Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief

Unruh’s body shudders. He draws a deep, wet, ragged breath. He coughs, and his eyes fly open.

‘What – where-’

‘I’m sorry, M. Unruh, this will only take a moment.’ Mieli hands me the upload helmet, a featureless black cap. I place it onto his head, and it sticks to his skull eagerly.

Unruh laughs, only to be broken by a cough. ‘You again?’ He shakes his head. ‘I am disappointed. I did not expect you to be some common gogol pirate.’

I smile. ‘I assure you that I don’t have a sliver of your gevulot, and I have returned all I stole from you. This is about something else. Hold still.’

It was the obvious thing to do. How do you find out if there are shadowy forces manipulating people’s minds? You find a clean template, and make a before-and-after comparison. Unruh was young, with no previous resurrections or Quiet time: his mind as a whole had never passed through the resurrection system. Now it has, and if someone has done something to it, we will find out. If not – well, I have been to worse parties.

‘If I must.’ Unruh sighs. ‘I see. You stole a minute of my Time, and gave it back? To get access to my mind here? Interesting. I can’t imagine why. This is a very strange crime, M. le Flambeur. I wish I could stay and watch young M. Beautrelet catch you.’

‘I will pass him your regards,’ I say. ‘And by the way, I apologise for the surroundings. I wish we could have at least arranged a drink.’

‘It’s fine. I have recently experienced much more discomfort.’

‘While we wait,’ I say, ‘I wonder if you mind me asking how you knew we were going to be at your party?’

‘The letter.’ He waves a hand.

‘A letter?’

He looks at me curiously. ‘It wasn’t from you? Oh, this is even richer than I imagined. Such a shame that I have to miss all this. A letter in my library, from you. We could not figure out how it got there. M. Beautrelet thought there was something wrong with the exomemory-’

We are getting the data now, Perhonen says. It does indeed look like there have been some changes, especially in the-

Unruh’s features twist into a snarl. He goes for my throat, white fingers digging into my flesh. He screams, a terrible, tearing sound, slamming his forehead against my face. My vision goes red in a haze of pain.

Mieli pulls him off me, twisting his arms behind his back. ‘Le Flambeur!’ he shouts, in a different voice. ‘He will come for you. Le Roi will come for you!’

Then he goes limp in Mieli’s grip as his Time runs out again.

I massage my throat. ‘Well,’ I say. ‘I’d say that if further proof of manipulation of Oubliette minds is required, we’ve got it.’

We got the data, Perhonen says. It is very strange .

Mieli cocks her head, listening. ‘Someone is coming,’ she says. And then I hear it too, distant footsteps and approaching Quiet.

‘Oh my,’ I say. ‘I think the teen sleuth actually worked out what we were going to do.’

Mieli grabs my arm. ‘You can play games later,’ she says. ‘We need to go.’

Mieli studies the three-dimensional map Perhonen has been compiling from their sensor data, looking for escape routes.

‘Shouldn’t we be running?’ the thief asks.

‘Ssh.’ The metacortex suggests ways out, computing paths with minimal probability of a hostile encounter. She has no desire to fight their way out. There : a possible path, up this chamber and then through-

The ground and the walls shake. There is a groaning sound, and the map changes . She realises what the large clumps of artificial muscle, heat and energy in the map are: Atlas Quiet. They balance the city platforms and its internal structure. They must be directly below the Maze, where the things change the most. The Resurrection Men are using the Quiet to corner them, blocking escape routes. That means a fight. Unless-

‘This way,’ she snaps at the thief and starts running down the tunnel, towards the voices.

‘More to the point,’ says the thief, ‘shouldn’t we be running away from them?’ Not wanting to argue, Mieli gives him a little jolt through their biot link.

‘There was absolutely no need for that!’

The tunnel running through the crypt chamber is wide and cylindrical, widening as they go. Her metacortex spots the echoes of the Quiet and Resurrection Men ahead. But they are not what she is interested in.

They enter a wide, low chamber a hundred metres in diameter. It is lit dimly by fluorescence from synthbio tubes. One of the walls is rough and organic, moving and pulsing, a scaled carapace of something alive: the side of an Atlas Quiet. Mieli summons her combat autism, mapping the geometry of the underworld around them, the platforms, the seams, how the pieces fit together.

‘Stop!’ shouts a voice. On the other side of the chamber, a group of hooded Resurrection Men enter, flanked by hulking war Quiet.

Mieli fires her ghostgun at the Atlas Quiet’s side, loading it with a simple slave gogol that will self-destruct after a few iterations. The walls and the floor begin to shake. The Quiet wall spasms. Its scales break. With a tremendous crack, the chamber splits open in the middle. Daylight shoots up from the yawning chasm. Mieli grabs hold of the thief and jumps.

They fall through the wound in the flesh of the city. Synthbio solutions rain around them like blood. And then they are outside, in the middle of the forest of the city legs, blinking at the bright daylight.

Mieli opens her wings to catch their fall, wraps them in gevulot and starts the flight back to the city of the living.

My spirits are high when we return to the hotel.

Under my gevulot, I’m covered in dirt and grime, shaky from yet another Mieli-powered flight, but elated. A part of me is thinking about whatever took over Unruh. But it is overruled by the majority that wants to celebrate.

‘Come on,’ I tell Mieli. ‘We have to celebrate. It’s traditional. And you are an honorary thief now. This is when one traditionally gets caught, by the way; arguing over loot, or bungling the getaway. But we did it. I can’t believe it.’

My head is buzzing. In the last few hours, I have been a Belt emigré, a detective, a Time beggar and a corpse. This is what it must have felt like before . It is difficult to stay still.

‘You did good. Like an Amazon.’ I am babbling, but I don’t care. ‘You know, when this is over, I might just come and settle here again. Do something modest. Grow roses. Steal girls’ hearts and some other things every now and then.’

I order the most expensive beverage the hotel fabber can make, virtually grown Kingdom wine, and offer Mieli a glass. ‘And you, ship! Well done with the quantum magic.’

I believe I should think of myself as the loony expert type who likes blowing things up, Perhonen says.

I laugh. ‘She knows pop culture references! I’m in love!’

I’m finding interesting things in the data, by the way .

‘Later! Save it for later. We are busy getting drunk now.’

Mieli looks at me oddly. Again, I wish I could read her, but the biot link only goes one way. But to my surprise, she accepts the offered glass.

‘Is it like this for you every time?’ she asks.

‘My dear, wait until we spend months planning a guberniya brain break-in. This is nothing. Just sparkles. That’s the real fireworks. But I am a thirsty man in a desert. This is good.’ I clink my glass against hers. ‘Here’s to crime.’

The thief’s elation is infectious. Mieli finds herself getting happily drunk. She has carried out operations involving elaborate preparation and planning before – getting the thief out of the Prison, among other things – but there has never been an illicit thrill like the one that radiates from the thief. And he did play his part well, like a koto brother, without any sign of rebellion, a different kind of creature entirely, in his element.