One minute.
Perhaps it is a trick. Perhaps the real crime is happening somewhere else.
There is a sudden shiver in the F-ring that is not due to Pandora or Prometheus. Mieli’s systems, linked to the Great Game, find solutions to the inverse problem, look for gravitational sources that could explain the anomaly. That can’t be right. Several huge masses, approaching fast. Seven of them.
Guberniyas. Not now, not yet. He is working with them. This was all just a distraction.
The spimescape goes white with zoku chatter. The ripple in the rings grows into a tear. Mieli’s systems register something impossibly blue-shifted for an instant.
Then a vast knife slices through Saturn’s rings.
There is a wedge-shaped disturbance that plows through the silver bands of F, D, C and B, leaving behind a deformed cut, fraying at the edges, pulling icy bodies behind it. Then, a single flash of light on Saturn’s surface.
The Sobornost just hit a Plate with a kinetic weapon, she thinks. No matter. It’s just another level boss, like Zinda said. All of Supra City will join the war zoku. Already, she can feel a new thread in her q-self, pulling at her will, and she gets ready to flow in the cool stream of the zoku volition, anticipates the heat of battle.
A discontinuity. A flash of a scintillating web, overlaid on the face of Saturn. Then, a sudden emptiness.
It takes her a moment to realise all her zoku jewels are dead, devoid of entanglement. The sudden utter freedom in her head is like falling, naked, from a great height, towards the abyss of Saturn. A great terror rises within her. Is this what Zinda felt like? And she still did it for me?
The spimescape fills with the white noise of non-qupt chatter. All quptlinks are broken. All entangled states in zoku jewels have decohered. All zoku – the Great Game and the Ganimard and the Notch and the Evangelion alike – are in utter disarray, their perfect quantum order dissolving into chaos, like melting ice.
And the Sobornost is coming.
What have they done?
The nova of her anger surprises her. She pushes herself off Prometheus on her suit’s thrusters. The raions and nanomissiles will be coming soon. She launches autonomous q-dots in a sphere around her to form a defensive perimeter. Something drops a metacloak near her and triggers them almost immediately.
A ship. In quicktime, she has a brief flash of its shape, a blue, elongated droplet of smartmatter, like the petal of a flower. She fires her cannon at it.
The newcomer’s EM field grabs her, hard. The 20G acceleration shakes her like a leaf in a hurricane. Prometheus becomes a pinpoint in an instant. What is it doing? Through the acceleration strain, she tries to scan the ship, target something she can hurt with the tiny antimatter payload in her cannon. It is pulling her in.
Wait. Wait. She tries to keep her weapon steady. The EM field pulls her closer. Her gogols are making sense of the ship’s structure now, a strange zoku-Sobornost hybrid, high-end picotech and a micro-singularity somewhere inside. Well, this should at least hurt. She gets ready to fire the antimatter pellet, targets it to burrow into the ship’s core. If the Hawking radiation containment breaks, it will take them both, but the fire in Mieli’s mind wants something to burn.
Just before she presses the mind-trigger, a qupt comes.
Hello, Mieli. There is something familiar about this. Except this time, you were the one in a prison.
She hesitates for an instant. The EM field pulls her in, and the midnight skin of the ship swallows her.
16
THE THIEF AND MIELI
Mieli appears in the pilot’s cabin of the Leblanc, just like she does in my fondest memories: wearing a furious expression.
‘You,’ she hisses. She is how I remember her from Perhonen, a compact woman in a black toga, her only ornament the jewelled chain around her ankle, a gift from an Oortian lover. The sudden rush of familiarity almost makes me embrace her. Still, I keep my distance: we may be in a Realm under my control, and I was prudent enough to delete her weapons when qupting her into the virtual space inside the ship, but Mieli is still one of the most dangerous individuals I know.
I grin. ‘Me. Welcome aboard the Leblanc. As you have probably figured out by now, I didn’t come here to steal Saturn’s ring. I came here to steal you. I have a small Great Game jewel, and managed to slip some ideas into the zoku volition, so I could make sure you were somewhere I could find you. In case you had any ideas from someone called Lenormand, that was me. I had a strangelet bomb set up on Pandora as a distraction. Turns out I didn’t have to use it, thanks to the exceedingly well-timed Sobornost invasion. Tell me, how does it feel to be free?’
Her hands clench and unclench. Then she moves faster than I can react. A silver filigreed blade shimmers into being in her hand, and then its point is inches away from my eyeball, her other hand firmly around my throat. Of course. Zoku enhancements. Adapt to Realms. How silly of me to overlook that.
‘Wait,’ I gasp.
‘What makes you think I want to hear what you have to say? Get me back out there. Right now. I have a war to fight.’
This is going better than I thought. At least I still have a tongue.
‘What did they tell you? That you would be free to leave any time? They lie about that, you know. I had to help you. The only way to do it was to break the whole system, to give you back your free will.’ My eyes widen. ‘Or … don’t tell me you are still working for the pellegrini? I didn’t see that one coming. What happened to the copy in your head, by the way?’
She throws me to the floor. I sit up slowly, massaging my throat.
‘She is gone,’ Mieli hisses. ‘Just like the entire Supra City will be soon. What in the Dark Man’s name did you do to the volition system?’
I smile sadly. ‘The Spooky-zoku and the Great Game have known about this for some time, but they have worked very hard to keep it a secret. It’s the reason why they destroyed Mars. I’ll give you the crib notes: the Collapse was caused by quantum mechanics breaking down. It turns out there is a bound for the size of entangled quantum states: create anything bigger than that, and things get even more crazy than usual. The whole zoku quantum jewel system has been teetering close to the boundary a while. So I just gave it a little push.
‘You may have noticed that there has been an increase in the number of spam zokus recently. I have been generating them algorithmically, with Sobornost-derived gogol minds. It’s amazing what you can do if you look past ideological differences and combine technologies in creative ways.’
I stagger upright. Mieli is standing with her back turned to me, still opening and closing the fingers of one hand, rotating the Realm-knife in the other.
‘As I said, I did not anticipate the invasion. But Mieli, it will be fine, the zoku have dealt with Sobornost before, this is some power move in the civil war, Joséphine getting desperate since her scheme with the jewel went wrong, surely. The zoku are always at their best when pushed into a corner. And what do you care, anyway? Have you gone native? Don’t tell me you have. I was going to take you home. They’ve done too good a job on you, Mieli. We are on our way to Oort, I thought that’s what you wanted, Perhonen said you missed it.’ My voice breaks.