Be My Enemy (24 page)

“What I want to know is, who killed it?” Sharkey asked.

In the next storeroom the headlight beams glittered from metal and circuitry.

“What is that? Light it up,” the lieutenant ordered.

The flashlights lit up a thick metal disk, three meters across, covered in wires and coolant pumps and heat exchangers. Webs of cable ran from it into the darkness. At the center was a hole the size of Everett's hand. He had seen that hole, this disk before. He had seen it on a wmv file on Ryun Spinetti's computer, but he knew that the real one stood in a basement like this one under Imperial College, just as this one stood in an almost identical basement under Imperial University.

“The original Heisenberg Gate.”

“Lieutenant.” Sharkey's voice was loud in the dark, musty, dusty room. He spoke the word with the accent of an American Confederate.

“Enough archaeology. Move out,” Lieutenant Kastinidis ordered.

“Lieutenant,” Sharkey insisted. “They're going to leave you.”

“We don't have time for this.”

“The Brigadier and the Agister. They got a plan, ma’am.”

“Enough, Mr. Sharkey.”

But Everett had heard power armor move enough to know what that whine of motors and shuffle of feet meant. The squad was troubled. And he knew that Sharkey had heard the rustle of discontent too.

“Once they have this device, do you know what they'll do? Open up a gate and get the hell out of this world.”

“Impossible. The sun…”

“We got here. They made a deal with us. You help us find the device; they get a free ride to whatever universe they want. I didn't hear them mention you.”

“You're lying.”

“‘The Lord be a true and faithful witness between us,’” Sharkey said. “Why do you think they came in the ship? Your Brigadier, maybe, but the Agister? She's surely a woman of many parts, but none of them, I think, is military. Do you concur?”

“One more word from you and I will shoot you. I mean that most sincerely, sir.”

The darkness was deep, the light unsteady, but Everett thought he saw a small smile on Sharkey's face. He didn't need to say one word more. He had said quite enough. The seeds were planted.

“We complete this mission, we get out. Now, where is this thing, Dr. Singh?”

I have underestimated you, Myles O’Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey
, Everett thought. Sometimes it's not a choice between saving Everett and saving the ship. Sometimes both can be done at the same time.

The storeroom at the very end of the corridor was a spooky museum of dead technology. Here stood a dozen Heisenberg Gates, obsolete dusty gateways to nowhere. The glint of helmet lights off white insect wings startled Everett, then more lights came to bear and he saw that the object was a drone. Cobwebs dripped from the fan engines in its delicate wings. Everett had seen a similar device come out of the Heisenberg Gate under Imperial College after a fantastical flight over the domes and minarets of E2 London. Similar but different.

“Gathering dust,” Tejendra said. “We went from the queen of sciences to Cinderella in a single moment. Nanotech was the thing now. Nanotech would solve everything. There was money in nanotech. There were things we could make and sell. There was never any money in the multiverse. This way.”

Helmet lights struck strange shadows from row upon row of steel shelving. Cubes, boxes, rectangles, neatly arranged. They all looked perfectly anonymous to Everett, but Tejendra worked slowly along the line, checking each one carefully and thoroughly. He stopped, laid a finger on a small box the size and shape of an old-fashioned paperback book.

“I think…”

“It looks like a computer drive,” Everett said.

“A quantum computer drive. I'll need to boot it up to find out if it's still working.”

Everett's heart lurched in his chest. He had never thought that the mapping device, the Panopticon, might not work. When you need a thing so badly, you can't—you dare not—imagine failure.

Lieutenant Kastinidis stepped forward. “Give it to me.” She turned the little box over in her gauntleted hands. “Looks like a standard socket. We haven't invented much in fifteen years.”

“We haven't invented anything,” Tejendra said.

The lieutenant popped a panel in her left wrist and ran out a power cable.

“As long as that thing doesn't eat too much power. I need every watt.”

Tejendra plugged in the Panopticon and stroked the upper surface. A single blue dot woke in the center of the panel and glowed beneath the metal. Then the room was filled with glowing stars, turning slowly like the great, billion-year wheeling of galaxies.

“Oh,” Everett said. “Wow.”

“Panopticon,”
Tejendra said. “That's a good name, isn't it? The device that can see everywhere. I'll scale it in a little.” Tejendra dragged his fingers in across the metal surface and the holographic display contracted to the size of a table top. “Yes, that's how I remember it.” By the light of the Panopticon Everett could see Tejendra smiling. “All those stars, those are Heisenberg Gate events.”

“That's it. That's so it,” Everett whispered.

“Lieutenant, I'm getting an upsurge in Nahn activity,” Trooper Winkelman said. “Increased energy levels in the hotspots. There's a huge power spike in the Hyde Park nexus and I'm getting Nahn source-code traces running right here. They may be on to us.”

“I need to determine whether it's complete,” Everett said. “There might be some interface unit missing. We'd have to come back for it.”

“Let's see if I can remember how to get into the system files,” Tejendra said. He reached for the Panopticon. A flash of light blinded everyone in the dark storeroom. When Everett could see again, a new star burned brilliantly in the holographic constellation.

“What the hell was that?” Lieutenant Kastinidis said.

“I don't know,” Tejendra said. “I didn't touch anything. It's still operational…”

“I do know,” Everett declared. “A Heisenberg Gate opening. Right here, right now.”

“Whatever it is, the Nahn know we're here,” Trooper Winkelman said. “Activity just went off the scale.”

“Mr. Singh, completion will have to wait.” Lieutenant Kastinidis ripped the power cable from her wrist. The stars died. The darkness was sudden and total. “We leave now. Standard protection formation. Go go go.”

Blinking, dazzled, Everett grabbed the Panopticon and stumbled toward the door. He felt a hand in his back, urging him, guiding.

“Go on son, you'll be all right,” Tejendra said. Everett tucked the Panopticon into an inside pocket of his jacket. The glow tubes on his clothing shone as if he were a man made of stars. Not bright enough to see by, but bright enough to be seen.

“Major hotspot,” Trooper Winkelman said. “It's right under us.”

Everett M hit the harness button and dropped lightly to
Everness
's hull. He landed hard. He had half expected to bounce on it like a trampoline. He let go of the tether line and watched the hedgehopper, set free, soar away until it was lost against the white sky. It would fly until its batteries ran out. No need to bring it back.

The airship was huge. Size of a building huge. Landscape huge. The upper hull curved up gently before him and away on either side. The skin was dusted lightly with snow. There was no sense that he was a hundred meters from the ground. There was no sense that he was floating on air. The only hint that he was on the back of a great machine was a gentle vibration that came up through the soles of his feet: the airship humming to the pulse of its engines.

The tail fin was the size of a house.
Stay away from the moving
parts
, Everett M told himself as he squatted down to unzip the quantum tracker from his backpack. It was Thryn-tech white, sealed inside a plastic bag. Foiled by plastic packaging at the last moment, Everett M had to use his teeth to tear it open. It looked like a computer mouse. Everett M realized that he had no idea what a quantum tracking device should look like, but the idea was that you pulled the strip from the adhesive panel on the flat base and stuck it down. Simple as that. He cleared away the snow with his numb, cold hands. Two seconds. Done.

Done.

Mission accomplished.

All the fear. All the horror and the dread and the bravery, the destruction and the cold, to stick a little plastic blister to the hull of an airship. Everett MEverett M. almost laughed. He didn't because he knew that if he did he would not be able to stop, and that the laughter was right on the edge of crying, from the tension and the insanity and the sick feeling in the stomach of dread that went deeper than fear. The least thing would tip it one way or the other. And he wouldn't be able to stop.

The push button on top was the only moving part. It activated the tracker and at the same time transmitted Everett M's location to Earth 4. All they had to do was open the Heisenberg Gate.

All they had to do was open the Heisenberg Gate.

The Heisenberg Gate.

Why hadn't they opened the gate?

They couldn't. They wouldn't. They'd invested too much in him, in all the Thryn tech. He was too valuable. They couldn't leave him here, could they? He saw Charlotte Villiers's red lips beneath the net veil of her hat. Beneath the lipstick her lips were thin and cold. She could leave him stranded in this world. She could do anything.

A dot of blinding white appeared in the air in front of Everett M. In an eye blink it opened into a disk of glaring white. The white light cleared and became the white of the Moon.

“Goodbye, I hate you!” Everett M yelled. Then he grabbed his backpack, pushed up his goggles, and dived through the Heisenberg Gate. It was a good backpack. He would have hated to have left it.

Everett ran. The corridor was so much longer, the floor so much more treacherous than it had been on the way in. The grey light of the stairwell never seemed to get any closer. And the room, so many rooms…Helmet lights bobbed and wove crazily around him, little flashes of insane illumination. Trooper Winkelman stopped abruptly, held up her hand for the squad to stop, and held up her scanner. Reflected light played off her visor. Everett saw her helmet move and knew it was a shake of disbelief.

“Nahn!”

“Where?”

“Every bloody where!”

A soldier darted ahead to cover each open door as the squad ran down the corridor. Storerooms full of lost science and history now housed creeping horrors. Everett saw something blacker than the blackness rear up among the tumbled shelves and dead computer cases. It looked like liquid night. It had legs. Too many legs. Far too many legs. Then the soldier fired and the EM pulse blew it all over the walls.

“Clear.”

“Don't look back,” Sharkey shouted at Everett's shoulder. Everett looked back. A wave of blacker-than-blackness advanced up the corridor, along the walls, the floor, the ceiling, coating it like some vile vomit. Faces. There were faces in it. Ten meters, five meters. Steps. Steps up. Steps out. The light in the stairwell was blinding. Everett hesitated, dazzled.

“Up up up!” a trooper yelled. Everett took the steps two at a time. He missed his footing on the final step and almost reeled headlong. Lieutenant Kastinidis seized his collar in a power-armored steel grip and hauled him upright. As the squad hurdled through
shattered remains of the Huxley Building's doors a solid column of black Nahn stuff erupted from the stairwell. It towered like a tree made up of twining snakes. It blossomed at its summit into faces, like a many-headed Hindu god, then fell and splashed all over the lobby. In the moment it took to re-form, two soldiers unclipped grenades from their belts and lobbed them into the seething lobby.

“What are those?” Everett shouted, racing for the cover of the passage under the Huxley building.

“EMP grenades,” the soldier beside him answered. Everett pressed the Panopticon close to his chest. Not that it would do any good; the EMP pulse would go through him as clean as an X-ray. If it could fry the Nahn, it could fry the Panopticon. All he could do was hope that the quantum-computing circuitry was protected. The grenades went off with two flat cracks.
EMP grenades
, Everett thought.
Just like
Halo. Glancing back, he saw that the Nahn stuff frozen in the door lay like a breaking wave of oil, faces fixed forever in midscream.
Everness
hung huge above him, but black Nahn stuff was sliding out of the gutters, flowing along the Victorian fake gargoyles, taking their shape, and launching off into the air. Nahn demons stormed out of the air. Elena Kastinidis's soldiers met them with EM blasts that blew them into strange, angular kite shapes that fell to the ground and shattered like glass.

“Power down to 40 percent,” Winkelman said.

Everett saw Elena Kastinidis glance at her wrist, then look up. Her fist smashed Everett to the ground. Before he could cry out, she aimed and fired. Shards of dead Nahn fell tinkling around him. He manically brushed them off as Sharkey grabbed his arm and rushed him into the passage. Elena Kastinidis paused for a moment to look at her wrist readout. She tapped it, twice. Everett thought he heard her whisper “shit” on the open channel.

From the open expanse of the Queen's Lawn, Everett glanced up at
Everness.
Sen stood at the great window, hands pressed to the glass. Even at this distance he could see the fear and helplessness on her
face. This time she could not ride to his rescue on a drop line, disarm the bad guys with a well-aimed thumper shot, and whizz everyone into the sky. And between Everett and Sen, the Nahn swarmed on wings of living nanotech. But the sight of her, so far away and vulnerable, yet so strong, put fibre in his legs and iron in his spirit and a fire in his heart.
You won't ever have to make that jump home
, Everett thought.
I'm coming back.

At the foot of the Queen's Tower now. Boots trampled the shattered door.

“In in in…” Lieutenant Kastinidis pushed the civilians into the tower. Everett dashed past her. A blackness slammed out of the sky. The lieutenant put up her arm, and the Nahn hit it and clung. It had the face of a two-year-old child. With her free hand Elena ripped it from her, threw it into the air, and shattered it with a blast from her pulser.