by Ian McDonald
Charles Villiers waited in the antechamber. He applauded softly. The hand claps were very light and dry in the huge white room. A woman stood at his side. She was so like Plenipotentiary Villiers that they could be twins. Everett M suspected they were closer than that. She was dressed in what looked to him like 1940s-style clothing—tight skirt, fishnet tights, jacket nipped at the waist but wide at the shoulders, a small, dapper hat with a lace veil that covered her eyes. Her lips were very red, vampire red. She could only be from E3, that weird parallel earth with no oil.
“My alter, Charlotte Villiers,” Charles Villiers announced.
Alters creeped Everett M. They were the many yous that Prime Minister Portillo had carefully avoided talking about. Sometimes they were the same sex, sometimes, like Charles and Charlotte, they were not. Everett M knew the urban legends about alters—that they could share thoughts across universes, that many famous people had been replaced by evil alters without anyone ever knowing, that they should never meet because if they did they would annihilate each other in a colossal explosion that would destroy everything inside ten kilometers.
Charlotte Villiers extended a gloved hand. With a flicker of thought Everett M retracted his weaponry. The hatches in his arms closed without a seam. He took the offered hand. Charlotte Villiers's grip was strong, but with the Thryn enhancements, he could crush it like an origami bird. He could crush any hand. He hardly needed to think about the weapons Madam Moon had put inside his hands and forearms, the grip she had put in his fingers and the agility in his shoulders, the speed in his legs, the sight in his eyes that went way beyond normal vision, the super-sharp hearing, the new sense that was not quite sight and not quite hearing, more like a radar in his head. They were as much a part of him now as the lungs and heart and brain he had been born with. But could he even trust those? Just because he couldn't see them didn't mean they had not been touched by Madam Moon. There might be no part of him that had not been rebuilt by Thryn technology.
“Impressive, Mr. Singh,” Charlotte Villiers said. “It's almost second nature to you. Thought and action one seamless whole. I think you'll soon be ready for what we need you to do. Soon.”
“I don't quite understand what you mean ma'am.” Everett M had learned that Plenipotentiaries expected to be addressed respectfully. Shake their hands. Bow to them. Call them ma'am and sir. He did so, even though he mistrusted Charles Villiers and mistrusted his cool, arrogant alter even more.
“Paintballs, Mr. Singh. Really, what are they? A small sting and a stain that quickly washes out. The real world does not fire paint, Mr. Singh. The real world fires lead. Dare you face a live-fire run, Mr. Singh? Safeties off. No paint. Lead. Hot lead. That's a test worthy of what we've had done to you.”
“That's a big ask, Ms. Villiers.” Despite the veil, Charlotte Villiers could look Everett M clear and straight in the eye in a way that her alter, Charles, could not. Everett M could look straight back.
“Yes it is, but I couldn't ask it if I were not prepared to do it myself. A race, Mr. Singh. First out of the gate wins. Live fire. Are you up to it, Mr. Singh?”
“Ms. Villiers, I don't mean to be rude, but I've been fitted with Thryn technology.”
Charlotte Villiers snapped open her bag. She took out a small gun. It was as pretty as jewellery, with an ivory handle, a barrel engraved with twining flower patterns.
“St. Xavious's School Shooting Champion 1996; Cambridge Ladies Sporting Pistol and Revolver 1997, 1998, 1999; All-England Women's Small Arms 2000, Empire Games Gold Medal 2001. Charles, be a darling, set up a doubles course.”
“Ms. Villiers, I don't think…” her alter said.
“Charles, my mind is set.”
Charles Villiers went to the control panel, a black oval on the top of a white cylinder that was the only feature in the white antechamber. White on white was the colorless color of the Thryn, but Everett M knew by the tug of gravity that this training facility was not on the Moon. Where it might be, he had no idea. He had walked through a doorway, and in one step he'd felt the weight on his bones grow six times. Charles Villiers's finger hesitated over the touch panels. His alter snapped him a freezing look. Charles's fingers danced over the glowing lights. Everett M heard subtle machinery whir beyond the big, white wall with the glowing exit portal. The floor trembled. He was learning this about Thryn tech: it consisted of massive transformations hidden behind perfect, seamless surfaces.
“Thank you, darling.”
Everett M's eyes went wide as Charlotte Villiers shook loose her skirt, let it fall, and stepped out of it. She unbuttoned her jacket and slid it off. Beneath she wore a leotard and fishnet tights. Her body was as lean and wiry as a whippet. From her bag she took a pair of light ballet pumps, kicked off her shoes, and pulled them on. Last of all she removed her hat, straightened the veil, and handed it to her alter. She kept her gloves on. Charlotte Villiers shook out her curling fair hair and glanced over at the control panel. Again, that glare of ice. “Charles. I said, safeties off.” A fingertip skimmed a switch. A light went from green to red. Entrance gates opened on either side of the exit portal, black holes in the white. Charlotte Villiers walked up to the gate on the right, moving as lightly and confidently as a hunting animal, her gun easy in her hand.
“Will you play, Mr. Singh?”
Everett M gave her a small bow and took his place in front of the left gate.
“Whenever you're ready.”
Charlotte Villiers smiled.
“Count us down, Charles.”
A thirty second clock appeared over the gate. Everett M looked down deep into himself, felt the depth of the Thryn technology inside him, touched it, woke it. Strength, speed, alertness gushed through him. He felt the weapon systems under his skin come to life. He willed away the tranquilizer darts, the concussion field. Live fire was live fire both ways. Nano-missiles and finger lasers online, he thought, and he felt them stir inside him.
The counter ticked down, twenty to ten to five. Klaxons blared. The gate was open. Everett M leaped forward. Beside him, Charlotte Villiers sprang like a pouncing cat.
When the first soldier sprang up straight in his face within two strides of the entry gate, Everett M knew this was not the same maze. He ducked under the targeting laser, pointed his fingers, and swept it across the machine. His own laser sliced the dummy into two smoking halves. Melted plastic dripped from burn line as the severed top half wavered and then fell to the floor. It hadn't even had time to pull its gun.
Cold gripped Everett M but he pushed on. The fingers lasers drew on the energy of his own body. Each shot drove the cold deeper into him.
The corridor doubled back on itself in a sharp S-shaped bend. An obvious and easy place to defend, with pop-up soldiers, one in each corner, covering the approaches and the angles. Running the mazes had taught Everett M to notice hairline cracks in the floor, the edges of the trapdoors and hatches from which the soldiers sprang. He edged carefully around the corner. Too far and the sensors would spot him and the soldier would pop up and shoot. It would not be paint they were firing this time.
He heard a muffled gunshot. That would be from the other maze. He didn't think it was the dummy soldier. A television-screen-sized area of the corridor wall blurred and turned into an image: Charlotte Villiers in her maze, pressed up like Everett M against the same corner. Her gun was pressed against her cheek, ready to swing on to the next target. Everett M didn't doubt that Charlotte Villiers was watching him on a similar screen.
But I can see things that you can't, Everett M thought. With his new Thryn sense, he looked into the hairline cracks in the floor and felt out the mechanisms in there, the ones he could see and the ones he could not see directly. He could sense how they were connected together and how they would operate. I see you now, Everett M thought, willing power into his finger lasers. He took a breath, then rolled. The soldiers at each end of the corridor came up, their guns swinging. He took their heads clean off, one with the left laser, the o
ther with the right, before they could take aim. Again he heard gunfire, but he followed the roll through, underneath the arc of fire of the third soldier at the far end of the double-back. As the soldier tried to track him, Everett willed the panel in his forearm open. The nano-missile he fired took out the soldier instantly. The blast was deafening in the confined corridors of the death maze. His Thryn-augmented hearing moderated the noise to a safe level.
Did you hear that, Charlotte Villiers?
Everett M moved into the next section, a screen that was clearly Thryn technology following him as he moved. He watched Charlotte Villiers take the pop-up soldiers cleanly out, one shot each. She walked like a cat down the corridor, calmly and efficiently reloading her gun.
The next section was a long, straight run of corridor. It was clearly a big, obvious trap. Everett M scanned it with his Thryn sense—he had come to think of it as longsight. He longsaw nothing. But that didn't mean that there was nothing there. There could be traps inside traps, traps beyond the range of his longsight. Maybe there were no traps, and that was the trap. Maybe the maze was designed so that you would edge forward, always expecting something to spring on you, but nothing would, until you were so tense with expectation that when the real trap sprang, you would fall right into it. Everett M armed weapons, slid them out of the hatches in his arms, and walked forward. And walked. And walked. The screen kept pace with him, Charlotte Villiers matching him step for step. His evil twin, his alter. This section of the maze, Everett M thought, was that last kind of trap.
At the end of the corridor the maze turned sharp right. Here was where the trap would be sprung. Everett M willed power into his legs. Accuracy and firepower are good, but speed is best. Speed is life. He launched himself forward. And walls, ceiling, floor opened up in soldiers and turrets and swivel-guns. A sweep of his left-finger laser took out three soldiers, pin-point shots with the right took out the turrets springing out of the floor. As he ran and jumped and dodged, he launched nano-missiles from his forearm and sought out and killed the ceiling guns. He hated using the missiles. They were single-shot weapons that could not be replaced. But there was so much, coming from everywhere, all at once. He made the next turn of the maze. Behind him the corridor was a mass of burning, smoking, melting plastic and circuitry.
Everett M was panting. He was freezing. He had pumped a dangerous amount of energy into the lasers. And he did not know how much more of this there would be. He looked at the floating screen. He had been too occupied with the cacophony of gunfire and explosions on his side of the maze to pick out the pistol shots that rang out from Charlotte Villiers's side. On the screen she stood calmly, steadily reloading her gun. A single bead of sweat ran down the side of her face.
A section of wall opened. A new corridor curved out of sight. Everett M clenched his fists and felt the power channeling into the Thryn biotech lasers. And again. And again. He darted through tunnels that switched back on themselves and went over and under themselves and perhaps even through, each turn guarded by soldiers. He fought through a maze of panels that slid and rearranged themselves, sometimes opening false corridors, other times exposing entire batteries of automatic weapons. He slid down shafts that suddenly opened under him, fired between his feet at the gun turrets opening up deadly iron flowers before him. And every time he looked, Charlotte Villiers kept pace with him—cool, elegant, and relentless. Not a blonde curl was out of place.
Behind him, Everett M Singh left smoking wreckage. He was shaking with the cold now, and he'd grown ravenously hungry. His own lasers could kill him just as surely as any soldier's bullet, sucking the heat out of him until hypothermia came creeping into his bones, with its sly, evil suggestions: Slow down, lie down, rest a little, go to sleep. But he kept pumping energy into the lasers. He had to keep the nano-missiles in reserve for when he really needed them. Adrenaline burn kept him going, kept his Thryn senses sharp and fast and deadly. He seemed to have been running this maze for hours. He thought it might be rebuilding itself behind him, turning him back on himself and sending him through the same loop again and again—the same, but rebuilt into something different every time. He might be on Earth, but this was not human technology. He was sure of that. And then he saw it, a glimmer of neon. The exit gate. He paused to lock his longsight on the glow. Suddenly, a ring of soldiers sprang up around him. Everett M crossed his arms and yelled. A spread of nano-missiles shredded them. The gate was in sight. He could afford to use missiles now. Everett M willed power into his legs and charged for the circle of white light. Soldiers leaped up in his path. He cut them apart with laser fire even before they had completely deployed and unfolded. He glanced at the moving screen. Charlotte Villiers was three paces behind him. The Thryn technology had turned Everett M's natural body sense—the same body sense that had made him such a good goalkeeper at Bourne Green—into something almost like a super power, but Charlotte Villiers moved like a trained athlete. Senses, thought, action amounted to one thing—instinct. Everything was instinct, every move the minimum effort for the maximum effect. And her little evil gun never missed.
There was nothing between Everett M and the exit gate. A quick dash would win him the race. Then he remembered. Look behind you. He turned just as the soldier bounced out of the floor. A nano-missile blew it to shards of flying plastic and metal. As he turned to the gate, he saw Charlotte Villiers running for her own glowing exit portal. He saw the soldier pop up behind her. He saw it unfold and level its guns. He saw that she did not see it.
Thought and action in unity. Everett M took a visual fix on the soldier in the other maze. He fed targeting commands to his Thryn systems. With a yell, he loosed his final nano-missile. It blazed out through the gate in front of him, then turned. Go go go! Everett M willed at it. The nano-missile entered Charlotte Villiers's maze through the exit gate. On the screen, he saw Charlotte Villiers's eyes go wide in shock as she dived out of the missile's path. You think I'm trying to kill you, Everett thought. You'll find out the truth in three, two, one…He could hear the explosion through the maze wall. Charlotte Villiers looked behind her. In that glance, she made up her mind. She ran for the exit gate. In his own maze, Everett M sprang forward. But he was so cold, so drained. He watched Charlotte Villiers pass through her exit gate two steps ahead of him.
She stood beside her alter, hardly out of breath. Everett M could read the look on her face. It was not triumph. It was something he had never seen before: hatred. I saved your life, Everett M thought. You owe me, you will always owe me, and you hate that. You hate that and you hate me. With a thought, he powered down his lasers and closed up the weapon ports Madam Moon had put into his body. I have an enemy now.
Frost clung silver to the decking and to the nanocarbon-fibre struts. Everett's breath froze as it left his mouth. He carefully wiped the ice crystals from Dr. Quantum's screen. A careless touch and he could erase a key line of code. Days of work, with the temperature dropping around him as Mchynlyth tried to conserve power, could be undone in an instant. And he couldn't even be sure that there wasn't a mistake in there, some unnoticed slip of fingers so cold they hurt. Everett remembered the sports teacher at Bourne Green School who had arranged to end the Christmas Term one year by holding a football tournament. Sleet had blown horizontally from a weather front straight down from Greenland. Within ten minutes Everett's fingers had been so numb that he couldn't grip the ball. A kick, a punch, a dive between the ball and the back of the net was the best he could do. The teacher-referee finally, mercifully, blew the whistle. In the shower at home Everett had almost wept with pain as the hot water brought life painfully back to his frozen hands.
This was worse.
Everett blew on the fingers of his right hand, breathing a little warmth and movement into them. Done. It was done. It had been a long, painful grunt job. There had been no moments of revelation, no blinding insights that ignited and inspired him to work beyond the limits of exhaustion and hunger. It hadn't been like the night, two universes away,
when he had discovered how to turn the data in the Infundibulum into a map of the multiverse. Unlike that night of breathless insight, this project had been nothing but the hard slog of translating one bit of code into another, finding a way for the Infundibulum and the jumpgun to talk to each other. And it was finally done. He would have loved a day—even a few hours—to debug the code. But he had only twenty minutes. That was the lead time Captain Anastasia and Sen had over whatever they had found out there on the ice. Sharkey's radar had picked up three contacts: two that were small, fast, and fleeing, and one that was big and fast.
Everett didn't believe in a god, so he couldn't send up a little prayer. And he didn't believe in luck—he knew how probability worked and how people liked to make coincidences into patterns. So he just said “Okay, go,”—a geekboy's prayer—and tapped the run button. Code scrolled up the screen. Everett watched, his breath steaming and freezing. The code rolled on and on and on. Had it looped? Just as he was about to hit the cancel button, the screen went black, then cleared to show the desktop and an install dialogue box. He clicked install. The green bar filled. Everett realized that he was holding his breath. The screen went black again. Then the Infundibulum opened, along with his own piece of code: the Jump Controller. Everett had designed it from his memories of the control system for operating the Heisenberg Gate in his own world, hidden down in the abandoned Channel Tunnel exploratory diggings, buried deep under chalk. Operating the Jump Controller was simple. You dragged a multiverse address code from the Infundibulum into the destination panel. Then you hit the big JUMP button. The interface fed code to the jumpgun, which opened a maximum-aperture portal around Everness. And in an eye blink you would be somewhere else.
