Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Let’s go,’ Agrata said, and they arrowed through ripples of smoke and dove through a hatch into the long corridor that ran parallel to the hold where Hari assembled Dr Gagarian’s experimental apparatus. In the airlock at the far end, Agrata fastened her helmet and helped Hari pull on and check the systems of an unfamiliar pressure suit that popped and creaked as it adjusted to fit him. Its eidolon greeted him and cheerfully asked what he would like to do today. He ordered her to be quiet with absent-minded curtness. There was the quick vibration of pumps, a brief flash of mist as moisture condensed from the last of the air, and the external hatch opened to raw vacuum and sunlight.

  He chased Agrata around the ship’s ring. They flew from shadow to shadow as if playing a game of tig, pausing, looking all around, moving on. One of the storage bays was venting a plume of vapour, but otherwise everything looked absolutely normal. Sunlight glared on the sides of modules, on stretches of hull. Hari’s blank shock was beginning to be coloured by fear and excitement. He saw the irregular shape of the reef beyond the twist in the ring and the tower of the command and control module, then realised that something was wrong with the tower – its skin was punctured and torn open in several places and a cloud of debris was expanding away from it . . .

  Agrata grabbed his arm and pulled him into a scuttle hole. A hatch slammed shut, lights came on, air hissed as the lock pressurised. Agrata told Hari to keep his suit sealed, and he followed her out into a small, red-lit, spherical space he’d never seen before: rows of small flatscreen panels set amongst quilted padding; three acceleration couches jutting from the walls.

  It was the old emergency bridge, according to Agrata. She shucked her helmet, stuck a gloved hand in a slot in the wall, twisted something. A square hatch slid open beside her and she turned to Hari and told him that it gave access to a lifepod, told what he had to do.

  He refused, shocked and dismayed.

  ‘You want to fight the hijackers,’ Agrata said. ‘But it wouldn’t do any good. The security systems fell over. We were unable to implement internal defence protocols or activate the reaction cannon. We lost control of manikins and bots and drones. Your father is gone. I believe that Nabhoj and Nabhomani are gone, too. The ship is lost. Pay attention! You have to reach Tannhauser Gate. This lifepod will get you there, but it will take more than two hundred days – you’ll have to spend most of the trip in hibernation. When you arrive, you’ll contact our broker and his partner. Rember Wole and Worden Hanburanaman. No, don’t ask questions. There’s no time. You will also take this with you.’

  She unhooked the insulated flask, told Hari what was inside.

  ‘We were lucky. Lucky that you were working in a place where you could be isolated from the fighting. Lucky that I found Deel Fertita before she could finish cutting off Dr Gagarian’s head.’

  ‘She was doing what? Why?’

  Deel Fertita was a proteome specialist, one of the people the family’s broker had recruited to help the family strip Jackson’s Reef.

  ‘Deel Fertita and the others were in league with the hijackers. They sabotaged the security and comms systems, infected your father’s viron and the ship’s mind with djinns. And Deel Fertita killed Dr Gagarian, and I killed her before she killed me,’ Agrata said flatly: a blunt statement of fact. ‘I killed her, and then I finished what she’d been doing. One thing is clear. Dr Gagarian’s head is valuable to the hijackers. Its files must contain something they or their employer badly want. You will take it, use it to bargain for the freedom of anyone left alive. And for the ship.’

  ‘What about you?’

  Hari found it difficult to get the words past the obstruction in his throat.

  ‘The lifepod can carry only one person,’ Agrata said, ‘and it is the only one still active, because it isn’t connected to the commons. Aakash installed it when the ship was refurbished. A last-ditch measure for an emergency he hoped would never come. But here it is, and here we are. Don’t worry about me, Gajananvihari. I am a hundred and twelve years old. I was born in Thrale, Mars, and left as soon as I could. I worked for a biotech merchant in Iron Mountain. Learned enough to start my own export business. Lost everything, wrote librettos for two operas, made enough to start my life over. I have visited all of the major cities in the Belt. I have been to Earth. I have been partnered three times. I had two children. My son died in an accident more than seventy years ago, but my daughter is still alive, and I have three grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. One of my granddaughters is the mayor of Thrale. Another is a famous composer of aeolian symphonies. I have had a long life, Gajananvihari. A good life. I’ll keep the hijackers distracted for as long as I can, and if I die it will be with few regrets. You will get to Tannhauser Gate and find Rember Wole and Worden Hanburanaman. Rember will help you get in contact with the hijackers and negotiate the return of the ship. Worden will help you understand Dr Gagarian’s work, and how to carry it forward.’

  ‘What if the hijackers won’t talk to me?’

  ‘They’ll want to talk because of who you are, and because you have what they want. You’ll understand everything when you get to Tannhauser Gate.’

  Agrata gave Hari a card that would allow him to draw on the credit the ship had deposited in Tannhauser Gate’s bourse.

  ‘I know that I am asking a hard thing of you,’ she said. ‘But you are the only one who can do this. There it is.’

  There it was. No chance to make a last glorious stand, or fight the leader of the hijackers in hand-to-hand combat. Instead, ignominious flight, exile from everything he knew and loved, and an impossible mission.

  ‘I won’t disappoint you,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ Agrata said.

  7

  Hari landed the lifepod by remote control and walked out across the surface of Themba for the last time. The sun had set and he navigated by enhanced starlight. Reviewing the brief conversation with the hijacker over and again as he crossed grainy, monochrome vacuum-organism pavements. Trying to work out where he’d gone wrong, what he should have said.

  ‘I failed them,’ he told the eidolon. ‘I failed my family. I screwed up. It was a simple transaction. Her freedom in exchange for the answer to a single question. It should have been an easy sale. Absolutely straightforward. But I failed.’

  ‘You told me that she was a fanatic,’ the eidolon said. ‘It is my understanding that such people are not amenable to reason.’

  ‘Nabhomani would have persuaded her. He told me that you start making a sale when the customer turns you down. You have to make them want what you’re selling. You have to lead them to the decision. That’s what I failed to do.’

  ‘She was willing to pay with her life, and yours,’ the eidolon said. ‘Even if she had been dealing with someone who possessed superior negotiating skills, it would not have changed the logic of the situation.’

  ‘You don’t really understand people,’ Hari said.

  But as he walked on, examining his conversation with the hijacker from every angle, he couldn’t see how it could have ended up at a different place. The ruthless logic of self-sacrifice scared him. It would make another encounter with the hijackers extremely risky, but he knew he had to find them, had to talk to them. He had get off Themba and reach Tannhauser Gate, and Rember Wole and Worden Hanburanaman. He had to save Agrata and his brothers, if they still lived. He had to negotiate their return, and the return of the ship. And he still wanted revenge. Now more than ever.

  He wished he knew why the hijackers wanted the head. Something Dr Gagarian knew. Something he had discovered. Something to do with the traces left by the Bright Moment. He should have paid more attention to the tick-tock philosopher’s work.

  The lifepod had landed some way beyond the slim rectangle of the monolith, squatting at the centre of a circle of scabbed char. Hari shuffled due south from the monolith to a small, shallow crater packed with tangles of fine wire. The eidolon watched as he knelt at the edge of the crater, tangled threads gleaming shock
ing scarlet in the beam of his helmet lamp, and pulled from its pit of loose dust a cryoflask wrapped in radar-absorbent cloth.

  He carried it to the lifepod and wriggled inside, acquired his destination, pressed the big red button that floated in the virtual keyboard. Twenty minutes later, he was climbing into the airlock of Little Helper.

  The gig was a stack of three spherical modules of diminishing size. A simple, sturdy design. The smallest module housed the lifesystem; the one in the middle was an unpressurised cargo hold; the largest contained the motor, fission batteries, and tanks of air, water, and reaction mass. The gig slowly revolved about its long axis as it swung around Themba’s battered sphere, with the lifepod’s blunt cone nosed into the open hatch of the cargo hold.

  The two hijackers hadn’t bothered to change the security profile. Hari worked up a course, ignited the motor. Themba’s lopsided profile shrank into the starry black. Dwindling to a fleck, a faint point, gone.

  For several days, Little Helper fell sunwards on a free-fall trajectory, heading for a waypoint that would slingshot it towards the outer edge of the main belt and Tannhauser Gate. Then attitude thrusters ringed around the joint between its motor and equipment hold modules popped and stuttered, aiming it towards a new destination, and its motor ignited and kept burning.

  Hari had discovered that he was being followed.

  PART TWO

  MAROONED OFF VESTA

  1

  The pursuer came trolling out of the outer dark at a steady 0.1g. Easy Does It, the largest of Pabuji’s Gift’s gigs. When Hari had first spotted it, it had been more than fifty million kilometres away. Twenty days later it had closed half that distance, and was still coming on.

  Hari had given up on Tannhauser Gate. It was a long way around the outer edge of the main belt, and Easy Does It would catch him long before he reached it. Instead, he’d altered course, driving Little Helper towards a waypoint on the far side of the 3:1 Kirkwood gap.

  Easy Does It altered its course, too. Hari made no attempt to contact his pursuers. Opening a channel risked infection by the same species of djinn that had compromised the comms of Pabuji’s Gift. His pursuers didn’t attempt to contact him directly, either, but soon after they matched his new course the eidolon reported persistent attempts to locate and utilise open ports in Little Helper’s comms, and Hari was forced to shut everything down. The gig running dark and silent as it crossed the Kirkwood gap, falling towards the waypoint.

  The prominent gap, one of several swept clean by orbital resonance with Jupiter, divided the Belt into two unequal halves: the populous main belt, close to Mars, and the more diffuse outer belt and its outlying clusters. More than ten thousand gardens and habitats constructed from materials mined from rocks and comets orbited within the main belt; there were more than a million and a half rocks with a diameter of more than a kilometre. A few, like Vesta and Pallas and Hygiea, had diameters of several hundred kilometres; Ceres was almost a thousand kilometres across. There were cratered rubble-piles blanketed in deep layers of dust and debris. There were mountains of nickel-iron, stony mountains of pyroxene, olivine and feldspar. There were rocks rich in tarry carbonaceous tars, clays, and water ice. Some orbited in loose groups, or in more closely associated families of fragments created by catastrophic shatterings of parent bodies, but most traced solitary paths, separated by an average distance twice that between the Earth and the Moon, everything moving, everything constantly changing its position relative to everything else.

  Little Helper closed on the waypoint and swung through its steep gravity well, changing course and gaining velocity, racing towards Vesta and its artificial moon, Fei Shen. It was an old trading city, Fei Shen. Pabuji’s Gift had visited it several times after Hari had been born. There would be people who knew his family and their ship, people who might help him.

  Easy Does It swung past the waypoint, too.

  Hari made his plans, unmade them, remade them. He read in Kinson Ib Kana’s book. It was a slim black slab that woke when he tapped its surface three times. There was no index, no method of making any kind of input or connection to whatever spark of intelligence it possessed. Each time he woke it, it displayed a random sample of unadorned, unaugmented text, usually an aphorism or a brief verse or a praise song:

  I shall not coil my tangled hair

  But let it hang free

  And when I bathe

  I shall splash water all around

  But never wet my hair.

  And:

  Secrets are safest in the mind of a wise man.

  And:

  On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.

  They lingered for ten minutes or for an hour or more before they faded and were replaced by another random sample. Hari supposed that he was meant to study them and unpack and contemplate every possible meaning; instead, he short-circuited the process by switching off the book with three quick taps and switching it on again. Tap tap tap, tap tap tap. On/off, on/off, on/off. Skipping through poems and songs and sayings until the book presented him with something more substantial. Stories about the long ago, before human beings had quit the shelter of Earth’s skies; stories about the Age of Expansion or the True Empire; stories about dream worlds, or worlds of other stars.

  Some were as long and intricate as any saga. The story of a Martian paladin’s quest during the rise of the True Empire, for instance. The Trues had conquered Ceres, the Koronis Emirates, and half a hundred lesser kingdoms and republics, and as they began to probe the defences of Mars the Czarina dispatched twenty of her paladins to search for the armill of one of her ancestors, which was believed to augment the wisdom of its wearer and control secret caches of powerful weapons and squads of shellback troopers from the long ago.

  After adventures in the deserts and mountains of the red planet, fighting bandits, dust ghouls, and rogue gene wizards and their monstrous offspring, the paladin was riding through the trackless forests of the Hellas Basin when she discovered a circular lake with a slim, bone-white tower rising from its centre. As she approached the slender bridge that arched between shore and tower, another rider came out of the trees and challenged her: a rogue paladin whose armour, like hers, had lost its devices and beacons to battle-damage and sandstorms. They drew their vorpal blades and spurred their chargers and flew headlong into combat. Their chargers bit and mauled each other and collapsed; the paladins fought on into the night. Sparks and flames from their clashing blades lit up the lake and the tower, and the red rain of their blood speckled the stones of the shore. Both were grievously wounded, but neither would yield. At last, the paladin dispatched her enemy with a killing thrust, but when she wrenched off his helmet she discovered that he was her own brother. As she wept over his body a man dressed in black furs appeared. He gathered her into his arms and carried her across the bridge, into the tower. She glimpsed the armill, a slim platinum bracelet set on a bolster inside a crystal reliquary; then its guardian carried her down a spiral stair to a basement room, stripped off her damaged armour, and lowered her into the casket of an ancient medical engine.

  When the paladin woke, she was hungry and thirsty, and very weak. The room was dark, the stairs were blocked by rubble, her armour was gone. After she clawed her way out, she discovered that the tower was in ruins. There was no sign of the reliquary and its guardian, and the lake was dry and the forest all around was a wasteland of ash and charred stumps.

  She had been asleep for a century. Mars had fallen to the Trues. The Czarina and her family were long dead; her battalions and her ships were destroyed or scattered. The last paladin dug up the grave of the brother she had killed, put on his armour, and went out into the world and waged a long and terrible war against the conquerors of Mars. She was a fierce and relentless enemy, driven by remorse and guilt. She killed everyone who pursued her, including five suzerains, and raised an army of brigands and sacked the ancient capital. But nothing could atone for the mortal sin that had derailed he
r quest. When she and the tattered remnant of her army were at last cornered in the Labyrinth of the Night by five squadrons of elite shock troopers, she died with her dead brother’s name on her lips.

  Hari’s broken arm healed, aided by scaffolding laid down by mites that the gig’s medical kit injected into his bloodstream, and he built up its strength by careful exercise. Vesta grew from a point of light to a small lopsided disc, one half illuminated by direct sunlight, the other in shadow. And then, just after Little Helper had begun the manoeuvre that would insert it into orbit around the little world, the interface with its motor blazed with overload and failure alarms, and the reaction chamber flamed out.

  Hari’s first thought was that it was sabotage. That his pursuers had managed to find an open, unsecured port and slip in a djinn or transmit a command string that had executed some kind of fail-safe procedure. But a quick inspection revealed that the motor hadn’t simply shut down: it was badly damaged. The feeds to the reaction chamber were out of alignment and its ceramic casing was cracked.

  He pulled up recent footage of Easy Does It, looking for a flare or sudden spark that would betray the launch of some kind of drone, but it turned out that the hijackers had been more subtle than that. Just after he had initiated the insertion burn sequence, the faint star of the pursuing gig had begun to flicker with coherent, high-energy pulses from a maser.