Please hurry, Isidore. And stay out of this. You have a planet to rule. There is a Sobornost civil war going on: the usual courtesies do not apply anymore. If they find out you have the Key, they will come after you. You don’t need distractions.
Like I said. You have no idea, Isidore qupts. There you go. A dense, compressed collection of co-memories floods the quptlink. I file it away for detailed analysis, thankful that I kept the vasilev-made exomemory emulation and hacking tools I used during my brief but eventful visit to the Oubliette.
Thank you, Isidore. I am in your debt. I pause. Please say hello to Raymonde for me. I try to hide the bittersweet emotion with vodka and lemon, sending the tart taste of my drink with the qupt.
I will. But Jean, why are you trying to find Mieli? She fought side by side with Raymonde, her ship saved us from the phoboi, we are all grateful for that, but what do you owe her? It sounds like you are free now. You can go anywhere you want. This time the hint of bitterness is his. From what I know about her, Mieli can look after herself. Why are you trying so hard to save her?
The question takes me by surprise. I let time flow at its usual pace so I have time to think. Isidore is right. I could go anywhere. I could be anyone. I could go to Saturn or beyond, find someone to take care of Matjek, and then be Jean le Flambeur again.
Perhonen once asked me what I was going to do when our mission was over. When I think about it now, it is like peeking over a sheer cliff. It makes my gut wrench with fear. So little of me came out of the Prison intact. What do I have left, except promises?
Besides, Mieli still has a chance. She has spent her entire life chasing after a lost love, and it has all been for nothing. That’s what happens to those whom Joséphine Pellegrini touches, I know that far too well.
Because it’s the kind of thing that Jean le Flambeur would do, I whisper down the quptlink. Stay out of trouble, Isidore.
Then I cut the link and lose myself in the data, and finally find Mieli in the memories of flowers.
The data is from a Quiet-built distributed telescope. Like much of Oubliette technology, it is more like an art project than engineering: synthbio flowers with photosensitive petals that collectively form a vast imaging device, seeded in the city’s footsteps across Mars. They spend their lives watching the Martian sky like a vast compound eye, until the phoboi eat them.
The data is from the Oubliette exomemory, and so accessing it is like remembering. Suddenly, I recall seeing a tiny dot in the sky. But unlike with a normal memory, the more I focus on it, the clearer the image becomes, until I see Perhonen’s winged spiderweb form. A thought brings me to the right moment. There is a flash, and then a smaller shape detaches from the ship, hurtling through the void.
There she is. I follow her with the flowers’ eyes.
Mieli floats in the nothingness, a woman in a dark robe, turning and tumbling, until a ship comes for her, a zoku ship, shaped like a glass clockwork orrery. Zoku trueforms – foglet clouds around human faces with jewel haloes – pour out and surround her. Then she is gone, and the ship accelerates at a solid G, towards the Highway.
I summon my minions. It only takes them moments to identify Mieli’s rescuer in the public Highway spimescapes. Bob Howard, a Rainbow Table Zoku vessel – one of the sysadmin ships that the zoku use to maintain their router network. Uncharacteristically, it is currently on its way to Saturn, riding one of the expensive kiloklick beams, and will reach Supra City in approximately seventeen days. Not very efficient use of resources for a sysadmin zoku, especially given the chaotic situation in the Inner System.
I steeple my fingers and think. The Great Game Zoku has Mieli, there is no doubt about it now. One of their sleepers in the Rainbow Table must have spotted an intel gathering opportunity and has been ordered to deliver Mieli to Saturn. Of course, they could have decided to shove her through a Realmgate instead, turned her into quantum information and used the router network to get her there nearly at the speed of light – but Mieli has military-grade Sobornost implants that could have self-destructed her when passing through a Realmgate. No, they are trying to get her there with all her atoms intact.
I empty my glass, lean back and let the mutter of the bar wash over me. There is still time. The seeds of a plan are already taking root in my head. Unfortunately, the Wardrobe will never get to Saturn that fast. My issues with the jannah ship are not merely aesthetic.
But Isidore had a point. I do have my freedom now: apart from annoyingly persistent copy protection, the cognitive locks that Joséphine caged me with are almost completely gone. Ever since we left Earth, I have been thinking about my other ship, my real ship, the Leblanc, and its hiding place in the Gun Club’s Arsenal on Iapetos. If I could just get to it in time—
Or if I could slow things down.
All the uncertainty is gone. I feel like myself again. I lose myself in the plan. I’m going to need tools. A quantum pyramid scheme. A pair of physical bodies, a nugget of computronium, a bunch of entangled EPR pairs and a few very special hydrogen bombs …
I’m going to take her away from you, Joséphine. I’m going to steal her back.
To my surprise, the pyramid scheme turns out to be the easy part.
You are now a Level 4 Navigator! I receive a satisfying jolt of entanglement from the Highway-zoku with the qupt, a reward for discovering a new coordination equilibrium that unravelled a conflict over trajectories through a Jovian Lagrange point. Of course, they don’t have to know that I used a botnet to create the conflict in the first place.
Bid for your mass stream herding contract: gathering fragments specified by <SPIME> and guiding them to Iapetos. Offer: a combinatorial auction for Iapetos corridor access or equivalent Highway entanglement. A cetamorph ship – a huge bubble of water held together by a synthbio membrane and crewed by hominid-whale hybrids – wants to take up my job offer to collect the Wang bullet fragments and take them to Saturn. I set up a mental alert to review it later: I can’t afford it just yet.
Expressing. Desire. Collective. Join. A qupt that echoes with a thousand collective voices. A big punter, this one: a Venusian floating city jury-rigged into a spacecraft, the Vepaja, carrying Sobornost-grade computronium. I devote a few milliseconds of attention to reel it in and send it a quantum contract. The city does not read the fine print. It’s hard – NP-hard, to be precise – when verifying the contract structure is computationally intractable within the lifetime of the Universe.
Earth’s destruction convinced the Beltworlds that the Sobornost has finally started a campaign of active assimilation. The Highway is overloaded, with every refugee competing for rapid low-energy orbits out of the Inner System. I am one of many entrepreneurial minds to propose a collective computational effort to nearby ships to look for better corridors out of the Inner System, and to win Highway-zoku entanglement. The trick is to embed a simple quantum program in the contract that allows me to skim a small amount off the top of whatever the collective members receive – and to make algorithmic bids for certain trajectories, making them very desirable.
Ursomorph rockship Yogi-14 attacking Ceresian ships Featherlight and Honesty.
I cringe. That was an unfortunate side effect of my scheme. An ursomorph rockship – shaped like a flint axe, kilometres long, sculpted by synthbio and fusion flame – refuses to admit that it lost a trajectory bid. The wispy medusa ships of the Ceresians descend upon it. The Highway-zoku struggles to contain the destruction, sends in their own q-ships, relocates lightmills to route traffic around the expanding bubble of the battlefield.