The Quantum Thief

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 emigre, 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.

‘I still don’t get it,’ she says, sitting back on the couch, letting herself coast on the bubbling feeling. ‘Why is it fun?’

‘It’s a game. Did you never play games back in Oort?’

‘We race. And compete in craft and vaki song.’ She misses it, suddenly. ‘I used to like it, crafting, making things out of the coral. You visualise a thing. You find the words that it is. And you sing them to vaki; it grows and makes it. And in the end you have something that is truly yours, a new thing in the world.’ She looks away. ‘That’s how I made Perhonen. That was a long time ago.’

‘You see,’ the thief says, ‘for me, stealing is exactly the same.’ He looks serious, suddenly.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asks. ‘Why are you not back there, making things?’

‘I’m just doing what I have to,’ Mieli says. ‘That’s what I’ve always done.’ But she does not want to let the darkness well up.

‘Well, not tonight,’ says the thief. ‘Tonight, we are doing what we want to. We’re going to have fun. What do you want to do?’

‘Sing,’ Mieli says. ‘I would like to sing.’

‘I know just the place,’ the thief says.

The Belly: underground streets and walkways between the inverted towers. Pinpoints of Quiet lights below, newspaper drones selling stories of the city quake earlier during the day and the strange goings-on at the carpe diem party the night before.

The tiny bar is called the Red Silk Scarf. It has a small stage; the walls are covered in feed posters of musician lifecasts that throw flickering lights across a group of small round tables. They do open mike nights. The audience consists of a few young Martians who have seen everything, wearing perpetual expressions of being unimpressed. But the thief ushers them in, getting her into the program, talking to the landlord in hushed whispers while she waits at the bar, drinking more strange-flavoured alcoholic drinks from tiny glasses.

The thief insisted she spend time getting dressed, and with Perhonen’s assistance she obliged, fabbing a dark pantsuit with platform shoes and an umbrella. The thief quipped that she looked like she was going to a funeral. He flinched when she said it could be his. That actually made her laugh. The strange clothes feel like armour, letting her feel like someone else, someone reckless. It is all a little fake, she knows: her metacortex will flush out all the intoxication and unnecessary emotions at the first sign of trouble. But it feels good to pretend.

How’s it going? she whispers to Perhonen. You should come and join us. I’m going to sing.

On stage, a girl in oversized sunglasses is doing something that combines poetry with abstract tempmatter images and the sound of her heartbeats. Mieli can see the thief cringing.

I’m sorry, the ship says. Busy solving a high-dimensional lattice cryptography problem with a thousand mathematics gogols. But I’m glad you’re having fun.

I miss her.