Mieli sighs. ‘All right. There are things we need to talk about.’
They wait for Mieli and Zinda on the surface of the koto, near a roofless smartcoral house that marks the entrance to the honeycomb beneath the ice.
‘My lady,’ says Mik, in his baseline form. ‘I doubted you. I grieve for the wounds you suffered. Should anyone question your honour ever again, my blade will have a ready answer for them.’ He kneels in front of her, head bowed.
‘Functor: isomorphism,’ says Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere.
Mieli’s connection to them feels stronger, and there is something new between her and Zinda as well. Entanglement? Is that what it feels like? At the thought, her jewels whisper to her: she is now a Level Twelve Badass of the-Liquorice-Zoku, and a Level Seven Existential Risk Manager of the Great Game.
‘But I failed,’ she says.
‘No. No, you didn’t,’ Zinda says. ‘You discovered that the Sobornost civil war is a great sham, a cover for something. Anti-de-Sitter worked it out. We have already sent the results to the rest of the zoku. You can’t believe how much entanglement that got us.’
‘Show me,’ Mieli says.
Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere opens the Great Game intel spime. It looks strange in the Oort-realm, a multicoloured ball of twine floating in the air.
‘Bayesian inference: different prior. Operation: process tomography.’
The spime expands until they stand in the middle of it, threaded orbits and colourful potential fields.
‘If you work from the assumption that the civil war is a distraction, this is what the zoku thinks they are really doing,’ Zinda says.
The raion and asset flows shift. Subtle anomalies that can be attributed to metacloaked ships are highlighted and interpolated. Even without her tactical gogols, Mieli can spot the pattern. A new hub forms in the network, a blue knot of activity near the Broken Places of Jupiter-that-was.
‘They are assembling a fleet,’ Mieli says. ‘You could hide it in the topological defect webs in the Broken Places. Even guberniyas. Better than a metacloak. Can you tell how many assets they are moving?’
‘As far as we can tell … possibly all of them,’ Zinda says.
I have given them a common enemy, the All-Defector said.
‘Our ancient enemy is moving!’ says Sir Mik, grinning. ‘My blade Soulswallower thirsts for Sobornost blood!’
‘We still don’t know what’s up with the Founders, who or what has managed to get them to cooperate. But it does look like they are getting ready to invade Supra City!’
That’s it, Mieli thinks. All-D is also after the Kaminari jewel. But why did it want me?
She stares at Zinda. The zoku girl’s eyes are gleaming. A strange enthusiasm filters through her zoku jewel.
‘I don’t understand. This is war we are talking about! Why are you all smiling?’
Zinda laughs.
‘Oh, Mieli. Because it’s going to be so much fun!’
Mieli’s rebirth party is just getting started when she arrives.
Her transport bubble leaves her at the opening of a cavern of leaves that leads into the depths of a forest. Ahead, there are warm, coloured lights, shouts and faint music. The party zoku jewel – a small robin’s egg blue thing glittering in her complex hairdo – pulls her forward insistently. She straightens her back, unused to walking with open wings and uncomfortable in her elaborate black dress – another detail Zinda insisted on – and clutches the small handbag she brought for her zoku jewels. Then she takes a deep breath and walks in. The warm heady smell of a summer night greets her.
She had a perfect view of the party Circle from the bubble. The Strip has transformed into a vast woodland garden. The hex where Zinda’s house used to be is overgrown with wild forests, meadows and steep ravines. The river is the only familiar feature, and small boats with colourful sails drift along it. Zinda is expecting a lot of guests: a mass stream has been diverted and hangs in the sky like a silver rainbow. Transport bubbles drift drown from it, mixing with the Chinese paper lanterns that float everywhere above the trees. The solettas have been turned away from the Strip, and the sky is almost as vast as outside a koto in Oort, full of faint stars and the bright discs of Rhea and the other inner moons.
Mieli sighs. Cypress leaves rustle and tickle her bare feet as she walks. There is a clearing somewhere ahead, and the voices grow louder. She is not looking forward to meeting more zoku strangers, more faces that are just masks for something else, that shift and change between every Realm and Circle faster than she can keep track of.
‘Of course you have to come!’ Zinda said and gave her a shocked look, when she hinted that she was tired. ‘It was my first field mission, and it would not have happened without you! We have to celebrate!’
Mieli just wants to pray and meditate in her garden, but it is difficult to sit still when her new body is a chorus of noise. She was remade after the battle on Hektor. The Great Game offered her a trueform – a completely artificial shell of foglets and diamond – but she refused, insisting on a synthbio replica of her biological body, preserving whatever original components survived. It is not baseline, of course: she kept her metacortex, tactical gogols and reflexes, and added a few choice zoku q-tech enhancements. Having a high level of entanglement in the Great Game Zoku turned out to have some advantages, after all. If she ever meets the All-Defector again, she will be ready. But it is taking a while to adjust. Her gogols constantly complain about the unfamiliar interfaces, a subliminal neural chatter that leaves her edgy, and there are phantom tingles in her right leg, in spite of her attempts to filter them out with the metacortex.
Yet it is nothing compared to the thoughts racing through her mind, in circles like horses in the brass-and-neon carousel she glimpsed in the party clearing from above. The invasion. The pellegrini. The Kaminari jewel. Sydän. Round and round.
She reaches the edge of the clearing. The carousel is ahead, and a few scattered guests are standing around it. There are small tents and tables, long-legged golden robots in tuxedos serving drinks. The party jewel is urging her on. Others are floating down from the sky, trueforms shimmering into well-dressed baseline party guests. Zinda is clearly trying to make her comfortable: the Circle rules specify human forms only. She blinks when the ground shakes and an angular, robotic kaijuform from the Big Game Zoku that towers above the treetops steps into the party Circle, and instantly evaporates into a shimmer of foglets, leaving behind a small party in evening wear: two girls in twin yellow dresses, laughing, and an elf-man in a tuxedo who reminds her a little of Sir Mik.
Mieli frowns. How can they be so carefree? There is an invasion coming, perhaps within days, certainly not much longer – now that the Sobornost ruse has been discovered, the obvious tactical move is to strike immediately. The fleet and the guberniyas with their Hawking drives may already be on their way. The zoku must know that with the vast energies of the Inner System under Sobornost control, Supra City is at an enormous disadvantage – yet the Liquorice-zoku talks about the coming battle like it was a difficult level in a game. If the Great Game is doing something about it, she is not included in the effort: that jewel has been silent ever since their return from the Jovian Trojan belt. And in spite of her enormously increased entanglement within the secretive zoku, she has not dared to request any more information.