Ian McDonald - Brasyl

The door is quantum coded. Amen. What quantum seals, quantum shall undo. He draws the Q-blade and with one economic gesture cuts the door free from its frames. The two halves hang a moment, then fall backward onto the woven grass carpet of the reception area. As Yanzon’s boot soles crush the faces of carved baroque angels and demons, silent alarms detonate across his expanded vision.

Edson hammers on the elevator call button. Every street-sense, every gene of malandragem says never trust the elevator when your soul and love depends on it. But he’s seen what’s down the stairs. It’s here: bing. Stupid stupid stupid elevator AI: I don’t care about safety instruction. My girlfriend’s down there with an admonitory of the Order and a Q-bow. We can take care of a bunch of old queen fidalgos , Alcides Teixeira had said. No you can’t. They don’t care for your money, they don’t care for your empire, they don’t care for your polittical patronage and your power. They are beyond mere economics.

The elevator bid Edson a good night. The door opened on chaos. The great baroque doors of the EMBRAÇA headquarters, appropriated from a church in Olinda, lie on the ground. Twenty alarm lights flash; a panicked sprinkler system douses the hardwood front desk. No one on that desk. Does he spy fingertips on the carpet? Running feet, voices cracking over com channnels. Teixeira’s seguranças will shoot whatever they see. Move out, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas. But he takes a grain of reassurance from his eyeblink reconnaissance. The admonitory is working through the corporate levels first. He has still time to make the apartment.

Yanzon sees the running guards through two corridors. He will take one and the other will run away. His weapons are expensive, even for the Order, and should be reserved for the mandatory targets. His mission on this level is complete, all targets accounted for. His I-shades track the two figures through the wall: in one breathtaking, killing move he draws an arrow from the magnetic quiver, nocks, pulls. The bow’s complex pulleys and levers slide with molecular precision. Fires. The Q-blade-tipped arrow cuts through wall, room, wall, running guard, out through the closed-down spaces of EMBRAôA’s corporate headquarters, out through the glass wall of Oceanus . A flash of blue light and a man is down, dead, pooling blood across the pimpled black rubber. Yanzon steps around the corner, a new arrow strung. The terrified survivor throws his hands up, his gun down and, as predicted, flees. Yanzon mouths a brief consignatory prayer for the dead man. The Lord will receive his own. If he does not know the Lord Jesus, then he must prepare for the Lake of Fire. Yanzon has yet to visit a universe that does not know the saving power of Christ. He has seen the true, the unimaginably true, extent of God’s might. The glowing icons of Teixeira security move erratically: panicked, afraid. Slipping through their indecision, Yanzon takes the emergency stairs two at a time down to the residential levels.

Fia mutters in chemical sleep; soft babyish utterings.

“Theory of Computational Equivalence. If anything can be a computer everything can be a computer. Ah!”

Edson shakes her again. “Get up!”

Her face creased into the pillow, she mutters, “What is go away let me sleep.”

“The Order is here.”

She sits up, eyes wide, electrified, a thousand percent awake.

“What?”

Edson claps his hand over Fia’s mouth. The sound the smell the state of the air the prickle of electricity: all his favela-senses tell him death is here. He grabs I-shades; his, hers, and throws them on to the bed as he rolls Fia on to the floor. The oldest, best malandro trick: they trust too much in their arfids and their Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. As he claps his hand over Fia’s mouth two flashes of ionized blue pierce the bed and it explodes in twin gouts of feathers and foam. Edson pushes his cidade senses to their most attenuated fringes to pick out nanoshifts of pressure, rustles on the edge of audibility, a quantum’s difference in the slit of light under the door.

“He’s gone. Now, with me. Don’t say a word.”

Hand in hand, he scuttles with Fia to the balcony. Stupid stupid stupid rich man’s apartments with only one door. Edson peers over the balcony. Up: the black helicopter hovers, waiting to rendezvous with the admonitory. Down is a long long drop to an iron sea. Edson jerks a thumb toward the neighboring apartment.

“That way.” High-waist flares and a ruffle-front shirt are not the best things in which to monkey across the face of a twelve-million-ton kilometer-and-a-half-long cruise ship. Edson springs up on the balcony rail, seizes the stanchion, and with a prayer to Exu swings round to the neighboring railing. “Piece of piss. Just don’t look down.”

Fia boggles at the drop, then in one ungainly movement makes the crossing.

“Hey! Look at me!”

Edson touches finger to lips. Apartments light up around them. Edson hears distant alarms, vehicles rushing overhead and far below. The great ship swarms like an ants’ nest spiked with battery acid. The hunter is still in there.

Yanzon, admonitory of the Order, moves unopposed through the residential boulevards of the Teixeira corporacão, destroying the enemies of the Order. The alarms are irritating him now, and he has had to eliminate a few of the more bold seguranças; but he has established dread and awe across the EMBRAÇA headquarters. They showed him once the order the Order enforces. When he crosses and becomes superposed with all his alters, that is the truth. There is a universal mind, and all are notions of it. The prelates and the presidents, the pontiffs and prime ministers call it the Parousia, the end-time, but the eye of a simple man’s faith can better know it as the kingdom of God. The Enemy says that is a lie, an endlessly repeated dream grinding ever slower as the multi verse wheels down, and they seek to break it, to wake the dreamers. They call this freedom and hope. To Yanzon it is pride, and annihilation, an endless drop into the final, eternal cold. A dream is not necessarily a lie.

He glances up. Through three floors he sees Alcides Teixeira trying to escape within a cadre of his bodyguards. They are heavily armed and equipped little sensor ghosts. Small avail against a hunter who can shoot through solid bulkheads. Yanzon sets arrow to his Q-bow, aims up through the ceiling. He whirls. Multiple contacts, closing fast. Oceanus ’s marines have found him. Yanzon lowers his bow and breaks into a loping run. His mission now is to destroy the Q-cores and reach the extraction point. Or kill himself. The Order has always understood that its agents die with their secrets. One fast, easy pass with the Q-blade; almost accidental in its casualness. Yanzon has often imagined what it would feel like. He imagines his flesh parting down to the quantum as something silver and so subtle, so painless you would only suspect when the blood began to rush. No pain. No pain at all. And no sin, no sin at all.

Edson counts windows. Eleven, twelve.

“I feel sick,” Fia says. “Here.”

Lights burn behind drapery. If he had a Q-blade, Edson could cut his way in neat as neat, a big circle of glass just falling away in front of him onto the bedroom pile. He doesn’t, but he can trust that Oceanus builders did it as cheap and shoddy and minimum wage as every other piece of work done for rich people. He grabs the stanchion, swings up, and punch-kicks forward. The whole doorframe comes away from its track and swings inward.

“Ruuuunnnnn!” yells Edson at the naked twentyish man standing starrtled in the middle of the floor. Tech-boy gives a little scream and flees into the bathroom. By Edson’s calculation they should be opposite a stairwell. Not even an admonitory could be fast enough to catch both of them on the short dash from door to stair. Surely. He flings the door open. The corridor is swarming with Oceanus marine security. Targeting lasers sweep walls, floors, ceiling. They catch Edson’s heel as he pushes Fia up the stairs.