When the answer comes, it feels like summer rain.
Mieli?
Zinda? Where are you?
Again, a few heartbeats of agonising delay.
In a Realm running on reversible computation near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Saturn. It’s very slow here. We are trying to set up a guerrilla operation.
There is not going to be an occupation! I told you, the All-Defector is coming.
What happened to you?
There is no time to explain. Mieli pauses. I need you. She lets her fear and longing from the deck of the Provence to filter down the qupt, and feels a sudden stab of anxiety, as if something precious just slipped through her fingers.
And then Zinda is there, in her green dress, beautiful against the labyrinth of the thought-web, smiling a little sadly.
‘What do you want me to do, Mieli?’
‘What you did on the mountain. I want you to save me.’ She kisses the zoku girl fiercely, until neither of them can breathe. Finally, Mieli lets go.
‘And to forgive me,’ she says.
They find one of the meeting rooms, away from the frantic qupt chatter. Mieli explains the thief’s plan to Zinda.
She frowns. ‘I don’t know anything about the Planck brane, or how to get entangled with it. It would have to be something only the Elders know about. My level is simply not high enough. The only one I know is Barbicane, and I doubt he would be willing to help you, even now. All the entanglement I have is yours, but it’s not going to help you very much. I lost most of it when the volition system collapsed, like everybody else.’
Mieli frowns. ‘Can you have a look at this?’ She hands Zinda the huge complex qupt the thief gave her. The zoku girl’s eyes widen as she takes it all in.
‘Mieli, do you know what this is?’ she says. ‘It’s a viral zoku. It’s a giant twinking machine.’
Then she grins. ‘If there is ever a time to do forbidden things, it’s at the end of the world!’
It is Zinda who sends out the qupt, carefully crafted according to the Kaminari template, with the precision and speed of an experienced party organiser.
Twink the Liquorice-zoku if you want to save Supra City and to slay the Sleeper.
It spreads from Great Game member to Great Game member, even through the chaos of battle.
‘We have to be fast,’ Zinda says. ‘The Elders are going to notice, and reset everybody’s entanglement. But we might have time for one quick volition request, so be ready.’
It starts slowly. But little by little, the twinks start coming in, all the EPR qubits the zoku armies are earning by slaying the enemies of Supra City. In a few moments, the trickle is a flood. The connection to the zoku hums inside Mieli’s mind, and suddenly the Great Game jewel feels like a part of her brain, something that has always been there, a true q-self.
‘Now!’ Zinda breathes. ‘Do it quickly!’
Mieli casts the thought they crafted together at the Great Game jewel. Give me Planck tanglematter from the Spooky-zoku. The entire zoku rings with her volition. ‘I bet they are going to notice that,’ Mieli says. And sure enough, a moment later, the feeling of omnipotence disappears, replaced by a sense of almost complete emptiness.
Twinking is against the zoku rules, an angry qupt comes through her jewel. You are now back at Level One. Mieli’s heart sinks, but then she catches herself. It’s just a game, she thinks, smiling to herself.
Then the tanglematter package arrives with a pop, carried to their small corner of the Invisible Realm by quantum teleportation protocols. A grey dull sphere with a simple volition interface, a dense data spime wrapped around it. Mieli glances at it, but is immediately lost – EPR states distilled from neutralinos using the entire mass of Saturn as a detector, entangled with supersymmetric matter on the Planck brane. Whatever it is, it is the key to sending her and the thief to the hiding place of the Kaminari jewel.
‘It looks terribly boring!’ Zinda says. ‘Are you sure this is what we need?’
Mieli smiles. ‘No. But I … trust the man who said it is.’
Mieli frowns, looking at the Great Game intel spime. With the sudden drop in her entanglement level, she can’t see most of the battle anymore. But she can monitor the specific vectors that the thief said he and Matjek would use when escaping the guberniya in a thoughtwisp. Where are they? It should have only taken them minutes in our frame.
‘What do we do now?’ Zinda asks.
‘The only thing there is to do before the last battle,’ Mieli says. ‘We wait.’
19
THE THIEF AND THE ALL-DEFECTOR
I look at the flaming sky and the All-Defector, squeeze the jewel of judgment in my hand and try to think. There is always a way out.
Or is there?
The vir shows us a painfully detailed view of the battle of Saturn. The supramundane world-shell is unravelling. There is a swirling boil on the side of the giant planet that can only be a black hole, shooting up a fountain of X-rays.
Plates have shattered, Strips broken. On the ground, botlets and combat alters pour from Realmgates to resist von Neumann beasts, slow-moving but tenacious creatures that turn any matter into copies of themselves.
The zoku are redirecting mass streams from the undone structures towards the sky as improvised defensive weapons, weaving a dense sheet of iron pellets, each tiny metal flake carrying the kinetic energy of a train. Raions shatter against them like bugs on a windscreen.
Above the Plate of Irem, something strange is happening. There is a raion formation above it – but they seem to be defending the Plate from other Sobornost craft. The Aun are still fighting. But it won’t be enough. All-D is not using Dragons yet, but he will, if he has to.
I look at the Saturnian space beyond the torn fragments of the planet’s rings. The zoku ships have been decimated. The battle for the sunbeam mirrors is almost over, and the perfectly reflective quantum dot structures are aligning to burn away the rest of zoku resistance.
Finally, I can’t take it anymore.
I take a step forward. ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ I hold up the trap jewel. ‘You let me and Matjek go, or I open this, and we find out if you can outplay a Dragon.’
He smiles contemptuously, a cruel expression on a little boy’s face.
‘I know you too well, Jean,’ he says. ‘I can predict your every move. The moment you decide to do it, I will know. Why do you think I let you keep it? I can’t touch it, but I can touch you. The moment you decide to open it, I will erase you. And you would not risk the boy, not now. You have to lie to me much better than that.’ He sits down on the sand and looks up at the battle in the sky again. ‘Not much longer,’ he says.
I look at Joséphine. A prison door, opening. We have danced a long dance, she and I.
‘He is me, isn’t he?’ I say. ‘A Dilemma Prison anomaly, but from a le Flambeur seed. Do you want to lose to me?’
‘I’m not losing, Jean,’ she says. ‘I am winning. You were never the enemy, death was.’ Help me, her eyes say.
‘Matjek,’ I whisper. ‘Do you remember that game we played, back in the Leblanc? The game with time?’
He nods, eyes wide.
It’s worth a try. All-D may control our surroundings, but this vir does come from Matjek’s memories, very close to something he spent centuries in on Earth. And I only need a moment.
‘Let’s play it now.’
Matjek closes his eyes. The air around us becomes viscous and thick. It is difficult to talk.