Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Gives you cancer,’ a voice said behind him.

  Everett M felt his implanted weaponry leap into action at the surprise. He struggled to keep the ports in his arms and hands closed.

  ‘Smoking.’ Mr Myszkowski the groundsman stood behind him.

  ‘I’m not …’

  ‘Of course not. I have to lock these gates.’

  Nothing for it then, and no one else to do it. To battle. Heroes with girlfriends …

  *

  The trace was very faint and indirect. A hint here, an echo there, a confusion of signals bouncing from metal garage doors. He had to stand on the spot and turn several slow circles before he got a fix on that one. He hoped no one had seen him. A pattern emerged: rat runs all over this part of Stoke Newington, all converging in one place. Take out the Central Node: wasn’t that how they did it in action movies?

  How many action movies had the Nahn seen?

  Everett M followed invisible lines of radio chatter along Stoke Newington Church Street. The web seemed to focus around Green Lanes. He had an instant flash of Noomi, curled up in her great leg-wear on her sofa at the Mermaid Cafe. His imagination put another guy, another homework date, at the other end of the sofa, with a Vietnamese coffee and the dreadlocked DJ – his name was Aidan – playing all the tunes of his life. The stab of jealousy was so sharp Everett M almost vomited. It took him a moment to get his breathing back to easy and comfortable. Concentrate.

  Aden Terrace was a narrow alley at the rear of a row of Victorian terrace houses on Clissold Crescent. Behind the padlocked chain-link fence local gardeners had created a secret urban farm of allotments. The plots were grey and wet and sludgy in wet dark January, but the chatter of Nahn activity was deafening. Go, Everett M thought at his implant weapons and shivered at the surge of power as they armed and readied.

  A few paces up and down the lane established the focus of the signal: the shed in the fifth plot down. The shed was the usual allotment mash-up of door and pallets and old windows raided from skips and house clearances. A wheel-barrow leaned up against the door. The raised beds were black with the rotting remains of the growing season. A few Brussels sprouts stood proud and green. Garden ornaments and cheap concrete Buddhas leaned at odd angles. Rusty wind chimes and Buddhist prayer banners hung in the still air.

  The shed.

  Everett M realised he hadn’t seen a rat all day.

  The flicker of a finger-laser dealt with the padlock. The one on the shed door would pose no more difficulty. Hit hard, hit fast, take out everything. If only he had some of those sweet little Thryn EM-warhead nanomissiles. He had used them all in his battle at Hyde Park, when he drove back wave after wave of Nahn. But the Nahn always had one more wave.

  Battles. Too many battles.

  Pulser muzzles emerged from the palms of his hands.

  ‘WTF, Everett Singh?’

  Everett M reeled forward with shock and banged his head painfully against a hanging watering can.

  ‘Okay: your family lives in a garden shed?’

  Noomi. Standing in the open gate, arms folded, head cocked on one side, eyes wide and nostrils flared and angry in that will-someone-please-explain-to-me-what-is-going-on-here way that is more aggressive than any shouting. At the end of Aden Terrace was one of her friends/spies, arms also folded, head also cocked to one side, showing that she was as disgusted as her friend.

  ‘No points for lying, Everett Singh.’

  ‘Noomi …’ His hands. The pulsers were still in his palms. Concentrate. Concentrate. He willed his weapon ports shut.

  ‘I had hopes,’ Noomi said. ‘Minimum standards: truth, honesty, caring.’ She never looked more fabulous to Everett M Singh than the moment he knew he had lost her. ‘What is this? Some kind of boys’ club? No girls? You got porn in there?’ She held up a mittened hand. ‘No. Don’t want to know. Disappointed.’

  Nahn buzz sang as loud in Everett M’s head as Noomi. Too much. He thought his Thryn systems down into standby.

  ‘I can explain!’ Everett M said. She was already walking away. And he couldn’t. The only way he could explain was to show her what was inside him, what he feared hid inside the shed.

  His phone pinged as Noomi reached the end of Aden Terrace.

  YR DMPD.

  She didn’t even look back.

  ‘I’ll get back to you later,’ Everett M said to the allotment shed. ‘And you are dead. That’s a promise.’

  He turned on Thryn speed. Heads turned on Green Lanes as Everett M ran past, backpack flapping, faster than any jogger or runner or cyclist. He arrived at the door of the Mermaid Cafe and was waiting as Noomi and her friend arrived.

  Noomi’s brow furrowed. ‘How?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Everett M said.

  Noomi nodded her head at her spy-friend. She went and looked around a Boots local across the road in a sniffy bad temper.

  ‘My life is weird,’ Everett M said. ‘But, how I got here ahead of you, that’s the same as how I did that thing with the Coke can, and jumping over the car. There’s other stuff I can do too, and that shed back there, that’s part of it.’

  Noomi’s silence was killing him.

  ‘I can do things no one else can,’ Everett M said, ‘but that means I can’t be like everyone else.’

  ‘Stop doing those things,’ Noomi said.

  ‘I can’t. They’re part of me. It’s a physical thing. There’s stuff I can’t even tell my mum.’

  ‘It’s okay if you’re gay. That’s cute.’

  ‘I’m not gay!’ Everett M said, then, again, gently, ‘I’m not gay.’

  ‘Oh, sad. No – you’d have dressed better. Are you a were-wolf?’

  ‘What? No! Yes. Sort of. No. No. Werewolves don’t exist. This is what I mean. Maybe I’m just not the type of person who should have a girlfriend.’

  ‘Who said I was your girlfriend?’

  She was tying him in knots. He had said too much already.

  ‘Well, we meet up, and we talk, and it’s …’

  ‘It’s what?’

  ‘I really like you! I want to be back with you again, like the way it was.’

  Noomi looked at him a long time.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, then turned and crossed Green Lanes to join her friend shopping for cosmetics.

  What? Everett M wanted to shout. So, are we on or off? Are we okay or not okay? What?

  Everett M’s phone pinged again. A new SMS.

  Back on.

  Nahn, you almost broke me and Noomi up, Everett M thought at the buzzing node of communication channels behind the rooftops and aerials and satellite dishes of Green Lanes and Statham Grove. You’re double dead now.

  24

  ‘Madam Villiers, do you think …?’

  ‘Madam Villiers, what can we …?’

  ‘Madam Villiers, help us …’

  Madam Villiers … Madam Villiers …

  Charlotte Villiers flipped down her veil and pushed through the press of clamouring Plenipotentiaries. Madam Villiers, help us. Help yourselves. You are the leaders of the Known Worlds. You are the power. Zaitsev would have made this easy. He would have cleared a path through the frightened, bleating politicians. He would have made sure she got the respect she deserved. She had not respected him. She had seen that in his eyes, as the Jiju blades came in and she operated the relay that bounced her back to the jump-room deep in the undercroft of the Tyrone Tower. The gate crew would have seen it too, in that moment of clarity as the gate opened. They would have seen the Jiju, and the blood.

  I treated you shamefully, Zaitsev, Charlotte Villiers thought. I hope at the end you understood the necessity.

  An Earth 5 symbiont stepped into her path, the tayve’s long, bejewelled arms and legs wrapped around its hrant host’s body, its feeding finger tapped into an artery in the neck.

  ‘Madam Villiers!’ the tayve announced in a thin, fluting voice. Charlotte Villiers swept past. ‘Our world may not enjoy your technical arts, but Earth 5 will not sh
irk its part in apprehending this criminal, Everett Singh!’ the hrant shouted. Charlotte Villiers said nothing but smiled behind her veil. If she had made Everett Singh the Multiverse’s Most Wanted she had won a great victory.

  25

  Palari was a tongue rich in swearing and Sen employed it joyfully, inventively and horribly. In the docks and warehouses of Old Hackney Captain Anastasia had heard every race abused and sexual practice accused and deity offended, but even she looked up at Sen’s outburst.

  Sen sucked the burn on her forearm.

  ‘Dorcas, if you covered up a bit more,’ Captain Anastasia suggested.

  Sen scowled and pushed her goggles up on to her head. Her face was greasy and smudged with smoke. Her hair smelled of burned insulation. The two women were at work on the power linkage to number-two impeller. It was cramped, intricate, high-voltage work. It involved power tools and welding guns. Sen usually loved working on the ship, wielding electrical tools like Sharkey his shotguns – with bravado and serious purpose – but today the work felt like emergency surgery on a sick and dying creature. The ship had been wounded again and again and could never be whole again: number-three impeller was gone. Lost. The impeller, and the ship’s weighmaster and planesrunner. Sharkey and Everett.

  Sen did not like to stop too long to think about Sharkey and Everett, or the great wound to the ship, like a missing foot. It made her feel as if the bottom of her world had opened beneath her feet, and below her was a endless drop through tinkling darkness. The ship – her home, her safe place, her heart – might never be whole again. Sharkey and Everett might never come back. She might never leave this hideous, hideous world. Sen patched, Sen cabled, Sen welded.

  ‘Tharbyloo!’ Sen looked up. High above, tiny in the fingernail-sized patch of brightness, Mchynlyth’s face looked down through one of the gashes the Genequeens had cut in the skin. If there was one thing Sen loved more than digging into Everness’s innards, it was working with the Chief Engineer out on the hull, the two of them whooping and yo-ho-ing with insane glee as they leaped and swung on drop-lines across the hull. But more than the missing impeller and the piercings and the gashings of the shipwreck and the Jiju hijacking, Sen hated to see Everness bound and captive in the steel tentacles of the Genequeen squidships. The ship looked like a picture she had once seen in a cyclopeeja of a deer caught in the coils of a constricting snake, the loops drawing tighter and tighter, squeezing the life out of it. The deer’s eyes had been so calm. It was the calm of surrender to inevitable death. Sen shuddered at the thought of those filthy half-living, half-machine tentacles closing around the hull. It was as if the ship’s skin was her own. ‘Come on oot. I’ve a wee thing I want you to see.’

  *

  ‘That’s a nasty enough wee burn you got there,’ Mchynlyth commented as Sen and Captain Anastasia stepped out on to the balcony on Everness’s midline. He belayed down off the tentacle that coiled up over the top of the hull and dropped lightly to the metal grating. Sen found herself looking down along the tentacles on to the bridge of the Genequeen squidship. There were graspers and cutters and a clatter of mechanical manipulators at the centre of the knots of tentacles, and half a dozen goldfish-bowl eyes. Behind each transparent bubble, a Genequeen. Over the curve of the hull, a second squidship grasped Everness’s starboard side. The third ship held Everness by the head. Looking down through the metal mesh, Sen saw treetops move lazily far below her feet. They were not out of Crechewood yet. Everness was a big fish, to be landed carefully.

  ‘Hates it,’ Sen whispered for her own ears only. She hugged herself and gave a yelp as she set off her still-seeping burn.

  ‘You’ve something for us,’ Captain Anastasia said. Sen could see that she also found the sight of her beloved ship trussed and helpless, like a great and noble whale hunted and harpooned.

  ‘Aye.’ Mchynlyth pulled a fist-sized device from one of his orange coverall’s many pockets and held it out. A white egg, flattened on one side.

  ‘What is it?’ Captain Anastasia asked.

  ‘I dinnae sabi, but it was down at the tail end, stuck to the skin, and sure as eggs is eggs it’s nae part of the general schematics of a cargo airship.’

  ‘Someone put it there?’ Captain Anastasia checked.

  Sen picked the thing up, dropped it as if it was hot lava. ‘Plastic!’

  ‘Oho,’ said Captain Anastasia.

  ‘Aha,’ said Mchynlyth. Earth 3 possessed no usable reserves of crude oil. No oil age, no plastic age. This device could only come from another plane than Earth 3. ‘How do you think yon Villiers woman dropped her wee toy soldiers right on to our main catwalk?’

  ‘Give it to me, Sen,’ Captain Anastasia ordered. The Captain held the device up in front of her face. Her large eyes narrowed. ‘Evil thing. How did it get … Never mind.’ She dropped it to the mesh and brought her heel down sharply. Plastic splintered.

  ‘What you doing?’ Sen shrieked. ‘Everett could …’

  Captain Anastasia stamped it into shards, then kicked the shards through the mesh. They snowed down on the crimson treetops.

  ‘Everett could, I have no doubt. But Everett’s not here. And this is my ship. And she’s suffered enough.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Everett’s not …’ Sen began, then cut herself off before the word took root in her mind. To say dead meant that he might be. But Everett was the planes-runner: he was too smart, too quick, too important to let something as slow and stupid as death catch him. No, death is quick and smart and catches everyone. You learnt that early among the Airish. Friends had fallen, ships had burned, captains had been lost in storms. Death was a frequent visitor to the Airish.

  ‘Oooh the Dear,’ Mchynlyth said suddenly, in a voice that snapped Sen and Captain Anastasia’s attention away from the fragments of the tracking device. He was looking to stern, body tight as a hunting dog. ‘Our wee ship’s no done suffering yet. Not by a long chalk.’ Sen looked where he pointed. Far astern, half hidden by tail fins, was a swarm of black specks. Sen knew at once that they were large and far away, not small and close. And they were moving fast. In the few seconds she had been observing, they had gained shape and definition.

  Captain Anastasia pulled her monocular from the holster on her belt and focused on the objects. Sen saw her bare her teeth, hiss an intake of breath.

  ‘Ma, can I?’

  Captain Anastasia handed her the monocular without a word. Sen adjusted the focus. The objects came into resolution. Three-hulled aircraft; two hulls above, one below, mean as daggers. Ten, eleven, twelve … twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five of them. Big. Half the length of Everness. No obvious lift-cells, or even wings like the air-o-planes she had seen on other Earths, but they moved like they owned the sky. Air shivered around them like heat-haze; light glinted from dozens of windows. Sen clicked the monocular up a notch. The pursuing aircraft leapt in magnification and she saw that the heat-shiver was a cloud of much smaller flying objects. Nanobots: swarms of them. Even their aircraft had haloes.

  The Genequeens were already aware of the closing fleet. Jiju moved in frenzied action behind the eye-ports. Everness lurched under Sen’s feet as the tentacles shifted their grip. She grabbed the railing. The entire two hundred metres of hull gave a terrible straining creak. Sen felt her centre of gravity move as the ship accelerated.

  ‘You’ll tear my ship apart!’ Captain Anastasia shouted. ‘You’re killing her!’

  ‘Who are they?’ Sen asked.

  ‘Kax’s people,’ the Captain said. ‘There’s only one possibility …’

  ‘The Sunlords know about the Infundibulum,’ Mchynlyth said. Again, Everness shifted and groaned as the Genequeens struggled to press the ungainly flying circus to greater speed.

  ‘Everett!’ Sen exclaimed. ‘That’s how they know. Everett told them about it. Everett’s all right.’

  ‘And Sharkey,’ Mchynlyth said. Captain Anastasia took the monocular from Sen and shifted the focus from Sun-lords to squidships, Sunlords to sq
uidships. Sunlords to squidships.

  ‘Miss Sixsmyth, you know Everett better than any of us.’ Sen was always suspicious when Captain Anastasia addressed her by her crew name. Ship stuff coming. ‘You remember I told him to hide the Infundibulum – where would he have hidden it?’

  ‘That’s easy! He’s so naff at hiding things. I mean, I know where he’s put everything.’

  ‘Well, so bring me the Infundibulum. I will get the jumpgun. Mr Mchynlyth!’

  ‘Yes, ma’am!’ Mchynlyth too knew the tone and words of command.

  ‘Prepare the escape pod.’

  ‘Captain, due respect and all that, but I’m no likin’ what you’re implying,’ Mchynlyth said.

  ‘In a very few minutes we may find ourselves in a fight between the Sunlords and the Genequeens that will make our barney with the Bromleys look like a Sunday-school picnic. I fear that the Genequeens will destroy the Infundibulum rather than let it fall into the hands of the Sunlords.’

  Sen’s mouth fell open, her eyes went hollow, her breath faltered with horror. ‘They wouldn’t do that!’ she said.

  ‘Polone, people do it all the time,’ Mchynlyth said. His jaw was tense, his face grim.

  ‘And they’re not even people, but yes, they would,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘I am captain of Everness and I love her with all my heart and my hope and my dear life, but my duty is to its crew. Prepare to abandon ship.’

  ‘No!’ Sen shouted. ‘No! You can’t! The ship—’

  ‘And I am its captain. You have your orders, Miss Sixsmyth. Mr Mchynlyth?’

  ‘Aye, ma’am.’

  ‘Quick’s the word, sharp’s the action.’

  26

  The Jiju skyqueens were big, fast, powerful and absolutely thrilling to fly aboard. From the moment the royal flagship led the fleet from their docks in the wall of the hole in the world, Everett had not moved from the observation deck. Like the royal yacht, the skyqueens of the Sunlord navy were catamarans – twin hulls joined at the rear – but the warships carried a third hull beneath the main booms, at an angle that suggested the open claw of some hunting raptor, ready to strike. Everett reckoned that was entirely the idea. There was a clue in the ship’s name: Death Falls from an Azure Sky. The observation deck was in the lower part of the port-side hull; Everett was surrounded by glass, even beneath his feet. Below the third hull, the red roof of Crechewood moved at a speed that made Everett dizzy if he looked at it too long. Sunlord pilots liked to fly low and very, very fast.