Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  As Kax spoke the skin of her face darkened into a deep indigo stripe that ran from the edge of her crest to her chin, and around each eye.

  ‘Kax, your face …’ Everett said.

  ‘It’s what you call crying.’

  Captain Anastasia beckoned Everett away from the great window, summoned her crew with the crook of a finger.

  ‘Everett,’ she whispered, ‘what is your plan?’

  ‘Do you remember the Battle of Abney Park?’ Everett said. ‘Do you remember how we got away from it, Sen?’

  ‘You called up a gate on your telephone–comptator thing. You dialled it up behind a tombstone and we jumped through,’ Sen said.

  Everett held up his iPhone.

  ‘The Jiju copied the Infundibulum. Exactly. In every detail. Which means …’

  ‘You can control their Infundibulum,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘But there’s a muckle of them Jiju cityships out there. And that’s just your world here, laddie. Buggerello for our world.’

  ‘They’re all routed through the one command point,’ Everett said. ‘That’s how they all jumped at the same time. Because they got the command from the Empress.’

  ‘You’d just need to send the command to the one …?’ Sharkey said.

  ‘And they’d all go,’ Everett said. He waggled his phone. ‘And I have a signal!’

  ‘Go where?’ Captain Anastasia said. Her voice was flat and hard. ‘Where would you send them?’

  Everett swallowed.

  ‘Back,’ he said.

  Everett saw Kax’s face change colour and her crest lift the split second before the halo fired an arrow at him. A flash, a loud clang and the arrow was embedded in the ceiling. Sen clenched her fist. A boomerang flew back to her hand. A wave of the hand and the boomerang came apart into its component bots and fused with the buzzing swarm of bots at the head of her Genequeen battlestaff. She rounded on Kax.

  ‘You will not send my people to the fire,’ Kax said. ‘My mother, my sisters. You will not send them back there.’

  ‘You don’t touch Everett!’ Sen shouted. Kax hissed and dropped into combat crouch. Sen grabbed the battlestaff double-handed and lifted it above her head. ‘I can work your toy. Good as you. And there’s only one princess on this ship and guess what. Ain’t you.’

  ‘I will cut you and gut you from top to bottom, ape,’ Kax shrieked.

  ‘Mr Sharkey, restore order!’ Captain Anastasia shouted.

  The shotgun blast was deafening in the confined space of the bridge. Woodchips and shotgun pellets snowed down on Everett. The air reeked of spent cartridge. He had fired one gun into the ceiling. The other he trained on Kax.

  ‘There is no cutting, no gutting and absolutely no princesses on my ship,’ Captain Anastasia thundered. ‘There has been enough violence. Enough killing. Enough blood. I am sick of it. Mr Singh: I will not be party to genocide. You would send billions back into the exploding sun. You would exterminate the entire Jiju race – all except one. She’s there, in front of you. The last Jiju. Everett, you would be no different from the Empress of the Sun. No different at all. There has to be some solution that doesn’t kill billions. Come on, Everett. Think fast. Think better.’

  Sen held the battlestaff level. Kax’s halo rippled. Sharkey’s gun was steady and sure.

  Think, Everett, think.

  Everett stared at the weapons he held. The Panopticon. The Infundibulum. His phone. The jumpgun.

  Not a thing in his head. Just staring, not seeing.

  Ten worlds. Billions of lives. Human and Jiju.

  No one moved. Time chilled and froze over.

  Think, Everett. Think!

  And then he saw it. It was right in front of him. It always had been.

  ‘I can do it,’ he said. ‘It still just takes one phone call.’

  ‘My people,’ Kax said.

  ‘I won’t send them back. I promise you.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll send them everywhere. The jumpgun. That was the clue. It sends objects to random parallel universes. I can do that. I can send a command through for the Empress’s Infundibulum to send every single one of the Jiju cityships into a random parallel universe.’

  ‘Do it, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said.

  Kax growled deep in her throat.

  ‘You move, you so much as twitch, and my wrath shall wax hot against thee,’ Sharkey said.

  ‘They’ll live,’ Everett said.

  ‘Can you promise that?’ Kax asked.

  ‘No one can promise that,’ Captain Anastasia said.

  ‘I dinnae ken if this is important,’ Mchynlyth said, ‘but the lights are going out.’

  ‘What?’ Everett raced to the great window. The shadow of the Sunlord mothership was so deep and profound that London’s street lights had switched themselves on. Now, before Everett’s eyes, the city was blacking out, street by street, district by district. Islington to Canonbury, all along the Balls Pond Road. Shacklewell to Albion Road. Stoke Newington High Street.

  ‘My mother is drawing on your power grid to keep Palatakahapa aloft,’ Kax said.

  ‘No!’ Everett shouted. ‘No no no no!’

  The phone in his hand flashed signal bars. They dwindled to one bar, then went out.

  ‘No!’ Everett stared at the dead phone.

  ‘Your tone concerns me, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said.

  ‘I’ve lost signal. I can’t do it remotely! I’ll have to open up a jump point right into the Sun Chamber.’

  ‘And go in there,’ Captain Anastasia said.

  ‘Yes. But. I have to be the one does it.’

  ‘I will be with you,’ Captain Anastasia declared.

  ‘“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,”’ Sharkey said.

  ‘I’m with ye,’ Mchynlyth said.

  ‘I’m not being left out of this,’ Sen said. ‘We’s crew.’

  39

  ‘I need your velo.’

  The unshaven young man in the yellow motorbike helmet stared at Charlotte Villiers as if she had beamed down from the Jiju cityship.

  ‘Your bike, whatever you call it, I need it.’

  It was a small, light motorised bicycle, with a boxy cargo area behind the seat. Domino’s Pizza. Some kind of fast-food delivery service. The shock of the Jiju cityship’s appearance had passed and now Piccadilly was coming to life again as a hundred drivers and a thousand pedestrians each decided that they needed to get away, get home, get to family and loved ones. Get out of London. Engines revved, cars moved and shunted, horns blared. The street was locking up into a massive, panicked traffic jam. There would be violence soon. Charlotte Villiers could not be trapped here. Everett Singh and the Infundibulum could have already arrived over Stoke Newington. This time she would not need soldiers or force of arms. She would not need Everett’s treacherous alter, or to threaten his family. She would not even need to take it from him. When she told him what she could do with it, things he had not even dreamed, how she could destroy the Jiju, he would give it to her. But she needed to get there. She needed to get out of gridlocked Piccadilly. Then she saw, five cars down, the startled pizza-delivery guy with his moped.

  ‘Give me the velo!’

  ‘Is not mine. The pizza company will fire me,’ the pizza man said. He had a strong Russian accent. He gripped the handlebars firmly.

  ‘You stupid, stupid man. The fate of universes hangs in the balance.’ Charlotte Villiers took the gun from her bag. ‘I need your velo.’

  He almost tripped in his haste to step back, hands up.

  The velo was quick, agile and stupidly good fun to ride. Charlotte Villiers hitched up her skirt a few centimetres to free her legs, twisted the throttle and skidded off along the footpath. The horn was a petulant buzz, but the sight of the moped charging towards them made pedestrians scatter. She clapped her hat to her head, pulled down the net veil. Along the pavements, weaving through the traffic jammed across intersections, driving at full speed, t
he little klaxon blaring at the stupid sheep people milling around lost confused not knowing what to do. Past the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus beneath the shining neon signs, up Shaftesbury Avenue, dodging under the awnings of Theatreland – all the shows still advertised their wares in neon and glitter. Above her the underside of the Jiju cityship crawled with blue electric fire. Charlotte Villiers drove on, north by east, Oxford Street to Theobalds Road, Finsbury to Shoreditch, ever closer to Stoke Newington, followed every metre of the way by a strong smell of pepperoni and double cheese pizza from the delivery box.

  40

  The pinpoint of blinding light opened into a disc opened into a gate. The crew charged out into the Sun Chamber. The Heisenberg Gate closed behind them. Sharkey swept the room with his shotguns. Captain Anastasia dropped into savate stance. Sen menaced with the battlestaff.

  ‘Feeling a wee bit exposed here,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘An old Punjabi–Scots fruit wi’ anger-management issues; it’s no exactly a superpower, is it?’

  Sharkey threw him a shotgun. ‘The end with the two holes points away from you,’ he said.

  ‘Where is it?’ Everett stood in the centre of the chamber. ‘The Infundibulum – where is it?’

  The chamber was empty. The control desks, the Jiju who had operated them, the model of Diskworld’s sun and the Sunlord mechanisms that had finally destroyed it: all gone.

  The thin stand that had supported the Sunlord Infundibulum; the tablet computer itself: gone.

  There was nowhere it could be, but everyone looked, everyone searched, everyone scanned the room.

  ‘Maybe, like, if the Empress of the Sun came out of the floor, maybe it went back in the floor,’ Sen suggested.

  ‘Sen, you’ve got a … connection with the Jiju,’ Captain Anastasia said, as if the words tasted like dogshit in her mouth. ‘Can you work something?’

  Sen pressed her hand to the floor. ‘I can feel something,’ she said. ‘It don’t like me. I’s the enemy. The Genequeens … !’ Sen stood up quickly, eyes wide. ‘They’re all dead! Oh the Dear, all of them.’

  ‘Sen, here.’ Captain Anastasia held out a hand. Sen took it. The moment of contact was love, reassurance, hope. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

  ‘Maybe Kax?’ Sharkey said. ‘She’s royal blood and all that.’

  ‘Aye, like you’d trust yon lizard,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘She’d never have arranged all this just to lure us in here and spring some sort of trap, would she?’

  ‘Kax stays on the bridge,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Everett …’

  ‘Simple,’ Everett said. While Sen had been searching, he had been looking at his phone. The mobile network might be down, but there were other ways that phones and tablet computers could communicate. It all depended on how slavishly the Sunlords had copied Dr Quantum. A few taps. He almost yelled with delight when the DEVICE AVAILABLE icon lit up. Everyone else held their weapons. Everett held up his. ‘Bluetooth! Oh yeah! Brilliant or what?’

  ‘Blue what?’ Mchynlyth said.

  ‘It’s a phone thing,’ Everett said.

  ‘This is a strange and perverse plane,’ Mchynlyth said.

  Sharkey held up a hand. ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something Jiju this way comes,’ he said, aiming his shotgun single-handed at the door to the Sun Chamber.

  ‘Everett, how much time do you need?’ Captain Anastasia asked.

  ‘I need to get into the Infundibulum and then write some code,’ Everett said.

  ‘Time!’ Captain Anastasia shouted.

  ‘Five … six minutes?’

  The adults looked at each other. Captain Anastasia shook her head. ‘Sharkey, Mchynlyth …’

  ‘Aye, ma’am,’ each of the men said.

  ‘Sen, keep him safe.’

  ‘Ma?’

  ‘Keep him safe. Everyone is expendable here, except Everett.’

  Now Everett could hear the drumbeat of running claws, a swelling choir of bird voices. He would never hear the dawn chorus of songbirds the same way ever again.

  White light flooded the Sun Chamber: a blazing atom exploding to a circle of white light. Kax dropped out of the Heisenberg Gate into a crouch on the floor. Her halo spun like a buzz-saw.

  ‘What?’ Everett said. ‘How?’

  Kax tapped his iPhone with a fighting claw, then her head.

  ‘Clever, but not so clever, Everett Singh. Earth 10 stuff is easy. Captain, my sisters will cut you to pieces. Leave them to me. We are eggs, we are blood, we are princesses. Save yourselves.’

  ‘But your people—’ Everett said.

  ‘You waste thought, Everett Singh!’ Kax hissed. ‘We are bad, we have done the greatest wrong any creature ever did, but we do not deserve to die. The Sunlords need to find a better way. Maybe apart, we can find it.’ Then she bowed in the human way to Everett, and touched her crest in the Jiju way and charged down the corridor.

  ‘Kax!’ Everett yelled. ‘Kax!’

  ‘Code!’ Captain Anastasia commanded. Everett’s fingers flew over the key display. He hissed and swore at every miss-key. Stupid stupid fiddly smartphone keypads. For thick people who pointed at things. The jump codes were easy: a simple arithmetical function could generate the coordinates for each of the cityships in a fraction of a second. Like in movies, getting out was the tricky bit. Done. But there was one last piece he had to write himself. He had to close and bolt the stable door. He had to make sure that the Sun-lords stayed in their billion different exiles.

  ‘Everett …’ Captain Anastasia said.

  ‘Just one last piece of code.’ No time to test it, of course. He had one shot: one shot made up of three parts, and each of those parts had to work the first time.

  Then he heard something. Not a noise – something in his head like a noise, but more like an absence of noise. He could not say what it was, but the un-noise was louder than any of the noises and voices in the Sun Chamber.

  Everett snapped his head up from his iPhone to the corridor.

  ‘Kax.’

  He knew. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. Something was gone out of him. Something forged in a forest clearing in the shadow of thousand-foot trees: all ashes now, and the terrifying, magnificent creatures that lived among them. Dust. Gone. Something that touched mind to mind, Jiju to Human. Gone.

  ‘Kax!’

  ‘Everett …’ Captain Anastasia said gently.

  ‘Sorry. Yes. No. The return gate should be here about …’ Once again, blinding light as a disc of light opened into a Heisenberg Gate on to the welcome bridge of Everness. ‘Go go go, I have to send the code. There’s a five-second delay. And I put in a command that will erase the Infundibulum files on every Jiju computer. Just to make sure they can’t come back. Or when they do, we’re ready for them. Go!’

  Sen was last through the gate. Her on the bridge, Everett in the Sun Chamber. Rattling claws: close now: the bird-song was a war shriek now. He hit the send button as Jiju warriors burst into the Sun Chamber. Their haloes were rings of fierce blades. Everett saw a whirlwind of swords fly at him. Sen lifted the Genequeen battlestaff, then threw it at the Sunlords and with her two free hands grabbed Everett by the waistband of his ship shorts and hauled him back on to the ship. Everett hit the deck hard.

  The Heisenberg Gate closed.

  ‘Three,’ Everett counted, struggling to his feet. ‘Two. One …’

  41

  A thousand people stood motionless on Green Lanes. Schoolkids, grandparents with baby buggies, young women with plastic shopping bags, Hackney Council workers in yellow high-vis, street runners and old ladies. Cars stopped, trucks and buses came to a standstill. Cyclists paused to stare. From down the road came the bang and crunch of one car shunting into another. Drivers and passengers got out. People came out of shops and cafes, businesses and offices. Everett M could see workers at upper windows all along the street, all staring upwards.

  Everett M looked full on the thing in the sky. Black stalactites, upside-down towers, buttresses and i
nverted domes; millions of glowing windows – this was a thousand Gothic cathedrals, ten thousand Disneyland castles turned upside down and mashed together. In an instant the world of every one of those thousand people on Green Lanes, those millions of people all across London, was turned upside down. Whatever they were thinking, whatever they were feeling, their problems their joys, their heartaches their heartbreaks and the hearts they had broken, were all swept away. There was a thing in the sky so big it hid the sun. He clenched his fists, willed energy into the Thryn weapon systems. The power excited him as it always did. Everett M’s hands flew open. The power ebbed away. The thing hanging over London blacked out the entire sky. It was miles across. He had finger lasers, EM pulsers, speed, strength and enhanced senses. All of those made him as effective against the invader in the sky as anyone else on Green Lanes. There was nothing he could do. But he had to do something. He was supposed to be a hero.

  ‘Screw you, Charlotte Villiers,’ Everett M said.

  Whatever he did, it would not be what she wanted.

  Everett M’s phone played Swedish House Mafia: Ryun.

  ‘It’s the Jiju, isn’t it?’ Ryun said.

  ‘It’s the Jiju.’

  ‘The size of that thing …’

  ‘Ryun, I need to call my mum. I don’t know how long the network will stay up.’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  ‘Ry, get everyone you can and get them out of London.’

  ‘My dad’s at work …’

  ‘Do what you can, Ry. Have to call Mum. I’ll be in touch.’

  Everett M thumbed Laura’s number.

  ‘Everett, where are you? Are you all right? Come home right away.’

  ‘Mum, is Vicky – Victory-Rose at Bebe’s?’