Echoes of swearing gave way to silence and an awareness that both shins now hurt so badly he was moving beyond the ability to curse. Tentatively, Avatar wrapped one hand around his ankle, half from gut instinct/half to check for real damage and felt warmth ooze from beneath frozen skin. Somehow, finding blood returned his ability to swear.
“You could always try turning on the lights,” said a voice behind him.
Ankle bleeding or not, Avatar spun on the spot and flipped his gun to firing position, thumb already ratcheting back its hammer. The only thing that stopped Avatar from doing what he intended, which was ram the barrel into the gut of whoever stood directly behind, was that no one stood directly behind. The darkness was empty.
“To your left,” said the voice. “Over near the wall . . . Follow the pipe until you hit a pillar. The control is on the nearest side . . . Oh,” it sounded darkly amused, “and try not to trip over anything else.”
The switch was where the voice said it would be. A simple square of cracked white plastic that, once clicked, lit a single bank of strips from one side of the low ceiling to the other, leaving Avatar standing in a dimly lit hold. At his feet, a frosted pipe vanished through the floor. There was a new pipe every hundred paces or so, rising out of the deck on one side of the hangarlike space, crossing the floor and disappearing again. Most of the pipes were frosted for their entire length with ice.
“It was cheap,” said the voice. “From a decommissioned power station outside Helsinki. You’re probably wondering why the Soviets didn’t use something better suited.”
Avatar wasn’t. He could honestly say the question had never occurred to him.
“Inefficiency. Plus they had to take what they could get at the time. That’s a good maxim for politics, you know. Take what you can. Let free what you can’t . . .”
“Sounds like shit to me, man,” said Avatar.
“Oh.” The voice sounded puzzled, the puzzlement breeding a long pause that left Avatar time to look round the hold. And Avatar remained there, hung inside that pause, until he grew bored with waiting and decided to demand a few answers of his own. Get the basics, Raf had once said. Most people didn’t, but then, as Raf pointed out, most people were dead.
“Where am I?”
“Where . . . ?”
“Yes,” said Avatar. “That’s what I said. Where am I, exactly . . . ?”
The voice thought about that. “You’re on Dminus7, a third of the way into krill processing. Well, what used to be processing before the partitions were bulldozed and the vats dismantled.”
“Right,” Avatar said flatly, “and where are you?”
“Exactly?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“I’m exactly close enough to make contact.”
Avatar smiled, despite himself and in spite of air so cold that it leached heat from his arms and dragged the questions from his mouth in wisps of smoke.
“You can do better than that.”
“And if I can’t?”
“I’ll leave you facedown with a bullet through the back of your head.”
“You’re not Ka, are you?”
“No,” Avatar said slowly. “You can safely assume I’m not Ka.”
“But you are armed?”
“Oh yes.” Avatar waved his borrowed Taurus in the air, so whichever camera was watching through the gloom could get a clear view. “That’s me. Always ready. Armed to the teeth.”
“Good,” said the voice. “Though personally I’d recommend an HK/cw, double-loaded with kinetics and 20mm fatboys, explosive and airburst.”
Silence.
“Looks like a pig and weighs like one too,” added the voice. “Heckler & Koch, plastic and ceramic job. Kill anything. Really useful if you’re an amateur.”
“If I’m an . . .” Avatar snapped off a shot in the direction of the insult, then ducked as sound waves swamped the low hold, deafening him.
“Are you sure you’re not Ka?” The voice sounded amused.
“No,” said Avatar. “I’m, um, Kamil ben-Hamzah . . . More famous as DJ Avatar,” he added quickly, refusing to compromise totally.
“Kamil . . . eh? Tell me, not-Ka, why exactly are you here?”
“To claim a debt.” That seemed to be the only way to put it.
“You mean to kill me?”
Avatar took a deep breath. Every hour since Hani first called him up he’d spent riffing this moment. He’d done what a lifetime of street smarts suggested he do, which was introduce himself. Only now Avatar couldn’t remember in which order he was supposed to make his points.
“My father’s on trial . . .”
No, Avatar shook his head, that wasn’t where he was meant to start.
“My name is Kamil. My father’s name is Hamzah Quitrimala. I’ve come to . . .”
“How old are you?” demanded the voice.
“Old enough,” said Avatar.
“I had tank commanders younger than that.” The voice sounded almost regretful, as if the man speaking wished Avatar was less than his fourteen years. “Hell, by your age most of my tank commanders . . .”
“Were dead.” Relief cascaded over the boy as he realized that he’d done it right and found the Colonel; but all he said was, “Yeah, I heard.”
If silence could have shrugged, it did.
“Everybody dies,” said the Colonel. “Well, almost everybody.”
“You’re alive . . .”
“And so, it seems, is little Ka.”
“Ka?”
“Kamil. The boy who hated war so much he gunned down everyone who wanted to take part, including the whole of his own platoon, if you believe the reports. And officially I always make a point of believing official reports . . .”
“He actually killed all those people?”
Avatar lowered his revolver and shook off his rucksack. He felt sick, sick and empty, like someone had ripped open his stomach and taken his guts when he wasn’t looking. “I thought you were meant to be Dad’s alibi . . .”
“I think,” said Colonel Abad carefully, “you’ll find I’m meant to tell the truth.”
“You’ll do it?” Avatar sounded shocked. “You’ll stand up in court?”
The way Hani explained it, the SS Jannah functioned as an autonomous micronation. That was, so long as the liner stayed within international waters it ran to its own laws. So why would someone like Colonel Abad put himself in danger by offering to come ashore?
“You thought you’d have to kidnap me?” The Colonel’s voice was sour. “No chance. This is my Elba. You remember Napoleon needing to be forced off that island at gunpoint?”
Avatar didn’t remember anything about Napoleon at all. Zara was the one with the expensive education.
“You’ll find me on Dminus9, right at the bottom of the pit. You do know that the last and deepest circle of hell is ice-cold, don’t you? In the fourth round, Judecca. And the ninth circle, Cocytus. That’s the problem with being captured by someone with a classical education. They want to get all clever on your arse.”
As there wasn’t an answer to that, Avatar turned his attention to reaching the far end of the hangar, though now the Taurus was heavy in his combats pocket and most of his attention went on not tripping over the trip-wire pipes.
“How do I get through this?” Avatar asked, when he hit a steel wall thrown across the point of the liner. In it was a door, also steel, with three heavy, old-fashioned locks. Since this was the first door he’d seen on the entire level, apart from the one he’d used to get in, Avatar figured it had to be right.
“Try opening it . . .”
Avatar did, and the heavy door swung open in a cascade of metal dandruff as its hinges creaked and popped fat flakes of rust. A twist of riveted steps fed down to the coldness below and then kept on going to the level below that, bypassing the turbine rooms.
Old-fashioned switches waited for Avatar at every landing but the bulkhead lights were empty of bulbs, so he felt his way through the da
rkness, until the fingers following the icy rail ceased to be his and vanished into a dull ache.
The deeper Avatar went, the colder it became until every inward breath froze in his throat or plated the inside of his nostrils and every outward breath condensed at his lips. The cold had a physicality that was new to him. And with the cold came a tiredness and the need for sleep.
Heat he’d lived with all his life. It arrived with late spring, sometimes earlier if a khamsin hit, with its fifty days of hot dry wind, and trickled away into the end of autumn. With it came catlike lassitude and pointless quarrels. But this was more than heat’s opposite. Every twist of stair Avatar descended took him further inside himself, folding him into lethargy.
“What’s the temperature?” Avatar demanded.
“Cold,” said the voice. “Cold enough to shut down your core.”
“And you live in this?”
“It makes no difference to me,” the voice said. “And Saeed Koenig wanted to discourage sightseers.”
His teeth chattered uncontrollably and his feet were a memory beyond feeling. The black T-shirt and combats he’d put on that morning now seemed less of a fashion statement and more of an absentmindedly written suicide note.
“Where now?” Avatar asked, knowing he’d been followed on camera every step of his descent.
“Straight ahead. Use the door . . .”
Still cursing the lack of a flashlight, Avatar inched through the darkness until his outstretched hand found a handle, low down and on the right. He gripped it tight with shaking fingers and everything started to go wrong. Disbelief giving way to panic as he tried to yank free his hand and heard skin rip. What panicked Avatar wasn’t pain but its complete absence.
He was frozen fast to a subzero metal door handle.
“Piss on it,” said the Colonel.
Avatar ignored the comment and tugged again.
“Piss on it,” Colonel Abad ordered crossly, his voice echoing from two places at once. “Go on. Do it now.”
The man meant it, Avatar realized. Using his good hand, Avatar fumbled at the nylon zip of his combats.
“Now piss on the other hand. Get some warmth into those bones.”
Avatar did as Colonel Abad ordered, fastened his fly and stepped through to the Colonel’s quarters, fingers still dripping. He didn’t imagine the Colonel would want to shake hands.
The room was in darkness.
“Lights,” said the Colonel, and a strip lit overhead. What it revealed was an empty space like all the others Avatar had passed through; just smaller, narrower and less high. The walls, which curved on both sides, were blasted back to bare steel and riveted plate. Obviously enough, there were no portholes. Also no furniture, apart from a low metal table, and no cooking equipment. No sign of human habitation and no Colonel.
As jokes went, it was a bad one.
“How are your fingers?” asked a voice behind him. “I’ve just checked my libraries and you may need a skin graft, when we get ashore . . . If we get ashore, ” the voice amended, as if suddenly concerned not to push the bounds of accuracy.
Avatar looked round until he spotted a speaker, attached to the ceiling over in the corner of the room. It was so out-of-date that its grille was cloth, set into a case that looked like it might actually be wood. Soviet-made, from the look of things. “Where are you?”
“I’m the housekeeping routine on the table.”
“You’re what?” Avatar looked across to see a small radio wired into a feed socket on the wall. At first glance the radio looked to be covered with grey suede, but that was just dust fallen from the ceiling or carried in through a ventilation duct on the Arctic wind. Beside it, by themselves, stood an ugly-looking pair of spectacles.
“Yeah,” said the Colonel, “that’s me.” A CCTV camera on the wall swung slowly between Avatar and the table. It looked like nothing so much as a duck shaking its head. “Not what you expected, huh?”
Avatar shook his head in turn. “No, it’s not.” All the same, he felt he needed to clarify the position. “You’re my dad’s boss? Colonel Abad?”
“‘But in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. That is, destroyer. Angel of the abyss, he that brings God’s woes upon his enemies . . .’
“Revelation,” added the voice, when Avatar looked blank. “I’m either the true angel of God or his deadly enemy. Unfortunately, no one can decide which, though theologians once wasted a lot of time trying.” The Colonel’s tone made clear what he thought of that.
Revelation? That was the nasrani political endgame, at least Avatar thought it was. He wasn’t big on politics. “You believe this stuff . . .”
“What do you think?”
He thought not.
“Either it was a geek joke,” explained the Colonel, “or they needed to find a framework in a hurry . . . Lash-ups are always easier than starting from scratch, take a look at religion or computer games. My guess is the shapers fed in a couple of terabytes of world myth plus Jung. It didn’t worry them if the deep background was suboptimal. I was only there for the duration of the war. And that was only meant to last a few months.”
“I’m dying of cold,” said Avatar, “and you’re talking shit . . .”
CHAPTER 49
28th October
Mohammed Tewfik Pasha, Khedive of El Iskandryia, rolled over in his huge water bed and opened one eye at the sound of knocking. The bed in which he woke was larger than king-sized, obviously enough, since this was the Imperial Suite.
It was also empty apart from him, and that choice was his. He’d seen how he was watched by the daughters of other guests, their eyes tracking him as he walked down the ornate stairs into the dining room to take his place at the captain’s table. And he knew too that the Van der Bilt girl had dined alone in her cabin every night until he’d taken to eating his supper in public.
El Iskandryia was widely expected to lose its status as a free city. And the shallow end of the gene pool was preparing itself for the Khedive’s new role as romantic but tragic hero (with looks, money and title).
His face was on that week’s Time, but for all the wrong reasons. Cosmo Girl had even produced a poster showing him in shorts and T-shirt, standing barefoot on the deck of a yacht and staring moodily out to sea, or so he’d read. He’d never actually seen the poster and couldn’t remember having been allowed to go barefoot anywhere. Just getting permission from the General to appear out of uniform usually took a tantrum.
Any one of the young mothers who promenaded their children through the upper deck’s Palm Garden each morning would go to bed with him. He’d had sly smiles, batted eyelashes, even a handwritten note folded and slipped into his trouser pocket by a mother of twins. Then there was that Australian woman, her smile anything but innocent, asking him how many slaves he had in his harem . . . And would he like one more?
Yet the only girl he wanted, the one he’d actually invited, had sent her bastard half brother instead.
“Rotate.” Across the suite on a white ash sideboard (so retro-Cunard), a silver photo frame started to flick from picture to picture. It showed what the Khedive’s guests expected it to show. The General and Tewfik Pasha standing together in the throne room. Tewfik Pasha silhouetted against the sun in the luxuriant green of the General’s garden. A winter sunset over the Corniche. And, as a default setting, elegant hand-drawn calligraphy showing the name of God.
They were all an irrelevance . . . Except for the name of God, obviously. The Khedive’s correction was heartfelt and instant, but all the same he felt sick at the thought of his unintended blasphemy. And yet, the fact remained that the only picture that really mattered to him was a tattered clipping, tucked away in the back of his wallet.
It was taken in the early dawn outside an illegal cellar club and showed Zara naked except for a tight faux-fur coat. The grainy shadow between her half-seen breasts bothered him more than any of the pink Renoir nudes so carefully collected by his grandfather and great-grandfather.
He’d forgotten about the earlier knock at his bedroom door.
“Yes,” said the Khedive and watched a heavy door swing open to reveal the captain, looking every inch the master of the world’s largest seagoing liner. One thick and three lesser rings circled the cuffs of Captain Bruford’s immaculate jacket. Her trousers had razor-sharp creases at the front and a heavy gold stripe down each outer seam. She seemed slightly embarrassed to see the Khedive, which puzzled Tewfik Pasha until he realized it might be because he was wearing nothing, at least nothing visible.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, sir.” With an effort, Captain Bruford shook her gaze from the half-naked boy. “You know we pride ourselves on how seriously we take the safety of our important guests. All our guests,” she corrected herself.
The Khedive nodded. It seemed unlikely that she’d come up to the Imperial Suite to make a mission statement on behalf of her company, much less discuss its core values or whatever buzzword best described the clichés he’d already heard on the induction film. All the same, the captain seemed to be having trouble coming to the point.
“Yes?”
“Helicopter . . .”
He looked at her in blank amazement.
“On the edge of our systems,” she said. “Approaching the SS Jannah. ”
“And that’s a problem?” Guests came and went by helicopter all the time: that was the whole point of being aboard the SS Jannah; it never docked, anywhere, ever. The only time it left international waters, and that time was covered by special treaty, was when the liner passed through the Panama Canal or the Pillars of Hercules.
“They’re shielded,” said Captain Bruford. “And we can’t get a handshake. Believe me, we’ve tried.” The Englishwoman looked something between irritated and anxious.
“I think it would be safer,” she added, “if we were to get Your Highness off the ship. We have three high-speed VSVs available, Thornycroft-built and with submersible capacities . . .”
She just couldn’t help it, the Khedive realized. Every statement she made about Utopia Lines came out sounding like an advertisement. It had to be something the company burned into their brains at training school.
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