Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief

Fire support. On my mark , she tells Perhonen .

I’m going to have to change orbits , the ship says. There will be trouble with the orbital Quiet .

Do it .

Mieli feels the knife edge of nearby death. She is a singleton, truly finite: anything else would be betraying her ancestors. She won’t get a second chance if she fails. And sometimes, that edge makes all the difference, especially against the Sobornost.

The gogol pirates are speeding up too, but they are infiltrators. Their synthbio bodies do not have the same level of military enhancements. Still, they have ghostguns, implanted in eyes, hands and torsos. After ten milliseconds they fire the first volley, stars of infrared playing across their faces like glittering makeup as the nanomissiles are launched. The room explodes into a deadly spiderweb of vectors and trajectories in Mieli’s vision.

She grabs the thief and throws him against the base of the middle statue, into a gap in the web. At the same time, she fires a burst of q-dots. It feels like fingerpainting in the air, each stroke leaving a glowing trace. The dots – each a Bose-Einstein condensate, charged with energy and quantum logic – become extensions of her mind, like disembodied limbs. She uses three of them as a flail to swat missiles out of the air, tearing the deadly web to give herself room to manoeuvre. The other two flash towards the vasilev crowd, ready to explode into bursts of coherent light.

The vasilev missiles respond, targeting her. Others shift their trajectories to curve towards the thief. The vasilev crowd splits, trying to avoid the incoming q-dots, but too slowly. The dots blossom into white laser suns that light up the interior of the gallery, melting glass, synthbio bodies and priceless art.

She leaps forward. The air feels like greasy water. Even through combat autism, the freedom of movement is exhilarating. She weaves her way through the missiles, leaving frozen footprints in the water, punching through the art student’s abdomen as an afterthought.

Then they are upon her, Anne, the family, the woman in the garish dress, three others. Disassembler tendrils shoot out of their fingers, lines of vibrating destruction. One lashes across her back. Her armour reacts, burning away the infected layer, giving her wings of flame for an instant.

She programs a simple defence routine into her ghostgun and fires it at them, one, two, three: the thief will need more protection. She gets two. The ghost gogols take over the vasilevs’ brains and hurl their bodies at the paths of missiles aimed at the thief.

She tears off the caleidoscope’s disassembler arm, swinging it at Anne. The girl’s torso explodes into dust as the molecular fingers tear her cells apart. She fires her last q-dot into the red-haired man’s eye. Several vasilevs return fire. Ghostgun impacts make her armour scream. Gritting her teeth, she grabs one of the bullets in her fist. It will contain a copy of a vasilev mind – time to ask it questions later.

They rush her, all at once. There is a mass of bodies on top of her, a coordinated mountain of synthflesh, ignoring her punches and kicks that tear into it as if it were mist. Her skull presses against floor. She sends Perhonen a set of coordinates. Mark .

Fire from the sky cuts the balcony from the hip of the city like a surgeon’s knife. Metal groans. Somewhere above, Perhonen ’s wings rain hard hot light.

The sudden freefall feels like home. She navigates through a bloody mist and tangled bodies, finds the thief and seizes him. Then she opens her wings. As always, the sensation – like flower buds opening in her shoulders – brings back her childhood, flying in her koto’s forests in the ice, racing paraspiders. But her wings are stronger now, remade, strong enough to carry both her and the thief, even in this heavy city.

Together they burst through the ceiling of the gallery. The twisted, burning remains of the balcony and the vasilevs plummet towards the city legs below.

Shame about the statues , she thinks.

The world is a chaos of bodies, explosions and the smell of burning flesh. I blink, and my body is hurled against stone. Staccato thunderclaps rock my skull. I am crashing through glass, Mieli is holding me and we are flying and there are flames below us and a whooshing sound of air as if in a wind tunnel that empties my lungs-

I scream. And then I fall. For about a metre. In Martian gravity. I land on my back, ears ringing, colours flashing in front of my eyes, mouth still open after the air in my lungs runs out.

‘Stop that,’ Mieli says. She is kneeling, a few metres away, and a pair of wings are slowly retracting into her back, two delicate trees of silver with gossamer-thin tracery, separated by a transparent, shimmering film, like Perhonen ’s wing fabric. In a moment, they are gone.

‘Fuck,’ I say, when I catch my breath. We are on a gently sloping rooftop, somewhere near the edge of the city. The conflagration and a column of smoke in the horizon clearly shows where we were mere seconds ago. A flock of tzaddikim descend towards the battlefield, like crows. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘I told you to stop that,’ Mieli says, standing up. Her toga is in tatters, showing expanses of smooth brown skin. She notices my gaze and turns her back as her garment starts knitting itself back together.

‘F-’ I take a deep wheezing breath, cutting myself short. ‘The bastards. Somebody told them. Who we were. Somebody knew.’

Darling doves , says Perhonen. I’m glad you are okay, but don’t expect to hear from me for a few hours. I had to flee my holding position in stealth mode: the orbital Quiet might as well be blind and deaf, but even they have noticed me firing lasers down at their planet. I’ll let you know when I get back. Be safe .

‘What happened back there?’ I ask Mieli.

‘They attacked. I had to ask Perhonen to take them out, with extreme prejudice. Protocol.’

‘So, they are – all dead?’

‘Destroyed. No possibility of an exomemory sync; if they get resurrected, they won’t remember us. They were stealth vasilevs, they would not have had neutrino comms equipment.’

‘Jesus. Any collateral damage?’

‘Just art,’ Mieli says, and for the life of me I can’t figure out if she is making a joke. ‘But you got what we came for, yes?’

I touch the data the little pirate girl dumped on me. Parts are missing, but the important bits are intact.

‘Yes. I’m going to have to study this.’ I massage my temples. ‘Look, something is going on. Clearly, somebody tipped them off. Is there some twisted Sobornost power game going on with your employer? Is there something I should know about?’

‘No.’ Her answer does not leave any room for argument.

‘All right, then we have to assume it’s local. We are going to have to look into it.’

‘ I am going to look into it. You are going to get on with the mission.’

I get up, slowly. My body is undamaged – no broken bones – but it pretends that it is. Everything tingles as if covered by one massive bruise. ‘Yes, about that.’

‘What?’

‘You do realise that you are going to have to give me more than just hurt privileges for this body? If I’m going to create a new identity, I’m going to need some flexibility. Even hunting this Raymonde girl down is going to involve more than just eyes and ears. Not to mention emulating the gevulot sense or surviving if we ever happen to encounter our many-voiced friend there again.’

She studies me carefully, massaging her hands together. A thin layer of dried gore is peeling off them, falling down in flakes as her skin cleans itself.