Be My Enemy (6 page)

There was nothing between Everett M and the exit gate. A quick dash would win him the race. Then he remembered.
Look behind you.
He turned just as the soldier bounced out of the floor. A nano-missile blew it to shards of flying plastic and metal. As he turned to the gate, he saw Charlotte Villiers running for her own glowing exit portal. He saw the soldier pop up behind her. He saw it unfold and level its guns. He saw that she did not see it.

Thought and action in unity. Everett M took a visual fix on the soldier in the other maze. He fed targeting commands to his Thryn systems. With a yell, he loosed his final nano-missile. It blazed out through the gate in front of him, then turned.
Go go go!
Everett M willed at it. The nano-missile entered Charlotte Villiers's maze through the exit gate. On the screen, he saw Charlotte Villiers's eyes go wide in shock as she dived out of the missile's path.
You think I'm trying to kill you
, Everett thought. You'll find out the truth in three, two, one…He could hear the explosion through the maze wall. Charlotte Villiers looked behind her. In that glance, she made up her mind. She ran for the exit gate. In his own maze, Everett M sprang forward. But he was so cold, so drained. He watched Charlotte Villiers pass through her exit gate two steps ahead of him.

She stood beside her alter, hardly out of breath. Everett M could
read the look on her face. It was not triumph. It was something he had never seen before: hatred.
I saved your life
, Everett M thought.
You owe me, you will always owe me, and you hate that. You hate that and you hate me.
With a thought, he powered down his lasers and closed up the weapon ports Madam Moon had put into his body.
I have an enemy now.

F
rost clung silver to the decking and to the nanocarbon-fibre struts. Everett's breath froze as it left his mouth. He carefully wiped the ice crystals from Dr. Quantum's screen. A careless touch and he could erase a key line of code. Days of work, with the temperature dropping around him as Mchynlyth tried to conserve power, could be undone in an instant. And he couldn't even be sure that there wasn't a mistake in there, some unnoticed slip of fingers so cold they hurt. Everett remembered the sports teacher at Bourne Green School who had arranged to end the Christmas Term one year by holding a football tournament. Sleet had blown horizontally from a weather front straight down from Greenland. Within ten minutes Everett's fingers had been so numb that he couldn't grip the ball. A kick, a punch, a dive between the ball and the back of the net was the best he could do. The teacher-referee finally, mercifully, blew the whistle. In the shower at home Everett had almost wept with pain as the hot water brought life painfully back to his frozen hands.

This was worse.

Everett blew on the fingers of his right hand, breathing a little warmth and movement into them. Done. It was done. It had been a long, painful grunt job. There had been no moments of revelation, no blinding insights that ignited and inspired him to work beyond the limits of exhaustion and hunger. It hadn't been like the night, two universes away, when he had discovered how to turn the data in the Infundibulum into a map of the multiverse. Unlike that night of breathless insight, this project had been nothing but the hard slog of translating one bit of code into another, finding a way for the Infundibulum and the jumpgun to talk to each other. And it was finally done. He would have loved a day—even a few hours—to
debug the code. But he had only twenty minutes. That was the lead time Captain Anastasia and Sen had over whatever they had found out there on the ice. Sharkey's radar had picked up three contacts: two that were small, fast, and fleeing, and one that was big and fast.

Everett didn't believe in a god, so he couldn't send up a little prayer. And he didn't believe in luck—he knew how probability worked and how people liked to make coincidences into patterns. So he just said “Okay, go,”—a geekboy's prayer—and tapped the
run
button. Code scrolled up the screen. Everett watched, his breath steaming and freezing. The code rolled on and on and on. Had it looped? Just as he was about to hit the
cancel
button, the screen went black, then cleared to show the desktop and an
install
dialogue box. He clicked
install.
The green bar filled. Everett realized that he was holding his breath. The screen went black again. Then the Infundibulum opened, along with his own piece of code: the Jump Controller. Everett had designed it from his memories of the control system for operating the Heisenberg Gate in his own world, hidden down in the abandoned Channel Tunnel exploratory diggings, buried deep under chalk. Operating the Jump Controller was simple. You dragged a multiverse address code from the Infundibulum into the
destination
panel. Then you hit the big
JUMP
button. The interface fed code to the jumpgun, which opened a maximum-aperture portal around
Everness.
And in an eye blink you would be somewhere else.

It took Everett three goes to get his numb fingers to drag a piece of multiverse address into the destination box. The
JUMP
button went from grey to green. He looked a long time at the long string of numbers. The way back. The code for this exact geographical location in his own world. He felt no sense of achievement, no exaltation, no need to punch the air or rejoice. Job done. The road home was open. Then he slipped Dr. Quantum inside his many layers of cold-proof clothing and ran up the frost-slippery stairs to the bridge.

Sharkey came from the communications desk to peer over
Everett's shoulder while Everett connected the special USB cable to the jumpgun. Mchynlyth had built Everett his own station, beside Sen's flight control desk. He had wired it and cabled it and had built a cradle for the jumpgun so that it didn't look like what it was: a handgun that shot people into another universe. Everett carefully docked Dr. Quantum and hooked up the power. He stroked the screen and it came alive with a haunting, hypnotizing visual display of the dimensions-within-dimensions folds of the Infundibulum.

“‘He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names,’” Sharkey said softly. Everett did not like him so close. He had not trusted him since they had made their run for the border of High Deutschland, trapped between two pursuit frigates and the fighters of HMAS
Royal Oak.
Sharkey had called for Captain Anastasia to hand Everett over to Charlotte Villiers. He'd wanted to surrender the Infundibulum to save the ship.
You quote the Bible
, Everett thought,
but do you live by it?

Sharkey looked up suddenly. He went to the great curving window of the flight deck. He pulled down a magnifier from in front of one of the ceiling-mounted computer monitors and moved it on its angle-poise arm over the glass until it was focused on the thing out there in the white glare that had distracted him. He pulled down a microphone on a scissor arm.

“Mr. Mchynlyth, the prodigals return.”

Everett felt a vibration run through the airship, through the decking, up through his feet. In his brief time as stowaway, cook, planesrunner, and now as a transuniverse navigator, he had learned the many shivers and shudders and twitches and tremors of
Everness.
This low hum was the cargo hatch lowering. He would not feel the hedgehoppers landing, they were too light and clever to make a heavy footfall, but he could feel the bridge shake to other feet, two sets, coming fast up the spiral staircase. He didn't look up. He worked on, steadily, surely connecting Dr. Quantum to the jumpgun in its cradle.

“Mr. Sharkey, Mr. Mchynlyth!” Captain Anastasia made every entrance voice first. “Prepare for flight.” She strode onto the bridge, pulling off her sheepskin-lined gauntlets. “I want us up up and away from that thing.” Every time she spoke, Captain Anastasia's tone of command made Everett jump. He had always had problems with authority, whether school teachers who insisted you play football in a Christmas sleet storm or E3 Hackney Great Port Airish airship commanders. Everett turned away so that Captain Sixsmyth would not see his smile of relief—and affection. It felt like pride to see her back where she belonged, standing at the great window, hands clasped behind her back, in command. Sen pulled off her flying helmet and shook ice crystals out of her amazing pure-white afro. The crystals rang from the decking like little bells. She pinched Everett as she slipped behind the piloting console.

“I's back, Everett Singh. Glad to see me or what, omi?”

Everett looked away, embarrassed. She was so direct, so cheeky, so aggressive. She scared Stoke Newington Everett, but she was irresistible to Punjabi Everett. Sen wiggled out of her orange Baltic suit and took the Everness tarot from its place next to her heart. She kissed the deck and set it on the control panel.

“Mr. Singh!” Captain Anastasia loomed over Everett's console. She held the smartphone up for him to see. The screen showed a blurred image of what looked like a hovercraft from hell, armed and armored and adorned with the back-to-back crescents of Alburaq, E2's strangely displaced Britain. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Thought so. Me neither. In your professional opinion, can we fight it?”

“Ma’am, not a hope.”

“Thought not. That thing is ten minutes behind us. Thank you, Mr. Singh. Is the Heisenberg jump operational?”

“I think so.”

Everett saw Sharkey glance over.

“Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia shouted, without ever taking her big, deep eyes from Everett, “cast off double quick. Get you up on that hull with a skinripper and cut us free.”

“Ma’am…”

“Double quick, sir.” Without another word, Sharkey rose from his seat and went to the companionway. Everett saw a quick backward glance, saw the set of his shoulders, the way he pulled the skinripper—the Airish knife designed to cut and repair airship nanocarbon—from his boot top. Captain Anastasia pulled down a microphone and thumbed the talk button of the palari-pipe. “Mr. Mchynlyth, I have two questions for you. Can we fly? Can we make a Heisenberg jump?”

Mchynlyth's Glasgow accent was flat and hard as a spade in the charged atmosphere of the bridge.

“We can fly, we can jump. We cannae do both.”

“I need both, Mr. Mchynlyth.”

“I dinnae have the power, and even if I did, the impeller pods are frozen solid. And that's before I get on to the steering gear. And the ballast; it's ten tons of solid ice in there. I cannae work miracles.”

“I'm afraid nothing less than a miracle will do, Mr. Mchynlyth.” Captain Anastasia turned her gaze to Everett. “Mr. Singh, two questions for you. What is the difference between ‘think so’ and ‘know so’?”

“‘Think so’ means the power hookup mightn't work. We fire up the jumpgun and go nowhere. Or the interface mightn't mesh, and we'd go nowhere. Or there could still be a bug in the system and we wouldn't go nowhere, we'd go everywhere. Each atom would be sent to a different universe. Like
vammm
! So fast you wouldn't even know it.”

“My next question: how long until we get from ‘think so’ to ‘know so’?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“That thing will be on us in five. We were lucky once, we will not be so again. Sen, on my command. Mr. Singh, bona speed.”

“Ma’am.”

As Captain Anastasia turned back to the window, Everett saw Sen slyly turn up a card from the Everness tarot. She saw him see. She showed it to him. It was not one Everett had seen before, but that did not surprise him. He was beginning to suspect that Sen owned many, many more cards than she carried in her deck at one time. The picture on the card, drawn in ink, was of a flock of crowned butterflies—or were they moths?—chained together wingtip to wingtip, flying up to the smiling moon. The name of the card, written in very old, beautiful, faded handwriting, was
Powdered Wings.

What does it mean?
Everett mouthed silently.

“They travel together to a far goal, and that can be like a big hope thing, or a completely hopeless thing,” Sen whispered. Everett had noticed that Sen's voice, the words she used, the structure of her sentences, changed when she spoke of the Everness tarot. Who had taught her the voice of the cards? How had she come by the cards? “Or, they want to fly free, but they never can. Always two meanings.” She folded the card back into the deck. She turned away from Everett to her flight controls, but he could read from the set of her shoulders and the tension in her arms that she was troubled by what she had read in the card. She would never tell him. He was not Airish, so he would see bright Sen, sassy Sen, feisty Sen, brave Sen, smart Sen, but he would never see scared Sen. Her fears, her dreads, these she would always keep closed up with the cards, next to her heart. Forced to live close to each other, the Airish built subtle, strong walls around their lives. It made him sad. When Captain Anastasia had asked him his professional opinion, he had glowed with pride. He was respected, accepted, one of the crew. Family. Now, in the way Sen turned her back and turned her face to a mask of
everyday
and
busy work, nothing wrong
and
don't ask
, he saw that there were places in the lives of all these people around him where he could never go.

The power hookup lit green on Everett's control console. Lights
came on in the handle and barrel of the jumpgun. They shifted red to orange to yellow back to red. What they meant he had no idea. But when he touched the jumpgun, it felt warm, it felt charged, it felt alive and powerful. He dragged a multiverse address from the Infundibulum into the Jump Controller window. The code sat there, the JUMP button remained grey. Everett hissed a
shit
through his teeth and went down into the code. From the corner of his eye, past Captain Anastasia, who was once again at her accustomed place by the window, he could see what looked like a blizzard on the forward horizon.

Everness
shook.
Everness
shook hard. Loose fittings rattled. Dust and dead, dried spiders fell from the many cavities and crannies of the ceiling. Everyone on the bridge looked up from what they were doing.
That's the biggest one yet
, Everett thought. He looked over at Sen. She silently mouthed the words
I's seen it. It's real. The thing in the ice.

Captain Anastasia pulled down the palari-pipe.

“Mr. Sharkey, how close are you to cast off?”

Sharkey's voice came through a shriek of ice wind.

“Two more, Captain. ‘He casteth forth his ice like morsels, who can stand before his cold?’”

“Spare me the word of the Dear, Mr. Sharkey. Inside now.”

“There are still two—”

“Cut a hole in the skin if you must, but I want you in now, Sharkey.”

There was a dark eye in the heart of the coming ice storm. As it bore down on
Everness
, it grew in resolution, from shadow to the vague outline of a machine to something with ducted fan engines and artillery turrets and machine-gun pods and missile racks. What the photograph had failed to capture was the size of the thing. This was a battleship riding a cushion of air. This was a killing machine. He tried the JUMP command again. The button remained greyed out. Back down into the set-up menu.
Everness
trembled again to the strange vibration.