The Changeling Game, Chapter 65

65.
Twenty-Seven ’Verses Wide

“Nephrite Undine to Plymouth Station A, come in, please.”

Audrey sat in the captain’s chair on the flight deck, watching the speck that was Plymouth Station A grow larger and larger in the front windows. To its right, the brilliant sphere of Deckard’s World hung in the darkness, still far enough away that it made her think of a blue-green Megaluna rather than a whole planet.

She was almost home.

Was that her home? She still wasn’t sure.

“Nephrite Undine, this is Plymouth Station A. We read you loud and clear.”

“Copy, Plymouth Station A,” she said, releasing a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “We are on final approach for docking, awaiting confirmation of gate assignment.”

Hopefully, Marianne Tepper sounded like a consummate professional. And an adult. She and MilitAIre had rehearsed her performance several times, in preparation for her interactions with actual human beings again. Assuming the person replying to her from Plymouth Station A wasn’t another AI, it was the first live human voice she’d heard in more than five months.

“Nephrite Undine, you will be docking at Gate 3. Maintain current heading and prepare to disengage ion drives on my mark.” The flight controller began a countdown.

“We good with that?” she asked CaptAIn and AIngineer.

“Standing by for the mark,” AIngineer replied.

The AIs were, of course, handling everything; she was just the mouthpiece. Still, she wanted to do it right. Although MilitAIre had assured her that there would be no record of any of the… peculiarities… that “Marianne Tepper” had periodically displayed during the duration of the flight, she found herself wanting to make sure that she played the part well enough that, if she ever applied to work for Sirius Shipping again, they’d be glad to welcome her back.

You never know what bridge you might need to cross again…

“…four… three… two… one… mark.”

The Nephrite Undine shuddered slightly as the ion drives switched off and, less than a second later, the station’s robo-tugs came in range and began tractoring it in.

Audrey consulted the screen by her left hand. Everything was green. “Nephrite Undine to Plymouth Station A, I’m showing a good lock. You have the conn.”

“Roger that, Nephrite Undine. You will arrive at the gate in approximately twenty minutes. Welcome to the Plymouth System.”

“Thanks, Plymouth Station A. I’m looking forward to seeing the sights.” She switched off the comms and leaned back in the chair, sighing.

In less than half an hour, she would be turning over the Nephrite Undine to Sirius Shipping reps and disembarking… in the company of a WitSec handler who would undoubtedly be coming aboard along with the reps. MilitAIre had assured her that everything was in order, but she could feel her stage fright building nonetheless. Soon she would have to play a series of roles in quick succession, in front of a much less logical and predictable audience than she’d had for the last five months. In front of strangers.

And it wasn’t even like she’d been that good at fooling the AIs until MilitAIre stepped in, either.

“I’m gonna miss you guys,” she said. She wished there was some way she could take them with her. Inhuman and unreadable or not, they had become genuine friends.

“We will miss you too, Marianne,” CaptAIn said. “Thank you for a lovely run-in flight. We have enjoyed your company immensely.”

She wished she could offer to stay in touch with them. But Marianne Tepper would, more or less, cease to exist once she left Plymouth Station A for Deckard’s World. Her handler would have all the arrangements, she assumed. But she would probably spend the next month and a half, until her biological fourteenth birthday had passed, incommunicado.

“You’re welcome,” she said, once she had her voice under control. It had been on the verge of breaking for a moment. “Thank you for a wonderful flight. You’re a fantastic crew.”

She spent the next fifteen minutes visiting each of the AIs to say individual good-byes and thank-yous, finishing up in the Security Room.

“I… don’t even know where to start,” she told MilitAIre. “Thank you… so much. I don’t think I’d have had a chance if you hadn’t stepped in.”

The strategy he had built for her was elegant, complex, and comprehensive, taking into account things that she could never have anticipated. Four months of his tutelage had left her aware of just how much she still had left to learn, too. She hoped her new handler would be even a fraction as adept as he was.

“You’re welcome, Audrey.” He, alone of all the AIs, could call her that. The rest only knew Marianne. “I know you will be in very good hands. And I believe we will meet again.”

“I hope so. I just—”

With a soft shudder, the ship came to a stop.

“Time for you to meet your boarding party, Audrey. Godspeed.”

She really wished he had a physical presence; she needed to give him a proper goodbye hug.

Her bag was already waiting for her at the airlock. She checked the seals, confirming that everything was ready, and pressed her palm to the security plate, authorizing the connection. As the airlock doors slowly opened, she took a deep breath.

Showtime…

Four people were waiting on the other side of the doors. Two of them carried large, heavy looking tech cases.

People. Actual living people. She had to suppress the urge to fling her arms around them and kiss them.

“Permission to come aboard, Acting Captain Tepper?” a dark haired man dressed in an expensive suit asked.

“Permission granted,” she replied, stepping back to make room for the party.

The suit nodded at the two technicians, who nodded to her as they passed.

“I’m Kyle Hanoran,” he told her. “Vice President of Plymouth System Operations for Sirius Shipping. I’ll be managing the hand-off. This,” and he turned and gestured at the woman still standing on the other side of the airlock threshold, “is Susan Travers. I believe she is the immigration agent you requested.”

MilitAIre had told her that that would be the cover story. It didn’t quite match up with the explanation she’d sent Nguyen when she had declined the posting on the Major Barbara and requested the Nephrite Undine instead, but it had reframed that explanation and would stand up to most scrutiny. Audrey wasn’t sure if Travers was her handler or was just going to transport her to whomever had been assigned that role, but she knew what was expected of her either way.

“Yes, thank you. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. Hopefully, after my family’s issues are resolved, I can apply for another posting with Sirius. I’ve really liked working for you.”

Hanoran, who undoubtedly had been given access to the carefully seeded gossip, smiled and nodded. “We hope you will.”

Yeah, he knew the “truth” about Marianne Tepper that MilitAIre had spread: her father, who had settled on Deckard’s World, was supposedly dying of a rare cancer that still had no treatment or cure, and she had requested the posting on the Nephrite Undine so that she could come stay with him through his final days. Nguyen, Abecassis, and Davidov, along with several other execs, had sent her sympathy “cards” via the beacons two weeks earlier after the story had begun to circulate. She had sent thank you “cards” back to each of them.

It was, she reflected, the best way to make sure that nobody wondered why she wasn’t applying for another position. And it meant that, should she ever need to use the Marianne Tepper identity again, all the bridges associated with it would remain unburnt. That was yet another thing that hadn’t even occurred to her when she was planning her voyage.

She was going to miss MilitAIre’s nuanced strategies.

He’d even taught her chess. She was really going to miss playing it with him. Even if she’d never won a single game.

It only took a few minutes to sign over authority of the ship to Hanoran. As the technicians returned to the airlock, they shook hands and she picked up her bag.

Was she going home, or leaving home? It suddenly felt like the latter. She knew every centimeter of the Nephrite Undine intimately, and suspected she would walk its corridors in her dreams for years to come, the way she sometimes still found herself in her grandparents’ house that had been sold when she was three. Lonely as the journey and ship had been at times, it had been a mostly peaceful interlude. Mostly.

The technicians fell in behind her and Travers as they walked into the station.

“We’ll be leaving for the surface right away,” Travers told her, and handed her an envelope. “Your paperwork is inside.”

The paperwork, Audrey knew, would include a replacement ID card with her adjusted height on it. She would still be “Marianne Tepper” until they had reached the surface and entered the safe house; after that, the name would be retired indefinitely.

She opened the envelope, nodding at Travers. “I appreciate all of this. I really do.”

She wondered how much the agent actually knew about her situation. The new ID card, she was interested to note, had an updated picture of her that MilitAIre must have captured at some point in the last few days, after EntertAIn and First-AId had helped her dye her hair auburn. 1.78 meters tall… damn. Well, he would know…

“It’s my pleasure,” Travers said in a crisply formal tone that didn’t speak to pleasure at all. Audrey found herself wondering just how many of the WitSec subjects the woman had dealt with were unsavory types.

Most of them, probably. While blameless witnesses to high crimes did end up under WitSec’s protection from time to time, MilitAIre had told her that the bulk of its subjects were criminals who had been persuaded to “flip” on their bosses, usually in exchange for clemency or even immunity where their own transgressions were concerned. If that was the norm, Travers would probably be disinclined to view her latest ward as a helpless innocent.

Not like I actually am one, anyway…

Being surrounded by so many living minds was intoxicating. The part of Audrey’s head that had been deadly silent for months was suddenly abuzz. It was a struggle to keep her mental “hands” to herself and not start reading people at random, but MilitAIre had warned her against that. They passed through the immigration and customs lines swiftly and efficiently, but she noticed that the only ones being subjected to intensive scrutiny in the lines were people with darker skin and “ethnic” attire.

Maybe, she found herself thinking again, this was a mistake. Did she really want to assimilate back into a world that treated people that way? Did she really want those kinds of bigoted thoughts trying to worm their way into her head? Coming, possibly, from people she liked?

I only have to stay here until I’m officially eighteen, she reminded herself. I’ll have graduated from high school. Even if I’m not biologically eighteen yet, I’ll be a legal adult as far as Deckard’s World knows, and they won’t be able to hold me.

WitSec, of course, still might. But she could continue under its protection somewhere else in the wider Federacy.

On the other side of the gauntlet, Audrey found herself in a familiar lounge. She’d disembarked there when she’d taken the shuttle up from Deckard’s World, before using some of her father’s security codes to sneak on board the Cloaked Butterfly. There was a weird sense of unfamiliarity about the space, though.

I’m six inches taller than I was when I last passed through here, she realized at last. Fortunately, her appetite had finally normalized in the last month, and it had been almost two months since she’d felt any bone-growth aches in her limbs. Hopefully, she thought, this was it and she wouldn’t get any taller.

Shuttles ran regularly; it was mid-afternoon in Settlement Point, so another one would be arriving soon. She got comfortable in her seat—as much as she could—observing the others in the room and trying to figure out their stories while she waited.

Tourists and campers, most of them, she decided. For all its backwater reputation, Deckard’s World was popular with people across the Federacy who wanted to get rustic, to “rough it” without being too far from civilization. Parts of the planet were even more frontiers-y than Shakti IV, and might have been an even more logical choice for Riddick to go to ground in… if only the population’s xenophobia hadn’t meant that he’d have been subject to intense and hostile scrutiny the moment he tried to reach the surface.

He might be anywhere, she reflected, but he definitely was not on Deckard’s World.

Most of the other people in the lounge had large amounts of luggage and camping equipment. Her single bag, containing barely any worldly possessions, was not at all the norm; other people-watchers would believe that she must work somewhere on the station and be commuting home, rather than that she had arrived on a Star Jumper after months of travel. Almost no one, even with stringent weight limits, traveled quite so unencumbered.

She took out her tablet and tapped into the local news headlines, careful to avoid any sections that might mention her disappearance. October 23, 2517 on the Federacy Standard Calendar, the heart of autumn or spring on old Earth, was late winter in the most heavily settled portion of Deckard’s World. The second semester of school was well underway; American-style football had given way, in the Settlement Point Monitor’s sports section, to basketball and ice hockey. It would be a blustery 24° Fahrenheit, with an 80% chance of snow, when they landed; Audrey glanced around the lounge again and noticed that almost everyone else in the room—and everyone with camping gear—was dressed in lighter clothes intended for summer.

They must be waiting for the shuttle to Wyndham Landing, she thought. October was late summer in Deckard’s World’s less populous northern hemisphere.

MilitAIre had told her to dress in her warmest clothes—which meant one of the sets of coveralls, provided by Sirius Shipping, over jeans and a nondescript shirt—and that she would be provided with a coat upon landing. She wondered how much her time spent offworld had thinned her blood; both New Athens and New Marrakesh had been in the hottest parts of their respective summers when she’d landed on them, and the crash planet had been an oven until the eclipse sharply cooled it down. She hadn’t seen snow in more than a year of lived time.

The shuttle for Wyndham Landing arrived first and the lounge almost completely cleared out. Audrey continued catching up on headlines as she waited.

The Settlement Point Monitor hardly discussed any events beyond the Plymouth System, treating the rest of the Federacy as remote and irrelevant. One tiny article mentioned that the New Casablanca Spaceport on Tangiers Prime had reopened its damaged concourse, and a reopening date had been scheduled for the New Marrakesh Spaceport, after a “wave of terrorism” had struck the planet earlier in the year. Both aware of MilitAIre’s instructions about reading texts for bias, and in full possession of the truth about both incidents and the man behind them, Audrey was swiftly disgusted to realize that the article heavily implied the involvement of Islamist radicals, possibly even connected to the New Taliban, in both explosions and other unnamed—and probably imaginary—incidents besides. Javor Makarov’s name didn’t even come up. The inconvenient truth, that a white man who had periodically sported a law enforcement badge had been behind two mass killings on a far more cosmopolitan world, had been swept out of the frame.

She hoped, suddenly, that Travers wasn’t her handler. She couldn’t imagine talking to the aloof, disinterested woman about how disconnected the articles she was reading were from actual reality, assuming her handler was even cleared to know that Audrey had been on Tangiers Prime and hadn’t just been briefed on her “witness to a local mob hit” cover story. She already missed talking to MilitAIre more than she’d ever expected. By the end of the journey, there had only been a small handful of painful moments in her run that she’d still been unable to discuss, and he’d finally, gently, told her that she should leave them be. He wasn’t a psychologist, after all, and First-AId hadn’t been cleared to hear them, so there was no point in setting off another panic attack trying to plumb them.

But she’d confided everything else to him, and the idea of having to do any of that all over again, with some new stranger, filled her with dread.

Hopefully, whoever it was would just have some dossier that MilitAIre had prepared for them to read and wouldn’t feel a need to rehash all of it personally. Several of the girls in C Ward had griped about their psychiatrists getting replaced mid-treatment and the replacements forcing them to start again at Square One, making them not only lose ground, but also lose trust in the process.

Just roll with it. Whatever happens, the important part is that it breaks your trail and tells the ’verse that you could never possibly have been Jack B. Badd.

The rest could be improvised. If things turned bad, she had the emergency comm number General Toal had given her.

And if that didn’t work…

It wasn’t like she didn’t know how to disappear.

Stop it. You haven’t even met your handler yet. MilitAIre wouldn’t fuck you over. It’ll be okay.

The entertainment feeds, she thought, would be a decent distraction from her progressively darker thoughts. It’d be a good idea to know what the kids in her classes were watching and talking about.

Remakes. The Deckard’s World division of Disney was doing remakes of “classic” twentieth century shows and movies. There was even a new feature article about it: the head of the production company explained that they were recreating everything shot-by-shot and line-by-line, mostly, but with the addition of tech, slang, and styles that contemporary Deckard’s World audiences took for granted, because he thought their absence from the original shows was why those audiences weren’t watching anymore. Viewership of the “classic staples” was continuing to drop.

Audrey sighed. Or maybe it’s because those shows aren’t about them, and still won’t be. They’re about people who’ve been dead for five hundred years and a nation that’s been gone for nearly as long, no matter how hard you try to revive it…

The shuttle to Settlement Point arrived at that moment, preventing her from stewing over it and roiling up even more doubts.

Travers, she realized, had been watching her the whole time with a frown. This was going to be just delightful.

But, fortunately, she had actual work to do during reentry. She held her bag close, casting her “extra” senses over it, making sure that everything inside was absolutely rooted in U1 and nowhere else. She did the same with the clothes she was wearing, and then with herself. Her five-shape had a strange “presence” in twenty-six other ’verses now, but her physical presence needed to be 100% in U1 or she could die during the descent into and through Deckard’s World’s atmosphere.

She could still “feel” the other ’verses, but she wasn’t “in” any of them. Nothing she’d brought with her was crossing into them, either. She’d been scrupulous about making sure she physically stayed in U1 when the Nephrite Undine hadn’t been actively isomorphing, but she felt a need to make absolutely sure anew. Especially given what she would be doing on the way down.

Stowing her bag in front of her, she took her seat and strapped in. Travers had given her a window seat, ostensibly a privilege. But it put the WitSec agent between her and the aisle, ensuring that there would be no rabbiting. Audrey wondered how often that happened.

Probably a lot… Hardly anyone was in WitSec by choice, after all.

She closed her eyes as the shuttle disengaged from Plymouth Station A, slowing her breathing and beginning the meditation sequences that both SensAI and the Apeiros had developed with her. She needed to know what kind of world she was approaching in each ’verse she had access to.

Holy shit!

She opened her eyes, stifling a gasp, and shifted her vision to see more clearly what was in U612.

It’s a fucking gas giant in that ’verse! Holy shit! She was already in its upper atmosphere there, surrounded by orange-pink gases and strange particles swirling through the cabin.

Okay, she couldn’t visit U612, at all, while she was on the surface of Deckard’s World. Down on the surface, the atmosphere would probably be crushing. She let her awareness of that ’verse slide away, focusing on the others.

There were two more gas giants, not quite as large, one composed of bluish-green gases while the other’s heavy atmosphere was rust-colored. In U289g, Deckard’s World didn’t exist at all, and in U27, there was an asteroid belt instead of a planet. But the planet existed in 21 more ’verses, and it had a visible atmosphere in nine of them. Her fingers flew over her tablet as she made quick notes about what she was seeing, and where.

U322a was one of the nine with an atmosphere. How weird would it be if there was a habitable world in Elsewhere here, too?

The shuttle’s descent through the atmosphere was fascinating. Four of the other atmospheres, including the one in Elsewhere, seemed almost identical to the one in Deckard’s World. Three of the others were far thicker, and two were significantly thinner. It was weird, discovering what she could sense even without physically engaging with any of the other worlds.

“We should be landing in another twenty minutes,” Travers said beside her. “When we disembark, let me do all of the talking.”

Audrey nodded. She leaned back in her seat so she could survey the skies now above her in multiple worlds. Elsewhere, and one other world, had blue skies. In U612 and the two other gas giant ’verses, stygian darkness surrounded her aside from periodic flashes of lightning.

Any time I’m in the mood to watch a thunderstorm, I’ll have one handy, she thought. In two other ’verses, she would already be underwater. There was a third ’verse where she was surrounded by some kind of liquid, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t water.

She made more notes as they descended toward Settlement Point.

Twenty-four of her other ’verses were definitely not habitable, but several of them had interesting properties that she might, cautiously, explore sometime in the future. Two—including Elsewhere—were still potentially promising.

Landing clinched it; she was in the middle of a forest in Elsewhere, and a rolling meadow in U74. The vegetation was almost, but not quite, Earthlike. She might just have a safe place, or even two, to isomorph over to if she needed out of U1.

It’d be so crazy if every planet in Elsewhere was already habitable…

She put her tablet away, picked up her small bag, and followed Travers out of the shuttle and into the Settlement Point Interplanetary Spaceport, aware that the two technicians who had boarded the Nephrite Undine were ahead of them, still carting around their huge, heavy boxes.

Two checkpoints later—she’d been asked to show her ID twice, but had let Travers do all the talking, as asked—they reached the main terminal and its three-story wall of glass. Snow swirled on the other side of the glass; she’d seen the storm approaching even as they had touched down.

“We’re a little underdressed,” Travers said. “Our contact is running late because the roads are already bad in Settlement Point itself. We probably won’t reach the house until after dark.”

Audrey nodded. Huge fish were swimming through the cavernous terminal over in U115. One headed straight for her and she had to resist the temptation to duck.

Having a five-shape that was 27 ’verses wide was going to take some getting used to.

The weird thing was that she wasn’t having any trouble telling which ’verse things were happening in. It was like some strange form of depth perception, or another kind of sense of direction. She didn’t know how she knew things about the different worlds, but she could identify the ’verses, and their relative positions to her, as easily as she could bring her fingertip to the tip of her nose with her eyes closed.

Five-dimensional critter, right here…

And, if all went well, the Quintessa Corporation would never know she existed, or could exist.

It occurred to Audrey, for the first time, that none of the ’verses she’d expanded into were the universe of darkness she’d sensed in and around the envoy. Even U37d, creepy as it had felt when she’d first encountered it, seemed perfectly ordinary now—as ordinary as any alternate universe could be, anyway—its version of Deckard’s World thin-atmosphered and volcanic but not even slightly eldritch. Even the darkness of the gas giants was missing the chthonic horror that had swirled around that elderly woman and polluted her touch.

She hoped she’d never find that hellish ’verse.

The snow outside of the windows was growing thicker as the sky darkened, and the contact still hadn’t arrived. Audrey called up the Settlement Point weather report. Sometime during their descent, a Winter Storm Warning had been issued. Six inches was expected before morning.

Welcome home, Audrey MacNamera…

Flights and liftoffs, she noticed, were losing their ETDs, the words DELAYED and even CANCELED appearing in place of the time codes. Some of the ETAs were listed as delayed, too.

Yeah, that’s not inauspicious at all…

Half an hour later, the forecast had upped the expected snow accumulation to eight inches. The terminal was emptying out.

“Shit,” Travers muttered.

“What’s wrong?” Audrey asked her, frowning.

“I need you to turn away from the window wall,” Travers said. “There’s a news crew arriving to cover all the flight cancellations, as if this doesn’t happen with every snowstorm. You can’t be on vid.”

Audrey nodded, turning so that she faced away from the entrance and sprawling across the empty seats as if sleepy. She used her bag as a pillow, draping one of her shirts over her face as if trying to block the light and catch a nap; even if someone turned a camera on her, they wouldn’t get a shot of her face. That was the most important thing, obviously.

“You’re good at this,” Travers observed. By her tone, that wasn’t entirely complimentary.

“Had some practice,” Audrey sighed. Hopefully, with her face obscured, no one catching a glimpse of some random, lanky redhead in Sirius Shipping coveralls would be reminded of either Audrey MacNamera or Jack B. Badd.

Another half hour passed before Travers told her that the news crew had moved on. Ten minutes later, their contact finally showed up.

He was a big bear of a man, probably some nine inches or so taller than Audrey. He arrived with thick winter coats for both her and Travers, leading the two of them out to an all-terrain vehicle that wasn’t doing a very good job of concealing its military affiliations. A cold-eyed man in its driver’s seat gave her a quick look-over as she climbed in, and then ignored her.

The drive was completely silent. Audrey didn’t try to touch any of their minds; if they were military, there was the possibility that they would recognize the signs of an esper getting mentally handsy with them, and that could upend the game. If they were her handlers, she’d get to know them soon enough. And if not, then maybe it was better not to have tried to know them, anyway.

The next month and a half, she thought, could be even lonelier than the voyage on the Nephrite Undine had felt at times. Human presences didn’t necessarily mean human contact.

I still have the Apeiros, at least…

The roads were almost deserted, but Audrey had a feeling that the part of town she was traveling through was barely inhabited even in good weather. Large, abandoned-looking warehouses crowded the road, and no plows had come through. Weirdly enough, it looked a lot like the kind of place she’d visualized the fictional murder she’d supposedly witnessed taking place in.

The abandoned warehouses gave way to boarded-up businesses, and then a down-on-its-luck area that had a mixture of actual businesses and places that had closed down. The vehicle slowed to a stop in front of a three-story building, its ground-floor windows all covered with graffitied plywood, an Under New Management sign on its door visible thanks to a rare working light above it.

A dark van was also parked in front of the building. As Audrey watched, two familiar men emerged from the lit entry, nodded to her companions, climbed into the van, and drove away.

Hadn’t those been the men that had accompanied Hanoran and Travers? She almost hadn’t recognized them without their boxes and bundled against the storm.

Huh.

Neither of the men in her vehicle got out. Travers, and Travers alone, escorted her to the door of the building and ushered her inside.

“Your handler is already here,” Travers said, terse as ever. “He’ll explain everything to you. I’m not cleared to meet him. Good luck.”

And that was it. A moment later, Audrey was alone in the building, the front entry locking behind Travers with a loud click. She felt utterly alone, as if the building was completely deserted aside from some small presences that she suspected were mice in the basement. Bright light spilled out of a doorway ahead of her. Taking a deep breath, she walked through it.

The room beyond was strangely similar to the Security Room on the Nephrite Undine. She wondered if someone had done that to set her at ease, or if security rooms just had a standard look—

“Hello, Audrey,” a voice she knew almost as well as her own, and hadn’t really expected to hear again, drawled.

Holy shit. She really should have seen this coming.