Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  Hari asked Khinda if she could be certain that the assistant was telling the truth.

  ‘She is completely reliable.’ Khinda paused, then added, ‘I dug into the backgrounds of the specialists. At least one of them, Odd Samuelson, was a reiver. He traded in biologics, but he also hired out as freelance security. He was part of the crew that took over Thor Five thirty years ago.’

  Hari thought about that. He said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Nabhomani could have met Deel Fertita long before we took Dr Gagarian aboard. He met many people. He knew many people. And it’s no secret that my brother liked women. They met, she seduced him, and asked him to remember her the next time he was recruiting specialists.’

  Khinda said, ‘I’m sorry if it’s bad news.’

  Hari thanked her for her discretion. ‘One thing is clear. My enemies have been planning this for a long time.’

  5

  ‘I’m at the front door,’ Rav said. ‘Ready to do my best to kick it down. How about you? Are you ready? Are you able? Are you willing?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Hari said.

  He was floating in the shadow of a service module close to the hull of Mr Mussa’s small, sagittiform ship. The eidolon of his p-suit glimmered beside him. Beyond, the combs of the docks dwindled towards a curved, prickly landscape crowded with domes and tents, blockhouses and bunkers, towers and turrets and steeples and spires. Most of the spires were wrapped in gold foil and topped with golden crosses or giant picts of bleeding hearts or crowns of thorns. The League of Christ Militant believed only the fittest could attain Heaven, and that fitness was measured by accumulation of wealth – most especially the accumulation of gold, which they believed to be as incorruptible as the justice of their prophet.

  ‘Of course, it’s not too late to switch our roles,’ Rav said. ‘I admire your pluck, youngblood, but I’ve done this kind of thing before and you haven’t. I’d take it badly if you got yourself killed.’

  ‘Neither Mr Mussa nor the assassin want to kill me,’ Hari said. ‘They both want what’s inside my head. Let’s do this before I lose my nerve.’

  Khinda Wole cut in, told Hari and Rav that her friends were ready to intercede if the police were called; a few moments later Riyya said that she had established contact with Mr Mussa’s ship.

  ‘An eidolon is screening calls,’ she said. ‘Do you still want me to go ahead?’

  ‘If someone is on board, they’ll be listening in,’ Hari said.

  Rav said, ‘You know what would really distract them? Blowing a big hole in their airlock and storming aboard.’

  ‘Start knocking,’ Hari said. ‘I’m going in.’

  As Riyya began to explain that she had discovered a vacuum organism capable of extracting and concentrating vanadium from very low levels, Hari sculled across the short gap to Mr Mussa’s ship and attached the emergency airlock package that Khinda Wole had located in her stores of miscellaneous salvage.

  Riyya said, ‘It’s a fast-growing variation of the old RUR-three-eighty strain.’

  ‘I’m not interested in purchasing vacuum-organism strains at the moment,’ Mr Mussa’s eidolon said.

  The package unfolded into a disc that clamped to the hull with billions of microscopic hooks and sticky pads. A puff of gas, enough to create a pressure of less than a hundredth of a millibar, inflated its dome and triggered a charge that flowed through two hoops of memory wire and configured its airlock.

  ‘I also have a robust ten-sixty-eight-dash-em strain,’ Riyya said. ‘It grows true.’

  ‘I have no interest in it.’

  Hari unsealed the flap of the outer hatch, scrambled inside, and resealed the outer hatch before pushing through the inner hatch into the little dome of the tent. So far, so good. It was a standard method for entering a pressurised vessel or habitat whose locks were in some way compromised, employed routinely during salvage work. Nabhoj had taught Hari the technique, but Hari had never before tried to solo it, and he was using it to gain entry to hostile territory.

  Riyya said, ‘Do you have anything to trade in exchange? I have a client who is looking for a specialised sunflower strain. I heard you might have a culture line that doesn’t have the usual cis-em-dash senescence error.’

  ‘Your information is not accurate,’ Mr Mussa’s eidolon said.

  ‘How about a germanium accumulator?’

  ‘I do not have any accumulator lines in stock at this time.’

  Hari unwrapped the rope of polarised explosive from his waist and began to lay it in a circle.

  Riyya said, ‘You do trade in vacuum organisms.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But not only in vacuum organisms.’

  Hari flinched. Riyya had gone off-script.

  ‘I am fully occupied with other business at the moment,’ Mr Mussa’s eidolon said.

  ‘There’s talk that you have a tick-tock person’s head,’ Riyya said. ‘I know a collector who’d pay good credit for it.’

  Silence, while Hari glued a strap of flexible fullerene across the point where the two ends of the rope overlapped. He felt a jittery static in his body. Then another voice said, ‘I assume you’re working with the Ardenist.’

  Riyya said, ‘I’m a sole trader.’

  ‘An Ardenist is attempting to force the hatch of the jetty to which my ship is moored. Tell him to desist.’

  Hari triggered the explosive rope. There was a faint tremor as the polarised explosive sliced through a circular section of the hull, and then the circle hinged up, pushed by air rushing out of the ship to fill the tent’s blister. Hari triggered the cylinder of incapacitating agent and sent it spinning through the narrow hole, then threw a flashbang grenade. There was a percussive blast and brief stutter of fierce light, and he swarmed head first through the hole, trying to look everywhere at once.

  As planned, making use of a model created by a single pass of the deep radar of Rav’s ship, he’d entered some kind of hold or storage area. A cramped cylindrical space, walls dappled with the flittering shadows of debris shaken loose by the detonation of the grenade and tumbling and bumping around a coffin-sized tank cradled in a web of pipes and hoses and pumps.

  Hari realised that it must be the tank where what was left of Mr D.V. Mussa’s corporeal body was maintained. He started when the p-suit’s eidolon appeared beside him.

  ‘Tell me what you see,’ he said.

  ‘I cannot detect any movement. But waste heat from the tank is interfering with my infrared imaging, and the noise of the pumps is affecting my motion detectors.’

  ‘Switch everything off,’ Hari said, and someone swam up from the far side of the tank. A small figure in a black p-suit, aiming a pistol with a flared muzzle. The eidolon shot past it, vanished into a bulkhead.

  Lights snapped off; the churn of the pumps slowed, stopped. Dull red emergency lighting kindled.

  ‘You’re early.’

  It was a young girl’s voice, soft and calm. Mr Mussa’s daughter.

  Hari said, ‘Why don’t you put away that pistol? Then I’ll restore your ship’s systems, and we’ll be able to have a sensible conversation about our common interests.’

  Rav had patched the system-killing routine into the eidolon. He claimed that he’d tricked a dacoit into giving it to him years back, said that he’d always wanted to try it out. Hari hadn’t been certain that it would work, and wasn’t sure that he could undo the damage, but it was the only bargaining counter he had. So far, there was no sign that the djinn was going to come to his aid. He hoped it was a good sign, hoped that it meant he wasn’t in any real danger.

  ‘I can fix anything on this ship myself,’ Mr Mussa’s daughter said.

  ‘Then you had better get to work. The tank that keeps your father alive has been knocked out.’

  ‘He’s already dead.’

  Hari was reflected in the mirror of her helmet visor. The muzzle of her pistol seemed to be about the size of a cargo lock.

  ‘I’m sorry about your loss,’ he sa
id.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ the girl said.

  The eidolon appeared behind her. ‘Her suit is hardened,’ she said.

  Hari told the girl, ‘I admit that you appear to have the upper hand at the moment, but your ship is crippled, and I have friends outside.’

  ‘The Ardenist, and the girl pretending to be a trader? Or the crew of amateur sleuths who have been keeping watch on me ever since I docked?’

  ‘We can help you find the person who killed your father.’

  ‘Take off your helmet,’ the girl said.

  There was a hard, unforgiving tone in her voice. It reminded Hari that she was much older than she appeared to be. He wondered why the djinn hadn’t taken an interest in her. Because he was negotiating with her, perhaps. Or because she was a little girl . . .

  He said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But I do,’ the girl said.

  The eidolon merged briefly with the girl’s p-suit, backed out, spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  A sudden glow was reflected in the visor of the girl’s helmet. Hari turned, saw Mr Mussa’s avatar floating in front of him. Its luminous sphere broke apart into a cloud of little needles, microbots, that swarmed over him. The row of indices and virtual switches under his chin blinked out; the p-suit’s musculature hardened around his arms and legs; the latches in his neck ring clicked back and the helmet rose away from his head. There was a strong, sweet odour – the incapacitating agent – and the red glow of the emergency lighting deepened to darkness.

  6

  Hari jolted awake with a chemical taste burning in his mouth and pain pulsing behind his eyes. He was held fast by bands across his chest, hips, knees and ankles, lashed to a fragment of wall that stuck up from a field of rubble like a grave marker. He had been stripped to his suit liner, something was clamped over his scalp, and his bios was blocked. He could not tell where he was or how long he had been unconscious, could not reach out to anyone. It was like being back on Themba. It was like being deaf and half-blind, like being unable to read or to recall the proper names of things.

  He sucked spit into the foul cavern of his mouth and softly called to the p-suit’s eidolon. Nothing.

  A smashed ruin of rubble curved up on either side and stretched away into a dim vastness. Little sparks glimmered far off in the unresolved distance. One or two were moving, but most were set in scattered clusters, thickening towards a hazy and irregular disc like a primordial galaxy. Hari began to understand where he was. Inside Tannhauser Gate’s cylinder. In the free zone, where anything could be bought or sold, where there were no laws except the tithe law.

  He called to the eidolon again, softly, urgently, and something moved at the edge of his vision.

  The little girl, Mr Mussa’s daughter, floating down through the air.

  She still wore her black p-suit, but she had taken off its helmet and hung it on her hip. She looked about eight years old. She planted one hand on the fragment of wall and leaned in close.

  ‘Your suit is presently heading sunwards,’ she said. ‘I did some serious damage to its comms back on the ship, and launched it from the escape-capsule tube. Don’t expect your neural net’s security to help you, by the way. It works through your bios, and I’ve been neutralising that ever since you boarded my ship. What do you find so funny?’

  ‘Everyone but me seems to know what’s inside my head.’

  ‘I spotted it the first time we met. When you met my avatar. A simple neutron backscatter scan revealed it. I wasn’t interested in it at the time, and neither were my clients. But things have changed. Very soon, I’m going to tell their representative where you are. And I’m going to tell your friends, too.’

  ‘They’re the Saints, aren’t they? Your father’s clients.’

  The girl’s smile, a quick, cold flicker, reminded Hari that she wasn’t what she appeared to be.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ she said.

  ‘And the head. Dr Gagarian’s head. Did you and your father sell that to them, too? Is that why he was killed?’

  ‘I didn’t try to sell the head to anyone,’ the girl said. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t check the integrity of its files? I paid one of Gun Ako Akoi’s granddaughters to take a look as soon as I arrived here. When she told me that the files were irrevocably corrupted, I realised that I was bait for your trap. It was clever, by the way, to let me think I’d got away with the theft, so that I would draw out the people who wanted the head.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Hari said.

  ‘But not quite clever enough. I knew you were chasing me. I knew you would come here, to find out who wanted to buy the head from me. When I told my clients that Dr Gagarian’s files were corrupted, I offered them your neural net. After that, all I had to do was wait. And here you are. I won’t stick around to watch the fun, when the representative of my clients meets your friends, but you’ll have a grandstand view. And there’s a good chance it will kick off something amongst the local inhabitants. When there’s trouble in the free zone, people come running. And not to help.’

  ‘If this is because you think I’m responsible for your father’s death—’

  ‘You made many mistakes, but that’s your biggest. Believing that someone killed him because of that head.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  The girl flashed her quick, cold smile again.

  ‘You,’ Hari said.

  ‘Care to guess when? I’ll give you a clue. It wasn’t here.’

  ‘Not on Ophir either, I suppose.’

  ‘The problem with being a tanky is that you are stuck in a tank,’ the girl said. ‘You have to rely on avatars, and the kindness of strangers. Like many tankies, the old man fettled up someone to act as his eyes and ears in the real world. She did all his dirty work, and guarded him against those who wanted to harm him. But then he tried to cheat some bad people, and they found out, and they killed his little helper. She was blameless, but she was on the spot and he was a long way away, safe in his tank. So then he had to make a new little helper. Who was just as skilled, and just as loyal. At least, to begin with. Because the old man didn’t learn from his mistake.

  ‘That’s another thing about tankies, you know? They are semidetached from the world. After a while, it all seems like a saga to them. They forget that actions have consequences, that you can’t reboot and start over when things go wrong. So the old man tried to swindle someone else, his new little girl barely escaped with her life when it all went wrong, and she began to wonder if he’d made the same kind of mistake before. She wanted to help him because that was how she’d been made, and the best way to do that, she thought, was to learn how to save him from himself. She broke into the old man’s files, and found out about her predecessor. Saw the pict that the bad people had made after they’d caught her, saw what they’d done to her. And she began to realise that the old man considered her to be disposable.

  ‘So, when he started to plan another dubious deal, his little helper tried to persuade him out of it. She was trying to save him from himself, and save herself, too. But he didn’t see it that way. He thought that she was rebelling against him, thought she was being disloyal. And he punished her. Hurt her badly. After she recovered, she decided that things couldn’t go on like this. She didn’t kill him. Not immediately. First, she locked him down in his tank. She took control of his avatar and his business. She let him know what he was doing, and told him why, and tried to reason with him. But he managed to open a back channel to a former associate, and the associate tried to kill me. So what could I do? I killed the associate and I killed the old man, and because I had no other way of earning a living, I continued to run his business.

  ‘I moved to Ophir, set up the old man’s tank as if he was still alive inside it, and went into business with your uncle, supplying exotic biota which he sold on to his contacts on Earth. I dealt with Tamonash through the avatar. He had no idea it was me and not the old man. And it was good, for a while. A nic
e, simple little business, with the promise of some real profit down the line. And then I heard about Dr Gagarian’s research, that people thought he’d discovered something significant about the Bright Moment. Something valuable. My clients mislaid you and that head, but their carelessness gave me the opportunity to sell it to them again. And here we are.’

  ‘You told them. The hijackers. You’re the one who told them about Dr Gagarian. I thought it might have been my uncle, but it was you.’

  ‘Let’s put it this way: this is the second time I’ve sold you to them. That’s why we aren’t doing the handover directly. For some reason, they blame me for your escape the first time around. And I think they think I had something to do with those corrupted files in the tick-tock’s head. The credit is already deposited with the bourse. It will be released when their representative takes custody of you. Your friends will create a distraction when they try and fail to rescue you, and I’ll be on my way to somewhere else. Somewhere far, far away. And since you cut a hole in my ship’s hull and futzed its systems, I believe I’ll take the Ardenist’s ship.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ a voice said close by, and a small drone dropped out of the dark air and aimed a brilliant light at Hari and his captor.

  7

  The little girl kicked away from Hari, somersaulted in midair, and drew her pistol and shot the drone, all in one fluid movement. Its light went out and Hari tried to blink away swarming after-images, glimpsed the girl skimming away above fields of rubble, saw someone swoop down and smash into her.

  It was Rav. As the girl tumbled away, he beat backwards, steadied himself in the air, and pointed at her. A thread of intense blue light flicked out from his fist and she burst into flames, kicking, writhing, dwindling cometwise into the dim volume of the cylinder. There was a brief shower of sparks when she struck a finger of stone, and then she was gone.

  Rav swept in towards Hari with three swift strong beats of his wings, neatly reversed, and caught hold of the edge of the wall.