Double Cross
Chapter 15: Double Cross
Planet three was made of ice.
Not the ordinary kind — not the ice in the freezer or the kind that forms on windows in winter. This ice was glass-smooth and dark blue, and it had formed into mountains and towers and arches so precise they looked like someone had designed them. The frozen ocean stretched in every direction, perfectly flat, perfectly transparent, so that thirty meters down you could see the shapes of enormous creatures preserved in the ice, their mouths open, their fins still mid-stroke, stopped in the middle of whatever they'd been doing when the planet froze.
The sky was white.
The wind was constant and the temperature on Doraemon's instrument was minus sixty-two.
The Space Suits handled it. You couldn't feel the cold through them, which was a relief, except it also made the landscape feel less real — you were walking through the most frozen place any of them had ever seen and none of them were shivering, which made it feel like a movie set.
Giant pressed his face against the ice to look at one of the frozen creatures. It looked back at him with one enormous preserved eye.
"What is it?" he said.
"Probably something that didn't make it," Doraemon said.
Giant thought about this. He moved away from the creature's eye.
The path on this planet was more obvious than the others — or had been, once. There was a cut road through the ice mountains, following a straight line. But the road had traps on it, and the traps were invisible.
The first one happened to Nobita.
He was walking on a section of ice that looked solid and reflected the white sky perfectly, and then he was not walking on it because it was not there. It was an illusion — a projected image of ice over empty air, over a drop of about fifteen meters into a crevasse filled with needles of broken ice.
Nobita fell.
Doraemon grabbed him with the Takecopter three meters from the bottom.
They landed on a ledge. Nobita sat on it for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing carefully through his nose.
"Loki," Suneo said.
The others looked at him.
"He did this." Suneo looked at the false ice, which had not disappeared — the illusion was still there, a perfect sheet, exactly the right color and reflection. "He was here before us. He had time to set traps."
"How do you know it's not natural?" Shizuka said.
"Because natural doesn't put an illusion over a crevasse. Natural leaves a crevasse. Someone put the illusion there to make the drop look safe."
Shizuka looked at the ice. "Who would do that?"
"Someone who wanted to slow us down without actually stopping us." Suneo thought about this. "He doesn't want to hurt us. He wants to get there first. Slowing us down is the same as getting there first."
"That is a very specific theory," Giant said.
"Yes," Suneo said.
"Based on what evidence."
"Based on knowing how that kind of thinking works."
Nobody asked him how he knew how that kind of thinking worked. They all had a general sense of the answer.
Loki appeared at the top of a glass mountain.
He didn't appear dramatically — no shimmer of green light, no announcement. He was simply there when he hadn't been before, sitting on a ledge of dark blue ice like he was waiting for a train.
"Careful," he called down. "There are six more of those."
"Thank you," Nobita called back, before anyone could tell him not to.
"You're welcome." Loki watched them make their way around the false-ice section, testing each step before putting weight on it. "You know, you could just come with me. I know where all of them are."
"We know where one of them is now," Suneo said.
"True. You have eleven more planets to map."
"Six more."
"Eleven."
Suneo looked up at him. Loki smiled.
He was lying. There were six. Suneo was fairly sure. But he noted that Loki had corrected him immediately, which meant Loki wanted him to believe the higher number. That was information.
The map split at the center of the planet.
This was not symbolic — it was literal. The road of cut ice reached a junction where two paths diverged, one going left and northeast, one going right and southwest. Carved into the ice at the junction was another Andromedan message.
"Two paths," Doraemon translated. "Each leads to the coordinate for planet four. One set of coordinates is real. One is false. The map does not say which."
Giant and Nobita looked at each other.
"Can you tell from the map which is right?" Shizuka asked.
"Not from here," Doraemon said. "We'd need to follow one and check."
"If we split up and check both simultaneously—"
"Then Loki takes the right one while we check the wrong one," Suneo said.
Loki's voice came from nearby, relaxed and unhurried: "You could just work together. I said that before. The offer still stands."
He was standing ten meters away on a shelf of ice, not having appeared to move from anywhere.
"You set traps on this road," Suneo said.
"Old habits." Loki gestured. "I've cleared the others, for what it's worth. A gesture of goodwill."
"You cleared them so we can travel this road quickly enough to be useful to you," Suneo said.
Loki tilted his head. "True. But the practical effect is the same."
"What do you want, exactly? You're a god. You can get gold anywhere."
"Gold is ordinary." Loki looked at his hands in a casual way, like a person checking their nails. "A mirror that shows you your deepest self. Now that's interesting. I have a lot of enemies. Knowing their deepest selves would be extraordinarily useful."
"You could show it to yourself," Shizuka said.
Loki looked at her. "Now why would I want to do that?"
Shizuka looked back at him calmly. Loki was the first to look away, which surprised Suneo.
"I'll take one path," Loki said. "You take the other. First one to the coordinates wins." He paused. "Truce on this planet. No tricks."
"You're the god of tricks," Giant said.
"On this planet," Loki said pleasantly. "No tricks. My word."
"Your word," Suneo said. "How much is that worth?"
"Today? A great deal. I'm enjoying this game. Cheating would make it less interesting."
Suneo agreed to the truce.
He was lying. He had a plan, and the plan required the truce to exist so he could break it productively.
The gadget was called Copy Robot. Doraemon had one in his pocket — a flat disc, silver, about the size of a commemorative coin. The label on the disc read: COPY ROBOT — PERFECT DUPLICATE. ONE USER PER ACTIVATION. DURATION: FOUR HOURS. SINGLE USE.
Suneo took it from Doraemon in the two minutes of consultation they had while Loki stood tactfully distant, appearing to study an ice formation.
"The Copy Robot will look like me, talk like me, and move like me," Suneo said quietly. "I send Copy-Suneo with Loki on the right-hand path. I give Copy-Suneo instructions."
"What instructions?" Doraemon said.
"Feed Loki false details about the real path. Specific ones. The kind I'd actually know."
"And if Loki realizes the copy isn't you?"
"He won't. Not for the first hour." Suneo thought. "Maybe ninety minutes."
"That's very specific."
"It's based on experience with how long it takes someone to notice a person is performing rather than being." He paused. "I've had a lot of experience with that."
Doraemon looked at him. Then he looked at the coin. Then he put it in Suneo's hand.
Suneo activated the Copy Robot. The coin vibrated, grew warm, and then Suneo was standing next to Suneo.
Copy-Suneo was identical. Same height, same white Space Suit with silver stripes, same default expression of mild self-satisfaction. Suneo leaned in and whispered a series of very specific instructions: false path details, plausible-sounding measurements, a fake secondary coordinate that would redirect about twenty kilometers to the northwest. Copy-Suneo nodded exactly the way Suneo nodded, which was somewhat unsettling.
"Don't make me sound stupid," Suneo told his own copy.
"Wouldn't dream of it," Copy-Suneo said.
Loki accepted the arrangement without apparent suspicion. He and Copy-Suneo went right. Suneo, with Doraemon, Giant, Nobita, and Shizuka, went left.
The left path was narrow. It cut between ice walls that angled inward overhead, turning the path into a kind of tunnel, and the walls caught the light and bent it at strange angles so that every surface was lit from a different direction. The ice creaked. Not structurally — it was solid — but the thermal stress of three suns and whatever deep geological process kept this planet cycling made it settle and shift with low groans that traveled for miles.
Three of the six traps were on this path.
Suneo found two of them. The third found Giant, who put his foot through an illusory section, but the fall was only two meters and he landed on a ledge of solid ice and climbed out with the irritated expression of someone whose dignity has been inconvenienced.
The Shrink Light was useful in the narrow sections. Doraemon reduced Suneo to twelve centimeters for a passage that had partially collapsed, and Suneo walked through a gap that the others would have spent an hour clearing. On the far side, he used the gadget controls to restore his size, then secured a safety rope for the rest of the group.
The Air Cannon dealt with a section where ice debris had blocked the path — not a trap, just a collapse. Suneo set it to low power and cleared the fragments in four precise bursts. The sound echoed off every surface and came back doubled, tripled, a rolling thunder of echoes that moved across the frozen landscape for a very long time.
"You're good at this," Shizuka said.
Suneo was recalibrating the Air Cannon for the next potential blockage. "Which part?"
"All of it. The traps. The Copy Robot idea. The path."
"It's strategic," Suneo said. He fiddled with the calibration dial. "I'm good at strategy."
"You're good at thinking the way people who want to trick you think."
Suneo put the Air Cannon away. "Sure."
Shizuka watched him. "You thought of it before we arrived on this planet."
"I thought of it on planet two."
"After you talked to Lucas."
"His name is Loki," Suneo said. "He's apparently a god."
The silence stretched for a moment.
"You knew that on planet two and you didn't tell us," Shizuka said.
"I said he was a con artist. That wasn't wrong."
"It wasn't complete."
Suneo looked at the ice wall. "I said I'd handle it. I'm handling it."
Shizuka was quiet. Then she said: "You are handling it. I'm not angry, Suneo. I just — I wanted you to know that you could have told us."
Suneo picked up the Air Cannon again and carried it until the next bend in the path.
The real coordinates were carved in a pillar of clear ice at the path's end. Doraemon photographed them. They were complete — a full set, no gaps, no ambiguities.
Copy-Suneo appeared twenty minutes later, moving very fast, slightly crumpled, its expression somewhat less composed than at activation. This was how you could tell the Copy from the original.
"He figured it out," Copy-Suneo said, and then the four hours ended and the copy dissolved into nothing, leaving a small silver disc on the ice.
"How far into the false route?" Suneo said.
"Fourteen kilometers," the disc said, and then it was just a disc.
Suneo picked it up. He put it in his pocket.
Fourteen kilometers. That was a gap. Not a large one, but it was something.
Loki appeared on the ridge above them six minutes later. He looked down. He looked at Suneo. His expression was different from the one he'd worn before — more genuine, harder to categorize. Not angry. Not quite.
"A copy," Loki said. "I should have checked."
"Yes," Suneo said.
"How long did it take me to notice?"
"Your message said fourteen kilometers."
Loki was quiet for a moment. "Ninety minutes, then. You said ninety minutes."
"I said maybe."
"You were right."
He looked at Suneo a while longer from the ridge. Suneo looked back from the path. The wind moved between them, carrying ice crystals that caught the white sky light and scattered it.
"See you at the finish line," Loki said.
"I'll be there first," Suneo said.
Loki smiled. It was, for once, a real smile — not the display kind, not the placed kind. It arrived all at once and meant something.
He stepped off the ridge and was gone.
Doraemon was already setting the coordinates for planet four.
The Anywhere Door swung open. On the other side, the light was warm and golden, and there was the smell of something that might have been flowers.
Suneo walked through.