6
THE THIEF AND THE ARSENAL
‘So, Colonel? What do you think? Capital idea, eh?’ Barbicane beams at me, while I swirl my port around in my glass, in rhythm with my thoughts.
I blink at a fusion flash that creates a new crater in Iapetus’s battered hulk below. Children and matches. I tug at the thread of the thought, and all of a sudden, my dilemma starts to unravel.
I smile at Barbicane.
‘Agreed! My comrades and I appreciate your candour and fairness. If you would allow me to step outside the Circle for a moment to advise them of the developments?’
The zoku Elder inclines his head, making his hat bop back and forth. ‘Naturally!’ He gestures at the silver boundary of the Circle.
I finish my drink, nod at Chekhova and step over it.
The sudden release from the Circle’s Schroeder locks gives me a head rush. The spimescape interfaces to my equipment flash into being in my field of vision. At the same time, the illusion of the drawing room shatters. I am in a featureless white smartmatter tube full of utility fog that floats in the air in powdery, inert form, pollen-like.
I immediately ramp my internal clockspeed up to the maximum that my cheap synthbio body will allow. Behind me, Chekhova and Barbicane become statues in their small green-and-gold patch of Victorian wood, brass and furniture. Another small mercy: the Gun Clubbers are too well-mannered to break the Circle just because I stepped out for a moment.
I take the computronium egg from my shoulder bag. It is heavy and cold in my hand, a beautiful, intricate brass thing, as if laid by some Fabérge bird. The art nouveau tracery on the surface makes it easy to forget the complex waste heat management machinery and the tiny pinpoint of pure atom-scale computational power inside. The egg alone swallowed a large chunk of my pyramid scheme profits, but I needed something to run the bookshop vir and to store the Sirr data in. I carefully erased all traces of them from the restored Wang bullet before handing it over to the Gun Club.
With a thought, I open a quptlink into the egg.
Matjek?
It takes a few moments before the answer comes.
Yes?
Remember when you asked if you could help Mieli, too?
A pause. It was a long time ago. But yes, I remember.
His voice sounds … older. The Aun have some strange ideas about time. How much time has passed inside the vir?
Well, maybe you still can, I say.
Tell me what to do! The qupt is so full of enthusiasm that it hurts my teeth.
I hesitate for a moment. Would it be better to just cut my losses, leave now and find another way in? I don’t have to involve Matjek in this. Do I have the right?
I shake my head. There is no time, and I have no alternatives.
All right, Matjek. Listen to me very carefully. Remember to do exactly as I tell you. I form a complex thought, mapping it out in the spimescape, and send it to him. He devours it eagerly.
Then I check the status of the nuclear warheads I sold to the zoku youths as detailed replicas of the Tsar Bomba. While a cursory inspector would mistake them for the biggest hydrogen bombs ever built on Earth, they are in fact disguised qupt transmitters. Their cores hide ion traps entangled with their twins inside the Wang bullet, and their complex layers of deuterium and tritium are designed to send out a carefully modulated neutrino signal, capable of penetrating several light years of solid lead – or the walls of the Gun Club’s Arsenal.
To my relief, several of the Tsars are still unused, even though the thermonuclear war game is heating up by the minute. I watch Matjek flash down the quptlink into one of the bombs like a genie into a bottle. I swear to myself I will make it up to the boy, and pray to all the gods of thieves that I will have the strength to carry the weight of all my promises.
Otherwise, the fail will be epic, as the zoku like to say.
‘We are happy with the approach you propose,’ I tell Barbicane when I return to the Circle. ‘However—’
‘Yes?’
I look at the zoku Elder hesitantly.
‘Would you grant me one favour in return? I would like to accompany you to see the famous Arsenal. I may be a deserter, but I am still a soldier, and I am still fond of the tools of my trade.’
‘But of course!’ Barbicane says. ‘It’s the least we can do!’
Chekhova looks disappointed. I’m sure she would prefer to flash back into her trueform and get on with it. But that would be rude as well: Barbicane has created this Circle, and she would lose face – and entanglement – if she was to leave. I smile at her warmly. She scowls at me.
An exceptionally large nuclear blast goes off in the Turgis Crater, somewhere above the British Isles.
‘Was that a Tsar Bomba?’ I ask. Matjek, converted into entanglement and neutrinos, delivered into a body waiting inside the Wang bullet in the Arsenal.
‘By Jove, you are right!’ Barbicane says. ‘How very astute! We do have a true connoisseur of ancient weapons here, Chekhova dear! You must see the Arsenal’
Then he frowns. ‘The spectrum was a tad off, though. Only means the young ones still have a few tricks to learn, eh!’ He elbows me rather brutally with his massive gun arm. ‘But no matter. There’s several real ones and more besides where we’re going!’
Ahead, the orbital ring sprouts a golden tendril that bends towards the surface of Iapetus, down towards the massive equatorial bulge that makes the whole moon look like a walnut. The ring is a continuous stream of magnetic particles, encased in a tube and accelerated to furious speeds with electromagnetic fields – a giant circular gun, in other words. Diverting a part of the flow to a receiver station on the surface creates a railway track in the sky. We finish our port as the train rides along it downwards, suspended between the looming yellow eye-lobe of Saturn and the fading nuclear fires of the children’s war.
The Arsenal of the Gun Club Zoku.
It is a series of chambers beneath Iapetus’s formidable equatorial ridge, buried beneath some of the highest mountains in the Solar System. Some of the spaces are tens of kilometres long and several in diameter, although it is hard to determine the strange blue-green illumination. The walls are not stone: they look like a blue sky, stretched and folded into itself. Looking at the smooth surface disturbs the eye. Nothing casts shadows on whatever the material is, probably pseudomatter of some kind, a picotech construct more solid than anything made of atoms.
The weapons themselves are suspended in the air in deadly constellations, rows upon rows of rifles, pistols and cannons. Their colours stand out starkly: black gunmetal, dabs of olive and camouflage and silver. It makes me feel like I’m floating across an ocean floor, surrounded by shoals of deadly multicoloured fish.
Barbicane, Chekhova and I are carried by a small q-dot bubble, still within our Circle, sitting in the armchairs. The bubble compensates for the low gravity of Iapetus by exerting a gentle foglet pressure on our limbs. I don’t like it: it makes me feel confined, and my anxiety levels are already high enough. Chekhova sits in an impatient hunch, barely looking at me, but Barbicane is enjoying his role as a tour guide.
‘It has taken a while to collect all these!’ he says. ‘And we keep at least one copy of everything our members create in here. Everything is perfectly preserved, in full operational condition.’
Zoku trueforms move between the guns like medusae. There is an occasional flash and a report as a weapon is tested. The shots echo hollowly in the vast space.
‘Ha!’ Barbicane says, when he sees me flinch. ‘Don’t worry! Safety first! But guns need to be used! Not like collecting comic books, to be kept inside plastic foil! All hooked up to our gunscape, to be used by all our zoku, everywhere!’
I smile and count seconds in my head. I need to keep Barbicane and Chekhova occupied until Matjek finishes his part of the job. What is taking him so long? Unfortunately, I don’t dare to leave the Circle to check.
‘This is all very impressive,’ I say. ‘Antiques are nice. B
ut I thought your zoku’s own creations were a bit more … ambitious. Tell, me, what is the biggest gun you have? That is something I’d like to see. I hear the Sobornost have solar lasers, and I always wondered if you could match them.’
Chekhova doesn’t even bother acknowledging my question. But Barbicane winks at me.
‘Oh, the biggest would not fit in here,’ he says. ‘We make the mass drivers for Supra City’s dynamic support members, for example. But I can show you the most interesting!’ He nudges Chekhova. ‘No need for false modesty here, my dear. Show him!’
She sighs and directs the q-dot bubble downwards with a gesture.
The next chamber is big.
It contains several holeships – gigantic wingless dragonflies, dull grey spheres with linear accelerator tails, several kilometres long. The insides of the spheres are perfect reflectors: they are used to store black holes, keeping them stable with their own Hawking radiation – until it’s time to fire them.
But it is the thing in the centre of the chamber that gives me pause. It looks vaguely like the head of a vast insect. There are two compound eyes, bulbous, globular arrays of transparent hexagons, joined at the waist. At the point where they meet, something rotates slowly, multiple silver spheres joined with spokes, like the model of a molecule – except that as it revolves, parts of it disappear and reappear in a disorienting fashion.
‘What is that?’
‘My ekpyrotic gun,’ Chekhova says wearily.
‘It does not look that big.’
‘This is just the main aperture. You need to drop it into a gas-giant-sized mass to fire it. After the Spike, those are in short supply.’
‘And what does it do?’
‘It generates a gravitational disturbance that makes our spacetime emit a brane into the higher dimensions of the bulk. It bounces off the Planck brane and collides with ours again. It creates a miniature Big Bang.’
Suddenly, it is easier to see things from the Great Game Zoku’s point of view.
‘Sounds like it would be quite difficult to aim.’
I check my internal clock. What is Matjek doing? My instructions were very precise. He should be in the Leblanc already. My original plan was to seal the deal and use the Bomba’s neutrino signal to qupt myself into the body I have hidden in the Wang bullet – just a loose collection of smart dust, almost undetectable – merely intended to get me aboard my ship, stored somewhere in the Arsenal. Once there, there is little that could stop us from getting out.
But perhaps the boy has gotten distracted.
‘Elder, is this really necessary?’ Chekhova says. ‘I have better things to do than to act as a tour guide—’
I start considering options to break the Circle for a second, but with the internal security systems of the Arsenal, I don’t dare risk it. To get here, we had to pass through a Realmgate that took us apart, scanned us at the atomic level for anything potentially dangerous. Of course, they would not do that to valuable antique items, risk damaging their precious quantum information contents: and that’s precisely what my plan relied upon.
I interrupt her. ‘It’s interesting to see so many ships here. I thought you were called the Gun Club?’
‘It’s not so different! Like your own Wang bullet! Ships are just guns pointed away from the enemy! The Robur and Nemo Societies find inspiration there.’ Barbicane strokes his whiskers. ‘We are often misunderstood! We don’t build things to destroy, but to test ourselves! Cannon shell against armour, vessel versus space – same thing!’
There is thunder in the distance.
Both Barbicane and Chekhova look up. I need to buy a few more seconds. I decide to go for the philosophical option.
‘So, you don’t have any problems with others using them for the purposes of war—’ I begin.
And then things start blowing up.
A rapid cascade of booming explosions makes the Arsenal feel like the inside of a drum. Missiles whoosh past us. Shells and bullets ricochet from the pseudomatter walls below. In the chamber behind us, rifles and cannons go off one after another like exploding domino pieces. The q-dot shell around us is like a night sky with blinking stars as it becomes adamantine under the constant fire from conventional weapons. The noise becomes so loud the bubble has to start filtering it out.
Then one of the holeships starts moving, slowly. Its linear accelerator stem swings around, back and forth, like the weapon of a drunkard.
The bubble zips us out of the way. Not that it will make much of a difference if the holeship’s weapon goes off. A single shot from one could take out the whole moon.
Barbicane and Chekhova break the Circle. She explodes into a bright constellation of foglets and jewels; he becomes a disembodied head with a stovepipe hat in the eye of a storm of diamond orbs. To hell with it. I speed up and hurl a qupt at Matjek.
What the hell are you doing?
There is an apologetic microsecond pause.
I got access to all of them, comes a response. I just wanted to play.
Well, stop that right now and come and get me! The thought has more anger than I intended. The response is hot with tears.
Okay, he says in a small voice. I’m sorry.
Never mind. Just come and—
Invisible limbs seize me. I find myself suspended in the air between them by foglet tendrils, spread-eagled. Somewhere, far away, the Colonel Sparmiento identity pops like a soap bubble. White fire of the explosions in the distance makes the two trueformed zoku members look literally incandescent.
Wait, I qupt at Matjek. Don’t stop. Keep them popping. But stay away from the holeships!
Barbicane’s eyes are bulging with rage.
‘You,’ he says.
‘Hello, Barbicane,’ I gasp. ‘It’s been a long time.’ I try to incline my head towards Chekhova, but I can’t move. ‘Jean le Flambeur, at your service.’
‘You are causing irreparable damage,’ Barbicane thunders. ‘Get out of our gunscape now!’
Another cascade goes off in another chamber further down. I’m pretty sure there is a nuke or two this time. Debris bounces off the skin of the nearest holeship. I squeeze my eyes shut, but it doesn’t help much: a red sun shines through my eyelids, and a metal brush of second-degree burns caresses my skin.
‘I’m afraid I can’t do that. Not until I have what I came for. But open the Arsenal exit and I’ll see what I can do.’
‘It’s the Leblanc you want, isn’t it? Why didn’t you just ask?’
‘This is way more fun. Besides, I never trusted you. What’s it going to be?’ Something black and sleek is moving in the distance. Come on, boy. I don’t have all day.
‘No deal.’
‘Suit yourself.’ The holeship turret is still moving, slowly but inexorably. It collides with a silvery seashell – a Protocol War metacloak generator, I now pick up from the Arsenal’s chaotic spimescape – and shatters it. ‘Oh my. That did look rather valuable.’
It’s not enough. They will detect Matjek any second. I need something else, something that will sting even outside the Circle.
Barbicane has been subtly different from the man I remember, but zoku Elders do not change. Not unless their q-self changes, unless they join a new zoku. Could it be?
It’s worth a try.
‘Something you may wish to consider, Miss Chekhova,’ I say. ‘Your Elder is working for the Great Game Zoku.’
Chekhova stares at Barbicane. A torrent of communication passes between them, blurring the spimescape. Her trueform features are a mask of shock and rage.
My low-rent metacortex picks up only a few fragments of the quptstorm between them, and fails to translate it. But I can imagine what they are saying.
‘I would never have believed it, but it makes perfect sense.’
‘He is bluffing! Can’t you see? He will say anything!’
‘This is why you blocked the ekpyrotic test, you bastard, it’s why—’
There is a blinding flash. My synthbio body
is jarred to the core. Matjek fired a Hawking shell, it’s all over now, I have time to think. But my continuing consciousness implies that our lives have not been ended by a dying black hole.
My vision clears, and I see Barbicane coalesce back into his steampunk form, except that this time there is a silver egg-like q-gun floating next to his head. I fall onto the bubble bottom gently. The air is thick with inert utility foglets and scattered zoku jewels. Chekhova is gone.
‘Now look at what you made me do,’ Barbicane says. ‘Or rather, what I made you do! That’s the official version!’
‘Not getting softer in your old age, Barbicane? You used to have a spark of anarchy. Remember the sunlifter job? You were quite happy to break the rules then. That’s why I asked your zoku to make my ships.’
‘Just playing a different game now, Jean! As should you.’
‘Oh, I’m not playing. Not this time.’
‘Jean, don’t be a fool! Work with us! We know you were on Earth. We need intel. The Sobornost is going mad! This is the best offer you’re going to get!’
I shake my head.
‘I don’t work for cops, even ones that wear stovepipe hats,’ I say. ‘And by the way, my best offer is this: I leave now – with my ship – or we’ll get to see what Iapetus looks like with a black hole in the middle. Quite a lot like Mars, I would imagine. But then, you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’
Barbicane hesitates. I can feel the invisible scan beam of the q-gun probing my forehead. I grit my teeth and try not to blink. It’s hard when a light show of lasers, particle beams and kinetic warheads turns the chamber above into a red-and-white spiderweb.
‘Get the hell out of here!’ he growls, finally.
In the spimescape, I see the great gateway of the Arsenal irising open.
You can stop now, I tell Matjek.
Do I have to?
Yes. We are going to talk about this later, young man.
The Leblanc rises beneath us. I can feel its cool non-mind touch my own through my quptlink with Matjek. It is a sleek, midnight blue thing, not large, barely ten metres long, a cross between a Rolls Royce Silver Phantom and a spaceship. The glare of its Hawking drive pierces the chaos of the Arsenal.