A World Too Near (6 page)

Stefan dragged a chair away from the wall. “Put your foot up here. Either one. See how it fits.” He handed the cirque over.

The carbon nitride casing was reassuringly heavy. Quinn put his left foot on the chair seat and linked the two ends, fitting them with a click. Active nan, military grade, riding his body.
Give me something I can’t lose
, he’d told them.
Something I don’t have to carry.
And here it was.

“Test it,” Stefan said. “That it comes off.”

Quinn examined the chain, noting again the three indentations on the loop. He pressed down the sequence: four, five, and one. Nothing happened. For a moment he thought, They mean for me to go down with Ahnenhoon.

“Pull it open.”

Quinn did, and the chain detached, coming away in his hands.

Lowering his voice, Stefan said, “From now on we don’t talk about the cirque, and we don’t look at it. There’ll be no physical exams. No baths, either, by the way.”

“It’s okay in water, though?”

“Yes, but let’s not chance it.”

“Not very reassuring.”

“Okay, take a bath.”

Looking at the cirque, Quinn thought he could do without.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Stefan said. “We could send someone else. You could brief somebody, train them. I’m not saying you have to go.”

“How sure are you about this thing?”

Stefan looked him straight in the eyes. “We’re not one hundred percent. But it’s the best we’ve got.”

Quinn liked that bit of honesty. “Do I really have an hour to get away?”

Stefan smiled. “So we’re still trying to kill you?”

“Do I have an hour?”

“Don’t wait an hour.”

Stefan glanced at the cirque in Quinn’s hand. “You know the value of that thing? Ounce for ounce, the most expensive artifact in the world. We’re giving it to you to do what needs to be done. If you’re not up to it, tell me now.”

“Who else is there?”

“That’s no answer.”

“I thought it was.” He looked at Stefan Polich, reminding himself that he wasn’t doing this for Stefan or for Minerva. It was for the Rose. For the people he loved, for Mateo and Emily, and for everyone else, as well. He would have done it even if Johanna, in her message to him, hadn’t begged him to act. She had reached out to him in a recorded warning, one she’d sent to him when he had first been imprisoned in the Entire. He hadn’t found it then, and never knew what she took to her grave knowing: that the Tarig meant to destroy us. Last time back, he’d finally heard her warning. But even without her urging, he would have tried to stop the gracious lords, as they termed themselves. At close quarters with them for so long, he’d had time to grow familiar with their ways. No one else had a ghost of a chance of stopping them.

Stefan was waiting for Quinn to answer.

Quinn took the cirque in both hands and, leaning over the chair, clicked it into place around his ankle.

They left the morgue, entering the corridor where their respective security staffs waited. The chain traced a cold circle around his ankle. He’d have to practice taking it off, so he could do it in a hurry.

He didn’t for a moment believe he’d have an hour to get away.

CHAPTER FOUR

I
N ZERO-G, Lamar Gelde felt like his stomach was floating free. The shuttle between ship and space platform had no rotation, so for these interminable minutes of approach to the dock, he was getting a good dose of weightlessness. He was strapped in and all loose objects were secure—the intercom kept reminding them not to take out anything that might escape and become a projectile—but he couldn’t do anything about his stomach.

“I’m too old for this nonsense,” he grumbled.

Next to him, Quinn smiled indulgently. Fine for him, thirty-four years old and accustomed to the topsy-turvy from his starship days. He resented Quinn at the moment, and it flooded him with relief to discover hard feelings against a man he’d wronged.

The forward screen showed their slow crawl approach to the Ceres platform, toward the dock mast. Rivets, handholds, grappling arms, and solar arrays bristled from the platform’s pockmarked hide. It had grown massively since Lamar had last been here, when he’d first watched Quinn enter the adjoining region. Since then the whole complex had become dedicated to dimensional interface, growing all the time. Crawling with workers and bots, its irregular design hid modules and compartments that most of crew never saw, and weren’t meant to.

A solid clunk announced they had docked. Several technicians debarked first, leaving Quinn at the last to help Lamar. Releasing the seat restraints they lost contact with the deck. Lamar went sideways in orientation to the former floor and flailed for a moment as he tried to right himself. At his side Quinn said, “Don’t struggle. I’ll steer us through.”

Lamar felt Quinn’s steady hand on his elbow. With a practiced assurance, Quinn used the handholds to guide Lamar toward the open hatch, through which a cold current of air now rushed. The dock mast had no rotation either; so still adrift, Lamar followed Quinn’s example in gripping the safety line and pulling himself to the lift. Arriving, they found the doors closed, the lift in use by the first contingent of passengers heading to the upper decks. Lamar and Quinn waited with their three guards, men in bulky jackets trying in vain to form a security perimeter here where all orientations were temporary and likely to float out of control.

Out of control. That was about the size of it. Damn Leonard Garvey anyway, trying to abduct the child, scaring the bejesus out of all of them. The man was a lunatic, a drunk, a security leak. It made Lamar sick to think how full of holes all precautions had become. The platform itself might be alive with spies, probably was, with all these newcomers. Helice said they were screening for federals too. Well, they could handle government types: shoddy, underpaid, bantam-weight goons. These were the types responsible for cobbling together the dole, the entitlements that somehow people thought they had coming. So 75 percent of company earnings went to prop up the unfit and envious. And while the feds might be easy to fend off, the industry competition was more worrisome: EoSap and TidalSphere among them. Lamar glanced at the three security men. Who could you trust anymore? The question brought his own duplicity to mind.

“Are you okay?”

Quinn thought his distress was the zero-g. Lamar clutched the handhold. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth.” He wanted to say, Helice is going with you. Just let her, Titus. Things have grown beyond you now, and it’s no ill will I bear you, far from it. I loved your family, your father, and you. But it’s all bigger than you know, Titus. And it’s bigger than Helice going along for the ride—much bigger.

Quinn gently nudged Lamar toward the now-open door of the lift. “We’ll get you some solid ground.”

Solid ground. Would there ever be such again? “I’m sorry,” Lamar said. Indeed he was sorry—for the Helice deal, and for so much else.

“We’ll be there in a moment. You’ll be fine.”

“No, but I
am
sorry.” It felt awful to say it and know that Quinn didn’t understand. Lamar wasn’t cut out for intrigue. God help him that it had ever come to this. He gripped Quinn’s forearm. “Just remember that I’m an old man; can you do that?”

Quinn looked amused. “Lamar. Don’t worry. Someday I’ll tell you about the time my chief navigator threw up in zero-g.”

“Please don’t,” Lamar said, now genuinely sick.

“Take hold,” the intercom voice said. “All lift passengers take hold. In five, four . . .” The voice counted down, and they pulled themselves down the handholds toward one of the walls designated in large letters as FLOOR.

Gravity came on, jarring them against the hard deck. Lamar bent over, bile running up his esophagus. He waved help away as the four others held the door open.

One of the security had fetched a rolling chair. Good grief, a wheelchair. He sank into it, and off they went down the corridor. Someone put a lap blanket over his knees, and his humiliation was complete.

Helice Maki looked around the antiseptic cubicle. Just a short walk now to the transition module. She was ready for it. Despite how little she knew about her destination, she was ready. Quinn would lead the way, teaching her as they traveled—he’d have to teach her or risk exposure to his enemies. Language came first. She had rudimentary Lucent, even though Quinn had refused to give lessons. Such a power-grab. Who did he think
paid
for his little visit to the Entire? In any case, the first time he returned from the Entire he had raved for days in a semiconscious state. All recorded. It had taken her people two years to crack Lucent from the fragments, but you can’t keep a good mSap confused for long.

She did a few deep knee bends to keep her circulation going and to fend off a mild nervousness. For a few minutes more she had to rely on Lamar and the others. Had to trust Stefan to remain befuddled. Stefan Polich believed in her passion to deliver the cirque and the nan. Quinn and Helice to the rescue. It
would
be a rescue, just not the one Stefan had in mind. Poor Stefan. A man who had faith in technology and human enterprise. Well, that
did
have a certain ring, yes it did. But how totally unimaginative. More typical of dred or middie thinking than his intellectual class.

In moments she would be in the Entire. It thrilled her, and beyond that, it was fun. Deadly serious, too, of course. She didn’t relish killing anyone, but deaths would inevitably occur. For example, she was going to be rid of Quinn at the first opportunity. After he had made all the introductions.

Walking amid his security phalanx, Quinn followed Lamar in his wheelchair, feeling a little light-headed. Sudden gravity demanded adjustments. As did suddenly leaving the universe. They were heading directly to the transition module with no sleep period, no delays. All for the purpose of staying ahead of the competition. Even if the competition had no idea what the stakes really were.

He had no reason to hope that, this trip, he would see anyone whom he’d known in the Entire. Like Anzi, the woman who had guided him. Her uncle and master of the sway, Yulin. His fighting master Ci Dehai. The timid Cho, who had ferreted out Johanna’s message in the library. The scholar Bei or the navitar Ghoris. The alive brightship that had deposited him at his home at the end. He wanted to find some or all of them again, especially Anzi. But the Entire was not just a world, it was a universe; smaller than the Rose, but not so very much smaller. And he’d be in a hurry.

Pressing against his ankle was the cirque—a weight he still was not used to. Just his imagination, probably, that it threw him off his stride. Just his imagination that the nan in their separate links were scratching at the doors between. Once the tiny chambers opened and their contents shared information, the nan went into changeover mode. Changing things.
Changing.
A nice word for a nasty business. He didn’t like bringing military nan into the land where his daughter lived. There was just the slightest unease in his mind that the weapon could not be controlled.

His goal was clear if hopelessly general: After Ahnenhoon he would go to the sway that held Sydney. Despite weeks of feverish thought, he’d formed no sensible plan to do so. He only knew, had to believe, he would find her.

Construction and tech uniforms everywhere, crowded corridors. From belowdecks came the high whine of robotic assemblers. Minerva was getting ready to
ship out needed equipment, if all went well. If peace could come of Quinn’s act of sabotage. If the inevitability of contact with humanity could persuade the Entire to make concessions for travel.

“Sir.” A stocky fellow with sandy hair had introduced himself to security and managed to fall in step beside him.

“Mikal,” Quinn said. Mikal James, program chief for the transition.

Mikal nodded at him and Lamar. “I hoped to meet you at the dock. Running behind, as usual.”

That didn’t bode well since Quinn was about to be lifted out of the universe in a controlled quantum implosion of which this man was nominally in charge. “Glad to see you. Set to go, then?”

Mikal hesitated a split second. “Yes.” A terrible smile, meant to be reassuring.

The issue was interface, crossing, correlations. Mikal headed the team of physicists who’d worked out what they’d do today: how and where Quinn would enter the Entire. Getting home was even more complicated, but
getting
to
was devilishly hard. The universe next door shifted. Connections came and went, and Minerva had damn little by way of maps or orientation to place. In Entire terms, they lacked the
correlates
, the formula predicting time and space connections between here and there. This was the most closely guarded Tarig secret, akin to the navigational charts of medieval times, those secret maps hoarded by the Portuguese in a desperate and losing gamble to keep Cathay and the new world to themselves.

So when Mikal had responded,
Yes, set to go
, he meant,
Yes, I have a way
in.
A way in that would put him in safety relative to the main things that could kill him, such as the storm walls and the River Nigh. Marking these entities were emissions of exotic matter, forming a signature—a loud one, but nothing compared to the bright, which shone like a beacon now that they knew what to search for.

In front of Quinn, security staff wheeled Lamar onward toward the wing housing the transition module. Here, the press of workers and crew grew thick.

By way of explanation, Mikal said, “Station’s at capacity for personnel. We’re perfecting the crossover. For objects of scale.”

Of scale. Material of the sort it would take to sustain a delegation: supplies, equipment, terrain vehicles, replacement parts. They believed in the possibility of making peace with the Tarig. They wanted to believe that eventually, they would be welcome.

“So you can send objects of scale now?”

“We’re a long way from perfection.” Mikal glanced over at Quinn. “You’ll be fine. It’s larger-mass objects that give us problems. Ships, for instance. We’re far from that goal.”