How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge

by K. Eason

  “Why is for people like Rory to worry about,” said Jaed. “She wants so badly not to be a princess, except, you know, she’s always a princess. Doing all the talking.”

  It was Thorsdottir’s turn to dredge up a laugh. “It’s what we expect from her. We’re sitting here now, and I, at least, am half-assuming she’s going to figure all this out. They could be doing awful things to her, but I imagine them talking, and her figuring out what’s going on, and somehow fixing all of it. And I think that’s what she expects will happen, too.”

  They shared silence, for a moment. Jaed’s gaze flickered sidelong; Thorsdottir felt it brush over her profile, in its restless patrol of their cell’s perimeter. She felt it return, and the weight as it settled.

  “Why do you think the vakari killed the people on G. Stein?”

  Thorsdottir shrugged, realized the gesture was largely obscured in a hardsuit, and pursed her lips noncommittally instead. Then, because she knew Jaed, and knew he would not just stop asking, “We assumed Rose was meant for the Confederation, but what if the Tadeshi were going to use them on vakari colonies or something?”

  Jaed sputtered a word he’d gotten from Grytt. “Then why abandon G. Stein before they found Rose? Why attack and board at all? Why not just blow the ship up? Why come back?”

  “Maybe the Protectorate didn’t know what they were looking for. Maybe the manifest fooled them. Or they think because we showed up, we would know where to find Rose, and maybe that we have them. Which. Ah.” Thorsdottir turned her head, made eyelock, and flicked her gaze down at the compartment on her hardsuit where she was keeping Rose’s clippings.

  Jaed’s astonishment splashed over his face. Then that astonishment cooled, dried, hardened into something cannier. He tapped the side of his helmet and raised both eyebrows. Then he sealed his faceplate. Thorsdottir reminded herself that he’d worked for Dame Maggie and the Lanscottar resistance for months on Urse, while evading his father’s increasingly invasive searches. He only looked like a fresh-faced innocent.

  An impatient innocent: Thorsdottir watched Jaed’s expression perform the facial equivalent of exasperated pacing for a few moments on the far side of his visor, before, with a careful tap of her skull on the helmet’s interior, she dropped her own.

  Her HUD came online, mostly green (you are alive) but with a not insignificant portion of amber (the atmospheric composition displeased it, as did the gravity). There were wobbly lines wrinkling the display at odd intervals, as if there were some kind of EM interference.

  Arithmancy, perhaps. Some indication the vakari had hacked the suits with their admirable, awful arithmancy. Thorsdottir slotted that possibility into the ever-growing category of things over which she had no control.

  “That guard out there might think this is suspicious,” she said. “Putting the visors down. Might as well shout that we’re talking about something secret on suit-comms.”

  “Well, we are.” Jaed leaned forward until her suit, and presumably his, beeped a warning. “Are you telling me you brought Rose with us?”

  “I didn’t exactly have time to store them somewhere else, did I?” The HUD was still flickering. Hope fluttered in the back of Thorsdottir’s throat. “But you know how good they are with hacking things.—Rose? Can you hear me?” If Rose couldn’t answer, or if there wasn’t enough of Rose left to answer, well, that was just how things were, and she and Jaed were no worse off than they’d been.

  Another splash of astonishment widened Jaed’s eyes. Thorsdottir noticed for the first time that Jaed had a fine spray of freckles on his cheeks, faint as milk. From their brief, brief stay on Lanscot, she thought. From the only time in his life he spent outdoors, in sunlight.

  “Are they there? Can they hear you?” he asked, at the same time that Thorsdottir’s HUD assembled a shakily pixelated yes.

  “Yes.” Thorsdottir frowned hush at Jaed. “Are you okay, Rose?”

  The yes blinked. It seemed to be getting a little brighter.

  She nodded, mouthed fine at Jaed, and said aloud, “Do you think Rose could invade their hardsuits? Or their ship? Maybe hack us out of this cell?”

  “That depends on their arithmancy, I guess, and on whether or not there’s enough of them left to contaminate anything besides your suit. Hold still. I have an idea.” Jaed stepped around her, and, after a moment in which she drew breath to demand what he was up to, began picking and prying at something on her backplate. “Presumably Rose had been able to migrate out of the stasis pods by . . . doing something. Something which perhaps required open power conduits, or unshielded, unhexed systems.”

  “Jaed.”

  “There’s a power-cell access panel back here. And if I can get it off, I can link our suits together, and—”

  “And that gives Rose somewhere else to migrate. Maybe someplace else to reproduce?”

  “I think they need something biological for reproduction. The clipping’s got to mean something. Maybe the mecha have a limited lifespan outside of biology? Maybe without a biological anchor the command codes won’t fully activate? I don’t know. I do know that two suits with Rose are better than one.—Yes. Yes.” The second monosyllable rang triumphant.

  Thorsdottir’s HUD announced, via several flashing teslas, that Jaed had succeeded in removing the panel. Next came a great deal of rattling.

  She cast her eyes at the imagined location of the surveillance ’bot. If their fellow prisoner’s image on the monitor was indication, then it must be placed high, maybe over the door. She could not see any of the expected indicators. No strange bumps, or lenses, or marks of any kind. Presumably Jaed, with his arithmancy, was more perceptive. Presumably his hex had blinded it. Presumably—and here, Thorsdottir drifted from presumption into hope, bordering on prayer—the vakari guard wasn’t watching them right now and getting suspicious about their activities.

  Her own attention was drawn to an ominous flash, bright and white and much like sunlight on ice, or a tesla flashing alert, above the door.

  Well. That solved where the surveillance ’bot was, anyway. And whether or not the vakar had noticed.

  “Jaed.” He wasn’t looking at doors or for ’bots. He was tugging on her suit, as if he were wrestling with it, and maintaining a muttered monologue.

  “Don’t have the right cables. Just need to expose a wire—and there. Can Rose cross—Oh. Yes. I see they can. Hi there, Rose. Come on over.—They’re on my HUD. Typing at me.”

  “Jaed. Is that your doing?”

  “What?”

  “Look up. Above the door.”

  She assumed that he was looking; the thumping about on her suit ceased, though that did not entirely reassure her. She did not want to deal with whatever came next with panel ajar still blinking at her.

  “Uh oh.”

  “So it’s not you.”

  “No. My hex isn’t working. It’s . . . gone. Something made it gone.”

  “Another arithmancer.”

  “Really good counter-measures. Could be automated.” He closed her back-panel with more force than she thought was entirely necessary. Then he came around and peered up at the flash. He retracted his visor and squinted up at the ’bot, as if he could peer through it. “Hey. Don’t worry, okay? She had a short in her suit. I was fixing it. That’s all.” He gestured at Thorsdottir. Thorsdottir noticed he’d removed the suit glove, and that his bare hand seemed very small and frail, poking out of the suit, clutching a small nest of wires, the ends of which still dribbled sparks.

  Unless the vakari guard was both especially trusting and not particularly bright, Thorsdottir supposed they would notice and take alarm. She was alarmed—sparks were never a good sign. “Did you destroy your glove?”

  “What? No. I’m just leaving my suit unsealed a little bit longer.”

  Thorsdottir drew breath to demand why he would do that—because it seemed unwise, damag
ing a hardsuit on an alien vessel, and because she was accustomed to Jaed doing things she thought were unwise. But she let her breath out, words unspoken.

  “Rose,” she said, by way of both query and explanation.

  yes, said Rose.

  Jaed, lips pressed thin as a blade, only smiled.

  The tesla above the door stopped flashing.

  Then the cell dimmed, then brightened, then went black for two very long blinks.

  “That was fast,” Jaed said, admiring. “Even for nanomecha.”

  But then the deck jerked underfoot, and he skidded along the bulkhead until he fetched up hard against Thorsdottir.

  “That wasn’t Rose,” Thorsdottir said. “That was an impact. I think this ship is under attack.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “There is nothing new in the multiverse” is an adage that, like most of its genre, is not especially illuminating, but which finds its way onto beverage containers and cheap garments and into the mindset of people under the mistaken impression that indifference indicates sophistication. Nonetheless, there is some truth to the maxim. The multiverse tends to repetition, at least in its physical construction. There are only so many ways physics and alchemy can conspire to create a planetary system, for instance.

  And so Samtalet was, on one level, nothing new: a standard yellow star, a scattering of planetary bodies, including the gas giants Kaosol and Perkele, around the first of which orbited an extensive ring system with rocks large enough to mine. The SAM-1 mining installation made its home in the seventh of Kaosol’s moons, also called (somewhat unimaginatively) SAM-1.

  When Favored Daughter tore a dainty hole out of voidspace and slid into the Samtalet system, she did so conservatively: coming in at the system’s edge, beyond the outermost orbit, clear of known debris.

  Grytt knew this because she was listening to Rupert and Adept Uo-Zanys Kesk, mostly the latter, who was at least as delighted as the former to pontificate on the finer points of arithmancy. Grytt was glad that the eye on that side of her head was a tesla. It couldn’t glaze, or glare, or otherwise betray her impatience. It could, however, show her Rupert, and he appeared to be raptly attentive. He wasn’t faking, either. Grytt could tell.

  She occupied herself instead with the main display, which Favored Daughter’s turing had assembled as a holographic representation above the central console.

  Grytt knew the general arrangements of planetary systems, and she had familiarized herself with Samtalet when Rory relocated there. The novelty in Favored Daughter’s rendition was a combination of orientation—they had not, obviously, come through the system gate—and composition, because in addition to planetary bodies, there were smaller, non-orbiting bodies marked in flashing rings.

  She leaned forward to her harness’s limits. “Are those ships?”

  Even as she inquired, another flashing icon appeared on the hologram, this one uncomfortably (to Grytt’s perception) close to Favored Daughter, parallel to their plane and vector and, evidently, matching speed.

  Hworgesh pressed into his harness, as if he could attain clearer vantage from the extra centimeters such a move afforded him.

  He side-eyed Grytt and stabbed out a finger. “That one, just came in? That’s Bane, my ship. That—” he indicated a purple-ringed blip, “is a Protectorate vessel. Can’t read the name from here, but it’s got a purple ring, so it’s veek. The alwar always make their enemies purple.”

  Purple? Grytt squinted, which was unhelpful for her meat eye and a signal to her mecha one to telescope its focus. It was a bit like looking down a ’slinger’s targeting scope. The rest of the bridge withdrew to the blurry edges of perception. Ah, yes, purple. She made a mental note: tenju vision was superior in distance color-perception, at least. And alwar had a prejudice against purple. That was something Rupert would find interesting.

  Now that she could perceive color, she also noted two red-ringed blips. She jabbed her mecha hand at the hologram. “And those?”

  Hworgesh’s gaze snapped from the hologram to Grytt’s finger, which had caught and reflected the ambient illumination in such a way that it appeared to possess a light of its own.

  “Tadeshi.” His gaze moved from her finger to her face, and he grimaced. “I can’t read the markers from here. Can you?”

  “I can’t read alwar,” she began to say, before realizing that the tiny column of characters beside the blips was not ship-names, but designators of speed, direction, mass, and energy emissions. She picked the one closest to their relative position and adjusted her fingertip accordingly.

  “The smaller one looks dead,” she said. “Minimal energy output. Looks like a little warship, maybe a corsair? That one”—and she pointed to the larger red-ringed dot, which was holding position on the far side of the Protectorate ship—“is alive and really big, whatever . . .” She trailed off. “I think that’s a Tadeshi dreadnought.”

  Hworgesh spat something unintelligible.

  At the word dreadnought, Rupert and the adept stopped talking. At the same instant, several bright yellow streaks appeared on the display, streaking from the dreadnought toward the Protectorate ship.

  “That’s bad,” said Grytt.

  “Yes,” said Rupert, for once devoid of extraneous verbiage or even sufficient volume to reach Grytt’s original, organic ear.

  She shot him a sharp side-eye. His face had collapsed on itself, the skin sagging off the precipice of his nose and cheekbones.

  She felt much the same way Rupert looked. A dreadnought was a serious commitment of personnel and resources for the Tadeshi royalists, and if Dame Maggie’s intelligence was to be trusted, they were getting a little short of both. If that ship was here, there was something of great importance that the Tadeshi were prepared to fight to get.

  Grytt squashed the sick certainty that the something was a someone named Rory. The Tadeshi would love to get their collective hands on her, but not so much that they would send one of their capital ships. This was something else: the weapon the fairy had told Rupert about. Bet on that.

  The bridge held its collective breath, except for a single alwar crew-woman who, after a staccato exclamation (Grytt bet, correctly, that she had called out “they’re firing”), murmured a monologue that sounded like countdown to impact. But before the yellow streaks could reach the vakari ship, they simply . . . vanished.

  The captain barked a query. A different crewperson responded, light-voiced and mostly obscured by the central console.

  “Veek battle-hexes,” Hworgesh said. “Best in the multiverse. It’ll take more than a mass-driven rock to punch through them.”

  “The Tadeshi have more than mass-driven rocks in their arsenal,” said Grytt. “They’ve got missiles. Warheads.”

  “Might as well be rocks.”

  The vakari vessel released its own set of streaks in an unremarkable white, almost lost on the hologram. It seemed to Grytt’s admittedly novice perception of such things to be moving a little bit faster than the Tadeshi’s yellow missiles had been.

  “You ever seen veek whitefire before?” Hworgesh sound both grim and satisfied. “You’re in for a treat.”

  A liberal interpretation of treat, Grytt thought; the white streaks made contact with the dreadnought, and a few of the readouts changed rather abruptly. The dreadnought began, if not a retreat, then at least a reconsideration, maneuvering to put itself behind the dead ship. As it did so, it fired again, another barrage of yellow, accompanied by a few fast-moving green specks.

  “Plasma weapons,” Hworgesh said, and repeated his earlier observation: “They’d be better off just throwing rocks. Veek battle-hexes are nasty.”

  “Wait,” said Grytt. Something was changing on the vakari ship’s readouts, a general shuffling of digits that seemed unusually random. Before Hworgesh could make further comment, the crew-woman who’d first called out did so again, in
tones of surprise. At then the yellow streaks struck their target.

  The purple dot that was the Protectorate ship registered an immediate, violent change in position. No further white streaks were forthcoming. The vakari ship’s readings abandoned their randomized dance and began a steady decline, which, Grytt noted, Adept Uo-Zanys Kesk was watching with a growing incredulity.

  Another set of yellow streaks followed the first, and again, made impact. The vakari ship failed to respond, and though a few of the readings steadied, a few others continued their dive toward zero.

  “Excuse me,” said the adept. She unhooked her harness and was halfway across the bridge before Rupert could finish the reflexively polite “of course.”

  There was some sort of conversation ongoing across the bridge between the adept and the captain. Grytt watched the body language evolve from heads together to facing each other to squared off, with mouths moving rapidly and often simultaneously. The crew kept about its business, pretending oblivion.

  Hworgesh grunted. “I’d trade a tusk to hear what they’re saying.”

  “I can hear it,” Grytt said. “I just can’t understand it. The mecha ear,” she added, when Hworgesh squinted at her, one-eyed and dubiously. “It’s got quite a range.”

  “People know you can do that?”

  “People don’t ask.”

  “Huh. Well.” Hworgesh sat back. “I’m guessing there’s a policy dispute of some kind. Adepts aren’t military, but they carry government weight. This have to do with your diplomacy?”

  He pronounced the word sound like a bad smell.

  “Probably.” Rupert gave himself a visible mental shake and slipped his diplomatic mask back into place. “We are supposed to proceed to SAM-1 to establish an embassy there for the Confederation of Liberated Worlds. I imagine that the fact that the Tadeshi are currently at war with the Confederation, and now appear to be engaged in hostilities with the vakari in this very sector, is likely the source of the captain’s concern.”