Be My Enemy (2 page)

T
he fat little cherub rode the dragon like he was in a rodeo, one arm in the air, the other holding tight to the dragon's mane. This was a Chinese dragon, as lithe as a stoat, capering in the air over a city of crystal skyscrapers. The cherub's fat little face was wild with glee. The card spun in the air, end over end, fluttering down through the cathedral-sized space of LTA
Everness
's interior. It looked like a single flake of snow. Bent over Dr. Quantum, Everett Singh glimpsed the movement out of the corner of his eye. He reached up and caught the card. A chubby angel on a luck dragon.
Yubileo.

“What does it mean?” he shouted up into the vaults between the gas cells. “Yubileo?” An object detached itself from the industrial grey nanocarbon engineering and hurtled toward him. Sen Sixsmyth plunged headfirst down a drop line from the high catwalk. Her head was tilted back, her arms were pulled in like falcon wings. The line shrilled through her drop harness pulleys. She was an unlikely grinning angel. She came to a halt a meter above Everett's upturned face. She looked down at him.

“
Yubileo.
Jubilee! Jubila! Jubilation! Rejoice rejoice!” Her breath steamed in the air.

“Aren't you cold?”

Sen was dressed in a clingy grey knitted top, ribbed tights, a pale fur gilet, and pixie boots and seemed perfectly comfortable in the freezing air. Everett had on two T-shirts, two pairs of leggings, and two pairs of socks under his dock shorts, and an old Air Navy great coat Mchynlyth had liberated from his time on His Majesty's Air Ship
Royal Oak
. Still, Everett was pale, anxious, and growing stupid with the cold. He had cut the ends of the fingers off his knitted woollen gloves. The cold seeped into them through the icy
screen of Dr. Quantum. After half an hour of coding, each keystroke was as painful as a hammer blow. He kept missing the keys, miscoding, making mistake after mistake, worrying that he was too thick with the cold slowly seeping through the airship's hull to know that he had made a mistake.

“Me? I's never cold. That's cause I's always moving, always doing something. Cold ain't got the time to catch up with Sen. Sit-down work, brain work, that makes you cold. All the blood rushes to your head. That's a well-known fact. All work and no play makes Everett a dull boy. And a cold one. Yubileo! Let the bona temps roll!”

Everett held up the card. Sen snatched it away and, upside down, folded it into her tarot deck one-handed. Her agility astonished Everett. He could think in multiple dimensions, but she could move in them. As a goalkeeper, he had been cat-quick, but she was like wind and lightning. Someday he would ask her to teach him the ways of the ropes and lines and pulleys. Someday when he wasn't busy saving the
Everness
and all who flew in her. Sen twisted and tumbled upright in one graceful twist and landed lightly on the deck. A flick of her fingers and the Yubileo card was between them. She slid in under the shoulder strap of Everett's borrowed greatcoat. He understood that the cards were an extra language to her—her third language, after English and the palari dialect of the Airish, the airship people. There were things only the Everness Tarot could say. She talked through them, and she talked to them. Everett had heard her whispering to the cards, in the big, echoing spaces of the
Everness
. There were plenty of places in an airship where you could imagine you were alone. He had seen her kiss the deck of cards with fast-flashing joy, then again with the slow love of a lifelong friend. They were sisters and friends, she and her face book of wolves and travelers, angels and queens and cherubs on dragons. And planes-runners. She had made a card for him: a boy stepping from a gateway, juggling worlds. She made new cards when she sensed the pack needed them. But she hadn't incorporated the Planesrunner
card into the deck. It was his, to use when he needed it most. The card, not Everett, would know when it was the right time.

“You need a break.”

“I got us into this. I have to get us out.”

“How you going to do that if you's seeing all them bijou letters double? Take a break with Sen.”

Everett had to admit that he needed a break. He had been up long before the dawn turned the great ice red, even before Ship's Engineer Mchynlyth, a famous bright and early riser. He had brought Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth her breakfast in her latty. When he knocked, she answered with bleary eyes, muffled up in three cardigans and bedsocks, frowning. For once she hadn't seemed overjoyed to see a plate of his cooking. Everett might be planesrunner, head coder, and the only way of getting
Everness
and her crew off this random parallel Earth, wherever in the Panoply of the multiverse it might be, but he was also ship's cook. The Airish, Captain Anastasia constantly reminded him, were a people of appetite.

“Mchynlyth's got the snipships to work. Wanna take a varda?” Sen asked.

Everett wanted very much to take a look at the drones. When he had pulled the trigger on the stolen jumpgun and dropped
Everness
out from under the guns and fighters of Charlotte Villiers and the Royal Air Navy into a random parallel Earth, everything inside the Heisenberg field had gone with them. Including two state-of-the-art Royal Air Navy remote drones—snipships connected by an invisibly thin but incredibly strong nanocarbon filament. Moving as a team they could use the nanocarbon monofilament line like a cheese wire to slice off
Everness
's impeller pods and carve her up like a Christmas goose nineteen different ways. Cut off from their mother ship in another universe, they had gone into automatic hover mode. For the first two days,
Everness
's crew had been too busy working out where they were to notice what else had come through the Heisenberg gate with them.

“Well, I'm not leaving good Royal Navy technology sitting out there dish deep in snow for whoever comes trolling along,” Mchynlyth declared. Until he said that, no one had thought that there could be a “whoever,” out there. He had trudged out with First Officer Sharkey through the shrieking, scurrying snow. The cold was so intense that his fingertips flash-froze to the metal. In the six days they had been in Engineering, Mchynlyth had taken them apart and rebuilt them to his own specifications.

Sen was already halfway to the central staircase. She looked over her shoulder.

“You coming, omi?”

Everness
trembled. Sen seized the handrail. Everett pushed his technology to the safe side of the table. The vibration was deep and huge; every part of the ship and everyone on her was shaken to the core.

“I hates it when it does that,” Sen declared. Since tying down in its mooring, the ship had been shaken by irregular but deep tremors. Not from
Everness
herself, but from deep in the ice. “What's doing it?”

“How would I know?” Everett said.

“You's the scientist.”

“Yes, but….” There was no arguing with Sen. “Let's go.”

“I bets its some big ice monster, deep down there,” Sen said. Everett thought a moment about explaining how scientifically unlikely it was that a giant monster could exist in the ice. Pointless. At least there might be some heat in Mchynlyth's dim, electricity-smelling, junk-stuffed cubbyhole.

It was the eighth day of Christmas, on the great ice that in another universe was the North Sea, twenty aerial miles from the airspace of High Deutschland. In the Airish version of the song, on that day my true love gave to me “eight breezes blowing.” Wind, hard, unceasing, and icy, had been a constant since Everett had triggered the Heisenberg jump into this white world. Wind shrilling over the hull with a hiss like knives. Wind drawing long moans like the songs of alien
whales from the guy lines. Wind pulling and tugging and worrying at every rough or protruding feature, ice fingers seeking for something they could hold on to, work at, tear free, and strew across the ice. Wind shaking
Everness
like a dog with a rat as Captain Anastasia navigated her away from the jump point. If Everett's theory was correct—that every Heisenberg jump left a trail behind it—she didn't want special forces dispatched by the Order arriving on top of them, or even inside the ship. E3's Heisenberg Gate technology was sophisticated enough to follow that trail and open a jump point right on the bridge. The wind shrieked over the hull as Everett made Christmas dinner up in the galley, every pan and pot and piece of cutlery rattling as he skinned and gutted the pheasants and made naan dough.
Everness
held her nanocarbon skin close and tight against the icy wind. Captain Anastasia had brought her down to a handful of meters above the great ice. Mooring lines, driven hard into thirty thousand years of ice, held the airship against the titanic draft of air rushing down out of the north.
Everness
creaked and strained and shivered at her anchors, but the anchors held.

“Now,” Captain Anastasia declared, “we eat.”

Everett carried the red gold and green saris he had bought from Ridley Road Market back in Hackney Great Port to the tiny galley table and spread them out. He lit little candles in empty jars. Sharkey gave a long and magnificent grace in the thunderous language of the Old Testament. Then Everett served: pheasant makhani with saffron rice and naan bread, which he puffed up on the end of a fork over a naked gas flame in a piece of kitchen theatre. To follow was his festive halva—Captain Anastasia's favorite—and his signature hot chocolate with a spark of chili. The tiny cabin was bright and fragrant with Punjabi cooking, but the spicy dishes could not win over the mood of the crew. Everyone ate elbow to ribs, knee to knee, in silence, looking up at every creak of the ribs, every change in the shirr of wind-whipped ice across the ship's skin. Snow piled in the porthole window. Everett looked out of the frosted porthole and thought,
my dad is out there
. When Tejendra had pushed Everett away from Charlotte Villiers's jumpgun the weapon had fired him into a random parallel universe. Everett had done the same thing when he jumped
Everness
out from under the guns and fighters of the Royal Air Navy. There was a chance that Tejendra and Everett had been jumped to the same universe. There was always a chance. Everett understood probability, he could work out odds. Flick a pencil up into the air: what are the odds that it will come down on its point and balance upright? There's a chance, a very small one. Now, do that a hundred times in a row. That was the probability that father and son had been jumped to the same universe. And even if that slim possibility had come to pass, no one could survive unprotected out there for more than minutes. The last time Everett had seen his dad, he'd been wearing Canterbury track bottoms and a T-shirt. But he was out there, somewhere.
Tell yourself that. Don't think that he was on the forty-second floor of the Tyrone Tower when Charlotte Villiers banished him to the same point in another universe
. Reality is marvelous, that was one of the first lessons Tejendra had taught him. They had been camping in the Dordogne in Southwest France. One still, clear night Tejendra had roused Everett from his bed and taken him out into the dark. “What are we looking at?” Everett, aged almost six, had asked. His dad had just pointed up. Far from the light and roads, the sky blazed with more stars than Everett had ever seen in his life. They were beautiful. They were brilliant. They were terrifying. He looked up into infinity. It called him, it touched him, it changed him. “I wanted you to see this,” Tejendra said. “We used to get skies like this in Bathwala when I was your age. You look up, and keep looking. This is the heart of all science: wonder.” Tejendra was out there. Everett would find him. It was Christmas all across the multiverse. He watched the snow pile up against the porthole, flake by flake.

Blue electric lightning flashlit the interior of Mchynlyth's engineering bay. Sen banged on the wall.

“Is it safe?”

“My engineering keeps your ass in the air and you're worried about a few wee sparks?” a Glasgow voice bellowed from within. “Come into my parlor. Dinnae touch anything. Live cables.” As Everett had hoped, the room was warm. It smelled of overstrained wiring oil and Mchynlyth, mostly Mchynlyth. Captain Anastasia had shut off the water to the showers, partly to stop the pipes from freezing, partly to conserve dwindling supplies. After eight days on the ice, everyone was getting stinky. Sen masked it with ever-larger dashes of her unique, musky-sweet perfume. Mchynlyth pushed his welding goggles up onto his brown forehead to frown at Everett.

“Should you not be getting our sorry dishes out of here?”

“Omi needs a break,” Sen pleaded. “One mistake and that could be us, kablooey. Bits everywhere.”

You're closer to the truth than you know
, Everett thought.
Scary close.
The deeper he delved into the mathematics of the Infundibulum—the map of all the parallel worlds of the Panoply—the more complexity and delicacy he saw. His dad had worked a staggering piece of mathematics. It was as fine and intricate as jewellery. The further in he went, the bigger it got. Everett felt he was swinging around with a sledgehammer among these shimmering walls of finely worked code. One mistake, one slip in transcribing the code, and the next Heisenberg jump could send each and every atom of
Everness
and her crew to different, separate universes. They would all die instantly.