I hesitate for a moment. Would it be better to just cut my losses, leave now and find another way in? I don’t have to involve Matjek in this. Do I have the right?
I shake my head. There is no time, and I have no alternatives.
All right, Matjek. Listen to me very carefully. Remember to do exactly as I tell you. I form a complex thought, mapping it out in the spimescape, and send it to him. He devours it eagerly.
Then I check the status of the nuclear warheads I sold to the zoku youths as detailed replicas of the Tsar Bomba. While a cursory inspector would mistake them for the biggest hydrogen bombs ever built on Earth, they are in fact disguised qupt transmitters. Their cores hide ion traps entangled with their twins inside the Wang bullet, and their complex layers of deuterium and tritium are designed to send out a carefully modulated neutrino signal, capable of penetrating several light years of solid lead – or the walls of the Gun Club’s Arsenal.
To my relief, several of the Tsars are still unused, even though the thermonuclear war game is heating up by the minute. I watch Matjek flash down the quptlink into one of the bombs like a genie into a bottle. I swear to myself I will make it up to the boy, and pray to all the gods of thieves that I will have the strength to carry the weight of all my promises.
Otherwise, the fail will be epic, as the zoku like to say.
‘We are happy with the approach you propose,’ I tell Barbicane when I return to the Circle. ‘However—’
‘Yes?’
I look at the zoku Elder hesitantly.
‘Would you grant me one favour in return? I would like to accompany you to see the famous Arsenal. I may be a deserter, but I am still a soldier, and I am still fond of the tools of my trade.’
‘But of course!’ Barbicane says. ‘It’s the least we can do!’
Chekhova looks disappointed. I’m sure she would prefer to flash back into her trueform and get on with it. But that would be rude as welclass="underline" Barbicane has created this Circle, and she would lose face – and entanglement – if she was to leave. I smile at her warmly. She scowls at me.
An exceptionally large nuclear blast goes off in the Turgis Crater, somewhere above the British Isles.
‘Was that a Tsar Bomba?’ I ask. Matjek, converted into entanglement and neutrinos, delivered into a body waiting inside the Wang bullet in the Arsenal.
‘By Jove, you are right!’ Barbicane says. ‘How very astute! We do have a true connoisseur of ancient weapons here, Chekhova dear! You must see the Arsenal’
Then he frowns. ‘The spectrum was a tad off, though. Only means the young ones still have a few tricks to learn, eh!’ He elbows me rather brutally with his massive gun arm. ‘But no matter. There’s several real ones and more besides where we’re going!’
Ahead, the orbital ring sprouts a golden tendril that bends towards the surface of Iapetus, down towards the massive equatorial bulge that makes the whole moon look like a walnut. The ring is a continuous stream of magnetic particles, encased in a tube and accelerated to furious speeds with electromagnetic fields – a giant circular gun, in other words. Diverting a part of the flow to a receiver station on the surface creates a railway track in the sky. We finish our port as the train rides along it downwards, suspended between the looming yellow eye-lobe of Saturn and the fading nuclear fires of the children’s war.
The Arsenal of the Gun Club Zoku.
It is a series of chambers beneath Iapetus’s formidable equatorial ridge, buried beneath some of the highest mountains in the Solar System. Some of the spaces are tens of kilometres long and several in diameter, although it is hard to determine the strange blue-green illumination. The walls are not stone: they look like a blue sky, stretched and folded into itself. Looking at the smooth surface disturbs the eye. Nothing casts shadows on whatever the material is, probably pseudomatter of some kind, a picotech construct more solid than anything made of atoms.
The weapons themselves are suspended in the air in deadly constellations, rows upon rows of rifles, pistols and cannons. Their colours stand out starkly: black gunmetal, dabs of olive and camouflage and silver. It makes me feel like I’m floating across an ocean floor, surrounded by shoals of deadly multicoloured fish.
Barbicane, Chekhova and I are carried by a small q-dot bubble, still within our Circle, sitting in the armchairs. The bubble compensates for the low gravity of Iapetus by exerting a gentle foglet pressure on our limbs. I don’t like it: it makes me feel confined, and my anxiety levels are already high enough. Chekhova sits in an impatient hunch, barely looking at me, but Barbicane is enjoying his role as a tour guide.
‘It has taken a while to collect all these!’ he says. ‘And we keep at least one copy of everything our members create in here. Everything is perfectly preserved, in full operational condition.’
Zoku trueforms move between the guns like medusae. There is an occasional flash and a report as a weapon is tested. The shots echo hollowly in the vast space.
‘Ha!’ Barbicane says, when he sees me flinch. ‘Don’t worry! Safety first! But guns need to be used! Not like collecting comic books, to be kept inside plastic foil! All hooked up to our gunscape, to be used by all our zoku, everywhere!’
I smile and count seconds in my head. I need to keep Barbicane and Chekhova occupied until Matjek finishes his part of the job. What is taking him so long? Unfortunately, I don’t dare to leave the Circle to check.
‘This is all very impressive,’ I say. ‘Antiques are nice. But I thought your zoku’s own creations were a bit more … ambitious. Tell, me, what is the biggest gun you have? That is something I’d like to see. I hear the Sobornost have solar lasers, and I always wondered if you could match them.’
Chekhova doesn’t even bother acknowledging my question. But Barbicane winks at me.
‘Oh, the biggest would not fit in here,’ he says. ‘We make the mass drivers for Supra City’s dynamic support members, for example. But I can show you the most interesting!’ He nudges Chekhova. ‘No need for false modesty here, my dear. Show him!’
She sighs and directs the q-dot bubble downwards with a gesture.
The next chamber is big.
It contains several holeships – gigantic wingless dragonflies, dull grey spheres with linear accelerator tails, several kilometres long. The insides of the spheres are perfect reflectors: they are used to store black holes, keeping them stable with their own Hawking radiation – until it’s time to fire them.
But it is the thing in the centre of the chamber that gives me pause. It looks vaguely like the head of a vast insect. There are two compound eyes, bulbous, globular arrays of transparent hexagons, joined at the waist. At the point where they meet, something rotates slowly, multiple silver spheres joined with spokes, like the model of a molecule – except that as it revolves, parts of it disappear and reappear in a disorienting fashion.
‘What is that?’
‘My ekpyrotic gun,’ Chekhova says wearily.
‘It does not look that big.’
‘This is just the main aperture. You need to drop it into a gas-giant-sized mass to fire it. After the Spike, those are in short supply.’
‘And what does it do?’
‘It generates a gravitational disturbance that makes our spacetime emit a brane into the higher dimensions of the bulk. It bounces off the Planck brane and collides with ours again. It creates a miniature Big Bang.’
Suddenly, it is easier to see things from the Great Game Zoku’s point of view.
‘Sounds like it would be quite difficult to aim.’
I check my internal clock. What is Matjek doing? My instructions were very precise. He should be in the Leblanc already. My original plan was to seal the deal and use the Bomba’s neutrino signal to qupt myself into the body I have hidden in the Wang bullet – just a loose collection of smart dust, almost undetectable – merely intended to get me aboard my ship, stored somewhere in the Arsenal. Once there, there is little that could stop us from getting out.