The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) Read Free Page B

care of Matjek, and then be Jean le Flambeur again.
    Perhonen once asked me what I was going to do when our mission was over. When I think about it now, it is like peeking over a sheer cliff. It makes my gut wrench with fear. So little of me came out of the Prison intact. What do I have left, except promises?
    Besides, Mieli still has a chance. She has spent her entire life chasing after a lost love, and it has all been for nothing. That’s what happens to those whom Joséphine Pellegrini touches, I know that far too well.
    Because it’s the kind of thing that Jean le Flambeur would do, I whisper down the quptlink . Stay out of trouble, Isidore.
    Then I cut the link and lose myself in the data, and finally find Mieli in the memories of flowers.
    The data is from a Quiet-built distributed telescope. Like much of Oubliette technology, it is more like an art project than engineering: synthbio flowers with photosensitive petals that collectively form a vast imaging device, seeded in the city’s footsteps across Mars. They spend their lives watching the Martian sky like a vast compound eye, until the phoboi eat them.
    The data is from the Oubliette exomemory, and so accessing it is like remembering. Suddenly, I recall seeing a tiny dot in the sky. But unlike with a normal memory, the more I focus on it, the clearer the image becomes, until I see Perhonen’s winged spiderweb form. A thought brings me to the right moment. There is a flash, and then a smaller shape detaches from the ship, hurtling through the void.
    There she is. I follow her with the flowers’ eyes.
    Mieli floats in the nothingness, a woman in a dark robe, turning and tumbling, until a ship comes for her, a zoku ship, shaped like a glass clockwork orrery. Zoku trueforms – foglet clouds around human faces with jewel haloes – pour out and surround her. Then she is gone, and the ship accelerates at a solid G, towards the Highway.
    I summon my minions. It only takes them moments to identify Mieli’s rescuer in the public Highway spimescapes. Bob Howard , a Rainbow Table Zoku vessel – one of the sysadmin ships that the zoku use to maintain their router network. Uncharacteristically, it is currently on its way to Saturn, riding one of the expensive kiloklick beams, and will reach Supra City in approximately seventeen days. Not very efficient use of resources for a sysadmin zoku, especially given the chaotic situation in the Inner System.
    I steeple my fingers and think. The Great Game Zoku has Mieli, there is no doubt about it now. One of their sleepers in the Rainbow Table must have spotted an intel gathering opportunity and has been ordered to deliver Mieli to Saturn. Of course, they could have decided to shove her through a Realmgate instead, turned her into quantum information and used the router network to get her there nearly at the speed of light – but Mieli has military-grade Sobornost implants that could have self-destructed her when passing through a Realmgate. No, they are trying to get her there with all her atoms intact.
    I empty my glass, lean back and let the mutter of the bar wash over me. There is still time. The seeds of a plan are already taking root in my head. Unfortunately, the Wardrobe will never get to Saturn that fast. My issues with the jannah ship are not merely aesthetic.
    But Isidore had a point. I do have my freedom now: apart from annoyingly persistent copy protection, the cognitive locks that Joséphine caged me with are almost completely gone. Ever since we left Earth, I have been thinking about my other ship, my real ship, the Leblanc , and its hiding place in the Gun Club’s Arsenal on Iapetos. If I could just get to it in time—
    Or if I could slow things down.
    All the uncertainty is gone. I feel like myself again. I lose myself in the plan. I’m going to need tools. A quantum pyramid scheme. A pair of physical bodies, a nugget of computronium, a bunch of entangled EPR pairs and a few very special hydrogen bombs