Coño! You fucking Homo quantus are dangerous! You can turn people into anti-matter!”
“We’ve never done it before,” she said. “I just thought of it now.”
Just fuckin’ thought of it now?
“Why the fuck haven’t you conquered civilization yet?” he demanded.
“Why would we do that?”
“Of course,” Stills said disbelievingly. “Zarba. Of course why would you do that? I just... I don’t...”
“Are you okay, Vincent?”
Stills didn’t often feel out of his depth, so to speak. He was smart. Smarter than most. And he’d occasionally served smart officers. But sometimes it was best just to keep his head down and do the grunt work and try not to absorb the big picture. This might be one of those times. He didn’t want to go nuts. But... fuck!
“Alright,” he said finally. “Never mind. I respectfully propose to your air-sucking highness that we go after that ass-licking Scarecrow.”
“We can’t,” she said. “We’re in our own past right now. What we just did is experimental enough. I don’t want to risk a real causal violation. Besides, we have no weapons.”
“You can stay on your mountain top thinkin’ your big thoughts, princess,” he said, “but get me into the Scarecrow’s future, then leave the flying, fighting and fucking to me.”
“Matter and anti-matter larger than the size of particles shouldn’t be interacting, Vincent. You’ll see the future. Effect before cause. You’ll make mistakes.”
“Look brains, as long
as fuck-face is in here with us, we’re in danger, right? You, me, Prancy-Pants, Iekanjika and by fuckin’ consequence all your contemplative circle-jerk friends. Military rules are pretty simple. Fuck up the enemy before they fuck you up.”
“We’re not even moving in the same direction of time, Vincent.”
“So he’ll never even see us comin’.”
“He will. He’ll see our future and we’ll see his.”
“Yeah, but we’re the only ones that’ll know what the fuck is going on.”
She finally agreed and gave him a set of navigational instructions. Stills hoped he was right. He was within a half-fuck of not understanding anything. But they couldn’t leave the Scarecrow armed in here. That goddamned electronic afterbirth could happen onto them by accident, or onto their past or future selves, as welcome as a finger up their asses. Even worse, what if the Scarecrow exited the time gates in the past or future, maybe fucking them up in time? Too many possible surprises. The best way to avoid surprises was to shoot them in the head.
Cassandra’s navigational instructions were easy compared to what he’d been pulling before. Following a dimension was easier than rotating across it, even a time dimension. He didn’t know where and when to find the Scarecrow, but she did.
“The event of the Scarecrow watching us disappear was defined in time and space even if it was in a twenty-two dimensional space-time hypervolume,” she said, as if that was useful information to him. He let it go. If he answered, she might want to expand on her point.
“How much time do you need to do your thing?” she asked.
“Give me a ten second window and I’ll shove his head up his ass.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Follow the Way of the Mongrel, baby. Bite every hand. Piss on every leg.”
She didn’t ask again, but navigated them along one of the time dimensions of the hyper-volume, carrying them into the local future, before calling for a stop.
“We’re up-future of the Scarecrow’s last known position and time,” she said. “We’re off by one spacial dimension. When you rotate ninety degrees across the x-axis, you’ll be about three hundred meters in front of the Scarecrow, moving backwards in time relative to him. At ten seconds, you have to rotate back across the x-axis, otherwise we’ll see ourselves in our past, and we already know we don’t see that.”
The Quantum Garden Page 26
