The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  The dreadnought was the Parizeau, transmitting open-comms stand-down-and-surrender-before-we-fuck-you-up messages.And if that wasn’t enough, a regular Congregate capital ship orbited even higher, the Val-Brillant. Its targeting lasers were all over the damaged Union warship.

  Inflaton alarms went off.

  There was no accompanying light, no radiation, but background starlight bent and blue-shifted.

  Then the Parizeau twisted a hole out of its center.

  “Ostie!” Marie swore.

  White fire lit clouds of gas frothing out of the Parizeau. The great dreadnought shuddered, as if uncertain what do with itself. Torn modules drifted and dangled. And then something radioactive within it detonated, engulfing the Parizeau in bright light and scouring fire.

  “Tabarnak.”

  The Gbudue changed course, accelerating towards the Val-Brillant.

  The Val-Brillant threw lances of particle fire as it retreated.

  “Câlisse,” Marie swore in final, quiet amazement.

  Marie pulled out the button Belisarius had given her, opened a panel and flipped the switch.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  THE SCARECROW DID not bother to be crated and transported to preserve secrecy. This was an emergency beyond secrecy and his metal and carbon-fiber musculature propelled him along hallways in zero g, so quickly that he struck two Puppets along the way, sending them careening into walls with crushing force. Lieutenant Bercier followed with human muscles augmented by cutting edge myo-implants and neural accelerators, but could not keep pace.

  The umbilical to the Puppet transport he’d arrived on was still attached and the hatchway open. Two other Puppets were inside, arguing with the pilots while the alarms continued ringing. The Scarecrow fired four slugs from palm-mounted throwers, killing them. Bercier entered behind the Scarecrow and briskly began strapping down the corpses.

  The Scarecrow could not fit in a cockpit built for Puppets, but he reached though the tiny door to the controls and established a transmitted connection. The umbilical detached and the transport shuddered. Bercier scrambled for a seat and strapped himself in even at the Scarecrow activated the thrusters and moved them back towards the mouth of the Puppet Axis.

  The Axis hung dark and difficult to see amid gantries and support struts. Alarm lights were flashing. No other ships were entering or exiting the mouth as the Scarecrow thrust the ship closer. The radio channels blared with stop orders. The Scarecrow transmitted the last authorizations he found in the transport systems he hacked. That delayed the Puppet weaponeers for a few moments.

  The Scarecrow got within a few seconds of the Axis mouth before the controls lit with proximity alarms as shots were fired around them. They had no time for evasive maneuvers so close to the Axis, nor would the transport have even been capable. A hit on the ventral stern plating blew a hole in one of the passenger areas and the main cargo bay. The transport pitched. Before its trajectory could change much, it slipped into the Axis.

  The throat of the wormhole, nearly absolute zero, patterned with odd X-rays, slipped darkly past. The passage was silent but for the hissing of atmosphere from the second passenger bay and the internal alarms.

  The sensors on the transport were rudimentary, but they began to resolve a strange shape up ahead. It was edged with running lights and moving on the same track as the Scarecrow, toward the Free City. The transport, while docked, had not recorded another ship having entered the Axis at Port Blackmore. Strange, but the Scarecrow might be overestimating its capabilities. The design was unclear because of the lack of light in the wormhole throat. It wasn’t another transport. He brought an emergency telescope online and integrated that new data with information from the main telescopes to model the shape. The image clicked. He was looking at one of the hollow-tubed cruisers from directly astern, seeing partly through it.

  How had it gotten to the Axis mouth at Port Blackmore? It hadn’t fought its way through; the port proper was undamaged. Had the Puppets been working with these invaders? If so, why go through the attack on Fort Hinkley?

  It almost didn’t matter. The ship ahead would be trapped in the port at the Free City. The bar doors protecting the Axis from the outside would not open and it could be targetted by a dozen pieces of artillery at point blank range. Unless this was a Puppet civil war and the attackers had allies among the port authorities in the Free City.

  The other ship wasn’t slowing, though. If anything it was accelerating. The dark face of the other end of the Axis throat abruptly swallowed it at full speed. The Scarecrow slowed the clumsy transport he was piloting because it was possible the hollow ship didn’t know that the Free City mouth of the Puppet Axis was capped and heavily defended. They might have smashed straight into the bay doors, igniting a firestorm of wreckage. The Scarecrow slowed further, just before the horizon.

  Then, proximity alarms went off. Something hadn’t been astern a second before was now closing on a collision course.

  The Scarecrow’s little transport was rammed from astern. The impact crushed the engines, the cargo bay, the passenger pods and spun the wreck of the transport out of the Axis. The impact crushed Bercier in a spray of blood. The transport’s spin stopped suddenly when the transport crashed, split open and flung itself to pieces.

  When all had stilled, the Scarecrow was prone on uneven ice in a vacuum, his steel and carbon nanotube construction having barely kept him intact. Internal diagnostics ran.

  Nothing was properly lit, but flashes burst across his senses in visible, infrared and gamma rays. The Puppet Axis was only fifty meters from him, embedded in the ice as it had always been. But the surroundings were otherwise unrecognizable.

  The cranes, warehouses, observation decks, and many of the gun emplacements were bubbling metal slag. Molten metal dribbled over ice that silently popping and steamed in the vacuum. The surviving artillery batteries were aimed up now, firing through the wreckage of the huge armored doors that had once been one of three impenetrable layers of defenses over the Puppet Axis. Two hollow-tubed ships were already in open space, enduring withering fire, while returning fire onto the surface defenses of Oler.

  The Scarecrow tried to access a local comms system. Nothing. Or chaos on bands filled with more messages than could be routed. Then the world exploded.

  Another hollow ship raced out of the Axis mouth. Its speed carried it out of the bay in flash, but its weaponeers were precisely timed, firing fractions of seconds after emergence, hitting the sides of the port, including the weapons battery above the Scarecrow.

  Ice, metal fragments and exploding munitions battered his body, and he fell twenty meters down the broken slope. No human would have survived. He clung to the ice and righted himself.

  Three warships. Unknown design. How had they entered the Axis at Port Blackmore? Nothing entered before him, nor had any other ships even been near the port as he’d entered. Port Blackmore couldn’t have fallen that quickly. Not even the Congregate could have reduced it, if at all. The attackers might have induced a wormhole Port Blackmore, but while emerging from the throat, they would have been easy targets.

  A fourth hollow ship surged through the Axis mouth. A wave of unknown force repelled the Scarecrow, flinging him partway up the slope. None of his magnetic or electrical sensors felt anything. What was the force? He still didn’t even know what kind of propulsion they were using.

  Who were these people? These thoughts took fractions of seconds before the Scarecrow had to worry about its survival. The cannon blasts from the cruiser had pounded the inside of the port and the Scarecrow leapt away from another crash of metal, plastic and ice. He needed to get to someplace safe. He could survive many things, but a direct hit from shipborne artillery was not one of them.

  As a fifth cruiser sailed out of the Puppet Axis, firing its way out of the port, the Scarecrow found the melted end of a portion of hallway. He climbed to its uneven floor and then into its meager protection as a landslide of debris came down the slope. The
Scarecrow pressed inward, crawling into the collapsed sections.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  THE BUTTON PAIRED with Marie’s changed color, silver to gold, in Belisarius’s hand.

  “Marie’s away,” Belisarius said. “Congratulations, major. The Gbudue is three hundred and twenty light years away and at least made it out of the Axis intact. I’m confirming receipt of the first half of our payment.”

  “You know nothing more?” Iekanjika asked.

  “These are entangled particles. They communicate across any distance, but only a single bit.”

  Iekanjika’s fingers twitched a complex code. Moments later, the display showed the next warships moving toward the induced wormhole that the Limpopo was holding open.

  The quantum intellect in Cassandra’s body spoke to them, choppy and distant. “Belisarius. Go away. Interference.”

  Iekanjika frowned. “What is it, Arjona?” she demanded.

  His heart swelled with pride. Even from the depths of the fugue, Cassandra’s orders to the objectivity that now ran her body were obeyed, creating a deception. Cassandra was good. He couldn’t have made his own quantum intellect do that.

  “My being here is interfering with Cassandra being in the fugue,” he lied. “I’m not trained as a fugue spotter.”

  “How far away do you need to be?”

  “At fifty or more meters, there should be no chance of interference,” he said. “I can wait in the tug.”

  “This is a ship in a war zone, Arjona,” Iekanjika said. “For now, we’ll keep you in custody until the last of the ships are through. Then you can both go.”

  “This is not how you treat a partner, major,” he said.

  “This is how we do war, Arjona. You’ll be safer in a crew cabin.”

  Belisarius made a disgusted face. Iekanjika signaled two MPs to escort him out. He followed one MP back through the line of the Limpopo, out of the operational areas and into crew quarters. He passed current from his electroplaques to the millions of magnetosomes in the cells of his arms, creating a low-level magnetic field with which to feel the ship around him.

  The MP before him and the one behind had sidearms, carbon fiber armor and flat holographic communications patches on the backs of their hands. The current in the wiring behind the walls gently distorted his magnetic field, as did the steel structure of the ship framing the walls and the mechanisms around the doors. Tiny cameras perched like spiders in corners, but not everywhere.

  They stopped at the doorway to an officer’s quarters, sixteen point three one meters from the last camera. The door slid open. There was no camera inside. The room’s owner was high-ranking enough to not have a camera watching her.

  Belisarius turned, his previous zero-g awkwardness gone. He touched each MP on the arm, and the air snapped.

  Six hundred volts of electricity for four microseconds.

  Their clothing smoked where he’d touched them. Angry red blistered his fingertips. He pulled the unconscious pair into the tiny crew quarters.

  “What are you doing, Mister Arjona?” Saint Matthew said in Belisarius’s implant.

  “I’m,” he grunted, pulling at straps on the MPs’ armor, “doing my job.”

  “What job?” Saint Matthew said. “You’re getting the Sixth Expeditionary Force to Epsilon Indi.”

  Belisarius took one of the MP hand-patches and slapped it onto the back of the hand carrying Saint Matthew in its wristband.

  “Saint Matthew, the holographic patch on my hand is an interface to the Limpopo. Break in now and make sure that the security systems didn’t see what I just did.”

  Saint Matthew was blessedly silent for a time, while Belisarius tied the MPs to each other and into a sleep bag with the straps from the armor. Saint Matthew shone laser light over the surface of the holographic patch, creating abstract glowing shapes of fractional dimensions as he spoke with the interface. Belisarius put on an MP uniform.

  “With only a few exceptions, the software security measures are relatively standard Union design, from perhaps three decades ago,” Saint Matthew said. “They’ve made some interesting advances, though.”

  “I know,” Belisarius sub-vocalized. “I broke in a few months ago.”

  “I’ve forged a set of sensor images showing you in this room and the MPs waiting outside. Now what are we doing?”

  “Now the real con starts,” Bel responded as he put on the MP’s helmet. Belisarius’s skin was dark, but far too pale to pass for a member of the Expeditionary Force up close. “I’m going to go into the corridor. Make the sensors not see me.”

  “What real con? Why won’t anyone tell me the real plan?”

  “The Union didn’t just invent an inflaton drive out of thin air,” Belisarius said. “They found a time travel device. We’re going to steal it from the Union.”

  “Time travel isn’t possible,” Saint Matthew said.

  “The Union has sent information back in time. It also made it possible for them to create their advanced drives. The time gates would be far safer with the Homo quantus. They’re the reason Cassandra and I took this job.”

  “You lied again,” Saint Matthew said. “The rest of us didn’t agree to this risk.”

  “We’re in it now, Saint Matthew.”

  “Why?”

  Belisarius felt his jaw tighten.

  “The Puppetsare born with the certainty of who they are,” Belisarius said. “The truth of the Homo eridanus stares them in the face, presses on them every second of their lives. Homo sapiens have had their questions answered a thousand times over by all the generations of history.

  “The Homo quantus are ephemeral. We touch nothing. We do nothing. We question, independent of meaning. I left the Garret for meaning, and found nothing but niches in ecosystems of uncertainty: gambling, confidence schemes. The Homo quantus are unsuited by design to impose meaning on their lives.

  “Or we were until I discovered that the time gates existed. They are causality, tied in a loop, naked for the studying. They’re the most direct means we may have to answer questions about what humanity has built into the Homo quantus, whether we’re a functionless appendix to history, or whether we’re a meaningful step to understanding why we’re here. Can you understand why I need this?”

  Saint Matthew was silent for eight seconds, almost as long as he had taken to decide whether to leave his little chapel on Saguenay Station. An eternity for both of them.

  “I can understand your need for meaning,” Saint Matthew said. “It’s enabled. Go anytime, but hurry.”

  Belisarius slid open the door and darted sternward down the corridor, with an agility he’d had trouble masking for all this time around Iekanjika. They sped through ladderways and corridors, into the stern, to the bays.

  “We’re close to the tug we came on,” Belisarius said. “Can you talk to it from here?”

  “Well enough,” Saint Matthew said.

  “Open the bay doors without anyone on the bridge knowing, and have the tug wait at section R of the Limpopo. You can’t let it be seen.”

  “It’s going to take a bit of work to make sure none of the external sensors notice. The ship is on high alert, and the Puppets are still shooting.”

  “You can do it.”

  Saint Matthew worked at that while Belisarius carried them further sternward.

  “I think you’ve been seen,” Saint Matthew said.

  “Sensors?”

  “No. Crewmen. They’re following.”

  “Damn! Can you reroute their communications to you in case they call for help?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Belisarius strengthened his body’s magnetic field, increasing his sensitivity to electrical and magnetic fields around him. The unnerving fine-grained interference in the magnetic field washed over him. The brush of magnetism touched him like swimming through water, or gliding through the subsurface skies of the Garret. The Union time gates were ahead of him, about halfway through the row of bays.

 
; “Mister Arjona,” Saint Matthew said. “You’re entering areas of hardened security systems.”

  “They’re using forty-year-old security algorithms. You’re one of the most advanced intelligences in civilization. Make it work.”

  “It’s not that easy, Mister Arjona.”

  “We’re committed. Break in or we’re goners.”

  “If the security around the time gates is too tight, we can let that go. You have a getaway plan. Let’s use it.”

  “We can get this done, Saint Matthew.”

  More MPs were probably approaching. Humans could not be tricked as easily as computers.

  “I cracked the security around the bay,” Saint Matthew said, “but I can’t hold it off for even ten minutes.”

  Belisarius darted through the air in zero g, deftly touching a rung here, a wall there. The bay airlock was at the crossroads of two hallways, the straight one he’d just come by, and a curved one running around the circumference of the big tube of the inflaton drive. The corridor leading off to his left and right vanished below its horizon after only a dozen meters. A thick-glassed window looked onto the inside of the airlock and another windowed door.

  A cabinet beside the airlock contained six vacuum suits. He pulled off the first, a general-service suit, heavily patched, with the number 337 hand-painted onto the chest. He pulled it on and put Saint Matthew back on his wrist.

  “How far away are they?” Belisarius asked.

  “Eighty meters and approaching cautiously, but not slowly,” Saint Matthew said. “You have about forty seconds.”

  “Send a signal through the security system to lead them off on a lateral corridor.”

  “That might not work.”

  “The tug is outside the bay doors, right?” Belisarius asked. “I need about four minutes to cycle open the doors and load the time gates into the tug’s cargo hold.”