The Quantum Thief

I almost fall down: I am high up on the wall of a huge cylindrical chamber with metal walls, covered by a grid of little hatches. It makes me think of a filing cabinet. Vertical cables run through it. Below, a Quiet – an octopus-like cluster of machinery and arms – hangs from them. It is placing fresh bodies into storage. I close the hatch, leaving a small opening to see through, and wait for it to leave. It zooms up past me, climbing up the cables like a spider. Then I venture out again. Gel dripping from my skin, I look for handholds.

All right, Perhonen says. I’m getting some imagery now. There are some maintenance shafts below: you can get Mieli in through there.

I reconfigure the q-dot layer under my skin to grab the material on the wall and climb down the coffins of the sleeping dead.

There is a constant background noise, a mix of distant and nearby hisses, rumbles and thumps. This is where the organs of the city are, pistons and engines and tubes where the synthbio repair organisms circulate, and the vast artificial muscles that move the city’s legs.

A splay of transparent tubes snakes down a series of shafts along the edges of the chamber, with rungs along them clearly designed for smaller Quiet. They are just big enough for me to squeeze in. Perhonen is feeding me ghost images she can get from my WIMP beacon: around me there is a chaotic anatomy of chambers, tunnels and machines.

I climb downward for more than fifty metres, skin scraping against the tubes and the walls of the shaft, stopping whenever I hear the scuttling of a Quiet. Once, a swarm of beetlesized Quiet swarms past me, ignoring me, climbing all over me, tiny eyes aglow in the dark, and it is hard to keep from screaming.

Finally, there is another horizontal tunnel, this one made from some ceramic material, slick with bitter-smelling slippery fluids that drip from the porous walls. It is completely dark, and I switch to infrared, trying to ignore the ghost world of giants moving at the edge of my vision, focusing on the destination.

After a dark eternity of crawling, the tunnel widens and slopes down: I have to struggle to keep from sliding. Finally, there is some light, an orange dusk in the distance, and I can feel a freezing cold wind. In the light, I can see that the tunnel widens into a sloping shaft, ending in a fine mesh that lets the light from the outside through.

Tell Mieli I’m ready when she is, I tell Perhonen.

She’s following your beacon. Should be there any moment.

Getting to this point involved a lot of planning. The gevulot around the base of the city is incredibly thick: the Oubliette does not want to make the lives of gogol pirates any easier. So the only way to get in was from the inside.

I take out the q-tool again and cut a hole in the mesh. It eats through the material smoothly. I feel a moment of vertigo, looking down. Then there is a gust of hot wind, and Mieli is there, hovering beneath the opening, wings extended.

‘What took you so long?’ I ask.

She looks at me disapprovingly.

‘I know, I know,’ I say. ‘I should put some clothes on when I come back from the dead.’

Mieli leads us through the tunnels towards the q-spider’s beacon that tells us where Unruh’s body is kept. I’m glad she is here: the tunnels and corridors are a blur. A few times she surrounds us with stealth fog as bigger Quiet pass us, wheezing and rumbling, carrying a stench of the sea.

Then there are the crypt chambers, cylindrical rooms a hundred metres in diameter, surgically clean and chromed in contrast to the dark tunnels, coffin hatches engraved with names and codes. We find Unruh in the third one.

As I enter, there is a hissing sound above: the mortician octopod Quiet has spotted us. It plummets down the cables towards me.

Mieli shoves me aside and fires her ghostgun at it. There is a grinding sound as it brings itself to a stop, metres above me, hanging from the cables like a puppet, swaying back and forth. I look at its mandibled non-face and swallow.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mieli says. ‘My gogol just took over its motor functions. The mind inside is going to be fine. We wouldn’t want to violate your professional ethics.’

‘I’m not so worried about that,’ I say. Mieli brought smart-fabric overalls for me, but I still feel cold. She gestures, and obediently the Quiet climbs up to fetch Unruh’s body. In a few moments, the coffin is on the floor in front of us. I open it with the q-tool.

‘Like I told Raymonde,’ I say, ‘we take from the rich and give to the poor.’