The Woman Who Died a Lot

“She’ll be disappointed,” I said.

“Always expect a kick in the teeth,” said Millon, “so that when you get a slap in the chops, it seems like a triumph.”

“Listen,” I said, “what do you know about a Goliath employee named Jacob Krantz?”

Before his days as a hermit, Millon de Floss had been editor of Conspiracy Theorist magazine, a position that necessitated he keep a somewhat lower profile these days, as some of his wackier “exclusives” had turned out to be far truer than expected— much to the displeasure of Goliath, who was implicated in almost every conspiracy you cared to invent.

“Krantz?” said Millon. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Does he have a Laddernumber?”

“It’s 673.”

“Wow.”

“Wow indeed. He might be working in the Synthetic Human Division.”

“According to Goliath, there is no Synthetic Human Division. Let me make a few calls.”

He disappeared back into his hermitage, and I watched as the observers trailed out of the bunker to stare sadly at the remains of the defense shield. They had all been driven away by the time I got down there, and I found Tuesday in the bunker, trying to make sense of the vast amount of telemetry generated by the test.

“I’m sorry, Sweetpea,” I said. “It must be a huge disappointment.”

She turned to glower at me. “If you hadn’t sent me to school this morning to prove I was a real teenager, then I might have made this bloody thing work.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. This is me being angry and you being gullible and sensitive when reacting negatively to my wild accusations.”

Tuesday could be very direct when angry—but also quite honest.

“I can think of three things at once, so school isn’t usually a problem,” she said as she calmed. “I’ve just got to fine-tune the algorithm to better predict the Madeupion Field. Do it right and we have over twenty gigawatts of free energy and a vexed deity. Get it wrong and we’ve got seven tons of the most expensive scrap on record.”

“Will you be able to get it finished by Friday?” I asked. “I’m not keen to see Swindon’s downtown disappear in a flash of blue wrath.”

“I’ll figure it out, Mum,” she said with a sigh. “You should have seen their faces. That mockup cost them sixty million to build, and it’s the tenth I’ve destroyed.”

“So you’re sure you’re okay?” I asked as a distinctive thupthup-thup sound heralded the arrival of a tiltrotor aircraft.

“I’ll be fine,” said Tuesday as the small craft appeared above the tree line and folded its rotor panels to landing configuration.

“That’ll be my ride.”

“Where are you going?”

“The Sisterhood is opening their library for scrutiny.”

“Oooh,” said Tuesday, “if you see a copy of Archimedes’ fifth issue of Practical Mechanical Theorems, the one where he outlines how to build a tumble dryer, I’d love a copy.”

17. Tuesday: The Sisterhood

The first tiltrotor was designed in the early twenties as a novel method of using a ducted fan as a propulsion and lifting mechanism. It took thirty years for a powerful enough engine to be introduced, and even then the craft was not a serious proposition until the introduction of a light and powerful nuclear reactor. Of the craft’s benefits, vertical takeoff and ease of use is their two best, and reactor leaks and the ability to drop out of the sky unannounced their two least.

Jane’s Aviation Digest

The small craft had landed on the front lawn, and Landen was chatting to Finisterre about how the technology had progressed since tiltrotors were used in the Crimea as spotter aircraft, a role in which they had been less than successful. The joke at the time had been “How do you get to own a tiltrotor?” and the answer was “Buy an acre of land in the Crimea and wait.”

“We’d better be going if we’re to make our appointment,” said Finisterre as I arrived. “The Sisterhood can’t abide impunctuality. Will you be coming?”