29

The Magic Trick

Sleeping next to someone is one of those things that sounds a lot better in stories than it is in reality. In stories it's supposed to be romantic or something. In reality, you can't turn over, and someone's elbow is always in your ribs.

Unless, of course, she's less than half your size, and you don't wanna turn over anyway because your side is all bandaged up and there's an IV line in your arm. Miranda and I actually fit together pretty comfortably. At least on a physical level.

It's the pain in my ribs that wakes me up—I think the meds are wearing off. I'm thirsty as hell, and my mouth feels like I've been licking a microfiber carpet.

And my neural lace is showing fifty-seven text messages.

I don't bother reading. There's only one person it could be.

“What is it, Leela?”

And there her avatar is in front of me, standing by the bed, leaning over us. For some reason, she's dressed in some sort of teenage goth fashion, complete with lace dress, clunky leather boots, and what looks like dark red lipstick.

“Hey,” she says, “How you feeling? Little better?”

“Worse, actually. Could use some more pain meds. I think I'll be okay, though.”

“I figured. Didn't stop you two lovebirds from getting frisky earlier, after all.”

Oops. Kinda forgot she's always listening. She's wearing a bit of a smug grin on her face, like she wants to say she told me so. But that's not what she says.

“Good thing you're finally awake. Your implants weren't taking calls, and I need to show you something. Can you wake her up?”

Miranda stirs against me with a sleepy little noise. Almost sounds happy at first, but the next one is slightly confused.

“Whaa….”

“AI wants our attention.”

“Yeah, if you two are quite done kissing and making up.”

Miranda wriggles my embracing arm down to her waist and sits up, her head going through Leela's hand for a moment, who flickers, vanishes, and reappears sitting cross-legged in the air. She doesn't mind breaking the laws of physics for emphasis, but doesn't seem to like it when solid stuff goes through her image.

“We didn't actually get to—” Miranda begins, then stops. “Okay, what is it? Is someone else matching courses already?”

“Not, not for another twenty hours, maybe more. But that's not what I'm talking about. It's the Snark.”

“The artifact? Is it tampering with the Cat again?” Miranda beats me to the question, but I feel a sick twinge of fear even through the fading drugs. As if we weren't fucked enough.

“No. Well, yes. But no. Sort of.”

“What?” say both Miranda and I, almost simultaneously.

“Sorry, lemme start again. I need to show you a magic trick.”

Somehow, when Miranda and I say “What?” again, it's just as synchronized. We exchange a glance, and, beaten down as I feel, something in me gives a little flutter. I squash it down. Way down.

“Here,” says Leela, “hold out your hand.”

Miranda gets there first, because she's sitting up, and I'm still kinda fuzzy. But when she does, Leela just projects the image of dropping something into her hand. Can't quite see what.

I wait for the next bit, for whatever Leela's going to do, for whatever she's trying to tell us with this weird little routine, but nothing happens. Leela doesn't do anything else, and Miranda just sits there, holding out her hand, very still. Almost frozen.

“Is that it?” I ask. “What's the trick?”

And that's when Miranda gives out a little high pitched whimper. Like a kicked puppy.

“Neat, huh?” says Leela.

Miranda makes another strangled noise.

“Ah, Pixie, you okay? What's going on, guys?”

Miranda doesn't say a word. She just reaches back, takes my hand in her tiny fingers, and slips something into my palm.

It's a ball bearing.

That's it. Ordinary polished steel sphere, with a slick fullerene coating. The sort that's in every ventilator fan and instrument tracking mount on the ship. Musta gotten knocked loose from somewhere in all the chaos.

“Uh, so what? Musta come out of something. Hardly our biggest problem.”

“Marcus!” Miranda hisses at me.

“Wait for it…” Leela chides her with a smile.

Wait for what? It's just a ball bearing. I don't know where Leela found it, or why she brought it in here…

Wait.

Brought it in here?

Oh.

The bearing slips through my fingers, and I hear it click on the floor. Bounce. I stare at Leela.

“Let me get that for you,” she says, and this time there's no pretense, no stoop or reach from the avatar… the bearing simply rises from the floor, levitating before my eyes. Slowly. With a slight wobble.

“How?”

That's kind of all I can manage to say. That little sphere just hangs in the air, trembling a bit, though it only weighs a few grams, but right now, it's as big as the Earth. Heavy with the weight of history, with the subtle gravity of everything quietly changing… forever.

“Remember how we were speculating that the Snark is some sort of datacore?” Leela asks. “Something like a computational construct?”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“Well,” she says, with a self-satisfied grin, “constructs can be hacked.”

A few minutes later, I'm propped up into a half-sitting position on a stack of pillows. And floating on a warm internal cushion of still more fentanyl. It's hard to worry about the dangers of addictive painkillers when living out the next few days is a toss-up.

Miranda's found a bottle of water to wash the wool-carpet taste out of my mouth, and I think her hand lingered a bit on mine as she passed it to me.

But I've almost forgotten to drink.

We're all just staring at it, that small sphere, hanging in the air. I almost expect Leela to put a top hat and tails on her avatar, pass a hoop around it to show that there are no wires. Maybe with Miranda as the beautiful assistant in something low-cut, and a skirt with lots of crinoline.

“I call it an 'effector.'” Leela says. “It makes electromagnetic fields.”

“What, an electromagnet?” Miranda asks.

“No. Look at it. For real,” I say, not making eye contact, because I can't stop staring at that little floating impossibility. “An electromagnet is just a fancy name for a piece of coiled wire. Leela is holding a magnetic field, shaped exactly how she wants, fifty meters away from the Snark and its… uh… effector, through several layers of steel hull plating. Leela, what can it do, anyway?”

Her avatar is suddenly wearing a white lab coat and old-fashioned “glasses,” with her hair up in a severe bun. “I don't know yet,” she says. “Efficiency does fall off with distance, but it can sculpt electromagnetic fields like we shape steel in a machine shop. I think it can even make Dirac monopoles. According to our physics textbooks, that shouldn't even be possible. ”

“I don't think the Builders read our textbooks,” I say.

“What's a Dirac—?”

I cut Miranda off before she can launch Leela into a physics lecture.

“Force field gun, okay? She's saying the Snark has a force field gun.”

“Not quite a…” Leela begins, and trails off. “Yeah, okay, close enough.”

Miranda plucks the bearing out of the air between an iridescent-tipped thumb and forefinger. She cocks her head to one side, the way she always does, as I look to meet her eyes, the spell of the floating sphere finally broken.

“I'm still not really understanding,” she says, “Help me out here. What does one do with a… ah… force field gun?”

“Use our hull as a broadcast antenna, for one,” I say.

“Manipulate objects at a distance,” adds Leela.

“If we can reverse engineer it, we could make more fusion drives. In fact, it's probably how the containment fields on the fusion drive work. Right, Leela?”

“Yeah! It is! See, that's how I got in! When we cut the Snark off from the network, it was still trying to talk to the drive—it must have seen the fields in action, thought the drive was another Snark, or something. So, I did what I did to Miranda on her spacewalk! I created a fake network address, and emulated the drive's network interface, and so the Snark—”

I stop her before she nerds out too hard.

“The point is,” I say, “this changes everything. It's not just that we can make more fusion drives. It's a lot more than that. Mass driver accelerators for liftoff from the gravity wells of planets. Remote guidance for probes.”

Miranda releases the bearing slowly, with a calculating look, and it scoots off to orbit Leela's virtual head.

“Magnetic resonance scans without sticking someone in a machine,” she muses, warming up to the idea. “Surgery without incisions. Selective destruction of malignant tumor cells.”

“You're not thinking big enough,” says Leela. “Any pulsed field can carry a signal. Fully wireless networks without broadcast interference. Wireless circuits. Wireless power transmission.”

“And if three jokers like us can think of all that in two minutes of staring at this thing, who knows what else the tech people will come up with?” I add.

And that's when Miranda says it. The thought we've all been carefully avoiding.

“Except it won't be us doing it, will it?” she asks.

And there it is.

All three of us just look at each other, for a moment.

When things get bad enough, your far horizon shrinks. You don't think about the future. You just survive the next few minutes. But we've been here for hours now, while Miranda patched me up, sewed me back together. While we… talked. While we fell into an exhausted sleep.

Those little stolen moments of peace, when we knew we were doomed… I guess if things get bad enough, if there's nothing you can do, you just try not to think about it. Well, we're thinking about it now, and there's no need to answer her question. We already know.

We're fucked.

“I don't suppose there's any way to use this, ah, 'effector,' to fend them off? Or fix the drive?” I ask.

Leela shakes her head slowly. “I'm sorry, I just—I don't really know much about how to use it, yet. And the Snark, well, it's damaged and I'm not sure if—”

“What can you do?” asks Miranda.

“I can lift this ball bearing. Maybe something a few grams heavier. If I had more time…”

“Hours?” I ask, “Days? What are we talking about, here?”

“I don't know! I wasn't coming here with a solution! I just… I thought you'd want to see!”

“Well, shit,” I say, “Sorry. It's great work, Leela. It really is. And I can see why you wanted to share the news, but… it's kinda moot at this point, isn't it? I mean, we're just floating here, and the rest of the swarm will eventually match course with us. The engine's shot, and even if I could repair it, which is not guaranteed, I don't think I'm in any condition to do that. I know I can't fight off any more boarding parties. So what do we do right now?”

“Well,” says Miranda, “we do have the other ship.”

“Which we just shot a load of scrap into,” Leela reminds her.

“Yeah, but would it hurt to have a look?”

I suppose it wouldn't.