She feels a pleasant tingle from her Great Game jeweclass="underline" the contribution is successful, and she is rewarded with a modicum of entanglement.
—Stored quantum information: it would make perfect sense, he would find the Gringotts F-Ring project fascinating—
—F-Ring: Schroederian tech, with the goal of making a long-lived storage mechanism indistinguishable from nature. Possible connections to the Fermi Paradox spam zokus—
The thread branches into involved speculation about the nature of the Fermi Paradox, and if the absence of any visible alien life has anything to do with the thief is attempting to do. Mieli traverses back along the thought-beads, chooses one that actually provides more information about the ring itself.
—The F-Ring: what are the likely physical mechanisms for actually carrying out the theft? The ring has little distributed hardware. The primary retrieval mechanisms are on Pandora and Prometheus—
—Prometheus, Mieli qupts instinctively. Stealer of fire. Prometheus means something to him. Being Prometheus, that sort of thing.
—Prometheus. A thematic connection, a common feature of le Flambeur crimes. The sharp cool joy of more entanglement, like fruit juice on a hot day.
—Put an agent there. Someone who knows him. Me. She attempts to weave her volition to that of the zoku, push at it with all her new-found entanglement. I need to at least try to get a message to him. And find out about Perhonen. A flash of anger comes when she thinks about the last moments on the ship, staring down the thief and the pellegrini both. They are alike. Barbicane was right. They will do whatever is necessary to get what they want. But I need to know what happened.
A flash of insight comes directly from her zoku jewel. A compulsion to be on Prometheus, as soon as possible.
The jewel is pulling her away, filling her mind with the need to allocate her resources to best serve the zoku. She fights it with her metacortex, tries to reach out to the bead game, to find at least a hint of the Kaminari jewel. Sensing her will, the zoku sends her a thread fragment.
Should we reconsider it?
To expose it to an individual’s volition? Never. And the resources required to access it would be prohibitive, especially in the case of invasion.
Resources: a better way required to transfer information between branes. Spooky-zoku has been harvesting dark matter particles entangled with the Planck brane, required for superdense inter-brane communication. The original jewel storage operation exhausted all the resources so far, but a new collection has been assembled at—
A personal qupt comes directly from Barbicane, and she pulls hastily away. The severed thread scatters random thoughts in her mind, like a rubber band, snapping at her painfully. A flash of the sheet of light, far away and close.
Mieli? A word, if you please, the Great Game Elder says.
Barbicane smiles at Mieli, his mouth a waxy line.
‘I noticed what you were doing, my dear,’ he says. ‘I do need to remind you that a decision on the subject of the Kaminari jewel has already been made, and the zoku volition will not allow it to be used. You will see what I mean if you try to pursue that line of thought further.
‘But—’ Mieli starts to protest. Barbicane holds up his manipulator hand.
‘Bear with me, my dear. I was not finished. Perhaps you do not take me seriously. Perhaps you laugh at the body I wear, at the Circles I choose. I do it because I celebrate what I lost. You of all people should understand.
‘I was a soldier, in the Fedorovist War. I believed I was protecting my people, fighting for my comrades. And then the Collapse came. Everything breaking. Chaos. An enemy we could not fight. All because of a tiny quantum effect we could not anticipate. Because we made a thing that was bigger than us.
‘Mieli, I think you know what it feels like when the world you love suddenly lurches and turns into something utterly alien, into something you never knew at all. You of all people should want to prevent that from happening to anyone else.
‘That is where my love of guns comes from, you see. Guns are predictable. Guns make sense. In a gun, you channel the destruction. You aim it. You make it do work. Or you use it as a threat, to maintain balance. With things like the Kaminari jewel, you can’t. To think otherwise is folly.
‘Le Flambeur is the same. When I was younger, I thought he could be aimed and controlled. We used him to attack a Sobornost sunlifter mine. The operation succeeded – but he used the mine for his own purposes. And now his scheme has brought the Sobornost upon us.
‘The Great Game’s purpose is to remove elements of chaos. Today, le Flambeur is one of them, just like the jewel. Do you understand?’
Slowly, Mieli nods.
Barbicane smiles. ‘Capital! In that case, my dear, we both have work to do!’
Prometheus.
The rings are a tilted mirror sea, glinting razor blades with dark gaps between them. Saturn itself is a vast sunrise that fills the sky. A silvery spiral of aurora borealis gleams near its south pole. The interwoven threads of Supra City’s Strips and the larger hexagonal blue-and-white shapes of the Plates are like a harlequin mask on the giant planet’s face.
She clings to the surface of Prometheus. The moon’s twin, Pandora, is a clumpy shape in the distance, nearly motionless, synchronised to the orbit of its brother, its partner in shepherding Saturn’s outermost ring.
Prometheus itself is subtly alive beneath her. On the surface, it looks just like a lifeless moon, elongated in shape, with large craters, barely enough gravity to hold her down. But in the spimescape, Mieli can see the hidden interfaces to the picotech embedded in the moon’s atoms, designed to last for aeons. When Supra City itself is gone, Saturn will survive – and the zoku legacy will be hidden inside it, there for some unimaginable archaeologist to discover in the distant future.
It is not just the moon that is seething with hidden activity. The space around Prometheus is full of metacloaked Great Game and Ganimard-zoku ships. Even though Mieli does not want to admit it, there is something satisfying about how during an operation, the zoku fulfils even her unconscious wishes. She is heavily armed, with an array of q-guns and a rather satisfying replica of a Sobornost multipurpose cannon.
Five minutes left to the thief’s deadline. Even without her enhancements or spimescape, she can see the F-ring itself in greater detail now, a twisting, kinked string of ice and dust.
The wait has been long: she has spent much of it in quicktime, engaged in collaborative planning with Lenormand of the Ganimard-zoku, mapping out the space of possible trajectories that could intersect with the F-ring. The Great Game agrees that to actually retrieve any quantum information from the rubidium atoms scattered around the ring’s icy objects, the thief will require access to the hardware on Pandora and Prometheus. The Gringotts-zoku is spinning further layers of cryptography around the data retrieval systems. Watching the entire circumference of the ring is difficult, but not impossible. With the resources the zoku has deployed, any attempted theft seems like madness.
Waiting. Always waiting. She allows herself to wonder what Zinda is doing, and regrets it immediately: even a fleeting thought of the zoku girl makes the wound inside her chest bleed something bitter and black. She almost tells her metacortex to extinguish the feeling, but decides against it. She needs to stay sharp, now more than ever. It will be walking on a razor edge: appearing as if she is acting in the best interests of the zoku, making sure the thief is not captured, sending him a message if possible. Damn you, Jean. What are you doing?
Three minutes. Prometheus is swinging closer to the F-ring. Its gravitational field sends a wave through the white weave of ice, makes it twist and dance. After a moment, Pandora follows, right behind its twin, adding its own smooth ripple to the ring’s movement.