Be My Enemy (22 page)

Everett M clenched his fists, closed the pulser ports, and let the circuits recharge. He felt like Iron Man. Tony Stark, the billionaire space explorer whose private-enterprise rocket had crashed on the Moon. Tony Stark had been rebuilt by the Thryn into a battle-suited superhero—Iron Man—who fought the forces of evil. Everett M's Thryn sense sparkled with multiple contacts. They had him encircled. The battle suit moved as easily and lightly as his own skin. Everett M spun, firing off two scythes of laser beams. Smoking chunks of hellhound cartwheeled through the air. Everett M's HUD chimed. Pulsers recharged. It was like a beautiful martial art: turn, target, hold up one hand, and fire while the other tracked the next Nahn hound hauling itself up from the trampled snow. Then they were all down and Everett M stood at the center of a circle of black splashes, like ink on paper.

Contacts. More and more. A circle beyond the first circle, and beyond that a third, racing toward him. Where were they coming from? How many reinforcements could the Nahn throw at him? The
first wave exploded in a hurricane of laser fire and EM blasts. The second broke on him. At the last moment, the HUD chimed:
pulsers online.
But beyond that wave was the third, the largest yet. Here they came, racing on their six legs over the splattered remains of their colleagues. One down, three, five. Close, closer than anything. Everett M took out two in midleap, each with a full-power pulser blast.
Pulsers offline
, the HUD flashed at him. One final contact, directly behind him. God, it was fast. Everett M whirled. The hellhound was in midair. Too close to risk lasers. Jaws gaped and teeth gnashed in Everett M's faceplate, then it struck hard, turned to liquid, and smeared itself all over the chest plate of his battle armor. The Nahn stuff crawled across him, trying to find some chink, some flaw in the Thryn technology. Everett M grabbed the edge of the sheet of Nahn stuff and peeled it away from him. The Nahn flexed and coiled, trying to lock on to his hand. Everett flicked his hand and flung the Nahn away from him. It spun in midair, trying to find its hellhound shape again. Everett M stabbed his left hand forward and blew it to sludge with a pulser blast. New contacts sparkled on his HUD. Nahn. Dozens of them.

“How long until the airship gets here?”

I estimate forty minutes.
The battle suit's words formed inside his head. Everett M did not like them there. They were too close. At least the suit did not speak in Madam Moon's calm, reasonable, maddening voice.

“I'm safer in the sky.” He could hide out on the rooftops, among the chimneys and aerials and air conditioners and water tanks of Mayfair, swoop in stealthily onto the back of the airship and cling there like a flea on an elephant while he planted the tracking device. And once the tracking device was in place, Charles Villiers could lock on to him, open the Heisenberg Gate, and get him off this hideous world.

His hedgehopper bobbed at the end of its tether to the lamp post. Twenty steps would take him to it.

Something tugged at Everett M's right foot. He looked down. Black tendrils had burst from the ground and wrapped themselves around his boot. Everett M tugged. The tendrils stretched. He willed a touch more power into the battle suit and swung his right leg forward. The tendrils snapped, fell to the snow, dissolved through it back into the ground again.

Now his left leg was snagged. Black glossy tentacles snared him up to the calf. He heaved. The tentacles heaved back. New tendrils burst from the ground and coiled up over his knees. Within seconds he was entangled to the thighs. Everett M fed full power to the battle suit and strode forward. Tentacles strained, stretched, snapped. He almost sprawled headlong. Seventeen steps. But now his left leg was caught again, tendrils boiling out of the ground, coiling around his leg like snakes. Everett M held out his hands and opened the pulsers in his palms. But the hellhounds were closing again, hard and very, very fast. And his right leg was snared again. Everett M heaved. The tendrils stretched but did not yield. He heaved again. The tendrils heaved back. They pulled his foot back down to the ground and held it there. The ground exploded. Tentacles swarmed up Everett M's legs. Within seconds he was snared to the waist. The hedgehopper hovered at the end of its line, seventeen steps away. Seventeen steps he could never take.

Pulsers online
, the HUD said. Everett M aimed his palms at his feet. Fry, you evil death tentacles. But what would happen to the battle suit's circuitry at so close a range? He closed up the pulsers and grabbed handfuls of black Nahn stuff. The tendrils coiled tighter around his thighs. Everett flexed his battle-suit muscles. Tendrils stretched, tendrils sheared. But here they came, out of the trees: the hellhounds. A wall of them. So many, so fast. Everett M blasted the first wave to slime with snap bursts from the pulsers. The second wave broke on him. Three he slashed into smoking chunks with his finger lasers, two he punched into flying blobs of Nahn stuff, a third he grabbed and tore to pieces. Pulsers recharged.
Everett M aimed at his feet. He had to make those seventeen steps, let the hedgehopper lift him away from this. He staggered to a heavy blow to his back.

I have been impacted by a Nahn unit
, the battle suit said.

The tentacles were tightening around his waist now. And here came the third wave of hellhounds. Lasers seared the air, pulsers splashed dead Nahn stuff across the snow. But there were too many, and they came too fast. White teeth snapped Everett M's face and covered him with crawling Nahn stuff again and again and again. And the tendrils spiraled higher and higher, to his waist, his chest, over his shoulders, snaking down his arms. He couldn't aim. He couldn't target. Black splashed across his visor like ink. Splash by splash, splat by splat, the Nahn tech shut out the light. He couldn't see. He was blind, deaf, paralyzed.

Sensor webs are compromised
, the battle suit said. Alone in the dark, Everett felt the soft thuds of more and more Nahn hounds splattering over him.
We are encased in approximately one meter of Nahn substrate.

Entombed in rogue nanotech. From the outside he would look like one of the mummy cases he had seen in the British Museum, a rounded coffin with a head. Black. All shiny black. And more Nahn piling on top of him every moment.

Software security has not been compromised
, the suit said.

“Meaning?” Everett asked.

I can maintain basic life support.

“How long?”

Until the power packs decay.

“How long?”

In this state, several months.

Everett M screamed then. He screamed long, he screamed hard, he screamed his throat raw. The blackness took the screams and gave nothing back. He tried to move, to kick, to punch, to even move a toe. Muscles balled. He focused power into his enhanced Thryn strength until he felt his muscles would tear sinew from bone.
Nothing. He could not move, he could not see, and all he could hear was the voice of the suit and his breath and the beating of his heart. Trapped inside Madam Moon. A metal and plastic coffin.

“Everett?”

A voice. Not the suit voice. Not his voice. No: his voice. His voice from somewhere else.

“What am I hearing?”

I am picking up a series of vibrations through the Nahn material and converting them into audible signals.

“It sounds like a voice. My voice.”

Yes it does, Everett M. Singh.

The blackness lightened. Everett M's vision turned grey.

The Nahn material is clearing from the helmet visor
, the suit said as tendrils of black crept back from his field of vision

Everett M blinked in the white. A shape, between him and the light. An oval shape filling most of his field of vision, blocking out the light from the winter sky. His vision cleared slowly. The spots and soft dandelion bursts in his eyes faded. He was looking into a face.

His face.

“Hello Everett,” his face said.

H
im. It was him. Standing there on the snow, among the dead Nahn things, dressed in the same battle-suit liner. His own height, his own weight, his own legs and arms and body. His own hands and feet. His own face. The eyes. That was where it fell down. The eyes were not his. They were made up of dozens of tiny black cells, like insect eyes. They caught the light and reflected it back in rainbow colors, like a dragonfly.

“Can he hear me outside?” Everett M asked the battle suit.

Yes. Now.

“Who are you?” Everett M asked. The double gave an embarrassed smile, turning his head away. Everett M would have done that. How much did it know about it?

“In a sense, I'm you—but it might freak you out talking to a double, so I won't call myself Everett.”

But I have met my double
, Everett M thought.
And it didn't freak me. I was cool and calm and completely rational. And you don't know. And that's one tiny advantage to me.

“Call me what I am,” the Everett M double said. “Call me Nahn.”

“You look like me.”

“It's more than just look, Everett. In a very real sense, I am you. We found we had your DNA in our database and used it to program this avatar. We thought you might be less hostile to something that looked and acted—and sounded—like you. We have your DNA, yet here you are before us. This puzzles us.”

“Clear that gunk away from me.” Everett thought
move
into the power armor. Thryn mechanisms strained, but the Nahn stuff was plastered thick around him.

“No, I don't think so, Everett. I've seen what those EM pulse weapons can do—and I've felt it too. Anything, everything done to me or any part of me, we all feel. I feel. Do you know what it feels like? Like a part of yourself being ripped out. Again and again and again. It burns, Everett. It burns.”

“What do you want from me?”

The Nahn double shrugged.

“You puzzle us. Your technology resists us. It's all through you. We can't assimilate it. We thought we understood your technology. You evolve a technology to exterminate us, we use the knowledge we've collected to find a way around it. This is something we haven't seen before. There's nothing in our Consciousness about this. Who are you? Where are you from?”

Again, another tiny edge of advantage.
It doesn't know about the Thryn. It doesn't know about Earth 4. It doesn't know that I'm not from this world at all. But it can just wait, puzzling all this out, until I starve to death. I need to take a risk.

“I'm Everett M. Singh. I'm not from this world. I'm from Earth 4.”

The Nahn double blinked its insect eyes twice.

“I'm communicating this to the Nahn Consciousness. Earth 4. Yes. We have a memory of that. We have the collected memories of the six billion humans we have assimilated, but there is a lot of knowledge still to be connected. Ah, yes. Parallel universes. One moment…” The Nahn double cocked its head, as if trying to listen in to an interesting conversation across a busy room. “The Thryn Sentiency. This is not human biology. This is why we can't assimilate it.”

Assimilate
me, Everett M thought.
Melt
me
into six billion others. Give
me
evil insect eyes. And that's my third advantage: I'm from another universe.

The Nahn double was studying him. Everett M could look back at it without horror and could see the differences, the details where the double wasn't quite perfect. The eyes, of course, and the battle-suit liner was clearly part of the double's skin: the feet were dyed grey
rather than grey from melted snow. The hair didn't quite move right. It looked like the hair of CG characters in movies, like it was moving underwater. As he had scanned the Nahn, with his sensors, it must have scanned him from the outside in. Again he tried to will the battle suit to move. No. But how did it know his DNA? Unless…

This time, Everett M kept the cry down. And he realized a thing about bravery. Bravery needs an audience. It's for other people. When it's just you, on another world, with the collected nanotech mass and knowledge of six billion entities that used to be people—that used to be you, in some way or other—there is no brave. There's smarts, and there is survival. And as Everett M realized that, he understood that fear was the same. Fear also needs an audience. No one alone can be afraid.

The airship is ten minutes out
, the battle armor said.

“You might like to know, I just got an estimate of the time it will take us to evolve a way to assimilate the Thryn technology,” the Nahn double said. “Somewhere in the region of six months.”

“I've a better idea,” Everett M said.

“We'd like to hear it.”

“I need you to release the suit.”

Again, the Nahn Everett M cocked its head like an inquisitive bird.

“The Consciousness…”

“There's six billion of you! There's only one of me!”

The Nahn clone blinked twice. Everett M felt his neck suddenly free to move, as well as his shoulders, his arms. He looked down and saw Nahn stuff sheeting from him in a black flood. Upper body, hips, legs. The Nahn flowed away and left him standing in a circle of trampled snow and weeds.

We are no longer restricted
, the suit said.

“Yeah,” Everett M said. “Give me the private circuit.”

We are private now
, the battle suit whispered.
The airship will arrive in seven minutes.

“Gives me time to do this,” Everett M said on the private circuit. “Blue. Lambda. Oryx. Buttercup.” The four code words for the override. Charles Villiers had drummed them into him, again and again and again, right up to the ramp to the Heisenberg Gate that had sent him and the Madam Moon/battle suit to Earth 1.

Without a word, the Thryn battle suit split along a seam from forehead to groin. Panels retracted and the suit opened. Everett M Singh stepped unarmed, unprotected, and alone into the battlefield of dead Nahn. He looked his double in his nanotech insect eyes.

“Let's deal.”

Sen brought
Everness
in silent as a ghost over Hyde Park, over the wreck of the Albert Hall, across the dead faculty buildings and libraries and laboratories and lecture halls of Imperial University, to a dead stop nose-in to the top of the bell tower that stood at the heart of the campus. She pulled back the thrust levers and swung the impeller pods into hover.

To Everett it seemed that Earth 1 was his world—Earth 10 but with the volume turned up. The great buildings of this dead London were taller, bigger, bolder. The colleges of Fortress Oxford were more medieval, their cloisters gloomier, their gargoyles more lean and menacing. In this Imperial College—Imperial University, Everett kept reminding himself—the tower that stood at the center of snowy Queen's Lawn was a Victorian Gothic monster, taller even than Big Ben in Earth 10 London. In his world, Queen's Tower did not have four huge stone lions crouching at its base, or four angels, each bearing a different symbol of learning—a book, a triangle, a telescope, a pair of scales—at the point where the tower was capped with a dome. And that dome was not so high, and it had never been crowned with a flying angel coming down from heaven, blowing a golden trumpet, wings upraised, one foot lightly touching the summit of the dome. The same, but different. Very, very different.

“It's not if the Nahn come, it's when,” Lieutenant Kastinidis had
said. Her troops were up in the out dock, armored and powered up. The Brigadier had set up a command post on the bridge. He would be controlling the mission from a distance.

“Some commander, as doesn't go into action with his sharpies,” Sharkey muttered to Everett as Sen trimmed the controls to hold
Everness
steady against the snow-filled gusts that swirled around the Queen's Tower.

“Bring us into boarding distance,” Captain Anastasia said. The tiniest nudge of the thrust levers brought the huge airship within range of the access bridge. “Full stop.”
Everness
hung motionless over the ruins of the great university. The Agister of Caiaphas College nodded her approval. For her status, but more, Everett thought, for her admiration of the ship and the crew who flew her, Captain Anastasia had allowed her the honored place by the great window. “Mr. Mchynlyth, run out the ramp.”

The bridge trembled as the machinery in the out dock rumbled into life.

“Are you ready, Dr. Singh?” the Agister asked. Tejendra nodded his head. Everett saw fear in his face and more: acceptance and peace. Tejendra Singh had always known he must face the Nahn.

“And you, Mr. Singh?” Captain Anastasia asked.

Everett took a deep breath.

“Bona.”

“Just one damn moment.” Sharkey's voice boomed across the bridge. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’” He slipped a shotgun from his coattail and threw it to Everett. “Everyone does the 23rd Psalm in the end. Here's some dry shell.”

Everett caught the gun and the ammunition that followed. He had already pulled on his old North Face jacket with the glow tubes tied to it. Visibility would be important in the lightless halls and corridors. Now he was complete.

“‘Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone…. You'll never walk alone,’” Everett said.

“I don't recognize your verse, sir, and I am conversant with the word of the Dear, Old Testament and New.”

“It's a song. In my world it's like the anthem for a football team. Liverpool F. C.”

“There's wisdom in some of them worldly songs,” Sharkey said. He tipped his hat with the muzzle of his shotgun, a salute to the Brigadier, and quit the bridge. See, a Lafayette-Sharkey is unafraid to walk the valley of death with his crewmate.

“Bona air, Mr. Singh,” Captain Anastasia said.

“Captain, can I have a word with Sen? Alone?”

“Make it quick, Mr. Singh.”

The stair foot was deserted. Everyone was above in the out dock, preparing each in his or her way. Sen threw herself on Everett like some over-affectionate animal, all hair and limbs. He almost went backward over the railing, down to the power deck below. She pushed her head hard against his chest. Her strange, warm, musky perfume was strong. It tugged at Everett's heart.

“Everett Singh, Everett Singh, don't go, don't go.” She banged her head against Everett's chest.

“I have to. I'm the only one who'll know if they find the one that'll work.”

“Everett Singh, no. Not again. ‘Sen mind the hedgehopper, Sen mind the ship.’ Sen gets told to stay behind but Sen saves your dish, Everett Singh, again and again and again. For you, it's always being on the run, for Sen it's, ‘Sen you're the pilot, Sen you're captain now.’ Don't go. This time, I can't save you.”

Sen was as wiry as a dog, but there was the strength of steel hawsers in her grip. She was built like
Everness:
light but stronger than any storm.

“Sen, I've, uh, I've got a loaded shotgun in my hand.”

“Well, let me help you with that.” Her fingers were so fast. She
slipped the shotgun free from Everett's grasp with the same deft touch she'd used to try to steal Dr. Quantum from him on the night train to Hackney Great Port when they'd first met. Resistance was futile.

She kissed him. She kissed like she had kissed him the last time he had gone into desperate battle, against his alter from another universe. It was full and without restraint. And it was much more intense than a girl her age should kiss. She was all energy and passion and contradiction. She went up on her toes. The shotgun fell from her fingers.

“Sen, parlamo palari.”

“Of course, omi.”

“The meese sharpie…”

“That cod fruit in the naff sharpie clobber.”

“He's aunt nelling, but he don't cackle palari. Sen, if I don't troll back from this barney…”

“Nante parlamo that Everett Singh. Nante.”

“Sen, I need a blag.”

“Blag me anything, Everett Singh.”

“I need to blag an amriya.”

“Oh, Everett Singh, an amriya is a big blag.”

“It's a bijou ask. The comptator. I've zhooshed up a code. If I nante troll back again, zhoosh it. It'll scarper you back home again. Then, Sen, do this. Remember when you told me about the Polone-queen, trolling the shush to Deutschland for the Iddler, when the lillies came? She dumped the shush in the big blue buvare and scarpered. Sabi?”

“Sabi, Everett Singh.”

“If I nante the comptator, nante everyone. And Dona Villiers, she's no reason to ogle for you, not without the comptator. Jump, dump, Sen. Sabi?”

Sen lifted Everett's right hand to her lips and kissed the second knuckles of his fingers.

“I promises, Everett Singh. An amriya is made.”

“Bonaroo, Sen. Fantabulosa.”

He was halfway up to the out dock when Sen called his name.

“Hey. Your shooter.” She threw the shotgun up to him. Everett caught it and slung it over his shoulder. “Hey, Everett Singh! Alamo!”

Everett M stepped out of the open battle armor. He looked the Nahn double straight in the insect eye.

“What could you possibly have to offer us?” the Nahn Everett said.

“A way out.”