Be My Enemy (21 page)

The cold looks froze the next smart line on his lips. He had no right to joke about the ship's history and traditions. He was crew, not a passenger, but he was not yet
so.
He might never truly be
so.

“Sen, the cards,” Captain Anastasia ordered. This was why she had called the divano. It was an
Everness
ritual, not for the eyes of passengers. Not for the eyes of smart Oxford folk, rational folk, scientific folk, who might sneer at what they saw and consider it a barbarous superstition.

Very slowly, Sen drew the Everness tarot from its place next to her heart. She kissed the deck. She whispered something to it that Everett could not hear. She shuffled it one-handed and set it on the table in front of Captain Anastasia. The Captain shook her head and slid the deck across the conference table to Everett.

Suddenly Everett was very scared. He was one of those rational folk, those scientific folk. He hesitated to pick up the Everness tarot. He didn't believe in magic. But he did believe in power.

He was scared, but pride glowed inside him. He had been given the Everness tarot. He wasn't Airish born and Airish blood, but he wasn't a ground-pounder, a load of cargo in the hold. He was from two worlds. He was the Planesrunner. He was
so.
He knew the rules and traditions of the cards. Cut the pack three times. Lay out the top six cards in a cross. Lay the final card across the card at the center of the cross. The cards held their faces to the polished nanocarbon.

“It's not magic,” Sen had said, that first time, when she had used the cards on the night train to Hackney Great Port to try and trick Dr. Quantum from him. It was looking a little up the ways, a
little down the ways, a little out to the sides. It was seeing things how they really were, deep down, under everything. Yet Everett held his breath as he turned up the first card.

A struggling man entombed in rock, his arms raised over his head, battling his way through the Earth. He might have miles or millimeters to go to break free to the surface. The man trapped in the Earth couldn't know.

“Bubbles of Earth,”
Sen said. “Enemies press close and there is no clear way to victory. Something is born, or reborn. Blind hope. Next card.”

A skyscraper in the classic Manhattan Empire State-style, stepping back level upon level to a sharp pinnacle. Perched on that pinnacle, a single eye, ringed with fire, inside a triangle. Very much like Tolkien's Eye of Sauron.

“Andromeda Heights.”
Sen did not give any of the card's possible meanings. The image was too recent in their memories: the dark tower full of eyes and faces. The endlessly screaming tower of the Isle of Dogs.

Everett knew these cards. He had turned them up before, on the greasy upholstery of a London Transportation Authority el-train looping around St. Paul's. The same cards would inevitably turn up in any deck, but was the magic at work here the kind he believed in? Sen was sharp with cards—he had seen the way she shuffled. Had she manipulated the deck? Did the turn of the cards mirror her own hopes and fears? Was it that her emotions shaped the cards and the cards shaped the emotions of the people around her? Was she not a magician, but rather a conjurer?

The next card. Here was something he had not seen before. A man sitting on the roof of a train. He looked out of the card, grinning. A glass of wine was held high in a toast in one hand, in the other a whole leg of ham. What he could not see, over his shoulder, was that the train was entering a dark tunnel.

“
The Jaunter
,” Sen said. “The bona times won't last forever. But
neither will the meese times. Do you know where you're going to? Another card, Everett Singh.”

Babies hung in cocoons like fruit in an orchard. Women in eighteenth-century dresses harvested the babies and collected them in baskets on their backs. Looking closely, Everett saw that the cocoons were spun from spider silk, and the babies had insect eyes and little claws—eight little claws—that pressed through the wrapping.

Sen gave a small gasp.
“Spiderbabies.
Who can you trust? Love turns into something weird. A bijou seed grows into a strange deed.”

There were only two cards now, the ones lying over each other at the center of the cross.

A stormy sea and a single bird taking off from the top of a breaking wave. Its feet scatter the storm spray. A vast beam of light fans out from over the horizon, so bright it seems to burn out of the dark, scratchy ink drawing. It was a white void. The card did not show where the light shone from—a beacon, a lighthouse, the sun, something bigger and more powerful than any of those—but the bird was following it home.

“Shining Path.
The way is open but the destination unseen. Do you know where you's goin' to? The sun blinds us.”

Sen reached across the table and slid
Shining Path
off the final card. Everett snapped it face up.

Season of the Wolf.

By pure reflex, Everett reached out to turn it face down again. Captain Anastasia's hand stayed his.

The sun, the planets, in the jaws of an all-devouring wolf. The eater of worlds. The season of darkness falls. The bad guys win. He had seen this card before. Captain Anastasia had turned it up when she'd called on Sen to summon the Everness tarot before the battle of Goodwin Sands. The bad guys who won had not been the Bromleys. They were not the bad guys. Charlotte Villiers and the Order, they were the ultimate bad guys, and they had blown Tejendra—the real Tejendra, Everett's dad—into a random parallel universe and
had turned Everett and the crew of
Everness
into exiles and refugees, fleeing across alternate universes. And the season of darkness still reigned. But the light would come. That was the promise of the
Shining Path
card. The storm-struck bird was like
Everness.
Light would come and light would guide them home.

Sen hadn't given an interpretation, Everett realized. She'd given the name of the card and its individual meanings but she'd never read the spread. The cards were the words, but she had never formed them into sentences.
That's for each of us to do
, Everett thought.
Each of us finds his or her meanings and fortunes in the combinations of the cards.

And what is your meaning, Everett Singh?

Don't do that, Everett. It's like a tiny wave on a beach that undermines the edge of the fantastic sandcastle, crumbling the whole edifice. But what I believe about reality is not built of sand. My beliefs test themselves against reality at every point, and where they are weak, where they can be undermined, the testing makes them stronger
. The universe is rational, even when it seems that it is not. There are rules.
But then
, Everett thought,
there are people.
People don't obey the rules. And the futures hidden in the cards did seem to come true, in ways no one could predict.

“You see what you want to see. We make our own luck here,” Captain Anastasia had said as they went into battle against Ma Bromley on her flagship.

Bubbles of Earth. Andromeda Heights. The Jaunter. Spiderbabies
.
Shining Path. Season of the Wolf.
The cards lay on the table for a long moment. Every crewperson read her or his future into them. Then Everett gathered the cards together and squared the deck. Sen stowed it next to her heart.

“We're over West London,” Captain Anastasia said. “To your posts. Clear for action.”

“Captain.”

Captain Anastasia hung back a moment as the rest of the crew went down the spiral staircase to the bridge and to engineering.

“Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me anything, Everett.”

Everett pressed his hands and forehead against the cold window. His breath formed a misty circle, trickling condensation. The outer edges of dead London lay under a veil of light snow. Reduced to white and black, the lines and shapes that people had put on the land showed clearly: the roads, the abandoned rail tracks, the rows of houses, the boundaries of gardens turning to jungle. He could almost believe humans still owned this city.

“Captain, when you challenged Ma Bromley…”

“The right of single satisfaction.”

Captain Anastasia had never spoken of what happened between the moment she walked out across the air bridge to
Arthur P
and the one when Everett had seen her climbing the spire of the capsized airship. The bruises had faded; she had patched up the torn ear and balanced it by putting more rings in the other one. She had never replaced the lost coat. And she had never said a word about what she had done on the
Arthur P
with her enemies all around her.

“Yes. When you went on your own, with all the Bromleys facing you…were you scared?”

Captain Anastasia answered without hesitation.

“Yes I was. I was very scared. Not for me. For the ship, for you all. I was scared for what could happen to you.”

Everett looked at the black-on-white cityscape, like a pencil drawing, slipping away under the hull.

“I have to go.”

“Don't go Everett.”

“I need to see it.”

“Your da…Dr. Singh will know what to look for.”

“I need to know it will work with the Infundibulum. I'll know if it does. He won't because he doesn't know the Infundibulum. I have to be there.”

Lieutenant Kastinidis had briefed the crew on what to expect
when they went down into what remained of Imperial University. It was not
if
the Nahn would come. It was
when.

“I mean, when we fought the Bromleys, I wasn't scared, not really. It was exciting. Really. And when we went to rescue my dad, when Charlotte Villiers jumped us, it was too quick, too fast, too much going on to be scared. Even when I was fighting that other me in the cemetery, it was like playing in a football match; it was all look, understand, react, like that, bang bang bang, no time to think about it, no time to be scared. But I can see this coming, I could see this getting closer all the way from Oxford, and now here we are and it's only a few minutes away and I can't turn the ship around and I can't stop it and they will come, the Nahn, they will come. Dr. Singh told me about them. The eyes are the last to go. I can see that. I can imagine that. I can think about what that's like. Sometimes it's not good to think so much. When you think, that's when you get scared. And I'm scared, Captain.”

“Of course you are. Only a fool wouldn't be. Being brave isn't about never being scared. It's about what you do with being scared. And that's why it's not bad to think. Thinking doesn't always make you scared. Thinking's the only way through being scared.”

“Yeah. I thought it would be something like that. Thank you, Captain.”

“Annie. You'll know when you're allowed to call me that.” She opened the High Mess door on to the spiral staircase. “Your post Mr. Singh.
Everness
will have need of every hand.”

“Yes ma'am.”

The Nahn storm was on him. It rolled over the bare treetops like a wave and broke into a swirling flock of dark, screeching winged things.

Everett M pushed his thought into his weapon systems. The circuitry of the Thryn battle suit meshed with the Thryn circuitry inside his body. And his arms opened. He was one with the battle
suit, the skin suit, the Thryn systems beneath his skin. Right down to the heart of the stuff they had put into him. Missile racks unfolded. Each branch of the rack carried ten nano-missiles.

“Go,” Everett M whispered. The missiles launched. The recoil jerked his arms backward and upward, but the missiles had their own target-seeking systems. He watched the rocket trails fan out across the face of the howling Nahn wave.

Now.

Everett M brought his hands together in a power-armored clap.

The EM pulse blinded him for a moment. The radio shriek had stabbed each eardrum so high and hard that he thought for a moment that he was bleeding into the helmet.

Conventional explosive missiles were useless against the Nahn, Charles Villiers had said. They would simply reprogram themselves and re-form. EM pulse missiles would burn out their software.

“What about the battle suit?” Everett M had asked. “Doesn't that have software? Doesn't every bit of it—and me—run on software?”

“We trust Madam Moon,” Charles Villiers had said.

The battle suit stood at the edge of a black-speckled field of white snow. The Nahn had dropped in a precise line that marked where the massive EM pulse of sixty nano-missiles detonating at once had knocked it straight out of the sky. Black snow. It ran as far to left and right as Everett M could see. The density dropped off the further from the front line the dead Nahn had fallen. The sky was clear. The destruction was total. Everett M surveyed his work. He took a step forward to grind the body of the closest Nahn—a four winged headless bird thing with two tiny human-like arms—beneath his white battle boot.

Targeting circles appeared in his vision. Everett M didn't want to think too hard about how Madam Moon was hooked into his eyeballs, but the HUD displays were spinning circles, like something in a first-person-shooter video game, where on-screen graphics
showed which character you were meant to be watching. Five contacts, low and fast. There. In the trees. Coming.

With a thought Everett M powered up the finger lasers. His fingertips were fused with the armor's fingertips. He didn't want to think too much about how that worked either.

Five hounds of hell. They had too many legs. Black as oil, teeth white as death. Five flicks of the fingers. The five Nahn hounds fell, slashed into pieces. There was no blood; no bone; no soft, swollen stuff inside. Already the Nahn assemblers were in motion, flowing toward unity.

Charles Villiers had told him this would happen. Everett M held the palms of his hands out. Circular ports opened in each palm. It took a few seconds for the EM pulsers to power up. The lasers took them down. The pulsers took them out. There was nothing to see, not even some video-game sound effect to hear. He simply turned his hand palm out at the scrabbling half hounds and they instantly fell apart into seeping black liquid.