How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge

by K. Eason

  She peered up the port passage as far as her headlamp would illuminate, ’slinger raised. Then she held her breath and darted across the opening. No one shot at her, or at Jaed, who remained to cover that passage while Thorsdottir forged on ahead. There was another intersection upcoming in four meters or so. As Thorsdottir maneuvered to see if the seals were engaged, the emergency teslas dimmed suddenly, as if someone or something conspicuously absent from the HUD had cast a shadow across them.

  Thorsdottir held up her un- ’slingered hand. Jaed stopped at once.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Yes.” He sounded unhappy. “But I don’t know what I saw.”

  “Rory, Jaed and I will investigate . . . whatever that was we just saw. You wait here.” Thorsdottir paused, leaving silence where there might have been a Princess or a Highness.

  “Mm.” Rory’s gaze hung in the unfocused nowhere that an arithmancer’s attention went to when they were busy.

  Right. Thorsdottir began edging forward into the cross-corridor. There were section seals here, poised to close in case of emergency. The bulkheads continued the alphanumeric tradition. This one said C-15b. She panned her headlamp up, over the bulkhead, onto the overhead. Nothing. She was on the verge of declaring the shadow nothing more than a power fluctuation in the teslas, subcategory, overactive imagination, when another flicker caught her attention further up the starboard cross-passage.

  She took a step toward it, exactly far enough to ascertain that no, it was just another dark patch likely due to a tesla malfunction and nothing more nefarious. She started to turn back, toggling the comm with her chin, drawing breath to report it was nothing.

  She saw Jaed coming into the cross-passage. They locked eyes through his faceplate.

  Then, abruptly, the section seal irised shut.

  * * *

  —

  “Wait! What was that? Thorsdottir!” Jaed slammed his fists against the unyielding metal. “Rory!”

  Rory heard both her name and the dull boom of Jaed’s assault from several layers deep in the aether. The multiverse was composed of numbers, described by mathematics; Messer Rupert had said, somewhat whimsically, that math was the language of the multiverse. He was not wrong about that; but practically, when one was trying to navigate an unfamiliar corridor in a hardsuit and carry on a conversation, the math tended to mumble. Or rather, blur, because Rory saw the equations, rather than heard them: the pressure of the atmosphere inside the corridor, the concentrations of aetheric gases, winking in and out of visibility at varying intervals, with varying brightness. The mysterious transmission was winkier and dimmer than the rest, and harder to track.

  No. It was impossible to track, with Jaed’s shouting. And her HUD was flashing at her, too, something about a dropped contact—

  Oh. Oh.

  She slammed back into the primary layer of aether with an eye-watering blink.

  Jaed hit the section seal a second time. “Thorsdottir!”

  “Thorsdottir. Thorsdottir, do you copy?” Zhang was not shouting, but the intensity of her distress made Rory’s chest hurt. “Jaed, what’s happening? She dropped off the link.”

  Rory caught her breath—she always forgot to breathe regularly, when she was trying to arithmance and walk at the same time—and studied her HUD. The comm-teslas for Jaed and Vagabond were still green. Thorsdottir’s was grey.

  That could be a sudden equipment failure. Or it could be—well. Something that didn’t bear thinking about, and which she had to consider nevertheless.

  “Rory,” said Zhang. Her voice was brittle, steady, on the comms. “I cannot raise Thorsdottir on the comm.”

  “Neither can we. Stand by.”

  Jaed gave up attacking the indifferent metal and rounded on her. The hardsuit’s headlamp bleached his features, smoothed them, so that he looked like a mask of himself. “The seal

  was it arithmancy

  just closed. Why?”

  didn’t you stop it

  The thirteenth fairy’s gift to Rory, at her naming, had been to know the truth, however anyone tried to conceal it. But because one of the other fairy gifts had been kindness, and because she had been a princess until very recently and therefore accustomed to diplomacy, Rory squelched the urge to snap, You, too, know some arithmancy, so why aren’t you also partly at fault? at him.

  She held up a hand instead, stay or wait or perhaps be quiet, and went to the seal. The Tadeshi emblem was painted on the metal, a small portion of it on each petal of the iris. On the bulkhead beside the seal, there was a panel, complete with a card reader and a keypad. The panel stared back at her, blankly unhelpful. The keypad had clearly been designed for fingertips, not fingertips inside of hardsuit gauntlets. That didn’t matter. All she needed to do was dip into the aether, and access the turing responsible for the locks—

  Rory sank her awareness into the layer of aether where turing codes lived, the reality of machine intelligence. On a station, there were hundreds of these: little turings, each individual and not quite conscious and yet linked to the larger system. On a ship there was usually one primary turing, self-aware; intelligence dependent on ship make, model, and purpose. A warship’s turing would be smarter than most. But the layer of G. Stein’s aether on which there should be swirling machine-code-sentience was blank and dark, like staring into a deep hole whose edges and depth she could not see.

  “The main turing’s dead,” she whispered. “I don’t mean offline. I mean dead. And that’s not even right. It’s more like its intelligence has been destroyed, and its body, this ship, is carrying on in its absence.”

  “You’re not supposed to be able to kill a warship turing like that. They’re shielded and—it’s just not supposed to happen. There are redundancies. Failsafes.”

  “And yet, it has.” Rory prodded the panel with her fingertip. The touchscreen was unresponsive. “Maybe we can get the panel off and . . . I don’t know. Open the hatch that way?”

  Jaed’s headlamp splashed down over her glove and onto the panel and the iris and the very edges of the Tadeshi device. “I can’t do that. I have no idea how to do that.”

  “Neither do I.” Rory closed her eyes. Then, having little hope of success, she cracked them open again and dropped her perception into the second aetheric layer. She did not know how to open a mechanical lock with arithmancy, but if Messer Rupert was right (and he always was) then there must be a way to do it. Math was the language of the multiverse. Just change a word, change reality, maybe, and she’d get the seal open.

  First, she saw the mysterious transmission she’d been following, still present and brighter than she’d seen it so far, its equation rippling like a flag. Then, as had been its habit when noticed, it retreated deeper into the aether and out of sight, like ducking behind a convenient tree in a forest. She ignored it. No time for distractions right now. Rory pushed her concentration into the mechanism of the section seal itself. The equations here were harder, less forgiving. Usually there was a flicker on the variables, some hint of what could be changed. Here, she saw nothing except an alphanumeric line, black and static and lifeless. It was as if the moving parts of the seal had been fused.

  Thorsdottir was on the other side of that seal, however, and so she had to try something. She did. And then she tried another something, and a third, and a fourth, to the same effect as Jaed’s punches.

  Then she saw movement: a flash, like light striking a mirror, small and fleeting (and unpleasant) as a needle-prick. She bent her attention that way, and saw another flash on her periphery, and felt another prick. It was a tiny hex, the tiniest she’d ever seen. And there were many of them.

  That layer of aether turned white and solid. And then it, they, threw her out of it.

  Rory blinked. Her eyes were watering in sympathetic aftermath. There was no actual physical sensation to which her body could respond. But her psych
e prickled. So did her pride.

  “I can’t get it open.” And then, because she knew Jaed would ask (Zhang wouldn’t; Zhang would just despair quietly): “This was arithmancy. Is arithmancy.—Don’t,” she said, as Jaed turned toward the panel. “Don’t touch that. It’s—active. Some kind of battle-hex on the seal.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. She was fairly sure whatever had just hit her was not a battle-hex, but she did not know what else to call it. Effective, certainly: that seal was not going to open. The very mechanisms were fused, and the little sparkling needle-stabs were actively making sure that they stayed that way. Jaed took a physical step back from the panel. “So there is an arithmancer on board.”

  “Or there was, and this is their parting gift to us.” Rory’s head was beginning to ache. She wished she could pinch the bridge of her nose. She settled for leaning her forehead against the helmet’s interior.

  Jaed peered into her faceplate. “Are you all right?”

  I have just been attacked by a million invisible, tiny battle-hexes. Fortunately, Rory’s fairy gift did not require her honesty, and so she said only, “Yes.”

  Jaed’s gaze flicked down. His lips pursed, then moved silently, but with exaggerated deliberation, so that she could not misunderstand, and so that Zhang could not hear: “Your nose is bleeding.”

  So it was. Rory sniffed hard and swallowed. “Fine,” she mouthed back at him.

  Jaed was just enough of an arithmancer to know that was both true and not. His jaw squared off. “What now?”

  Rory wished, sometimes, that people would try to answer that question themselves instead of soliciting her opinion. But then, she thought guiltily, she had a habit of ignoring what other people suggested if it crossed her own desires. Jaed probably just thought he was being efficient by asking her first.

  This time, however, she did not possess the pertinent knowledge.

  “I’m not the one who grew up on void-stations. You tell me. How do we get around a section seal?”

  Jaed was momentarily quiet. The backsplash from his headlamp carved new shadows into his features. For a moment, he looked alarmingly like his father, and Rory felt her skin creep. Then he whipped around and dropped to his knees on the decking. “On a ship this size, there will be maintenance tubes. There are access panels at every intersection—here.”

  Rory was impressed. She wouldn’t have seen the panel door. Or rather, she would not have noticed the seams in the bulkhead and thought someone can get behind that. Jaed pried the panel off and set it aside. There were numbers and letters stenciled on the back, where they would have been visible from the tunnel’s interior. Rory could see the faint bleed of emergency teslas from inside the tunnel.

  Jaed poked head and shoulders into the shaft. “On a station, mecha do the maintenance. But military ships use human crew, so the tubes have to be big enough for a hardsuit in case of emergencies. And, human crew means the tubes are numbered. My father wanted the military to go to mecha, because they’re cheaper. That was one of the arguments he lost with the Minister of Defense.” Jaed looked up at her. He wore a faint smile, brittle on the edges, that Rory didn’t think he was aware of. “Which is good for us. We can count our way through the decks. So where are we going?”

  This time, Rory had a ready answer. “We were heading for the bridge. Thorsdottir knows that. She’ll meet us there, if she can. So—up, Jaed. We’re going up.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Thorsdottir resisted the urge to pound on the unfeeling steel. She clenched her fists and silenced her distraught hardsuit. The teslas associated with everyone else—Jaed, Rory, Zhang—were grey and dim. That was . . . bad.

  “Jaed?” Her voice seemed small and thin in the helmet’s confines. “Do you copy?”

  She waited. The interior of her helmet remained silent, except for the puff of her own exasperation. A section seal didn’t close like that without provocation, usually in the form of explosive decompression or a fire or, worse thought, some arithmancer’s prodding.

  Thorsdottir closed her eyes and counted to five. Then she thrust her chin harder into the toggle. “Rory? Jaed? Zhang?”

  Then, very abruptly, the emergency teslas went out, turning the passageway into a weighted, hungry black that nibbled at her suit’s teslas, chewing away the meager glow of the HUD. Her helmet still had its headlamp, which punched a pool of brilliance into the dark, and which would alert anyone out there where she was, so they would know precisely where to aim a ’slinger bolt.

  Thorsdottir chilled and prickled at once, from her skin to her most interior organ.

  “Zhang, do you copy?” she said, with no real hope of response.

  This time, she heard the channel hiss. And then, more than that: a murmuring, almost inaudible. A voice, or at least something like a voice. But not the sure rhythms of normal conversation or the hammering cadence of troops calling orders. It was a more liquid utterance, less disciplined, wandering a range of tones and pitches, like a song. The melody resolved itself, suddenly, into syllables which sounded very much like help me and this way.

  The hardsuits were supposed to be hexed against interference and external meddling.

  The channel hissed again. This time, it took no imagination at all to hear this way in the whispers.

  Then the emergency teslas on the deck lit up again in sequence, starting from the one nearest Thorsdottir’s boots and proceeding up the corridor, one by one. Then they all went dark again, for a heartbeat, before repeating the sequence.

  And again. And—

  “All right,” Thorsdottir said. “I’m coming.”

  She made her way through the darkened ship, herded by the emergency teslas until the passage coiled down and around almost a full revolution. The teslas stopped at another sealed hatch, the bulkhead beside which bore the label Cargo 15b. This seal was not an iris, but a thick, flat wedge of metal that had dropped from the overhead and which dragged itself up as she approached, revealing an unlit interior space. The emergency teslas seemed reluctant to trespass, and flickered nervously at the threshold.

  Thorsdottir did not find that especially comforting. Her hardsuit told her that there was breathable atmosphere in the hold, and that its outer hull doors remained sealed, and that there were not, to its knowledge, any outstanding heat sources that might be a talented arithmancer wearing a hardsuit.

  Of course, her suit had been hacked. That made its reports suspect.

  Thorsdottir weighed the possibilities that, having led her all this way, a supremely talented Tadeshi arithmancer meant to kill her anyway. Then she dipped her chin inside the helmet and stomped forward into the cargo bay, leaving her emergency tesla escorts behind.

  A new bank of teslas greeted her, blue-white and studding a series of brushed steel cases mag-locked to both deck and overhead, one row on each side, like an honor guard (or a firing squad). They were, as she got a closer look at them, easily identifiable as cryostasis units, the sort used for transporting perishable organics, medicine, and occasionally individuals (although that practice was generally illegal, except for the transportation of prisoners, and even then the legality depended upon the jurisdiction).

  Thorsdottir examined one of the units, pleased, and then puzzled, to find its contents neatly labeled. She frowned. She was no scholar, but she had done well enough in botany to recognize the word rosoideae. The fiction of labeling smuggled goods as something other than they were made perfect sense, when she had assumed that G. Stein was a civilian vessel. Civilian, owned-by-a-florist G. Stein could have carried roses among its cargo without comment. But since its masquerade as civilian vessel went only as far as its false ID transmission, there would be no need to carry on the ruse into its cargo hold. Besides, cryostasis units like these were expensive, both in currency and in power consumption; and no one would waste that kind of hardware on decorative plants.

  And there wa
s still the matter of the arithmancer. Someone had hacked her suit. And someone had wanted her to come here to this cargo bay of falsely labeled roses. It was all very vague, but Thorsdottir had been a guard to royalty and was accustomed to having incomplete information and needing to act anyway.

  She peered down the bay’s dim length, where she could just make out the columnar silhouette of a turing console bolted to the bulkhead at the far end, near the massive exterior aetherlock. Double-wide doors, meant for ease of moving cargo to some location with breathable atmosphere. She walked to it slowly, half expecting an ambush from the shadows, or those doors to pop open and suck her into the void, but nothing happened.

  The turing console’s interface had not been designed for hardsuited fingers. She stared, frustrated, at the tiny keypad and the turing’s blank standby screen.

  Which, as if it sensed her attention, produced the words, help me, at the same instant she heard the same sentiment wisp through her comms.

  Thorsdottir swallowed dust and her own hammering heart. There were a couple of ways one could address an unexpected encounter. The ’slinger, while comforting, did not seem appropriate, or useful, or warranted. If something wanted to talk first, then that path was worth pursuing.

  She engaged the ex-comms on her helmet, even though she suspected what-or-whoever had hacked her could hear what she said anyway.

  “Who are you? Where are you?” She felt more than a little bit foolish, talking to a terminal in an empty cargo bay.

  The screen blanked again. Then the word rose typed itself out, just as the predictable whisper returned.

  Thorsdottir wondered if this arithmancer, this suit-hacker, was playing some kind of game, the rules of which they knew and she did not.

  “You’re . . . hiding in the roses? In one of the stasis units?”

  rose

  Not exactly a denial. “Rose? That’s, what, your name?”

  rose, the screen confirmed.