Be My Enemy Read online

  “I'm sorry to hear about your mum and dad, Everett,” Tejendra said.

  I know what you're thinking, Everett thought. If your Laura hadn't died, might you have ended like my Laura and Tejendra, just fizzled out?

  “Ten days before Christmas, my father was kidnapped on the Mall, right in front of Buckingham Palace. He was kidnapped by a woman called Charlotte Villiers. She's the Plenipotentiary from E3 to my world.”

  “The Plenitude kidnapped your dad?”

  “I think…I believe…there is a secret organization inside the Plenitude that wants to control it, and the Ten Worlds, and the Infundibulum.”

  “And if it controls the Infundibulum—”

  “It controls all the other worlds as well.”

  “Or keeps them safe.”

  “Charlotte Villiers said there were forces out there in the Panoply that threatened everyone. Every world.”

  Tejendra took a deep breath.

  “The Panoply is much, much bigger than you think, Everett.”

  “I know. I've got it on Dr. Quantum.”

  Tejendra smiled at the name Everett had given his tablet. His face turned serious in an instant.

  “No you don't know, Everett. You have the codes. You have the way to open a jump gate in any universe. But you haven't seen what's out there. There was a joke that went around at the time when we built the first Heisenberg Gate. ‘Now we just need someone to build the second one.’ It was three years before we made contact with Earth 2. In that time, we sent a series of exploration probes through our gate on random jumps. We found worlds without end, Everett. Worlds where the laws of physics as we know them don't exist. Worlds where the laws of right and wrong don't exist. Worlds where humans don't exist. Worlds where something else stands in our place. Worlds from which our probe never even returned. And with every bit of data we downloaded, we realized more and more the risks we were taking. Sooner or later we would run into something that could pick up the echo our probe left when it made its jump. And that echo, we realized, could be used to open up our gate from the other side.”

  “Dr. Singh—”

  “Please, call me Tejendra.”

  “Dr. Singh, have you heard of a thing called a jumpgun?”

  “I'd heard that the random jump technology had been turned into a weapon. Some people will turn anything into a weapon. But it's all right, they'd say, it's a humane weapon. No one gets killed, just sent away.”

  “My dad, your alter, he got shot by one of those humane weapons. By Charlotte Villiers. She's the Plenipotentiary. It was meant for both of us. He pushed me out of the way. He got hit. Sent away, just like that. We got the jumpgun from Charlotte Villiers and I found a way to hook it to the Infundibulum so we can make controlled jumps between worlds. The thing I want to know, Tejendra, is whether I'll be able to get my dad back.”

  Dr. Singh looked into the fire for a moment. Everett could see him calculating, making theories.

  “If you can find him, you can reach him with the set-up you have. But the problem—”

  “Is finding him. It could be any one of ten to the eighty universes.”

  “The Multiverse Random Survey was long before my time at Imperial, but I do know that we used a quantum-entanglement device to track the probes when we'd send them through the random jump—in case they didn't come back.”

  Everett was suddenly very, very conscious of the beat of his heart. He sat forward in his chair by the fire, gentleman to gentleman.

  “I need to know, does that quantum-entanglement thing still exist?”

  “It hasn't been used in years. It'll still be there, in Imperial. We had to leave most of the stuff behind when we evacuated.” Tejendra's eyes met Everett's. “Don't go.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Please don't go.”

  “It's the only way I can find my dad.”

  “Don't go, son.”

  A tap, a scratch. Everett started. The noise was as loud as a gunshot in the warm, quiet room. Again, tap-tappety-tap-tap. Everett looked around. Sen's face was pressed up to the tall, narrow window, pale as a ghost in the snow. She beckoned to him. Everett shook his head. Sen held up her wrist, tapped the drop-line controller and mimed a rapid ascent into the sky. Out. Up. Now. Important.

  Everett got up from his chair.

  “I have to go now, Tejendra.”

  Glancing back from the door to see Tejendra raise his eyes up from the fire to meet his gaze, Everett saw that Tejendra's eyes were misted with a mix of fear and despair, as if he were seeing a second son sinking into the endless black of the Nahn. The eyes are the last to go.

  Everness held secrets and surprises still. A door at the top of a companionway that spiraled up from the outer dock opened into a wide, generously proportioned room. Eight high-back swivel chairs stood around a long table. Behind them a window offered a panoramic view out over the airship's prow. Everett realized that he had seen Everness almost completely from underneath, looking up. Looking down from above was an entirely fresh perspective. The heraldic paint job of unicorns and palaces and peers was laid out around and before him, dusted with a fine powder of snow. The room was spotless, not even a nanoparticle of dust, like everything on Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth's ship, but the air smelled shut-in and stale, with a strong tang of…what? Something maddeningly familiar and very, very everyday.

  “Furniture polish?” Everett asked.

  “Aye, and why not?” Mchynlyth said. “Nanocarbon zhooshes up bona with a wee touch of polish. Lovely grain, that stuff. Only the best for our valued clients.”

  “Divano in the High Mess,” Captain Anastasia had boomed out over the speakers, calling the ship's company to council. As they took seats around the table, Sen whispered to Everett that she had only ever seen divano called once before. That time council had voted to take the Iddler's offer of a smuggling run to High Deutschland, for the sake of the ship.

  Overhearing, Mchynlyth said, “Bona decision, that was.”

  Everett had been ordered to make coffee, two pots, enough to keep the ship's company awake through however many hours of argument it took to reach a decision. Hot coffee on a raw, snowy morning.

  “Can they get the Infundibulum to work without you?” Captain Anastasia asked Everett. The mood in the room was somber. The clock was ticking. By dawn, when the Oxford advance base came to life, they had to have a plan of action.

  “In time, they could crack my password,” Everett said. “I made it pretty strong—like it would take billions of years for one of our comptators to crack it. Okay, so they've had comptator science since the middle of the nineteenth century, but that just means it'll take millions of years, not billions.”

  “Or the sharpies could just stick a gun in your eek,” Sen said. “Or even my eek.”

  “Ah,” Everett said. He should have thought of that. So easy to be too clever. Too clever could be the same as not clever. He flushed with embarrassment. There was one taunt in school that always stung him. Dana McClurg, who could find anyone's weakness and devise a barb for it, had thrown it at him: “Hah, Everett Singh, you're not as clever as you think you are.”

  “Aye, and bugger all we could do to stop them,” Mchynlyth said. “A wee smack in the screech from a thumper's hardly going to scare those sharpies in their fancy armor.”

  “We have more…efficacious weapons,” Sharkey said, looking over the rim of his coffee cup.

  “And the jumpgun is still a jumpgun,” Everett said.

  “I'll hear no more talk of weapons,” Captain Anastasia said. “It's not so. We've always been outgunned and outnumbered. Our weapons are our wits.”

  “‘Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts,’” Sharkey said. He took another long draw of his coffee. In his seat by the window the flickering green light of the Oxford defense grid fell across his face. Everett studied that face for any sign, any hint, any clue to what the Atlantan was truly thinking
. Is this the day the safety of the ship is more important than the safety of Everett Singh?

  “This I know for sure and spitting certainty, if we dinnae have yon comptator, we dinnae get off this world,” Mchynlyth said. “And I for one cannae wait to get my dish off this shite hole.”

  “Mr. Singh, your da…Dr. Singh was certain that this…quantum-entanglement device is at Imperial University in London?”

  “Yes. Ma'am.”

  “Ah well, that's just fandabbydozie,” Mchynlyth said. “If we cannae take on the sharpies, we've less than a fart's chance in a hurricane of getting into a London college, finding this device—and we don't even know what it looks like—and getting our dishes out again without them wee black nanobeasties eating our brains out from the inside. Thanks a bunch, omi, you've landed us in it again.”

  He was right. Hugely, crushingly right. They had no advantages. They held no trump cards. They had no smart tricks, no daring rooftop escapes, no last-moment drop lines to safety, no jumps out from under the guns of the enemy. He saw Sen shuffle the Everness tarot one-handed in her lap. She turned up one, glanced at it, then saw Everett looking and slid it back.

  “All I know is, that is what I have to do,” Everett said.

  Captain Anastasia took a sip of coffee.

  “This, Mr. Singh, is fantabulosa coffee. How did you make it?”

  “I measured it,” Everett said. Captain Anastasia savored the aroma swirling up from her coffee for a moment. Her eyes were closed. They opened, full of will and guile.

  “We have something they want, they have something we want. Simple. We do what we Airish have always done,” Captain Anastasia said. “We strike a deal.” She stood up. Ship's council was over. “Mr. Singh, take that jumpgun to your latty tonight. Stick it wherever teenage omis stick things they don't want found. Keep it safe. Mr. Mchynlyth, Mr. Sharkey, double watch if you please, though Mr. Sharkey, I'll need your redoubtable negotiating skills to be at their sharpest tomorrow. We're going to have to explain that the chavvies were spying on them, and we're going to have to persuade them to trust us with the Infundibulum.”

  “‘Through patience a ruler can be persuaded, and a gentle tongue can break a bone,’” Sharkey said.

  “No need for broken bones,” Captain Anastasia said. “We're traders. We trade.”

  She swept from the High Mess in a waft of furniture polish.

  “It was like that last time we's had a divano,” Sen whispered to Everett. “Talk for hours, then she makes her mind up anyway.”

  Captain Anastasia turned at the head of the spiral staircase and looked thunder at her adopted daughter.

  “Miss Sixsmyth, to your latty. Tomorrow we fly to London, and I want you well rested. I anticipate military guests. We will look airship-shape and damn Hackney-fashion.”

  A full pot and a half of coffee stood on the table.

  A circle of light appeared over East London. It was as bright as a new sun in the predawn gloaming. Birds and things that looked like birds rose from roofs and roosts at the touch of the alien light. The light vanished. Two figures dropped out of the hole in the sky. One was Everett M. Singh, suspended in a flying harness beneath a white hedgehopper. The other was a little old lady, all grey. Her hands were folded into the wide sleeves of her simple long dress. She flew beneath a second, rebuilt hedgehopper.

  Everett M wiped thin, stinging powder snow out of his flying goggles and pushed the steering yoke forward. The hedgehopper answered. Everett M cheered silently, the words wind-chilled in his throat, as he raced west by south, toward the staggering, beautiful, dead towers of dead London. For a moment, eyes watering in the slipstream that found its way around the edge of his goggles, he could savor the pure joy of flight and speed. He could forget that those thousands of glass windows were dead eyes. Nothing behind them.

  “These are clever little things,” Charles Villiers had said when the hedgehoppers—one complete, the other half trashed by a nano-missile strike—came through the gate from Earth 10. “There's more to those E3ers than brass and helium.” The police had found the second flying machine hidden behind the old chapel at the center of Abney Park Cemetery. Charlotte Villiers had given her contacts in the Metropolitan Police her standard answers: intelligence services, national security. Sergeant Tache and Leelee were becoming suspicious. “What are they?” they had asked.

  “Experimental military drones,” Charlotte Villiers had told them.

  “In Abney Park Cemetery?”

  Charlotte Villiers's dry-ice stare had silenced them, but her ability to contain their suspicion was weakening.

  Back down the M2 to the Channel Tunnel terminal, to the Heisenberg Gate hidden in the secret boring beside the main Channel Tunnel. Through the white light and into the greater white glow and feather-light gravity of the Moon. “Yes, we can do something with this,” Charles Villiers said, walking around the wrecked hedgehopper, examining its every strut and duct and fan blade. “What do you think?”

  “It is straightforward,” Madam Moon said.

  As always, Everett M had not seen Madam Moon arrive. Does she generate her own gateways? he wondered.

  Everett M looked over at the figure flying beside him. She hung beneath the flying machine like an angel, upright, with folded hands. Her long dress fluttered in the wind.

  “This is my special protective unit?” Everett M had shouted. Charles Villiers had taken him through a door-that-was-more-than-a-door to another one of the Thryn's featureless, dead-white chambers. From the echo of his footsteps, Everett M had guessed that the blank white space was very large indeed. Standing there was the same little old lady, all grey, with the same little mild smile on her face. “This is going to stop the Nahn from eating me from the inside out?”

  “What did my alter tell you about the place we are sending you?” Charles Villiers had asked as he and Madam Moon, a different Madam Moon—though they all looked the same, they were all different—escorted Everett M away from the Heisenberg Gate from Earth 10.

  “She said that whatever urban legends the over-fertile imaginations of Fifth Formers send wafting through the corridors of Bourne Green School, they're very far from the truth,” Everett M said.

  “They are,” Charles Villiers said. “The truth is much worse.” And he told him.

  In the cavernous white room deep under the far side of the Moon, the grey lady smiled and showed Everett exactly what Thryn technology could bring against the Nahn.

  “Why not send her?” Everett M had asked.

  “Do you remember, Everett, when I told you that the Thryn Sentiency is not actually sentient? It follows that the Thryn lack ambition. They simply would not see the need. The Infundibulum is as trivial to them as the football results. Humans are much easier to motivate. Also, humans have the concept of debt. For what we have given you, Everett, the Plenitude expects a return.”

  “The Plenitude,” Everett had said, “or the Order?”

  Even empty, this London took the breath away. Everett M's London had the taller towers—Thryn technology had made its way early into architecture—but these buildings had the boldness and daring and imagination of a culture supremely confident in its achievements. Tower tops opened like flowers or flocks of birds taking flight: roofs floated, atriums coiled like sea shells, buildings leaned at terrifying angles or hung in midair over the streets below. Nothing was solid and heavy; everything was light and lively and full of intention and energy. The city was like frozen ballet. St. Paul's Cathedral was surrounded by an honor guard of skyscrapers as thin and elegant as scimitars, curving in toward the great church like a military salute. Fleet Street was like a carnival of dazzling puzzles in solid geometry: fantastical buildings that suggested fish, or clouds, or rain forests, or rare and delicate mineral formations found miles underground leaned over the older architecture of bygone centuries without ever crowding it. There were parts of the cityscape that were familiar to Everett M, but whole streets and entire districts were new and strange—tha
t viaduct had never crossed the Strand, and that was a new old Victorian railway terminus, all glass and wrought-iron ribs, at Charing Cross. Where had the grand eighteenth-century opera house come from? And what about the covered market behind Regent's Street and the graceful Georgian crescents and circles of townhouses? In every part this London showed grace and balance and the face of a city made for its citizens.

  Swooping low, Everett M could see the rusting vehicles, the piles of abandoned personal effects turned to pulp by years of rain, the scrub growing from the gutters, the weeds in the cracks. Every window was blank, every building empty, every street deserted. The silence was total and terrifying. The only sounds were the soft hum of the impeller engines and the sough of wind through the architecture of dead London.

  Everett M glanced over his shoulder. The dark tower of Docklands dominated the eastern horizon, a knife stabbed into the heart of the city. His course over London kept it at his back, but he could not keep himself from glancing back at it. It drew the eye even as it repulsed the heart. It made the skin between his shoulders crawl. It made his balls contract in horror. It was hideous sexy.

  He flew over the tall chimneys and balconies of this world's Mayfair. Hyde Park opened before him. The Serpentine was a soggy swamp of reeds and rushes and winterkilled water lilies. The broad swathes of open meadow in the Hyde Park that Everett M was used to were in this world nothing more than weedy, rank scrublands, choked with brambles and buddleia and the tall brown wands of dead purple loosestrife. Everett M circled, looking for a landing space. It was a long flight to Oxford, further than the hedgehopper's range. Madam Moon carried spare power packs. Where she carried them and how she powered them were Thryn mysteries. Hyde Park was an open space with clear lines of sight and easy escape to the air, a good place to stop.

  “Oxford?” Everett M had asked Charles Villiers.

  “The Agistry has set up an advance study base among the colleges in the city. It's the logical place for them to go. If they survive long enough.”