Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (16 page)

Hari tried to focus through the drowsy haze of Taqi Koothvar’s patches. ‘They got inside my head, and everything stopped. The song they were singing, the drums, the lights. I saw the
eidolon. The eidolon of my p-suit. I saw that woman, too. She looked like a demon. Like she was made out of knives. And then the djinn appeared.’

‘You reached out to this eidolon, or it reached out to you,’ Rav said. ‘It penetrated the skull feeders’ network, and sent a djinn to help you.’

‘It claims that it has been weaponised,’ Hari said.

Kinson Ib Kana’s book and the flask containing Dr Gagarian’s head lay next to the dead woman. Rav stooped and picked them up, then plucked something else from the moss and showed it
to Hari. A slim, silvery drone the length of his little finger.

‘Is this one of the skull feeders’ drones?’

‘They were smaller,’ Hari said. ‘Like little white balls.’

Rav thought for a moment, weighing the drone in his palm.

‘I think I know what went down here,’ he said. ‘The skull feeders wanted to get inside the tick-tock’s head. They tried and failed to unlock it, and then they opened you
up, looking for a key or a code. And while they were busy with you, the hijacker took her chance and knocked them out. She probably used this drone to attack their network. Their minds were linked
together. When the network went down, so did they. That gave you the chance to contact your p-suit, its eidolon dealt with the hijacker, and then it called me. That’s how we found you.
Someone or something sent me the coordinates of this place. Have I got it right or have I got it right?’

‘More or less.’ Hari remembered the eidolon, turning towards him in the virtual room. But she hadn’t thrown the skull feeders’ drones at the hijacker. The djinn had
scooped them up. The djinn with the face of his father . . .

‘You have some serious protection, youngblood,’ Rav said. ‘I shall have to mind my manners.’

‘How long has it been?’ Hari said. ‘How long since they took me?’

‘A night and a day,’ Rav said. ‘We have to get off this rock before the commissars find out what happened here.’

‘It was self-defence,’ Taqi Koothvar said.

‘The commissars might not see it like that,’ Rav said. ‘Especially as two of the skull feeders are their bosses.’

Taqi Koothvar helped Hari into a white coat and sat him in the middle of the little boat. He clutched the flask and the book to his chest while the neuter and Rav poled through
channels of black water, between the pale islands.

They beached the boat at the entrance to the flooded chamber and walked down a long corridor lit by dabs of sharp blue phosphorescence, its stone walls everywhere carved with diagrams and crude
drawings and epithets in languages long forgotten. Taqi Koothvar pointed to runes carved at the bases of the walls. Made by rats, yo said. The floor was thick with dust that formed little drifts
and dunes, marked with footprints and the tracks of animals. A disabled bot lay on its back, a human-shaped shell of corroded plastic, memory clay inside its skull gone to white dust that seeped
from empty eye sockets. Hari felt the age of the city, the crushing weight of its history.

They reached an intersection and turned left, following a narrow, steeply sloping passage. Presently, Hari’s bios registered Fei Shen’s commons, and soon afterwards the three of them
emerged through a small hatch into one of the hutongs that ran between the avenues, this one lined with single-storey flat-roofed modules – buildings, homes – painted in bright primary
colours. Taqi Koothvar led Hari and Rav to the station, and they rode a capsule that dropped them through the core of Fei Shen’s rock to the docks on the far side. Rav was impatient to get
away, but Hari insisted on retrieving his p-suit.

In the airy hub of the public storerooms, a slender bot checked Hari’s ID, stalked away down one of the corridors, and returned some five minutes later, pushing a wheeled frame in which
the scuffed, dust-stained p-suit hung like a flayed trophy.

The eidolon drifted behind the bot, unseen by any but Hari.

Rav and Hari settled their bills for use of the city’s services, and Rav slung the p-suit over his shoulder and picked up the helmet and started towards the exit, followed by Hari and Taqi
Koothvar, and the eidolon. They hadn’t gone more than ten steps when the bot called out. Hari turned, expected to see a posse of commissars hurrying towards them, or a flock of drones
vectoring in with weapon-pods everted. In the screen set in the bot’s chest, Ma Sakitei smiled at him.

‘You are leaving. I am sorry to see it.’

Hari thanked her for her help and hospitality. He felt a freezing apprehension, wondered if she knew about the skull feeders, if she was a friend or sympathiser.

‘We feel somewhat used,’ Ma Sakitei said.

‘I didn’t mean to bring trouble here.’

‘We think you knew exactly what you were doing.’

‘I won’t forget your kindness.’

‘May we give you some advice?’

‘Of course.’

‘You believe the Ardenist can help you. You are wrong.’

‘Have I broken any laws?’ Rav said.

‘We don’t know,’ Ma Sakitei said. ‘Have you?’

‘I owe this city nothing,’ Rav said. ‘The youngblood owes nothing. We are free to go.’

‘There is no need to leave,’ Ma Sakitei told Hari. ‘Your enemies cannot touch you here. And we can help you find out who they are. We can help you in many ways.’

‘You told me to look for justice elsewhere,’ Hari said. ‘That’s what I’m doing.’

‘We have been investigating your story, and the circumstances of the hijack of your family’s ship,’ Ma Sakitei said. ‘We can be useful to you, if you let us. And you can
help us.’

Hari said, ‘What did you find?’

And Rav stepped up and struck the bot’s cluster of sensors with the tips of his fingers, once, twice. It froze in mid-gesture, and its screen went dark.

‘She’s trying to delay you until the commissars get here,’ Rav told Hari. ‘Time to go.’

In other parts of the large space bots turned from conversations with their clients, stepped forward from niches. Ma Sakitei’s face floated in their chest-screens. Her voice called
Hari’s name in an overlapping chorus.

‘Run,’ Rav said.

They ran. Hari in his borrowed white coat, the cryoflask slung over his shoulder, Taqi Koothvar in yo’s bright silks, Rav forbiddingly tall and massive, shouldering past a bot when it
tried to intercept Hari, sending it spinning away.

At the jetty to Rav’s ship, Hari told Taqi Koothvar that he needed one last favour, asked if yo would witness an agreement between him and Rav.

‘What agreement is this?’ Rav said.

Hari took a breath and said, ‘That in exchange for the help you have given me in the past, and for whatever help you may give me in the future, you will receive a share in any profits
realisable on the research of Dr Gagarian, those profits to be divided equally between you, any surviving members of my family, including myself, and any living relatives of Dr Gagarian.’

He had composed this on the short ride to the docks, and hoped that Nabhomani would have approved.

Rav laughed. ‘You traders probably tried to monetise the cosmic egg before it hatched. Suppose I don’t agree? Will you refuse to come with me?’

‘I want to make sure you get your fair share. Especially if you survive this and I don’t. Will you swear to uphold the agreement?’

Rav shrugged with a leathery rustle. ‘Why not?’

‘I so swear,’ Hari told Taqi Koothvar.

‘And I so witness,’ the neuter said.

Rav said, ‘Are we done?’

Hari asked Taqi Koothvar if yo would be all right.

‘Of course. I have done no more than help one of my guests.’

‘I meant the skull feeders.’

‘I doubt that they would want to draw attention to themselves and their crimes. And my people are not without resources. We ruled an empire once.’ Taqi Koothvar paused, then said,
‘Give me your hands.’

The neuter’s grip was hot and surprisingly strong. Yo looked into Hari’s eyes and after a moment yo’s warm brown gaze went out of focus and yo said, ‘When people go
looking for something, Gajananvihari Pilot, they often find something else.’

‘Is that one of your predictions,’ Rav said, ‘or a scrap of folk wisdom?’

Taqi Koothvar let go of Hari’s hands and smoothed the blue-black wave of yo’s hair with an elegant gesture. ‘It is what it is.’

‘Any words of advice for me?’ Rav said.

Taqi Koothvar smiled. ‘Would you listen to them?’

‘Good point,’ Rav said, and pushed Hari forward, and then they were running again, bounding towards the ship.

PART THREE

THE CAVES OF STEEL

Rav claimed that his ship,
Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
, was named after an ancient blasphemy. He also said that he’d won it in a dice game while riding
the elevator from Phobos down to the surface of Mars, and that he’d had to dispatch three reivers who’d been hired by the unlucky former owner to stop him taking possession of his
prize. It was an old design: a froth of spherical pods, all different sizes, clustered around a motor and utility shaft. Rav and his son lived in the largest pod, a mostly empty, unpartitioned
volume with padded walls; the others were used to store cargo or accommodate passengers.

Ardenists were exclusively male. They quickened their sons from templates derived from artificial recombinations of their own genome and that of a temporary or permanent partner, and treated
them as bonded servants. Rav’s nameless son was a slight, austere person about Hari’s size who deferred completely to his father and had been arrested in prepubescence: he would not
achieve maturity until Rav died. Whenever Hari tried to talk to him, he’d shrug and turn away. Hunch into himself, as if trying to minimise the space he occupied. He hardly ever spoke, and
when he did he always glanced at his father for permission. Saying once that he did not need to be thanked for carrying out his usual tasks. Saying another time that he was older than Hari thought
he was, and could take care of himself.

‘Oh, he’s old, all right,’ Rav said. ‘A lot older than you, youngblood. But he still has a lot to learn. I worry, sometimes, that he isn’t bright enough or tough
enough to survive on his own after I’m gone.’

The ship cut a long chord across the inner belt, swinging past a single waypoint, a tiny uninhabited rubble pile crushed down to a sphere by the string injected into its centre to deepen its
gravity well. Part of an ancient network constructed by Trues, using technology stolen from one of the posthuman clades they had conquered, to facilitate travel throughout the Belt.

Plugged into the ship’s mind, Hari watched the insignificant fleck of the waypoint brighten and swell into a tiny crescent that rushed at the ship and swung beneath its keel. The rigid
patterns of the stars swung too, as the ship gained a fraction of the waypoint’s orbital energy from the slingshot encounter, increasing its velocity and altering its trajectory. Heading for
the world-city Ophir, the Caves of Steel.

It had been Rav’s idea to go to Ophir. Hari had wanted to light out for Tannhauser Gate, to find out all he could about Deel Fertita and the murders of Rember Wole and Worden Hanburanaman,
and to attempt to make contact with the hijackers through one of the agents who arbitrated ransom deals for hostages, ships and cargoes seized by dacoit crews. And if the hijackers refused to talk
to him, or demanded a price he couldn’t pay, he would round up a crew of reivers willing to chase after
Pabuji’s Gift
and take her back by main force.

But Rav had other plans. Tannhauser Gate was presently on the far side of the sun, he said; Ophir was much closer. A diversion that would cost them only a few days. Hari could make himself known
to his uncle, who might be able to give him all the help he needed. He could investigate the murder of Salx Minnot Flores. And Rav knew a tick-tock matriarch who lived in Ophir. If she
couldn’t crack open Dr Gagarian’s files and find out what they contained, he said, no one could.

Hari suspected that the Ardenist’s interest in his plight would end once he had a copy of Dr Gagarian’s research, but knew that there was no point trying to argue with him. It was
Rav’s ship, after all. For the first time in his life, Hari was a passenger.

Even with the gravity-assist manoeuvre, it took fifteen days to reach Ophir. Hari read a long story he found in Kinson Ib Kana’s book, a tragic saga about a bloody civil war between scions
of a True suzerain who decided to hand over power to his youngest daughter. Rav examined what was left of the drone he’d taken from the dead woman, Deel Fertita’s sister, and determined
that it had been purchased in Fei Shen and modified with black-market combat algorithms. The woman’s genome, read off a skin scraping, didn’t yield a match on any of the databases he
was able to consult, but that wasn’t surprising.

‘Most cities and settlements keep the records of their citizens locked, and public catalogues of felons and fanatics are partial and corrupted. She isn’t on any of the watch lists,
and neither are any of her close relatives, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t a Saint. She could be a fresh recruit. A clean skin. Or someone operating in deep cover.’

Hari knew that it would be a waste of time to point out that the dead woman and her sisters were most likely dacoits. Most of the stories Rav told about his adventures and escapades were either
exaggerations or outright fabrications, but his obsession with the Saints seemed genuine. One of the first things he’d done, after they’d left Fei Shen, was show Hari a saga he’d
obtained from a disaffected member of the cult, depicting the mythic origins of its leader, Levi. A rarity that only a few outsiders had seen. Essential background information for their joint
mission.

According to the saga, Levi had been born in a remote agricultural garden inhabited by a humble sect, the Congregation of the Children of the True Christ, whose ancestors had quit Earth more
than a thousand years ago. They herded skysheep and tended orchards and platform farms. They cultivated vacuum organisms on the small rock which the garden orbited. They had no makers, no QIs or
virons. They maintained the ancient machineries that regulated the ecosystem of their garden and repaired their handbuilt pressure suits and scooters, but otherwise rejected every kind of
technology.