How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge

by K. Eason

  The name was . . . unlikely. This entire scenario was unlikely. Play along. Thorsdottir felt her lips arrange themselves in a smile of the sort one deployed with small children on the verge of a tantrum.

  “Fine. Rose, my name is Thorsdottir. Where are you?”

  rose

  The only possible source of this limited conversation was the turing console. Thorsdottir knew that sentient turings were impossible, though she did not know the exact arithmantic reasons. Rory would know, of course . . . but maybe, maybe, Rory did not know everything.

  “Are you in the turing, Rose? Are you the turing?”

  rose

  Right. If Rose was a turing, they did not seem to be very clever. Unless Rose was, well, a rose, which seemed even more unlikely.

  Although, Thorsdottir reminded herself, Rose—turing, plant, whatever they were—had gotten her down here alone. Her smile flaked away. “What do you want?”

  The screen blanked, and paused, and Thorsdottir had the absurd impression that it was thinking. Then:

  flesh

  That seemed fairly horrible, but Thorsdottir was also a little relieved. She was good at dealing with threats, and disinclined to be anyone’s supper, and she had a working sidearm.

  Although . . . flesh was an odd word to use, if ingestion was the intent. Meat would’ve been better. Flesh was living meat. Maybe if Rose needed Thorsdottir’s flesh, it was because Rose did not have any of Rose’s own.

  The back of Thorsdottir’s neck prickled tight. “For what, exactly?”

  The screen remained blank. Perhaps Rose was simply too polite to say I want to kill you.

  Then, after a long interval, the screen coughed up: rose.

  “Right, I got that. That’s your name. I asked what you wanted with flesh. My flesh.”

  The screen filled with a column of roseroserose. At the same time, the cargo hold’s blue-white overhead teslas rippled like leaves in strong wind, spangling the crates with electromagnetic raindrops. Then they went out, bank by bank, until only the cryostasis units were illuminated, bathed in pools of white light.

  It was, Thorsdottir thought, the equivalent of a turing throwing a tantrum, complete with pointing fingers and punctuated by shouts. It was also clear what Rose wanted Thorsdottir to do with her convenient flesh.

  “I am not opening those,” Thorsdottir said firmly. “Not until you tell me what the contents are.”

  roseroserose

  “No. That’s what the label says. That’s not what’s really inside, or . . .” Her stomach dropped. “Or who.”

  The channel remained silent for a chain of heartbeats. The screen remained blank. Perhaps the turing was martialing patience, or reconsidering Thorsdottir’s edibility, or deciding whether or not to short out her suit’s life support. Then the screen lit up, revealing an official-looking document bearing the seal of the Tadeshi royalists and the word classified in bold red, on which the word rose figured prominently numerous times. Then the screen abruptly resized its display, and the official-looking document resolved itself into words that, as Thorsdottir began to read, turned her guts to cold jelly all over again.

  She knew that honorable warfare was a diplomatic term, and that battlefield realities were different. She knew that collateral damage was inevitable and undesirable, but occasionally strategically necessary. And she knew that things in classified documents were rarely comforting. But there were some strategies that, if executed, would change the whole shape of a conflict.

  What she saw on the screen was just such a thing.

  It was a set of orders for the transport and eventual deployment of an alchemical weapon. A weapon which would, if she understood correctly, destroy an entire biosphere by infesting it with nanomecha which would alchemically transmute life-supporting molecules into lifeless ones, rendering the planet both uninhabited and uninhabitable. Except nanomecha were entirely theoretical, beyond even the most advanced alchemy and robotics. Size matters, that’s the problem, Rory had said once, after a viewing of a poorly rated fantasy-horror in which nanomecha-borne disease infected a void-station and turned everyone into monsters that the handsome and none-too-bright hero had then been forced to kill. We haven’t figured out how to program them collectively.

  Well. Someone appeared to have solved that problem, and then sold the result to the Tadeshi.

  “The roses,” Thorsdottir said. “They’re the weapon.”

  She didn’t realize she’d said it out loud until the screen blanked again. Then a single word appeared in the center.

  yes

  * * *

  —

  Another length of Jaed’s body disappeared into the maintenance shaft.

  “Maybe I should go first,” said Rory. “I’m a better—”

  “Arithmancer? Yes. But I’m a better shot.” Jaed wiggled all the way into the shaft. His voice, strained through the comm speakers, sounded a little breathless. “Not that I’ll have a hand free to fire a ’slinger. It’s tight in here.”

  “Zhang,” Rory murmured, “We’re proceeding to the bridge.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Then she got down on her knees on the deckplate and followed Jaed into the shaft.

  It was tight.

  She spent the next thirty minutes staring at Jaed’s boots, mostly vertical, occasionally canted at an alarming lateral angle. The shafts were minimally lit, either because of the EM damage from the unknown attacker or because it was assumed anyone in the shaft would provide their own light. The suit’s headlamps did that, although they responded to the ambient dark by dimming themselves so as not to blind their users. The effect was rather like crawling through a metal tube filled with twilight.

  Jaed’s boots stopped. The tiny blue teslas on his heels stared at her like eyes.

  “Bridge,” he said, closely followed by a muttered, “I think. I hope. It’s the end of the shaft, anyway.”

  There came a dull thump as Jaed wrestled with the access panel, followed by a vibration that Rory felt through her hardsuit as the panel hit metal decking. Then the ominous red of emergency teslas slivered down the shaft.

  Jaed let out a squawk, and then an expletive. He did not move.

  “What is it?” Rory asked sharply.

  Jaed did not appear to be in distress, which is to say, he was not kicking or trying to back up or making wet gasping noises. He was, however, breathing a little bit hard, which could be blamed on the last half hour’s exertions, or, Rory suspected, whatever it was he was seeing.

  At least he did not sound as if he’d met a patrol of marines, or someone demanding he exit the shaft or they’d shoot.

  Rory smacked Jaed’s ankle. His foot jerked. Then, without comment (and now she was worried; Jaed was not especially taciturn), he crawled out of the shaft. Rory scrambled after him, and lurched out into—

  Oh.

  Rory had seen footage of uncontrolled decompression before, although mostly in the special effects of e-vid renderings, enhanced for extra drama and gore. She knew that human skin would resist the dramatic burst, and that people’s insides tended to remain, well, inside. Vomit was not as appealing, so the e-vids tended to leave that out. It was much in evidence here, on the deck and on consoles and staining the fronts of uniforms that were all Tadeshi royalist military; there had been no attempt at maintaining the civilian fiction on board. She identified a captain’s insignia on the woman sprawled in the center of the deck, and what appeared to be several other officer insignias through the smears of digestive effluvia. The blood, fortunately, was minimal, a trickle of red here and there, from nostrils and mouths, and from at least one wide eye Rory glimpsed, the white of which had gone entirely red.

  “Don’t throw up,” Rory said, because Jaed was making unfortunate choking gasps inside his helmet. “Breathe.”

  She wondered why she did not need her own
advice, and, ironically, felt a little queasy that she didn’t.

  “Rory?”

  “Fine, Zhang. We’re fine. The bridge crew isn’t, though. Stand by.”

  G. Stein’s bridge was far larger than Vagabond’s pair of chairs and a jumpseat. The pilot’s and gunner’s stations were opposite the maintenance shaft, partly concealed behind the central pillar display with its multiple screens and the primary turing console. Rory stepped over the captain’s outflung limbs. There was a cabinet marked with the universal symbol for emergency, and the more descriptive, neatly stenciled Environmental Suits. The cabinet appeared unopened.

  Jaed panned his headlamp across the bulkhead, the overhead, the deck. He sounded steadier, as if his insides would also remain where they were, and also firmer. “What happened here?”

  “I think that’s obvious.”

  “But it’s not. This decompression happened too fast. Faster than a ship’s emergency systems would have reacted to an emergency. The crew should’ve had time to get to the suits, even if there was a breach or a fire. And the seals would’ve shut.” He waved a hand at the bridge doors, which were closed, but without the spiraled iris of a pressure seal. “This had to be some kind of battle-hex.”

  He was right. Rory examined that realization carefully, as if it might explode and take the rest of the known multiverse with it. She knew that she was being unfair: she was annoyed with Jaed for seeing what she should have before she had, and more annoyed—and, let us be honest, afraid—because she had no more idea how this had happened than he did.

  She stalked to the main pillar console. There was a body slumped in the chair, over which (whom? when did a corpse cease to rate human pronouns?) Rory leaned carefully. She peered into the turing screen, and then through it, into the aetheric layers. She could see the mathematical descriptions of the physical elements—polymers, alloys, circuits. On the next layer, where the usual workings of turings happened, there was nothing. She plucked one of the corpse’s hands aside, gently and without looking at it or its owner, and tapped a sequence of keys.

  The turing did not respond. But the screen coughed up a display, consisting of cryptic alphanumerics that all meant, essentially, this turing is dead. There were pieces of code, as if something had detonated inside the turing’s primary system and blown its code into shards.

  Rory’s stomach turned again. She had seen a bomb’s aftermath, in her childhood on Thorne, when her father had died. She had never been permitted to see what remained of her father, but she imagined he must’ve looked a little bit like this.

  “We don’t have any battle-hexes that can do this.” She stated the obvious, in the hope that something better would present itself.

  Something better did not. Something worse did, in Zhang’s cool, practical voice: “Then who else are the Tadeshi at war with?”

  Jaed made a noise like water on hot metal. “I’d have said no one. One war is enough. And where this happened—I mean, we’re on the edge of the Verge out here. There’s really nothing except SAM-1 and a few planets no one wants to live on and a lot of unexplored void.”

  That was not entirely true. “The k’bal have a couple of colonies on this edge of the Verge, if I remember right,” said Rory. “And they’re all arithmancers.”

  “The k’bal didn’t do this.” Jaed panned his headlamp over the bulkheads as if he could see through them to the void on the other side. “I mean, they’re pacifists.”

  “Well, maybe they offended someone. Or there’s, I don’t know, such a thing as angry k’bal.”

  “Who then turned around and killed a Tadeshi ship? I don’t think so. What about that transmission you intercepted? What if all this is sabotage, and the responsible arithmancer’s still on board?”

  “You watch too many e-vids.” Rory was certain that was not the case. Almost certain. “The transmission disappeared when the seal closed behind Thorsdottir.” She did not add that she had not exactly looked for it since then, either. Her sinuses still watered when she remembered the hexes that had thrown her out of the aether.

  “It’s either a saboteur or some unknown xeno-invasion from the Verge,” Jaed said tartly. “Which do you prefer?”

  “I don’t prefer. That transmission was more like a whisper. Crude. Whatever did this—well, it’s amazing, complex work.”

  “It might be an act of war,” said Zhang flatly. “I am looking at G. Stein’s hull right now. We do not know of a weapon that can inflict that sort of damage, nor who might possess it, but it seems reasonable that those same people might have other weapons that we cannot imagine.” She paused. Then, in a brittle voice, as if she spoke with a chestful of broken glass, “You should return to Vagabond at once.”

  “Not without Thorsdottir,” Jaed said, but he was looking at Rory.

  Rory nodded at him. “Not without Thorsdottir. Stand by, Zhang.”

  She cut the comms to Vagabond. She left her forehead resting on the switch, so that Zhang could neither hear nor respond. “Except, Jaed, listen. I don’t know how to get the seals open without the turing. I don’t even know how to start.”

  “I might have an idea.” Jaed circled around the main pillar. After a few seconds of staring at what seemed to be blank metal from close range, he popped open a panel and stuffed a hand into the console, as far as the hardsuit’s glove permitted. His face worked behind the visor, grimace to scowl to squint-eyed concentration.

  Rory knew from experience that the tactile interface on the hardsuits wasn’t especially sensitive. Whatever Jaed was feeling around for would have to be big or obvious—

  A small shower of sparks erupted from the console, like incandescent snowflakes. Every emergency tesla on the bridge went out simultaneously, dropping them into a sea of darkness with two little headlamp islands.

  “Jaed.”

  “Um.”

  The deck shivered. Then the entire bridge lit up, every panel, every tesla, except for a significant pattern on the central panel, which remained grey and dim.

  Rory blinked. “What just happened?”

  “Manual system override.” Jaed sounded a little breathless. “We’re lucky. This is an older ship. The new ones don’t have manual switches.”

  Lucky had not been a word Rory would’ve associated with this situation. Still, it appeared that Jaed had done something useful. That grey panel on the main console, though, worried her. “The turing is still dead. Shouldn’t it be rebooting?”

  “It should.” Jaed straightened. He frowned at the pillar, then, after a moment, struck it with a closed fist.

  The lights remained dim.

  “That never works,” Rory murmured. “Hitting things as a means of repair. Especially turings.”

  “You’d be surprised.” Jaed flashed her a grin that faded as fast as it had appeared. “There should be a secondary turing, though. This is a warship. There’s never one of any important system.”

  “The attack must have targeted the turings specifically, then, and taken them both out.” Rory was caught between admiration and dismay. A battle-hex that could take out a shielded warship turing (two!) could either be a great help to the Confederation or devastate it completely. This was also the last settled system before the Verge, the very edge of human-held void. Chances were good (or very, very bad) that G. Stein’s attackers had been xeno, of some new and hostile kind.

  In the interval while Rory had been pondering the possibility of a new and hostile power, Jaed had crossed the bridge. He stood now in front of the bridge doors, which, to Rory’s surprise, slid apart as he got close to them.

  He let out a little whoop. “The automated systems are back online. Barring an actual breach in the hull, we should be able to just walk down to Thorsdottir.”

  Rory did not mention that Thorsdottir’s hardsuit still did not register, or that, if there were saboteurs trapped in some sealed-off section, J
aed had just let them loose.

  She said only, “Then let’s go get her.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rory discovered three things, as she descended the decks on G. Stein. The first was that the attackers had gone no higher than deck three. The second was that any fears of meeting survivors were unfounded. The third was that, however unprepared she might feel, picking through the aftermath of what had been a terrible battle, Jaed Moss was even more so.

  “Breathe,” Rory said, a repetition somewhere between ten and infinity. “Don’t throw up.”

  “I won’t,” Jaed snapped—or gasped, more accurately—also a repetition between ten and infinity. He had so far kept that promise, despite some audible gagging.

  The carnage on the lower decks was both worse and not as bad as on the bridge. There, Rory had been able to distract herself by wondering how exactly the battle-hex had accomplished the bridge decompression, in the most shielded and defended portion of the ship. Here, the cause of death in the corridors was much more apparent: a number of scorch-marks and burns reminiscent of the damage on the ship’s hull, which suggested that the same sort of weapon had been used, and that it had much the same effect on Tadeshi marine hardsuits as it did on Tadeshi warships.

  “Rory,” Jaed said, and startled Rory out of her grim examination of yet another corpse. She looked away from her subject—faceshield cracked, helmet twisted at an impossible angle—and looked at Jaed, who was standing near a bulkhead on which there was a large splash of blood, presumably from the crumpled, armored heap on the deck, around which there was an equally impressively large stain.

  Rory wished—quietly, carefully, in the farthest corner of her mind—that the teslas would all go out again. “Don’t throw up, Jaed, just breathe—”

  “I am breathing.” He sucked in an audible lungful, then let it go. “Just look at this.” He hovered a finger above a tear in the armor. The edges poked up like broken teeth, jagged and darkly stained.

  Rory took her own advice (breathe, don’t throw up) and looked at what remained of the person on the other side of that armor. “We already know whoever did this has superior weaponry.”