Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  ‘If you had any kind of spine you’d kill me,’ Nabhoj said.

  ‘If you had any kind of spine you wouldn’t ask for the easy way out. I’m going to send you to a remote little rock. 207061 Themba. It isn’t much of a place, but I know from first-hand experience that with a little work it’s possible to survive there. Perhaps you’ll even contrive to escape, as I did. If you do, don’t bother coming to look for me. I’m going to confront the people who helped you destroy my family. There’s only a small chance that I’ll survive it.’

  Nabhoj began to speak, but Hari didn’t listen. He signalled to the drone controlled by the doctor thing and it moved forward and injected his brother with a soporific. After that, the mechanics of the operation were easy. The manikins dressed Nabhoj in a pressure suit and stowed him in a lifepod, and Hari launched the pod on the long, long course that would take it out of Saturn’s gravity well and across the vast gulf to a remote and unremarkable rock at the outer edge of the Belt.

  Then Hari was outside, riding in good old utility pod 09 Chaju, supervising a gang of manikins as they made alterations to Pabuji’s Gift’s motors and laid the explosive charges he’d spun in the ship’s maker. For a few hours, he lost himself in the details of the work. It was almost like the old days. Enthroned behind the little pod’s diamond blister, choreographing the stately dance of its arms and tools. The lower left-hand arm still had that stiffness in its rotator cuff he’d never been able to fix . . .

  Two hours passed. Three. Working as quickly and accurately as he knew how while the hard bright point of the sun dropped past the lower edge of the inner rings and set in a glorious arc of amber light that extended through the outermost layer of Saturn’s atmosphere towards the north and south poles, and Pabuji’s Gift swung into the giant planet’s shadow. Four hours, five. Trying to ignore the tick of time passing, everything outside the overlapping pools of light dropped by the pod’s lamps. And at last he was finished, and he drove the utility pod back to its bay and powered it down, and swam along the curve of the maintenance shaft to the docking garage.

  Manikins had already dressed the assassin in her antique p-suit and loaded her into the little prospecting gig, Jnana-chaksu. She lay in a crash couch, lashed down by six hoops, deep in induced sleep. As soon as Hari had settled into the neighbouring couch, Jnana-chaksu’s cradle everted, and it drifted away from Pabuji’s Gift on a light puff from its manoeuvring jets.

  Hari called up the eidolon, and they rehearsed what she needed to do. He told her that he was sorry he couldn’t take her with him.

  ‘I would rather not return to the book,’ she said. ‘It was very cramped, very limiting. And I am pleased to serve, as always. I will do my best, if the Saints try to take the ship.’

  ‘I know you will protect the ship as you once protected me,’ Hari said, certain that the djinn was listening.

  There was a pause, then the eidolon said, ‘We have had some fine adventures together.’

  ‘Yes, we have,’ Hari said, startled and touched.

  And then she was gone and Pabuji’s Gift’s motor fired up, a diamond scratch dwindling across the black shadow of the ring plane, spiralling into a lower orbit as it accelerated away.

  The gig swung on around Saturn’s nightside. At last the edge of the vast dark globe was defined by a widening crescent of dawn light. Beyond, the arch of the rings soared away into sunlight, packed lanes narrowing towards its apex, where a tiny half-disc hung against the outer dark.

  Enceladus.

  12

  The little moon was a bright, cold ice-world. Smooth, snow-white plains crazed with ice-blue cracks and shallow troughs, bordered with belts of icy grooves and ridges; spatterings of snow-white craters. But although its surface was one of the coldest places in the Solar System because it reflected most of the sunlight that fell on it, there was a small ocean of liquid water beneath its south pole, warmed by tidal kneading as it swung around Saturn. And that was why its surface was so bright, so cold. Vents in the floors of deep chasms exposed the surface of the ocean to vacuum. Water seethed and boiled and fed geysers that lofted ice dust hundreds of kilometres above the surface. Some of the dust spiralled inwards to Saturn; some went into orbit and eventually collided with other moons inside or just outside Enceladus’s orbit, coating their leading surfaces with sprays of frost. But most of it fell across Enceladus’s surface. A faint, constant snowfall that over centuries, millennia, millions of years, had built deep drifts that had smoothed out most of the small moon’s contours, buried ridges and small craters, filled the slumped bowls of the oldest craters to the brim.

  As the gig approached it, Hari thought that Enceladus looked like a fragile ornament spun from frost and fine glass.

  A swarm of tiny throwaway probes flew ahead of Jnana-chaksu, spying a handful of small settlements scattered around the equator, a wrecked city inside a circular crater, its angular tent shattered and the terrain around blackened and pitted, and a vertical city clinging to the side of a deep rift in the tiger-stripe terrain of the south pole, exactly where Rav’s son had said it would be.

  Now the gig decelerated, achieving an elliptical parking orbit that approached to within fifty kilometres of Enceladus’s surface. It wasn’t stable, thanks to the insistent tug of Saturn’s gravity, but Hari did not plan to stay in orbit for long.

  Pabuji’s Gift was halfway around Saturn’s dayside, travelling just above the division between the outer and inner rings, and the Saints’ cutter was accelerating towards it. Hari had anticipated this – the eidolon was primed to deal with any attempts to board the ship – but he still felt a tremor of unease.

  A second tranche of probes spiralled towards the south pole, blurting packages of multispectrum and radar images before they crashed into the surface. Hari studied 3-D renderings stitched from the data, then woke his cargo.

  The assassin showed no emotion when Hari told her where they were and where they were going.

  ‘I will meet your sisters to discuss reparations for the harm they did to my family,’ he said. ‘But I am not surrendering. We will meet as equals, or not at all.’

  ‘And yet you are delivering yourself to them,’ the assassin said.

  ‘Tell me how,’ Hari said.

  Enceladus’s icy shield curved away on every side, details resolving out of its bright surface as the gig descended. At the horizon, the faint plume of a geyser scratched the black sky.

  Hari piloted the gig towards a spot to the west of the geyser. Ridges and valleys drifted past. Boulders scattered along the tops of narrow, winding ridges. Steep slopes plunging into chthonic darkness. Jnana-chaksu killed the last of its momentum and hovered at the edge of a long rift, balanced on a whisper of manoeuvring jets.

  The city was directly below, a step-like series of narrow terraces cut into the wall of the rift. Everything frozen and dusted with ice glitter, everything at ambient temperature, cold as liquid nitrogen, except for a faint infrared glow radiating from a building perched at the edge of the lowest terrace.

  Hari picted the image to the assassin. ‘There?’

  ‘There. If your craft attempts to descend past the city, defence systems will target it.’

  Rows of buildings dropped past, one after the other, as Hari guided the gig towards a landing pad at one end of the last and lowest terrace. Fine ice crystals blew away in a circle as Jnana-chaksu touched down, washing against windowless, unornamented walls of low bunkers, everything settling back into immemorial silence and stillness.

  Hari warned the assassin that if she tried to harm him the musculature of her p-suit would freeze and he would leave her to die, and then he freed her.

  She sat up on her couch, smiled at him behind the visor of her helmet. ‘I am delivering you to my sisters. Why should I harm you?’

  ‘I’m making the generous assumption that you may possess a vestige of human irrationality.’

  ‘I am the arm and the hand.’

  ‘Lead on, then.’

  T
hey skated along frozen walkways to the building that was leaking a trace of heat. It was a severe cube three decks tall, partly cantilevered out from the edge of the terrace. A door irised onto a tall lighted space where transparent capsules nestled side by side against a long platform. Cables strung on horizontal stays dwindled away into absolute shadow.

  Hari and the assassin descended in one of the capsules, passing through several intermediary stations. Reflections of the capsule’s riding lights glimmering from vertical slabs of ice, from massive folds and pleats, from setbacks where drifts of ice crystals had collected. At first, the far wall of the rift was lost in darkness, but it slanted closer as they plunged down, until they were sliding between two walls no more than a hundred metres apart. Dim lights resolved below, illuminating an angular tent that stood on a ledge above a chaos of tumbled ice blocks pinched between soaring cliffs.

  The capsule slowed and eased through an aperture in the roof of the tent, passing through a long chimney of flexible black leaves, halting at a small platform. Hari followed the assassin along a spiral walkway that descended past dark clumps of banyans. No lights, no movement. The tent, once pressurised, had long ago lost its air. Everything in it was dead and frozen, glitter-dusted with frost.

  The walkway ended at a kind of plaza littered with fallen leaves that shattered under the featherlight tread of Hari’s boots, the whip of his waist tethers. A row of airlocks gaped like corpse-mouths. Outside, a wide walkway or road rimmed with little lights swooped out across the ice-block sea. Hari and the assassin followed it between ragged embankments, past rough facets and tilted slabs, the walkway turning now, descending to a long and ragged slash that might once have been the mouth of a geyser but was now capped with a rough slather of diamond-fullerene composite.

  A small dome squatted at the base of this cap; two figures in antique p-suits stood outside its airlock.

  Hari stopped when he saw them. Turned, and saw two more figures behind them. He knew he had reached his destination, and sent a brief squawk to his ship.

  ‘He is here, my sisters,’ the assassin said. ‘I have brought you the last of the family of heretics.’

  13

  Escorted by the assassin and her sisters, Hari passed through an airlock into a short tunnel lined with stained white ceramic, where hidden machines blitzed him with microwaves, neutrino beams, and X-rays. He was forced to surrender his book, felt a small surge of relief when it was returned to him after it had been interrogated inside a virtual space as ancient as the tunnel’s security protocols. It was the only thing he’d brought with him. He’d left everything of his old life behind, but he hadn’t been able to abandon or give away the book, and not just because it was a memento of the dead man who had saved his life, or because it had smuggled the copies of the eidolon and the djinn aboard Pabuji’s Gift. He had carried it through adventures and hardships; its stories had amused and amazed and informed him; he was bonded to it by something stronger than sentiment or gratitude. And he hoped that some trace of the djinn might still be hidden inside it; it was a faint and foolish hope, but he needed all the help he could get.

  With two of the assassins in front of him and two behind, he descended a ramp that spiralled down a vertical shaft. A small zoo of machines squatted in alcoves and niches cut into the raw, rough ice of the shaft’s wall. Most were dead, mantled with frost, but a few reached out with brief whispers of microwaves and a man-shaped bot stepped forward to watch the little procession go past, its eyes burning red in the chilly shadows of its crypt.

  A string of lamps hung down the centre of the shaft, and presently Hari saw that their little lights were reflected on a black circle below.

  Water. The still surface of the buried sea.

  Three streamlined scooters were moored at the bottom of the ramp. Hari climbed aboard one behind one of the assassins, as he’d once ridden behind Riyya, and the scooters drove down a long tunnel and at last emerged into a limitless dark sea. An icy overhead stretched away in every direction, lit by chains of floating lamps. Swales and humps like inverted hills, fins, long gashes fringed with stalactites dozens of metres long. Grids of illuminated rafts hung all around, dangling streamers of dark red or brown or black weed. In the far distance, a chain of fat spheres dwindled into the deep dark.

  Hari felt a flutter of relief. As he’d guessed, as he’d hoped, Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters hadn’t entirely thrown off their human instincts. They lived close to the overhead of their pocket sea. They were vulnerable. And, because they hadn’t shut down his p-suit’s deep radar, he could see the floor more than two kilometres below, could glimpse immense bulkheads, walls, curving away, delimiting a chamber that was less than five kilometres across. He supposed that it had been sealed off from the rest of the subsurface ocean so that it could be warmed and oxygenated. A small, vulnerable bubble habitat.

  His escorts drove him to a pod hung from a smooth bulge of ice where small schools of fish flickered amongst a fuzzy turf of red weed and clusters of fleshy flowers pulsing on bony stalks. They pushed him through the entrance, a moon pool at the base where external hydrostatic pressure was balanced by internal atmospheric pressure, and sealed him in. It was spherical, the pod, chilly and damp, divided into three levels by mesh platforms. In the lowest level, a teardrop-shaped cleaning bot that had clearly gone insane was slowly working its way around the rim of moon pool, following a shallow, circular groove it had carved into the floor. It might have been working there for centuries.

  There was no link that Hari could latch on to, either through his bios or the suit comms. He couldn’t open any windows in the pale walls.

  He wondered if the Saints had managed to intercept Pabuji’s Gift. The manikins controlled by the eidolon and the copy of the djinn should be enough to hold them off, but even if they gained control of the ship it didn’t matter. By now, its course had been set and its motor had been shut down. If the Saints tried to take control, if they tried to restart the motor, they’d trigger his little surprise; if they didn’t, it would activate itself in a little under seven hours. Meanwhile, there was nothing Hari could do until Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters decided to talk to him.

  He had a long wait. He couldn’t detect any toxins or contaminants in the pod’s atmosphere – a standard nitrox mix – but he kept his p-suit sealed. He watched the clock he’d set up in his visor’s display tick down, tried not to think about the potential flaws in his plan. Such as it was. He mostly sat still, trying to seem calmer than he felt.

  The insane cleaning bot completed a painfully slow circuit, began another. At last, with three hours remaining on the countdown, a patch in the opaque wall cleared. He ankled towards it, felt a flutter of relief when he looked out and saw a little cluster of faint shapes rising through the black water. Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters were coming for him.

  There were five of them, five weird sisters fluttering up from gelid depths like the phantoms of drowned sea-sailors. Their legs were vestigial, fused into short flat tails. Their arms were long and bone-thin, and filmy veils stretched from arms to hips, beating in slow synchrony as they ascended.

  Hari found a shelf facing the window, an ancient design that sucked air through mesh to tether him in the vestigial gravity, and composed himself as best he could. Running through the flow of his pitch. Trying to channel Nabhomani, his easy charm, his sincerity and sympathy. You have to understand the client better than he understands himself, Nabhomani used to say. And: you have to believe in what you are selling. You have to convince yourself of its worth before you can convince the client.

  Hari told himself that he was doing what his father would have wanted. He told himself that it was possible to win both revenge and redemption.

  The five weird sisters sculled up to the window in the pod’s wall and stared in at him. Their faces were identical, with prominent cheekbones and large, black eyes. Racks of red-rimmed gills slashed their flanks. Organs could be dimly seen through their translucent skin, snugly cased inside ches
ts and abdomens. Beating hearts, trees of blood vessels.

  Hari opened the visor of his helmet, breathed in cold damp air, the prickling odour of ammonia. The ghost of his smile floated in the dark window amongst the frank stares of Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters.

  At last, a whisper rustled in his bios: ‘You are the son who inherited the sins of his father.’

  ‘As you inherited the sins of your mother,’ Hari said.

  ‘We serve our mother, now and always.’

  ‘And I came here as the last representative of my family.’

  ‘You are here because we brought you here.’

  ‘I chose to come here,’ Hari said, trying to project a confidence he didn’t feel. ‘I came here because I want you to tell me why you tried to destroy my family. And because I want to make you an offer.’

  All five shrugged, a human gesture that made them seem all the more inhuman.

  ‘The path you followed does not matter, because every path you could have chosen had the same destination,’ they said.

  ‘I came here to make you an offer,’ Hari said again. ‘But before we can talk about that, you must allow me to communicate with my ship.’

  ‘There is no point in talking to it because you no longer control it,’ the weird sisters said.

  An inset opened in the window, tracking across fields of stars towards a small bright fleck that hung beyond the rippled, ruffled ringlet at the edge of the ring system. Centring on the fleck, zooming in to reveal the kinked circle of Pabuji’s Gift with a splinter jutting from one side: the Saints’ cutter.

  Hari imagined the Saints closing on Pabuji’s Gift, pinging and signalling and probing, obtaining no response. Sending a scouting team across, trying and apparently succeeding to hack into the control and command systems. Everything quiet and dead inside the ring ship. Everything abandoned in place. The cutter nosing into the docking garage, its crew disembarking, scattering through Pabuji’s Gift, searching for secret files of forbidden knowledge, and ambushed one by one by manikins, by the djinn . . .