Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  ‘She liked to talk, didn’t she?’ he said. ‘I thought she’d never get to the point.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have killed her.’

  ‘Why not? She tried to kill me. And caused me a good deal of inconvenience, too.’

  ‘Even so. It wasn’t right.’

  ‘We’re in the free zone. There’s no right or wrong here. And I don’t believe in little weaknesses like mercy or forgiveness.’

  The Ardenist flourished a knife and began to saw at the strip that pinned Hari’s ankles. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but I’m having a serious case of déjà vu.’

  Hari saw a dark wet gleam on Rav’s bare shoulder. ‘You’re hurt.’

  ‘It’s only a scratch. My boy won’t be growing hair on his balls just yet. It was a nice trick, firing off your p-suit. Good enough to fool the trader and her friends, anyway.’

  ‘But not you.’

  ‘But not me. When you broke into the ship, I suited up and went outside as fast as I could. I saw her sneak out of an access hatch in the stern, towing a storage pod. She was fast. Almost got away from me. Almost, but not quite. You know the rest,’ Rav said. He cut the last of Hari’s bonds and caught him by one arm and smiled into his face. ‘You also caused me a good deal of inconvenience, youngblood, but all’s well that ends well. I won’t let you out of my sight again, I promise.’

  Hari pulled off the cap that Mr Mussa’s daughter had clamped over his scalp. His bios rebooted; the volume of the cylinder immediately gained scale and clusters of names and other signifiers.

  ‘Mr Mussa’s daughter told me that the representative of her clients will be here soon,’ he said.

  ‘You would like to work up some kind of ambush. Ordinarily, I’d like nothing better, but we’re exposed here, and almost certainly outgunned,’ Rav said, and clasped Hari to his chest and kicked away from the stub of wall.

  As they arrowed through dim air towards the little galaxy of lights at the far end of the cylinder, Rav told Hari that it was time to regroup.

  ‘I’m not ready to leave until we’ve found Ang Ap Zhang,’ Hari said.

  ‘I’m not ready to leave, either. But we’ve been compromised, thanks to your little adventure with the tanky’s spawn,’ Rav said. ‘The assassin has had more than two hundred days to establish herself here. We’re right in the middle of her territory. She knows about us; we haven’t had time to find out about her. It won’t be easy, getting you out alive, but I’m going to do my best. We’ll get back to my ship, and work out what to do next.’

  ‘What about Riyya? Where is she?’

  ‘Oh, I made sure she’s safe, although I don’t expect she’ll thank me for it.’

  ‘I confess that I’m not very happy either,’ Hari said.

  ‘Your pride is hurt. Look at it this way. You weren’t the first to be fooled by that little girl, but you were definitely the last.’ Rav looked at Hari. His sharp smile and green gaze very fierce, very close. ‘You really are upset because I killed her. You shouldn’t be in the revenge game, youngblood. You’re too sentimental.’

  ‘I know what she was, and what she wanted to do,’ Hari said. ‘And I also know that you didn’t have to kill her. If only because she could have told us who her clients were. Whether they were the Saints, or someone else.’

  ‘Forget about that for now,’ Rav said. ‘Let’s concentrate on getting out of here alive. I’m going to do my best to save you, but you’ll have to work with me. Do what I say when I say it. Can you do that?’

  ‘I can try.’

  They were skimming over hills and valleys of broken flowstone, bright shards of plastic, twisted rebar. Here and there rubble-pile islands floated like baby asteroids, lashed together by nets and tethered by cables. Hari tried to imagine what it must have been like when the habitat had stopped spinning and centrifugal forces had torn everything loose. Buildings ripped apart, smashing into other buildings. A whirling hurricane of debris plastering itself against the cylindrical wall . . . Amazing that the habitat’s sleeve had survived. Amazing that anything recognisable had survived.

  Rav pointed out latticework spheres scattered across a bowl of pale green grass. Most were ten or twenty metres in diameter, but one was easily as big as Pabuji’s Gift.

  ‘Combat cages,’ he said, ‘where the good citizens of the free zone thrash out their differences. I’ve taken down a few braggarts there, over the years. Maybe we could set you up with the mastermind behind the hijack.’

  Lights thickened ahead. Archipelagos of rafts, erratic piles of cubes, towers that leaned out of the rubble at improbable angles, girdled with platforms or scabbed with the bubbles of small tents. Free-fall settlements of scavengers and dacoits, outlaws and pirates. Places where a person could buy any kind of mod or tweak, satisfy every kind of sexual desire, every appetite.

  Hari and Rav flew through a passage that twisted and turned between anarchic free-fall architecture, lit by dabs of luminescence, signs and images hung in garishly coloured blocks of light, the glow of gardens enclosed in transparent spherical tents like small, erratic moons. People moved in every direction, swimming along cableways, riding scooters and varicopters and jetbikes, towed by hand-held fan-motors, navigating the air with judicious squirts of propellant from a variety of pistols and jets. Children riding airboards burst from a narrow space between two square towers like a flock of birds, shouting taunts as they split around Hari and Rav. The air seemed thicker and warmer, tainted with the sweet stink of garbage.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Rav said, and a moment later changed course with a single strong beat of his wings.

  Hari looked around. A scooter was turning back towards them, ridden by a woman with long black hair and a familiar face. It was Deel Fertita. It was Angley Li. It was Ang Ap Zhang.

  Cold shock jolted through Hari. His bios popped warnings as his heart rate and blood pressure increased; a sliver of icy pain pierced his left eye. The djinn was waking up. Blue light exploded as he and Rav swept through a huge sign hung in the air; Rav told him to curl up as tight as he could, and gave him a hard shove.

  Hari flew through an open window, skimmed across a room where two women were tending rows of plants bristling from hydroponic tubing, shot through a window on the far side. A slab wall loomed dead ahead, and then Rav caught him and they stalled with a clap of wings and rose towards the underside of a platform. Rav caught at its edge and swung around. Everything flipped, and then Hari was clinging to one of the tethers stretched across a garden patched with dozens of different crop plants. His pulse was pounding in his skull and there was a dagger twisting behind his eyes and a feeling that something stood at his back.

  ‘That was intense,’ Rav said, and laughed.

  He was aiming a pistol here and there with sharp precise flicks, looking for and failing to find a target.

  ‘Khinda was right,’ Hari said. ‘The assassin was in the free zone all along.’

  ‘The representative, so-called, of your late little friend’s clients,’ Rav said. ‘She wants to snatch you, youngblood. She wants your head. Let’s try to make sure that doesn’t happen.’

  He pulled a knife from a loop on his harness, handed it to Hari, asked him if he knew how to use it.

  Hari squeezed the grip. The thin blade blurred with a vibration he felt all the way up his arm.

  ‘Could you cut or kill someone if you had to?’ Rav said.

  ‘I suppose I’m going to find out,’ Hari said.

  ‘If she doesn’t come after us again, she’ll be waiting at the gate,’ Rav said, and pointed towards the living wall of a giant banyan patch beyond the far end of the platform. ‘Think you can follow me?’

  Hari slid the knife into the cinchband of his suit liner. ‘I grew up in microgravity. Let’s go.’

  They both kicked away from the garden platform and plunged into the labyrinth of branches and leaves, zigzagging past platforms, past rooms like giant insect cocoons woven from living leaves or fibrous ropes. Hari fe
lt a primal exhilaration. It was like the games of tig he’d played as a child – but now everything was at stake. He was thinking with his muscles, following a heartbeat behind Rav, flying through air, through screens of big green leaves, swinging around branches. Rav smashed through a bower of flowers and Hari followed, bursting through an expanding storm of petals and shooting out across a spherical volume of open air. A man stared out at him from the window of a hut lodged amongst sprays of leaves. Hari laughed and saluted him, saw Rav grab a branch at the far end and kick sideways, grabbed the same branch, pivoted, followed.

  He caught up with the Ardenist when they reached a wide cordway on the far side of the banyan patch. They swam along it, using their fingertips to skim over the warp of the fat orange threads. Workshops along one side, a wall of leaves and branches on the other. They overtook people, passed people travelling in the opposite direction. After a couple of minutes, Hari realised that half a dozen young women in leather corselets and knee-length trousers were keeping pace with them, some twenty or thirty metres behind.

  Rav said that they were locals, not Saints. ‘It’s probably just a territorial thing. Ape posturing. But if they come at us, we’ll have to deal with them. Strike first, and strike hard.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Use the knife, but don’t try anything fancy. If you try to stab something vital, you’ll probably miss. Slash. Quick, tight strokes. It doesn’t matter where you hit your opponent. Even shallow cuts hurt, and they bleed a lot, too.’

  ‘Right.’

  Hari’s mouth was parched. The djinn had retreated, leaving behind a bright pulse in his left eye.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Rav said. ‘No turning back now.’

  Curtains of leaves fell away, revealing a huge shaft or corridor with bubbles and platforms and buildings cantilevered out into it and a swarm of people moving through the air, swimming along cableways and cordways, riding all kinds of machines, shouting, blowing whistles. Fanjet tractors towed strings of cargo sleds up and down the periphery of the shaft, sounding mournful horns. Strings of red and blue lights sketched traffic lanes that everyone seemed to ignore.

  All this stretching away for more than two kilometres, terminating in a black wall or shield pierced by tunnel entrances set in a hexagon, each ringed with red or green lights. The end cap of the cylinder. The gates to the exterior.

  Rav gripped the cord he’d been following, stopping so quickly that he swung through one hundred and eighty degrees. Hari stopped too, both of them hanging there, looking down at the gates. Their followers clustered some ten metres away, beside a pod with a dim red-lit interior and a banner sign printed with Pinglish ideograms rippling inside an underwater fantasia of bright fish and waving waterweed: Lete’s Eats.

  Rav flung his arms wide, so that his wings spread from shoulders to ankles. Calling out, saying, ‘Like what you see?’

  ‘I see fresh meat,’ one said.

  ‘And I see children who don’t know what they’re getting into,’ Rav said. ‘Run along. Play somewhere else.’

  ‘This is our playground, fresh meat. We go where we please.’

  ‘The only thing we have in common,’ Rav said, and kicked away from the branch.

  Hari followed. They kept inside the banyans as they moved towards the gates, making their way through curtains and fans of leaves, skimming around clusters of pods. Near the end of the long tangle, Rav snatched at a branch and waited for Hari to catch up with him.

  ‘If I was trying to snare us, I’d set an ambush at the only way in or out of this place,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to go under cover. We’ll have to sneak out.’

  ‘How are we going to do that?’

  Rav pointed to a short train of cargo sleds puttering past. ‘By hitching a ride. Ready?’

  Before Hari could answer, Rav kicked off and flew straight at the train. Hari kicked off too, shooting out into open air, smacking into a transparent bladder swollen with water, snatching at the straps that lashed it to a sled as he rebounded. Rav grinned at him, pointed. The gang of women arrowing out of the banyans, landing one after the other at the far end of the train’s string of sleds, moving towards them.

  Rav drew his pistol. Hari pulled out his knife, tingling with nervous anticipation.

  The leader of the gang laughed and said, ‘Is that all you’ve got?’

  She hung from the flank of the neighbouring sled by a hand and a foot. Her toes were as long as fingers, terminating in flat pads. Her hair was swept back in stiff wings on either side of her lean and eager face. Her eyes were white stones with tiny black dots at their centres. She raised her free arm and flung it forward and something snaked towards Hari – a whip divided into a hundred threads at its end, each tip armed with a vicious hook. Hari flattened himself against the taut bladder, felt the whip snap above his head, slashed at it with his knife, and lost his balance and tumbled into empty air. As he turned, he saw two women coming towards him from different angles. Then Rav struck him and held him, and they flew away from the train, banyans and gates and a ladder of buildings turning over and around.

  Rav’s wings beat around Hari. Their tumbling trajectory stabilised. The women were diving towards them, using little squirt bottles to steer themselves. Rav told Hari to catch hold of his harness, and pulled out his pistol and took aim. There was a blink of blue light and one of the women flared into a shrieking fireball that slewed sideways and struck a stack of platforms.

  The others sheered away in every direction. Hari clung to Rav’s waist as the Ardenist beat towards the gates. All around, people and vehicles were swerving around burning debris that sprayed across the shaft. Two trains crossed and collided, spilling wobbling blobs of water and expanding clouds of plastic pellets. Hari and Rav dropped through the debris. A hard rain of pellets stung Hari’s face and hands. As they came out of the far side, a scooter sliced past, Ang Ap Zhang leaning out, slashing at Rav with a long knife, gone. Rav gasped and jerked, and his wings folded as he and Hari arrowed towards a building jutting into the gulf of air and crashed through a wall, paper stretched across wooden framing, into a small room where a single sleeping cocoon was strung on a tether.

  Rav was bleeding badly, blood pumping from his thigh, tumbling away in scarlet droplets. ‘The knife,’ he said. His voice was tight with pain.

  Hari handed it over at once. Rav squeezed the handle and the blade vibrated and began to whine and shone a dull red that brightened to yellow, white. The Ardenist set his teeth in a jagged grin and plunged the knife into the wound.

  Hari gagged on the stink of seared meat.

  When Rav pulled the blade free the bleeding was much reduced. Hari took the knife from him and cut of a strip of material from the ankle of his suit liner, twisted it into a rope and wrapped it around Rav’s thigh, and caught a floating splinter of wood and used it to tighten the improvised tourniquet until blood stopped flowing.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ Rav said. ‘If the assassin doesn’t find us, that little gang of bad girls will.’

  ‘Can you move?’

  ‘I can still fly. The assassin is fast, but I’ll take her if it comes to it. You understand that the only way out is through the gates.’

  ‘We’ll do it together.’

  Layers of smoke obscured the gulf of the shaft. People were fighting a small fire in the banyan wall on the far side, whacking at flames with blankets, spraying foam. The building that had been struck by the body of the burning woman was a charred shell wrapped in a pearl of smoke. There was no sign of the rest of the gang, and the shaft was mostly clear of traffic.

  Rav went first, pushing away with his good leg, spinning out and down towards the gates. Hari followed, a fast exhilarating swoop. They fell past windows and platforms, past some kind of manufactory where elephantine machines shuddered and pulsed. They punched through a string of glowing signs, and that was when the gang of women ambushed them.

  They shot out from a tier of platforms, impossible to avoid. A whip snapped
around Hari’s leg as one of the women flew past; as they spun about a common axis Hari grabbed the whip and hauled close and slashed at the woman and felt the knife catch on something. He kicked free, flying towards the wall of the shaft as the woman he’d wounded tumbled outwards. A knot of women was writhing around Rav. Hari caught a branch and swung and got his feet under him, saw one of the women lock her arm around the Ardenist’s throat, saw two more hammering at his chest with the spiked handles of their whips. Saw a scooter sidle in, saw the women push away from Rav as Ang Ap Zhang stood up in her saddle and delivered the killing stroke.

  Rav’s body tumbled in a mist of blood. The women were swarming after his severed head. And Ang Ap Zhang was heading towards Hari, standing astride her scooter, flourishing a whip. Her unbound black hair flew behind her like a banner; her long knife was sheathed at the waist of her white shirt.

  Hari barely had time to draw his knife before she was on him. Leaping from the scooter as it went past, knocking him backwards through a tangle of branches. He struck out in panic, and the assassin hit his wrist with two stiff fingers and he dropped the knife. She spun him, pushed him away, lashed out with her whip. It spiralled around him, binding his arms to his sides, gripping with hundreds of tiny teeth.

  Ang Ap Zhang pulled him close. There was nothing human behind her gaze. A spray of blood glistened on her pale face. Rav’s blood.

  ‘I should kill you now, for what you did to my sisters,’ she said. ‘But you are wanted alive, and I am merely the arm and the hand.’

  She towed him to the edge of the maze of leaves and branches, where her scooter was waiting. The pressure was back inside Hari’s head. Light pulsed in his left eye, obscuring pop-up warnings from his bios. He felt as huge and heavy as a water bladder.

  Ang Ap Zhang paused at the edge of the banyans. Down the shaft, something inflated around the string of glowing signs. A giant figure jigsawed from shards of light, from compressed signage and images, its misshapen head turning, jagged eyes fixing on the assassin, an arm stretching out towards her, stretching a hundred metres. She flinched as talons tipped with flame whipped past, and the giant somehow grabbed hold of a fixed spot in the air and hauled itself towards her.