Be My Enemy (17 page)

“Agister, with respect, this is now a security matter.”

“Brigadier—”

“I have assessed the risks and I have no choice but to invoke Defense Protocol 4.”

“What's that?” Sen whispered.

“How would I know?” Everett saw Dr. Singh draw a sudden breath and sit up, as if something cold had crawled on the back of his neck. Lieutenant Kastinidis shot an uneasy glance at her superior officer. “But I don't think it's good.”

“Lieutenant, escort the captain and her first officer into custody.”

Heavy chair legs scraped on medieval wooden floorboards. Sen searched inside her jacket for the Everness tarot. She slipped a card from the deck, flipped it through her fingers, and dropped it carefully, oh so carefully, through a gap in the gallery's floorboards. It turned over and over in a fall that seemed to last forever. Then it struck the floor and time restarted. Moments later, the toe of Sharkey's boot came down toward it and at the last moment veered to one side. Quick as anything, Sharkey stopped, scooped up the card, and flicked it up the sleeve of his voluminous caped coat. He glanced up and winked.

“And you, too, Dr. Singh,” the Brigadier said. Tejendra's alter sent a worried glance to the Agister. She nodded. “Leave the device,” the Brigadier called out.

“Sen,” Everett whispered, “give me the drop-line control. I'm going after Da…Dr. Singh.”

Everett peered cautiously out of the window. Weather had moved in while he and Sen had spied from their hidden place. A light, fine snow was sifting down from the sky. The Airish, with their military escort, had reached the shelter of a college staircase. Tejendra's alter was crossing the quad, the collar of his coat turned up against the unexpected snow. Sen slipped off the control and deftly slid it around Everett's wrist.

“You mind yourself with that, omi. I's staying ‘ere. I ain't lettin’ that comptator out of my sight. I trusts that sharpy cove about as far as I could shit him.”

T
he snow swirled around Everett as he followed the scientist across the college garden, bare and blasted by winter. The Oxford defense field flickered above Caiaphas College's steep roofs and turrets.

“Dr. Singh.”

The scientist stopped in the shadow-filled arch to the staircase.

“Yes?” He peered through the flying snow at the figure that had called his name. “You're not as old as I thought. You're off the airship, aren't you? From Earth 3.”

“No,” Everett said. “Not Earth 3.”

Tejendra's alter took a step away from the gloom of the stone staircase into the light from the iron wall bracket. For the first time Everett saw him clearly. It was the Tejendra Singh of this universe. Like his dad in every part and feature, yet at the same time different. Life and experience had weighed on his body differently, had laid different lines on his face and had salted grey in his hair and in the loop of beard and moustache. Him, not him. Dr. Tejendra Singh frowned at Everett. Fine powder snow flurried across the cone of light from the suspended lantern. Then Tejendra recognized what stood before him.

“Oh my dear God.” His hands flew to his mouth in shock and horror. He looked as if he had seen a ghost.
Maybe you have
, Everett thought,
from another world. Maybe that's what ghosts are, flickers from a parallel world breaking into this one.

“I am Everett Singh,” Everett said.

“Oh my boy, you are, yes you are,” Dr Singh stammered. “This can't be right. This isn't right…You can't be…You are…”

“My father is Dr. Tejendra Singh of—”

“The Department of Multiversal Physics, Imperial University, London,” Dr. Singh finished.

“The Department of Quantum Physics, Imperial College, London,” Everett corrected.

Snow eddied around them.

“Come in, come in,” Dr. Singh said suddenly. “I need to…I've questions…Just come in. You'll freeze out there.” He stepped into the shelter of the staircase and opened the heavy wooden door to his ground floor rooms.

“I shouldn't be here. They think I'm safely locked up,” Everett said.

Tejendra Singh smiled, and Everett's heart turned over in his chest. It was his father's smile, rare and carefully portioned out, but when it came it transformed his entire face.

“The military think they run this base,” Tejendra said. “I take every opportunity I can for minor acts of rebellion.”

The room was like the one Everett had escaped: uneven floors, cold radiating from the stone window frames, walls wood paneled, the ceiling low and timbered with dark, warped beams. In an old stone fireplace, blackened by generations of smoke, a wood fire glowed behind a wire mesh guard. On either side of it two tall, wingback chairs faced each other. A screen glowed on the top of a small round side table. Everett could see no tablet computer, no laptop.

“Holographics,” Dr Singh said, noticing where Everett's eyes rested. “Make yourself at home.”

Everett let himself carefully slide into the chair. The leather creaked. It made him feel very adult. That was the way his dad had always treated him, like a fellow civilized human male. He caught the alter Tejendra staring at him. Dr. Singh tore his gaze away.

“I'm sorry. It's…scary. You look like…her. How old are you?”

“Fourteen. Fifteen in May.”

Dr. Singh closed his eyes. Everett saw old, deep hurt.

“May. Nineteen ninety-seven. I remember May 1997. I was on the last squadron of tilt jets to make it out of Birmingham before the Nahn assimilated the city. Get the scientists out. The scientists and the politicians. Everyone else was expendable. The Nahn was coming at us out of everywhere on that convoy to the airport: everywhere. In the sewers, up from the gutters, out of the sky…That's how they got through London so fast; the rats and pigeons. Assimilate those, and you've got the whole sewer system, the U-ground, the power system…If you're never more than ten feet from a rat, you're never more than ten feet from the Nahn. Under the earth and in the skies. It was after the Nelson Square Massacre that we realized what we were up against and that we couldn't hope to win. Fight the birds, the rats? We call it a massacre—but can you have a massacre when no one dies? But they did die, all those people who went down to Nelson Square to see the lions and stick their feet in the fountains and look at Nelson in his memorial and take pictures of each other feeding the pigeons. The Nahn-infected pigeons. They stopped being human. That's dying.”

Dr. Singh paused. He looked directly at Everett.

“But how could you know anything about this? You weren't there. You weren't born. You never were born. Nelson Square, then the attack on the London U-ground. Every single person on the subway that day just vanished. Assimilated by the Nahn and sucked into pipes and the tubes and the wires. They found the entire inside of the tunnels coated in black slime. That was the people. Dozens of kilometers of them. It seemed an unimaginable number of casualties, incalculable. Now it's just a statistical blip. The government drew up plans to evacuate London. Then the spire began to grow out of the Isle of Dogs.”

Once Everett had seen a David Attenborough wildlife series on the BBC. In one scene, a rain forest became infected by a fungus. That had seemed pretty creepy to nine-year-old Everett, watching on a Sunday night. What happened next would stay with him forever. The
fungus worked its way into the ant's brain. It turned the ant into a zombie, sent it climbing up to the top of the plant, where it locked its jaws into the stem, never to move again. Now the true horror began. The ant's carapace shrank and collapsed in on itself as the fungus consumed it from within. Then, under time-lapse photography, the ant's head split down the middle and a tendril wiggled out: the fungus's fruiting body. It wiggled and grew and grew and grew until it was ten times the ant's body length. A spine, a spire. At the very end, it burst, shedding spores. Spores drifting like smoke on the wind to infect new ants. Nine-year-old Everett found a thing out about the universe. It wasn't sweet and it wasn't kind, and it didn't have morals or pity. There was nothing human about it. It
was.
It was the scariest kind of horror because it was real. Then Everett saw the spire of nanotechnology, thrusting out of what in his world was Docklands, fed by the hollowed-out bodies of the people of London.

“That was when we knew we were out of time,” Dr. Singh continued. “We had to move right away. Eight million people, all at once. It was chaos. Roads were clogged for miles. The railway system broke down. No one dared use the U-ground. The police couldn't move. The army was trying to ferry troops around by helicopter to organize the evacuation. It couldn't work. It was never expected to work. If anyone got out it would be a bonus. What was expected was that we'd lose the entire population of London. I had priority clearance because of the university—they sent a helicopter to get Laura out of East London to meet me in Birmingham. It was scientists and their families.”

“Laura,” Everett said. “My mum.”

“Your mum. My wife. I was based in Imperial—we were sleeping under the desks, trying to develop something we could use against the Nahn. She was still in Stoke Newington.”

“Roding Road,” Everett said.

“Number 43. We'd just bought it. Hell of a mortgage. Like that matters now. The police were picking up everyone on the priority
list and taking them to an evac point up in Finsbury Park.
Evac point.
Spend enough time around the military and you end up talking like them. I heard later from one of the soldiers what happened. From Hyde Park to Hackney Wick, every street was gridlocked. Nothing moved, nothing could move, nothing could hope to move. I could hear the car horns from Imperial. It was people trying to take things with them. Pile it in the back, load up the trailer, throw it up on the roof, wedge it in around the passengers; they wouldn't go without their stuff. You'd think if it were your life or your stuff, there'd be no decision to make? Wrong. Their stuff was their life. There was nothing moving on Stamford Hill. The soldier said he'd never seen anything like it. They were jammed right up to the shop doors. When I saw what it was like in Central London I tried to call her, tell her to get up high, get up to a roof or something. She was wearing the color of the day—all the ones on the list had been told to wear yellow—they would have seen her and picked her up. The networks were all overloaded. The helicopter was coming in to the evac when the soldier saw what he thought was the biggest flock of starlings he had ever seen. It was like a cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon. Couldn't be, he thought. There aren't that many starlings in the country, let alone London.

“It was the Nahn. It didn't need pigeons or rats anymore. It had learned everything it needed from them and had discarded them. They were just fuel.”

“We saw flying things around the tower,” Everett said. “That's when we pulled out.”

“It was the last thing anyone saw,” Dr. Singh said. “Black flapping wings coming out of the sky. Attacking anything that moved. Falling like black snow, the soldier said. They saw the Nahn fall on people and take them. The eyes are the last to go, human eyes in the blackness. They had early EMP guns and were able to clear the lift zone for the evac. They just barely got out. Laura didn't. She was two months pregnant.”

Beyond the diamond windowpanes, the snow was piling up, flake on flake.

“With me?” Everett said.

“Yes.”

Your fear was wrong, Sen
, Everett thought.
It's not you in that black tower. It's me. You never even came to be in this universe. Perhaps you are what you feel yourself to be: unique. The one and only Sen Sixsmyth. All alone in the multiverse.

Sen lay flat on the wooden balcony, pressed as close as she dared to the rail, focusing all her concentration, all her attention, on the voices in the chamber below. Perhaps they felt self-conscious of speaking loudly in such a large space. Perhaps it was the natural sense of conspiracy when two high-ranking officials talk in private. Whatever the reason, the Brigadier and the Agister dropped their voices and Sen had to strain to catch their words. Even her breathing sounded loud enough to cause her to drop a phrase or miss a syllable.

“You know who the boy is?” the Brigadier said. He stood on the other side of the table from the Agister of Caiaphas, hands on the oak surface, leaning forward in her face. His stance was close and intimidating. The elderly woman refused to be intimidated. The Brigadier did not wait for an answer. “Dr. Singh's son.”

“Ah!” Sen gasped, then clamped both hands to her mouth.

“Dr. Singh's son was never—”

“Not in this world.” The Brigadier touched his wrist. A window of light appeared on the tabletop. From her painful angle Sen could not see what was in it, but from the expression on the Master's face she could guess it was Lieutenant Kastinidis's security report on the crew.

“Bastarding sharpies,” she whispered, then bit down sharp on her knuckle.
Hush up your screech, polone.

“He even looks like him,” the Brigadier said. “There can be no doubt. Everett Singh.”

“His alter found the Manifold,” the Agister said. “Does our Dr. Singh know?”

“No. I'm happy for it to remain that way for the time being.”

But he does but he does but he does!
Sen shouted to herself.

“Master, does it not seem scarcely credible that the Manifold—the key to the multiverse we have been looking for for over forty years—arrives in our world in a solitary E3 tramp airship?”

“What is your argument, Brigadier?”

“This, Master. If it were a genuine, Plenitude-wide break-through, the sky would be full of E3 airships and E2 tilt jets and E4 Thryn spiderships and God knows what else. In other words, Master, there is one Manifold and only one.”

“The Infundibulum. He calls it the Infundibulum.”

“And this Infundibulum is tucked into the hand baggage of the fourteen-year-old son of Dr. Tejendra Singh's alter. The E3 captain obfuscates. You wouldn't give the most valuable and unique object in the Plenitude to a teenager unless you had a very good reason for doing it.”

“Dr. Singh's alter needed to keep it out of someone else's hands.”

“He is in trouble. He may even be dead. Mr. Singh Junior has the only example and he is on the run from the same forces that threatened his father.”

The Agister's face tightened.

“We may have been cut off from the Plenitude for the last fifteen years, but it is inconceivable that it could change beyond our recognition.”

“With respect, Agister, everything has changed beyond our recognition.”

“Explain please, Brigadier.”

“We are not cut off from the Plenitude, or even the Panoply. We have a way through the quarantine. We can open a Heisenberg Gate and it won't drop us into the heart of the sun. We can get out. This world is finished, Agister. We can't beat the Nahn. It's too big, too
smart. There are too few of us, and we're too divided. Clinging to our islands, huddling in our little bubbles, puffing ourselves up on brave stories that we will launch some grand reconquest and take back our world. Won't happen. Can't happen. The Nahn hasn't finished us because it doesn't need to. It knows we are the final generation. We will dwindle and depart and humanity will be extinct in this universe. We erected the quarantine to protect the rest of the Plenitude from the Nahn. What we did was lock ourselves in the cage with the tiger. We have the key to the cage, Agister.”