The Venusian Gambit (23 page)

“Tom,” Finch said weakly. “If I did not keep it…”

“If you did not keep it, would England still stand?” Weatherby roared. “Would we not have found a way to defeat the
Corps Éternel
, despite what you have said? How many have died because you kept this! You hoard your knowledge like an old, corrupt dragon with gold, just as Franklin once warned us would be our downfall!”

Finch looked stricken, and indeed placed a hand upon the chair before him to support himself. “It is too dangerous for others, Tom,” Finch said. “It would corrupt us. Look what a mere fragment did to the French! And there is more. It is a way to communicate! I have done so with the others!”

Weatherby was about to speak, but was silenced by a surprising interruption from Vellusk. “What others?” the ambassador sang, loudly and with great anger.

“The others from our future!” Finch replied. “They have the Tablet, or an aspect of it! I….wait….” He suddenly looked as though he could see the very Void before his eyes. “Go to Venus. Go to Venus!”

At this, Finch’s legs gave out from under him, and he collapsed to the floor, still looking as though he was seeing leagues away. Or perhaps his mind was leagues away, Weatherby could not say. And despite his rage against the man he called friend, he nonetheless rushed to Finch’s side. “Anne, help him!” Weatherby cried.

She, too, rushed over, but they found Finch in a state of near catatonia. “I cannot say what has befallen him,” she said after several long minutes, spent in awkward silence. “We need time to study what this damned book has done to him.”

Weatherby turned to address Ambassador Vellusk, who was practically vibrating with intensity. “Ambassador Vellusk, my very wise and very good friend. It is only this day we began to suspect Dr. Finch’s possession of this artifact, and I must apologize, humbly, on his behalf, and for myself. And for all England.”

This helped Vellusk somewhat, though he still appeared quite agitated. “And what shall be done with this fell book?” he sang, notes of both dread and rage within his voices.

“I shall keep it locked away with the utmost security, and I shall hold the only key,” Weatherby said. “Only Anne and Philip will be allowed to study it, and only should you be consulted first. You or one of your representatives may be present at all times while it is examined.”

Vellusk seemed to pause a moment before responding. “This is acceptable, Admiral Weatherby, but I urge you to keep this matter most private,” the Xan sang. “If your Prince Regent discovers this is here, I fear that his lust for vengeance and hatred of the French will cause him to make ill use of it. And if my people were to discover it, it would only add credence to the belief, currently in the minority, that humanity plays with powers they cannot understand and harness.”

Weatherby had already thought of this, and the decision—the right one, he felt, but one that was wholly imperfect and in violation of several sacred vows—had already been made. “The existence of this damnable book remains secret to those in this room,” he said, gathering the attention of the others with the authority in his voice. “We must come to understand how it has affected Finch, whether he is to remain in our trust, and whether it can be used to reverse the evils of Napoleon’s alchemists. And if they are indeed going to Venus, I dare say we must convince the Prince Regent to mount an assault there.

“And we must not tell him the real reason why,” Weatherby said sadly.

CHAPTER 12

January 18, 2135

S
haila still couldn’t sleep. But at least, she figured, it was good to have different reasons.

A few days ago, she was angry and frustrated and wanting to do
something
worthwhile. Now, she was far less angry, though the frustration and the need to be elsewhere was still paramount.

Being locked in containment will do that to a person.

Shortly after she left Stephane and huddled with Diaz for her crying jag—a hugely embarrassing crying jag, she felt—Ayim and Julie had come in and gently requested she undergo more testing. Of course she agreed, because she was just as concerned about her blackout, and her vision of Andrew Finch, as they were.

However, they turned out to be far
more
concerned. Because they ushered her into a spare containment unit and locked her the hell down while they figured out why touching Stephane had created a massive Cherenkov radiation spike in addition to her rapid unconsciousness.

On the bright side, the monitors in her unit—on the other side of the clear barrier, granted, but still—were focused on Stephane. And that was a far better view than space.

So she watched.

Stephane remained in bed over the past sixteen hours, but he resumed consciousness for at least part of the time. He still looked like he’d been through the wringer, but Shaila knew it was
him
, and not someone else in that room. Spending two years in a relationship with someone—and a full six months on an interplanetary mission as part of that—was more than enough time to recognize the subtle movements and quirks associated with that person. The way he cocked his head when presented with something different, the way he ran his hand through his hair when thinking…it was all there. The DAEDALUS team had placed some of his personal effects from
Armstrong
in with him now, conveniently within reach, and he picked them up and turned them over in his hands. He had a few ancient paperback books, at least a century old, mostly French authors like Dumas and Hugo and Le Clezio. They gave him a datapad—almost certainly not networked. And there was a holopic of he and Shaila from when they visited Paris after finally finishing their debriefing after the
Daedalus
incident on Mars.

Shaila smiled at that. The trip itself was infuriating. Stephane had insisted on organizing everything, which meant they ended up crashing at a friend’s apartment and sleeping on an inflatable mattress in a closet of a room. They were up until 3 a.m. drinking wine—good wine, it should be said—and laughing at jokes in French that Shaila couldn’t really follow. Stephane had insisted on taking her to the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre, you name it. There was a river cruise on the Seine done on the cheap, which meant an engine malfunction and an extra two hours on a smelly river in the heat of the day.

If it were anyone else, Shaila would’ve left after the first night. With him, it was somehow the best vacation of her life—though she’d never admit it to him. She got to see him away from work and crisis, and found him to be generous, gregarious and surprisingly soulful—almost the exact opposite of the playboy dilettante she had first pegged him for on Mars.

She was still afraid to believe he was truly back. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe this was some sort of ruse. The alien intelligence inside him could be playing them, trying to lull them into complacency. Maybe it really was him, but he could be swallowed up by that…
thing
…at any moment, lost to her forever.

She tried not to think about it too hard. And besides, she had her own issues—those odd voices in her mind, stretching back more than two and a half years. Stretching back to a cave on Mars and a journal from an impressionable, young Lt. Weatherby, improbably sitting in a pile of rust-red rubble.

“Jain.”

Shaila’s reverie was interrupted by Maria Diaz, standing on the other side of the containment barrier. She didn’t even hear the general enter the room, which probably wasn’t good.

“General,” she replied, rushing to her feet.

Diaz looked concerned. “Another one?”

“No, ma’am, just thinking,” Shaila said, nodding toward the holomonitor.

That won her a small smile from the general. “Figured you’d want to keep an eye on him. He’s doing well, by the way.”

“Thank you, ma’am. How do you mean ‘well?’”

Diaz pulled over a chair and took a seat in front of her. “Well, his rad levels are stable, for the most part. There’s some peaks and valleys, and it tends to correspond with his periods of unconsciousness or inactivity. Nothing anywhere near the levels he hit when he was infected…well, hell, he really was possessed, wasn’t he?”

Shaila shrugged. “Let’s stick with ‘infected,’ ma’am.”

“So what’s
your
explanation, Commander?” Diaz’ face took a hard turn at this, leaving Shaila immediately worried.

“I…don’t understand, ma’am.”

Diaz frowned. “Here’s my problem, Jain. When you touched Stephane, there was a kind of…reaction. In that moment, there were
three
huge spikes in Cherenkov radiation in the room. One was from the Tablet, or whatever the fuck that stone is. One was leeching out of Stephane’s neural pathways. And one…was from
your
brain. Just like his.”

Shaila nodded. “I assumed as much. I’ve no idea why, though.”

“
Why
isn’t something we’re going to really get out of this, Jain. We still don’t know half of what’s going on. Ayim’s got all kinds of theories, most of which make zero sense to me. Some stuff about ‘quantum mind’ and ‘parallelisms’ and God knows what. The plain-English version, though, is that like attracts like. The reaction may have happened because you’ve had your own…interactions, I guess…with the other side.”

Shaila sat down slowly on her cot, a shiver running up her spine. “You think I’m infected, ma’am?”

“You tell me.”

“Not that I’m aware.”

Diaz smirked. “Good answer. And probably truthful. But not entirely.”

Now Shaila was thrown for a loop. “Come again?” she asked, the heat starting to rise around her collar.

“After Ayim talked my ear off for an hour, I had Jimmy run some database searches. He pulled all the sensor data from McAuliffe Base on Mars, including exteriors and pressure suit data, as well as all the data off
Armstrong
and wherever else we could find you over the past two and a half years. We managed to match up where you were, in physical space, with the sensor data around you. Guess what we found.”

It wasn’t a tough guess. “Cherenkov radiation.”

“Bingo. Not a lot—in most cases, it barely registered at all, and never set off any alarms. Just a ping, here and there, weeks or months apart. There were a few on Mars, naturally, and it was tough to work through all the ambient radiation that fuck-all caused. But it was there on
Armstrong
, and right before the tiger stripes blew on Enceladus. Little hits, here and there. And when we pulled the holovid, we saw you were distracted or spaced for a second or two.” Diaz stood up and walked right up to the clear barrier of the containment unit. “So if you’ve got anything you wanna say, Commander, I suggest it comes out here and now, before I have to make a report on it. Because if I do have to make a report, you’re pretty much gonna be a guinea pig for the rest of your natural life.”

Shaila nodded slowly. “It was nothing, really. Didn’t seem like it at the time, anyway.”

“Go on.”

“Just little moments, I guess. Visions? I don’t know. Just moments where something just came to me out of the blue. I thought I saw Weatherby’s journal during that first quake on Mars, but it wasn’t there—not until that second time, anyway. I had this…dream, or imagining, or something…about the tiger stripes going before they happened. Lately, it’s been words, like the stuff we saw in Weatherby’s journal, but not his writing. Same wording, that old-time stuff.”

Diaz nodded slowly. “Times and places, then.”

“Yeah…and you sound like you knew the answer before you asked.”

The general stood and walked over to the comm panel. “Gerry, you catch all that?”

Ayim’s voice came in over the loudspeakers. “I did, General. All readings normal.”

“Readings?” Shaila asked. She was starting to feel exposed, and a little violated. “Permission to ask what the hell’s going on, General.”

Diaz ignored her. “How about now, Gerry?”

“Zero Cherenkov, General. Though she’s starting to get agitated.”

“Roger that,” Diaz said. She turned and smiled at Shaila. “For once, that fuse of yours is actually helping you.”

And then Shaila realized what was happening. “You’re worried that if I get pissed off enough…”

“Yep. And your vitals are already past where Stephane’s were when you goaded him that first time,” Diaz replied. “So I think we’re good.” The general turned back to the comm. “Gerry, why don’t you come in here and tell Jain what we’re thinking.”

It took several awkward seconds—in which Diaz smiled somewhat apologetically and Shaila simply stood with her arms crossed, feeling irritated—before Ayim entered. “Well done, Commander! I think with our observations of the past day, along with your little test just now and all of the data the general recovered, I do believe—tentatively, mind you—that you are not infected.”

Shaila stood stock still for a moment until the laughter she was trying to contain burst forth. “Jesus Christ, we really are in the dark here, aren’t we.”

At this, Ayim looked slightly perturbed. “We are gathering evidence and data and building working theories, Commander. And you were a part of that. I apologize if you feel somehow slighted in all this, but as the general pointed out, you did withhold pertinent information regarding your…condition. Your experiences, if you will.”

Diaz shot Shaila a told-you-so look which prompted her to stifle her laughs and back down. “All right. Fine. What’s going on, then?”

Ayim pulled up another chair to the barrier of the containment cell. “Oh, it’s quite interesting, I assure you. You see, in basic quantum physics, a physical system—say, an electron or proton—exists partly in all of its physical states simultaneously. That’s quantum superposition. Only when that physical system is directly observed does it give us a view to only one of its potential states. Are you with me so far?”

Shaila nodded tentatively. “Mostly.”

“So let us say, then, that two entire dimensions existed for a finite amount of time in superposition. Now, there is no fundamental way we can reasonably observe the state of every single particle in that crossover, now can we? That would be impossible! Not even the most advanced sensor system, attached to the most powerful computer, could observe every subatomic particle that came into superposition with particles from the other dimension back on Mars—and that was only a limited area! So it was quite possible for the two dimensions to come together. More importantly, it is also quite possible that there could remain a kind of quantum entanglement in those areas of time and space where the crossover occurred.”