How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge

by K. Eason

  The turing screen faded. Then, in the middle, in a large, white type, appeared the words help rose.

  Thorsdottir was the only one to notice, Jaed and Rory being too busy glaring at each other again. She gritted her teeth and interrupted. She wanted to say, I told Rose that you weren’t a threat, and damned if you’ll make me a liar. But out loud, she said, “The xenos are afraid of Rose. That’s a good argument for keeping them alive.”

  Rory paused, mid-breath, and turned to Thorsdottir. She cocked her head, as if she could hear what Thorsdottir had not said, and her eyes narrowed.

  “Rose tried to kill me and Jaed.” Rory’s voice was quiet, even, dangerous.

  Thorsdottir’s voice was quiet, even, reasonable. “I don’t think they did.”

  “Really.”

  “I think they fought back, but there’s a difference between self-defense and assassination. They thought you were dangerous. You’re an arithmancer. Both of you are. So are the xenos, or at least some of them, from what you said you saw on the bridge. So maybe that’s the connection. Rose is afraid of arithmancers because they, Rose, are not that skilled at arithmancy. They’re scared, Rory. And you’re giving them reason to be.”

  Jaed cleared his throat. Thorsdottir and Rory both turned toward him, the latter expectantly, the former resignedly, both of them anticipating he would lend his support to Rory.

  And so both of them were surprised when Jaed said, “Thorsdottir’s right. There’s nothing like Rose anywhere. They’re unique. And besides.” He pointed at the screen. “They’re sentient, and they just asked us for help. That makes them a refugee, right?”

  Rory opened her mouth to argue. Then she, too, looked at the screen. Reason leaked back into her eyes, and compassion: an echo of the princess Thorsdottir had known on Urse, before Vernor Moss had imprisoned her, before she had abdicated crown and responsibility and decided the multiverse could fend for itself.

  “Rose,” she said.

  help rose

  Rory looked slightly queasy. “You tried to kill us.”

  The screen remained blank. Then, slowly: sorry.

  “Was it because we were arithmancers?”

  yes

  “Not much of a talker, are they?” Jaed muttered. “Reminds me of you, Zhang.”

  “Funny.”

  “No, but listen.” Jaed looked more serious. “The roses are still in cryostasis. How are we even talking to them? Are the nanomecha somehow not frozen? Are they immune?”

  “Maybe it’s only some of them,” said Thorsdottir. “It doesn’t matter. Point is, we need to bring Rose with us.”

  “We can’t, though.” This time, Rory’s voice was gentle. “Jaed’s right. We don’t have room on Vagabond for the units.”

  Thorsdottir opened her mouth to—she wasn’t sure what. Argue. Protest. Volunteer to stay on board G. Stein and wait for a larger ship to return, which she knew would lead to argument, and for which she was already marshaling counterpoints.

  “I just got a transmission from G. Stein,” Zhang said suddenly. “It appears to be some sort of shipping manifest for roses accompanied by what appears to be a classified Tadeshi military document with a lot of numbers. Some kind of . . . passcode?”

  They all looked at the console.

  “Rose,” Rory asked, “did you send that?”

  yes

  Thorsdottir could not help herself. “Still think they’re not sentient?”

  “No. I don’t. But that makes them more dangerous.” Rory turned and eyelocked Thorsdottir. “We don’t dare just leave Rose here and hope we can come back later. For all we know, that’s what the xenos did, and they’re already on their way. Or the Tadeshi, if they’re checking to see what happened to G. Stein. If someone gets them, and the data on this”—she gestured at the console—“then they’ll know how to use them. And we can’t let that happen.”

  Rory slid a look at the console, and from there up the bank of tubes. “I don’t know how much you can hear, Rose,” she murmured, “or how much you understand, but listen. You have to understand that you’re meant to kill people. That’s your purpose. Do you understand?”

  The screen remained blank for a few seconds. Then, slowly, it produced a yes. And then, immediately after that, rose not want, rose not kill.

  “See?” Thorsdottir said.

  Rory’s features might’ve been cast in polysteel. “That’s admirable. Nevertheless, we can’t leave them behind, and we can’t take them with us. So that does not leave us with much of a choice.”

  Thorsdottir shook her head. She did not trust her voice to behave. One did not shout at Rory Thorne, princess or no.

  Unless one was Jaed Moss. “You are not serious! We can’t—We are not going to do that. Rory. It’s wrong.”

  “I’m happy to hear alternatives—”

  “We purge the data from this ship and take the only copy with us! Or we just purge the data altogether. Then Rose can’t do anything—”

  “Until someone figures out the passcodes! Or whoever made them in the first place supplies a replacement. It’s a risk we can’t take—”

  “Who the hell are you to decide this?”

  Their voices grew in volume, tangling and tearing at each other like thorns against flesh.

  Thorsdottir turned her face away from them and lowered her voice to conspiracy. “Rose. Rory’s right, but she’s also wrong. We can’t take all of you. But we can’t leave any part of you behind that’s alive. Do you understand?”

  yes

  “I can take a clipping. Will that be enough? Can you . . . survive?”

  A moment, two, three, while Jaed called Rory a genocidal dictator and she called him a romantic idealist with no sense of history. Then Rose typed out a firm, large-fonted yes.

  There came a great hissing from the bank of cryostasis units. But there was no corresponding gout of cold air, as there would be in a defrosting. Instead there was a deeper rattle, like the machine was trying to cough. The hissing stopped. The teslas on the front of the units turned from blues and greens to yellows and reds. A few of them were blinking. Then they began to go dark, one by one.

  In the sudden absence of the subliminal hum of working machinery, Jaed’s horrified whisper seemed very loud. “Oh, no. Rory, what have you done?”

  “I didn’t do that!”

  They both looked at Thorsdottir, who stood up and walked briskly across the cargo bay to face off with the first cryostasis unit. The porthole was dark, now, the internal illumination dead along with the rest of its systems. Her own face stared back at her.

  She balled up her fist and slammed it into the control panel. She succeeded in denting the alloy and scuffing her glove.

  “Thorsdottir,” said Jaed. “What are you doing?”

  At least it wasn’t Rory asking. Then Thorsdottir might’ve taken the query as a request (or an order) to stop. From Jaed, however, she took it as an obvious question deserving of an obvious answer.

  “Opening this unit.”

  “That won’t work.” He nudged her aside and, before she could retaliate, pried the control panel off. He grabbed a fistful of wires. “This will. Sometimes. Just tell me what we’re doing?”

  “Thought you liked botany. Pull the damned wires.”

  “I do, but.” His eyes widened. “You can propagate roses from cuttings. I have no idea if that works on frozen roses, or nanomecha-hybrids.”

  “Rose thinks it will. I asked them. They agreed. Then they killed the cryostasis units.”

  “They could’ve opened them first. Saved me some work.”

  The unit unsealed itself with another hiss. The door rolled aside. The rosebush looked very small and helpless: roots in a sack bundle, stems cut back, the whole thing wrapped in twine. Thorsdottir had a hard time believing it wasn’t just a plant. But then, that was the point.
And technically, until someone sent the command to the nanomecha, it was just a bush with a dormant transformative bioweapon inside.

  Just.

  “Jaed. How do I do this?”

  Jaed, who had in his past life aspired to be a botanist, grimaced slightly. “Ideally, we’d have a nice clean sharp knife and some rooting hormones. Let’s assume a bioweapon can survive a little rough treatment. Just—take the longest stem you can, all right?”

  “Right.” Thorsdottir reached in and broke off a length of branch. It snapped with an audible crack, like bone, and she winced.

  Hardsuits did not come with an excess of pocket-compartments. Thorsdottir considered, then popped the chamber that held extra bolt clips for the ’slinger. She emptied one of the clips and passed the extra bolts to Jaed. Then she put the Rose cutting inside the clip and sealed it, and stowed it back in her suit.

  “If you can hear me,” she said, “I promise to get you some water soon. And some dirt.”

  She looked hopefully at her HUD, but there was no unauthorized blinking, nor any ghost-hissing on her comms.

  There was only Zhang’s voice, cool and terrified. “There’s a ship inbound. You have to get back to Vagabond.”

  “What kind of ship?” Rory asked. “Tadeshi?”

  “Xeno,” guessed Thorsdottir, a moment before Zhang confirmed, “Unknown configuration. I don’t know where it came from. It just appeared out of nowhere, and it’s coming very fast.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Grytt held a dim opinion of void-flight on a good day. She found it cramped, uncomfortable, usually cold. The alwar vessel (their liaison, the adept, had translated its name into GalSpek as Favored Daughter) had done nothing to dispel that opinion. If anything, the internal dimensions were even more cramped, designed as they were for a people significantly smaller than the human average. When Grytt passed through a hatch, her shoulder came a hairsbreadth from brushing edges. The tenju who had come with them—one, which was a compromise from the original offer of four, which was still one more than Adept Uo-Zanys Kesk had wanted—had to turn slightly sideways, accompanied by a muttered monologue whose sentiment Grytt understood, even if the words themselves escaped her. At least she did not have to duck. Rupert did.

  The bridge, to which they had been conducted upon embarking (while their baggage, having changed custody, travelled elsewhere on board), at least possessed something of a domed overhead, as well as an impressive array of various-colored teslas (some blinking, some not) and screens. There was a central, bowl-shaped console, large enough for the crew to sit around, with a three-dimensional, translucent globe display projected in the hollow. A ring of seats lined one of the bulkheads, in what was clearly meant to be an observational capacity. The adept had deposited them there before taking herself to the other side of the bridge and the central console to confer with an official-looking person who Grytt supposed must be in command.

  The entire bridge had a rather unmilitary (which is to say, impractical) decor. There were inlaid designs on the bulkheads, apparently unnecessary to function, but which looked expensive and well-crafted. On a Kreshti warship, such ornamentation would have been reserved for visiting dignitaries’ quarters and the conference rooms well away from the working environment. Grytt debated whether or not Favored Daughter was even a military ship; it could be a luxury liner, or a diplomatic vessel, from its level of opulence. But the crew’s uniforms looked military, and the personnel traded gestures that looked like salutes, and at least four alwar carried sidearms and stood positioned so that if they must use those weapons, they would not strike the bridge crew, but rather hit the visitors.

  So Grytt surmised that she, Rupert, and the tenju were guests, but also under observation. That seemed fair. She was grateful at least that the seats were made of a substance that did its best to conform to her dimensions within the limits of their own, though she didn’t have high hopes for fastening the five-point harness, due to its alwar dimensions, when it came time to tesser-hex. Damn sure it’d chafe in inconvenient places.

  Tesser-hex travel itself was dull no matter how comfortable the chairs or how attractive the decorations; much of it was spent traveling to the appropriate gates, which were really just fragile confections of wire and metal, built by the k’bal and etched all over with arithmantic symbols, through which a ship with the appropriate hex-codes could travel to another gate elsewhere. Then there would be a burst of dangerous speeds, at which point everyone would strap into their harnesses and wait through the actual hex—(“Minutes,” Rupert would say, scoffing, while Grytt scowled and thought “hours”)—after which the ship would appear in a similar gate across the void.

  There was no possible way a ship could get lost in void-space, said Rupert, the arithmancer, clearly intending to reassure her with his authority. Gates were fixed points, anchors, unmoving and unmovable. Grytt’s bone-deep conviction that they’d go into the void and stay there was entirely illogical.

  Grytt sucked in a lungful of dry, very ship-flavored air and pushed herself as far back into the alwar-dimensioned chair as she could. A buzz of what was presumably the alwar language surrounded them, as the individuals at the various stations got to work. It was a bewildering number, to Grytt’s eyes; there was a joke in there somewhere, about the correct number of alwar required to traverse the void. She considered saying as much to Rupert, even began to lean his direction, before reconsidering. His attention was bent entirely on the techs and pilots sitting around the central console, over which hovered a hologram model of Lanscot’s system, complete with the tiny station and a bewildering crosshatching of glowy lines. Grytt kept expecting Lanscot station to notice their absence, to call and demand their return. Either they hadn’t yet, or the alwar had ignored them.

  She glanced at the lone tenju. He, like every other member of his species that she’d seen, tended toward a muscular, stocky, solid physique, all with that slightly undershot jaw and the jutting lower tusks. They were uniformly formidable. Grytt hoped they were also interesting travel companions.

  This one was focused on that hologram. She followed his narrow-eyed scowl to a moving blip in the hologram, which was moving to match Favored Daughter’s heading as the ship left the station’s immediate void-space.

  “That your ship?” she said. “That blip?”

  The tenju’s eyes cut toward her. They were a clear, jewel-blue, remarkably lovely in that particular collection of features. His cheeks, more leathery than alwar or human skin, sucked in thoughtfully. The curse of a tesla eye, that she could count pores in a person’s skin from a meter away. The tenju had pores, but there was no trace of facial hair, also like the alwar. Either those species did not grow beards or their razor technology was markedly more effective. Rupert was scrupulous about shaving, but there was always a little bit of a shadow.

  The tenju decided that she was worth answering. “Mm. Yes.” Then he turned back to the hologram in a whisper of braids and hooks.

  Not a talker. Grytt could respect that. She supposed the tenju vessel intended to accompany them to Samtalet, since it was clearly following Favored Daughter. Both ships were queuing up for the tesser-hex, perhaps squabbling over the order of transfer. She wasn’t entirely sure what the reasoning was, why these two groups—who appeared to have a testy, though solid, working relationship—had decided to go to Samtalet at all, much less play transport. Maybe they had their own fairy visitors. Maybe they knew something she and Rupert did not, about what was happening out there. She wished she could ask the tenju for a better explanation of what was happening, but this wasn’t the place or the time or, clearly, the tenju to interrogate. She hadn’t even gotten his name.

  She distracted herself with the alwar instead. They were predominantly female, and both sexes shared a common physiology—humanoid, clearly mammalian, possibly primate—with at least as much phenotypical variation as Grytt was accustomed to see in human beings. Hair, e
ye, skin color varied from the predominant, obsidian black of Adept Uo-Zanys Kesk to the pasty-pale of one of her escorts.

  The tenju she’d seen so far—all four of them—seemed a little more uniformly presented. Harder to see secondary sexual characteristics. Darkish hair, in all shades from mud to darkest charcoal. Skin the color of river-rocks, in all those variations. The one sitting beside her was a medium grey-green, which made him look, under the alwar teslas, as if he were vaguely unwell.

  Perhaps he was. Grytt had, before her encounter with Tadeshi explosives, been prone to nausea on void-flights and to turning a similar grey-green. Since having most of her insides replaced with mecha parts, as well as both her inner ears, that didn’t happen anymore.

  She caught the tenju side-eyeing her. He probably thought she wouldn’t notice, and she wouldn’t have, except the tesla optic gave her a wider field of vision on that side. She let him observe, unchallenged. If he wanted to say something, he—

  “You meet any veeks yet?”

  —would do so. Which he just had.

  She cocked her head and drilled him with both eyes, aware that it was an unsettling expression, and awarded the tenju a point for not flinching.

  “What’s a veek?”

  On her other side, Rupert stirred and coughed, very softly. “I believe he refers to the vakari.” He said it slowly, as if trying it out for the first time. “Veek is the slang term.”

  The tenju’s jewel-blue eyes flicked past Grytt like twin plasma shots. He snorted. “They won’t much like you. The veeks, I mean. All that metal on you. Mecha, right? Implants?” He paused and pasted an expectant expression over his features.

  Grytt strangled a sigh. “Why is that a problem for these vakari?”

  “They’re religious fanatics. Really strict about organic purity.” The tenju hitched a shoulder. “I reckon it’s an excuse for their Expansion propaganda. They’re cleaning up the multiverse by taking over the rest of us for our own good. Keeping us all pure or some rot.”