Be My Enemy (20 page)

“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.”

“You could just send me into their Heisenberg Gate.”

“They locked the gates.”

“You can unlock them. You're the Order.”

Charles Villiers's long, hard, silent look had chilled even the cold place in Everett M's heart. In that look was all the cold and ambition of his alter. They were one soul in two bodies.

“Some things are impossible even for the Order. Earth 1's Heisenberg Gates have an automatic override. Dial in or out and you will be redirected into the heart of the sun.”

Now Everett M kept a cold silence.

“Tottenham's fine.”

“I thought so. Now, I want to test that new anti-Nahn weaponry again.”

E
verett M touched the ground as light as a creature from a dream. He pushed up his goggles, hit the harness release, and tethered the hedgehopper to a lamp post, half overgrown with grass and climbing plants. On every side rose the towers of London. Everett M was utterly alone. He stretched his arms out and spun three-sixty. He roared out his great shout of existence. “I am! In this dead city, I am! Everett Singh!” Birds exploded from the trees. Everett's breath hung in steaming clouds.

Madam Moon touched down beside him. She hardly seemed to bend a blade of grass. She did not react to Everett's great cry of himself. She did not react to anything.

The birds circled, slowly settling to their roosts. If they were truly birds. The Nahn could take many shapes, could slip inside and wear bodies like suits of clothes. Nothing could be trusted on this world. The Villiers alters had been right. The truth was much worse than any of the legends that had blown around Bourne Green Community School.

The dark tower was made up of the faces of the people it had assimilated. Everett M did not need to see that to know that those faces would visit him in his dreams for a long time to come. In a flicker of fear and doubt he went from King of London to alone and afraid and very, very cold.

“Have you the power packs? Give them to me. I want out of here.”

Madam Moon did not move. Everett M was about to ask a second time, with impatience, when her head jerked, a tiny motion, a bird-like turn of the neck.

“They're coming.”

Everett M felt very, very small and very, very alone.

“Who? What?”

“The airship. I have it on long-range scan. Strange. I am having difficulty obtaining a precise fix. It is as if something is interfering with my sensors. Like a cloud between myself and the airship. A moving cloud. But not a cloud, more like…snow. Particles. Insects. No. Not insects. Everett Singh! Everett Singh! Defend yourself. The Nahn is coming.”

The argument could be heard on the bridge. No words, but two distinct voices, shouting. One was a woman's, high-pitched but hard. The other was low and full of Glasgow growling. Mchynlyth.

Everett was on Captain Anastasia's heel as she strode from the bridge. Sen was one step beside him.

“Bona! A barney!”

“Mchynlyth has what we call anger management issues,” Everett said.

“Mchynlyth has what
we
call,
so
,” Sen said.

From the central catwalk Everett could see the ring of soldiers on the cargo deck and the two figures at its center. One wore the close-fitting outfit of an Agistry soldier. Camouflage patterns flowed across it. The other wore a leather flight jacket pulled over orange hi-visibility coveralls. They stood face to face, eyeball to eyeball. The kind of distance at which you could taste your opponent's breath. Veins bulged on Mchynlyth's neck and forehead. Elena Kastinidis stood like sculpted ice, cold, nothing moving. Her eyes did not flicker away from Mchynlyth's. Her fists were balled.

Heads looked up as Captain Anastasia clattered down the spiral staircase to the cargo deck.

“Mr. Mchynlyth, what is the meaning of this?”

The soldiers parted as Captain Anastasia strode through their circle. Her boot heels rang like pistol shots. Everett could imagine how wide and blazing her eyes must be. She came as close to Mchynlyth
and the lieutenant as they were to each other. Their breath hung in clouds. Mchynlyth did not look away from the lieutenant.

“That wee girl is stealing my power.”

“Ma'am, with respect, your crewman cut off the power to the battle suits in midcharge,” Lieutenant Kastinidis said.

“Two pieces of information for you, wee girl.” Mchynlyth said. “I am not a crewman. I am an engineer. Engineer First Class, time served on His Majesty's Airship
Royal Oak.
And the second piece of the information is similar: I
am
a crewman. You are a passenger on my ship.”

Everett felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked around. Sharkey stood beside him.

“You forgot something.” Sharkey slipped Dr. Quantum out from under his coattails. “‘I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.’ After all the trouble I had getting it off that cove, I'd hate to see you just leave it lying around.”

“It's all right, my da—”

“But he's not your dad. And I wouldn't put it past them to engineer a little diversion.”

“They still need me for the password.”

“I'm sure these gentlemen are quite capable of slipping something into your comptator to log your password,” Sharkey said darkly.

“Would they do that?”

“I would.”

Everett tucked the tablet under his arm, squeezed it tight against him.

“Captain!” The Brigadier's parade-ground voice boomed out from the upper catwalk. “I have twenty soldiers that need their battle suits powered up and operational before we hit London.”

“I hates that omi,” Sen hissed to Everett. “I would knife him if I could.” The thin, pure hatred in her voice made Everett certain she
would, given the opportunity. Her passions and hatreds were very strange and troubling to Everett. They came from a place very far from the educated, middle-class, cool Singh-Braiden family. He remembered the glee with which Sen had watched the fist fight outside the Knights of the Air pub, when Mchynlyth and Sharkey had gone up against the Bromleys. She had called out for blood.

“Aye, powered up with our power,” Mchynlyth spat. “Power I need to run my ship.”

“Power you took from us,” the lieutenant said.

“Power you gave us. Aye, give with one hand and take it back with the other.”

Everett could not see the captain's face but he could imagine all too well the bottled-up rage and humiliation behind the tight jaw, the flared nostrils, the wide eyes, the tense shoulders. He had caught the edge of her wrath before, when he had questioned the captain on her own bridge the time she had taken
Everness
to the ancestral Airish dueling grounds of Goodwin. She had been made to look like an amateur on her own cargo deck.

“And a piece of information for you, Mr. Mchynlyth,” Captain Anastasia said. “This is
my
ship. You are welcome aboard
Everness
, Lieutenant Kastinidis, and your unit. Take what you need to equip yourselves. My chief engineer will accommodate you. Hospitality to strangers and the needy is our way.”

Everett smiled at the little barb. Unit 27 had EM pulse guns and nanotech scanners and powered armor that could blend into the background or even make itself invisible to Nahn senses, but they had no air transport. They were cargo. The Agistry clung to the remains of a once-mighty technology, reengineering and fixing and bodging it up when it went wrong or needed to do something different, but the foundations of that technology had been undermined by the Nahn. There were too few humans. There were no new ideas. The battle suits, glowing and golden like bronze samurai, were patched and scarred with rivets and welds and mismatched spare
parts. Dr. Singh had been evacuated on a tilt jet, but for aircraft like that you needed engineers and tech guys and liquid fuel. There were so few humans left. They were so widely scattered. They were driven so far to the edges on their islands and highlands.

The fight hadn't been about electricity or asking permission. It had been about fear. The soldiers were scared. Mchynlyth was scared. Everett was scared. Even Captain Anastasia was scared. Every second drove
Everness
closer to the heart of Nahn-possessed London.

Mchynlyth and the lieutenant faced off for a moment then stepped back. Jaws tightened. Nostrils flared.

“Mr. Mchynlyth, with me,” Captain Anastasia ordered. “Ship's company, High Mess. Divano.”

Everett M froze. The cold inside reached out and paralyzed him. He could not move. His muscles were locked. His body would not answer, and he did not know what to do. The Nahn was coming.

Had he heard fear in Madam Moon's voice?

Don't freeze. Never freeze. Freeze and you end up a screaming face in the spire of souls. You do what you were trained to do. Everett M pulled off his gloves, threw off his fleecy flight jacket, kicked off his flight boots, slipped off the cold weather pants. Last of all, the hat, the goggles. The skin suit beneath was exactly what its name implied. It was thin, skin-clingy, and covered in what looked like tattooed circuitry.

“I'm not wearing that,” he'd said in the ready room on the dark side of the Moon.

Charles Villiers's patience was thin and ragged now.

“Oh, for God's sake, just bloody wear it.”

Once on, it did look and feel a bit like a plug-suit from the animated series
Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Exposed to the cold wind and swirling snow of Hyde park, the fabric was warmer than it looked—the Thryn were as clever with textiles as they were with any other technology—but the melted snow was soaking up from his feet.

“Help me, Madam Moon.”

And Madam Moon came apart.

She split down the front. From the top of her head to the lowest point of her torso, and along her legs and inner arms dark lines appeared. Light shone out of them. Madam Moon spasmed and unfolded. Her features melted and flowed, changing from mild-faced old woman to pure anime power armor. Her inside hollowed out, Thryn machinery rearranging itself, making space, a human-sized space. An Everett M-sized space. There was now no Madam Moon. A battle suit stood on the snow-dusted grass of Hyde park, whiter than the white ground. The armor stood open, like the shell of some undersea creature. Thryn circuitry sparkled with power. The printed patterns on Everett M's skin suit glowed in reply. But he hesitated to step inside and give himself to the battle suit. On the Moon, it had been the coolest of cool manga stuff. Here, it was a boy and his alien. Madam Moon used the same technology—nanotechnology—and was made of the same stuff as the Nahn. Nothing else could make machinery flow like water, change shape and purpose, reengineer itself from little old lady to killer battle bot. When he put his head inside that helmet and it closed around him, was there any difference between his face behind that featureless mask and his face trapped beneath the black glaze of the Soul Spire? The Thryn did not eat you from the inside. They said. It's our nanotech. But was it? He and Madam Moon were the sole objects from Earth 4. This was a whole new world for both of them. What did anyone really know about the Thryn? Everyone knew the Thryn kept secrets up on their half of the Moon. The full impact of their technology would have shattered Earth society. Too much, too fast. Did they lie as well? Was the theory that the Thryn Sentiency wasn't really aware and conscious of itself just a marvelous machine, another one of their constructions? Were they clever enough to pretend not to be sentient?

Charles Villiers had strung their technology through every part of his body. How could Everett M trust that his thoughts were his
own and not Thryn thinking? He had been given a word that would override the suit programming, shut down the combat systems, unlock the armor and let him step free. If that helmet closed, would it make him forget that word? Would it ever open again?

Contact with the Nahn in three minutes.

Everett M could see the edge of the nanotech like a storm front, blowing in from the northwest across the park. With a thought he could have dialed up magnification of his advanced vision. He didn't want to do that.

You're all alone in the face of a perfect storm of lethal rogue nanotechnology and your only ally is a shapeshifting alien battle robot.

Put like that, the decision was not so hard to make.

He stepped into Madam Moon. She closed around him gently but completely. Everett M had seen Venus flytrap plants in the biology lab and like every young male had been fascinated by their slow horror. That was how the Thryn combat armor closed around his body. Boots locked into place, calves and thighs sealed. The seam up the belly plate melted away. Everett M gasped in sharp pain as the skin suit meshed with the armor and his implants. The ends of his fingers grew into and fused with the fingertips of the suit gloves. Missile ports along the armor's forearms meshed with the ports in his skin. The suit was inside him. The suit was him. He fought momentary panic as the helmet sealed around his face like a fist closing. For a moment he was blind and deaf, then the sensors linked with the Thryn circuitry in his nervous system and he could see and hear as clearly and freely as if he stood in his own skin. Power blazed along his nerves and muscles. With a thought he could clear those trees in one leap. With his next thought he could level all of Park Lane.

His feet were still wet.

The eastern sky was black with flying nanotech. Everett M did not need his Thryn vision to see the birds, and things that looked like birds, and things that changed shape from birds into things that
could never, should never exist, let alone fly. Everett M threw his arms open to the hurtling Nahn storm.

“Bring it!”

“Two divanos in the same day,” Everett said as he settled into the seat he now thought of as his own at the conference table. “Must be a new ship's record.”