Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (21 page)

Hari saw all this without really seeing it. The hijackers had found him. They had reached out to him and shown him a nightmare. A crude threat meant to shock and intimidate him. And he was
shocked. Shocked, appalled, angry. But he had to get past his shock and anger. He had to work out what he should do.

He stared out of the port. He paced around the room. At last he called Rav, who answered at once.

Hari said, ‘The hijackers sent a message.’

‘Are you sure it’s from them?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘What did it say?’

‘I have a confession to make. I talked to the Saints.’

‘I know.’

‘You know?’

‘Always assume that I know everything, youngblood. You finally realised that the Saints were behind the hijack, and decided to approach them directly. You could have tried to send a
message to their leaders, but you weren’t sure how to go about it, and besides, your family are traders. You prefer to negotiate face to face. The Saints have a school in Down Town, and
that’s where you went while I was talking with Gun Ako Akoi. You thought that I was making a deal that would be to my advantage, so you decided to make a deal that would be to
your
advantage, by offering to exchange the tick-tock’s head for your family and your ship. The Saints you talked to denied that they had anything to do with the hijack. And they were probably
telling the truth. They’re locals, recruiting for a cause they don’t fully understand. But they contacted their superiors, the message went up the command chain, just as you hoped it
would, and now you’ve received a reply. Am I right, or am I right?’

‘You had someone follow me, didn’t you? Or wait – you talked to the Saints too.’

‘If I ever talk to any of the Saints, it wouldn’t be a cosy little chat about mutual acquaintances. And I didn’t have you followed. I worked it out from basic
principles.’

‘It must be nice, always being right,’ Hari said.

‘Actually, it’s usually disappointing,’ Rav said. ‘Time and again, I hope people aren’t going to do the obvious thing. Time and again, they let me down.’

‘Although I’m still not entirely certain that it
was
the Saints,’ Hari said. ‘Despite the timing.’

‘Who else would it be? You pushed them. They pushed back. I suppose they made some kind of threat or ultimatum. Because if they’d agreed to your terms, you would have taken that head
straight to the school in Down Town.’

‘Do you want to see the message, or do you want to assume that you already know what it is?’

‘Show me. Isn’t that why you called?’

Hari sent the short clip to Rav.

They watched it together.

It began without introduction or overture. Here was Nabhoj, naked, looking past the viewpoint with an uncertain expression, as if waiting for instruction. A stocky man with a small pot belly and
curls of black hair on his chest. Standing in front of a wall of rough dark rock, shivering slightly as he spoke.

This time around, Hari felt a slow burn of sympathetic humiliation. Nabhoj was a quiet, serious man. Long on thought, short on words, as Nabhomani liked to say. Brooding in the tower of the
command and control module like some ruined prince. Formidable. Minatory. And shy, this was something Hari had realised only recently, from the new perspective of his exile. Nabhoj had avoided
ordinary human discourse as much as possible because he was shy. But now he was stripped of his dignity, a naked shivering forked creature with his black hair loose in lank strings about his
shoulders. Halting, stumbling, as he recited what was clearly a prepared script. Licking his lips, once losing the thread of a sentence and starting over. Asking Hari to do the right thing. Telling
him that he must forget about heroics and tricks. Telling him that he was responsible for the lives of everyone he held dear. That there was only one right thing to do; only one way that things
would come out right.

‘You should not have run to Ophir. There is no help for you there. The Ardenist cannot help you. Tamonash Pilot cannot help you. There is no safety in his house. Give up the head of Dr
Gagarian. Deposit it in a safe place. You will be contacted again, and you will tell them where they can find the head. If you do that, they will let us go. You have my word on that, Gajananvihari.
You know that I do not lie. You know how precious the truth is to me. And you know what they can do. Give up the head. Do it straight away. Do it—’

The abrupt ending of the clip was a blow to the heart.

Rav said, ‘It raises several questions. The first and most important is this: was that really your brother?’

Hari said, ‘I wondered about that too. The two women who tracked me down, on Themba, tried to trick me with an eidolon of Agrata. It’s possible that this could be more of the
same.’

‘But you don’t think so.’

‘Agrata told me that she thought that Nabhoj had been killed by the hijackers. But she wasn’t certain. She couldn’t contact him, or Nabhomani. Their bioses were down. But she
hadn’t seen them. She hadn’t seen their bodies . . .’

‘It was clever, implying that others of your family are still alive. And the ending, that was also a nice touch. Melodramatic, but effective.’

‘I have to assume that it was him. That he’s alive. But don’t worry, I am not going to do anything rash.’

‘Except you already did. No need to apologise, by the way,’ Rav said. ‘I already factored it into my plans. And I have to admit that I’m disappointed that they responded
with this cheap little threat. I was hoping that they would try to snatch you, force you to retrieve the head from the bonded store. Then we could have had some real fun.’

‘They are trying to panic me. Trying to make me do something foolish. To give them what they want without talking to them, without negotiating. Well, I won’t,’ Hari said.

His anger was back. The unreasoning anger that had possessed him during his first days of exile on Themba. Prowling the basement of his mind. Hot and black and raw with grief and fear.

Rav said, ‘Have you told your uncle about this?’

‘Not yet.’

‘His attempts to help you haven’t amounted to much so far,’ Rav said. ‘Send him a message, or don’t, but come and meet me right away. We’ll take a quick look
at the dead philosopher’s stuff, and then we’ll knock the dust of this rotten little town from our wings.’

The government store was a dimly lit grey cube cluttered with machines and furniture and racks and crates of sooty, scorched kibble. The stink of char sharp in the dry chill
air. Everything tagged with dense blocks of police code.

The unsmiling police inspector explained that Salx Minnot Flores’ possessions were being stored there because a complex dispute about the terms of his will had not yet been resolved, told
Hari and Rav that they were welcome to look around but must not touch anything.

Rav leaned against the wall, picking at his teeth with a bamboo splinter, while Hari walked up and down. The breakfast he’d eaten at a hawker’s cart sat heavily in his stomach. He
found it hard to concentrate. He kept seeing moments from the hijackers’ message. His brother, naked, pleading, humiliated.

There was a maker, racks of machine parts, assemblies of what might have been guns or telescopes, elaborate arrangements of mirrors. Some of it vaguely resembled the apparatus Hari had built for
Dr Gagarian, but on a much smaller scale. All of it was broken and blistered and smoke-blackened. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it had been designed to probe or measure.

There were crates of burned debris. Carbonised shards and slabs. Ashy fragments. There was a table of heat-warped, piebald artefacts that mites had been reconstructing, millimetre by millimetre,
molecule by molecule, when the murder investigation had been abandoned.

‘That doohickey inside the Faraday cage is faintly interesting,’ Rav said. ‘Looks very much like some kind of neural inducer.’

He pushed away from the wall and stalked past a stack of storage crates and pulled open the door of a wire-mesh booth.

The inspector reminded him that he was forbidden to touch anything. Rav ignored her, peering at the chair and the spidery apparatus hung over it, looking over his shoulder at Hari, saying that
this looked very much like the kind of thing that would let you play with your own brain.

‘I told you to leave the stuff alone,’ the inspector said.

‘And I decided to ignore you,’ Rav said. ‘We bribed you for access, so you have no way to back up your authority.’

‘Think again,’ the inspector said, and reached inside a slit in her scarlet uniform jacket.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Rav said.

He held up her slug pistol, dangling from the little finger of his left hand by its trigger-guard, then leaned into the booth and made an adjustment to the spidery apparatus. There was a low,
deep hum as something powered up.

The inspector said that he was in serious trouble.

Rav showed his teeth. ‘Oh, and who are you going to tell?’

Hari said, ‘Let me try it. Let me see what it does.’

‘I think we should all try it,’ Rav said, and hooked his claws in the mesh roof of the booth and peeled it back, then reached inside again.

The inspector started towards the Ardenist and there was a soundless flash of white light inside Hari’s head. It consumed everything. Thought, sight, everything. And then he was back in
the dim, cluttered cube.

The inspector had fallen to her knees. She pushed to her feet and glared up at Rav and told him to have intercourse with his grandmother.

‘I never had a grandmother,’ Rav said.

Hari said, ‘I didn’t see a stick figure.’

‘Neither did I,’ Rav said. ‘Just the carrier wave.’

‘The white light.’

‘The white light.’

‘Right in the middle of my head.’

‘Right in the middle of everything.’

‘You’re meddling in things you do not understand,’ the inspector said.

‘Oh, I know exactly what I’m doing,’ Rav said. ‘And so did Salx Minnot Flores, as it turns out.’

‘It wasn’t much like the Bright Moment,’ Hari said, as he and Rav walked towards the elevators to the docks.

‘What would you know about the Bright Moment, youngblood?’ Rav said.

‘I’ve experienced simulations.’

‘I very much doubt that they were much like the Bright Moment, either. But it was impressive, in a way. And it was only a prototype. I wonder what the final version could do. A machine
built by a baseliner, capable of approximating a vision cast off by a posthuman intelligence at the moment of its vastening. Yes, I am impressed. How about you?’

‘I was impressed too. And frightened.’

‘Worth the price of admission, I think,’ Rav said. ‘And now we’ll get Gun Ako Akoi to open up your tick-tock philosopher’s head. We’ll find out about the work
of Dr Gagarian and the rest of that busy little crew, and then we’ll offer it to the Saints.’

‘Assuming the Saints sent that message,’ Hari said.

He was almost certain that they had. He wanted to believe that they had. It would make everything so much simpler. But a small margin of doubt remained, because the hijackers had been so very
careful to hide their identity.

‘Of course it was the Saints,’ Rav said. ‘If you can’t trust me, youngblood, at least try to believe that I know what I’m doing.’

It wasn’t just Rav’s size – his height and heft, the breadth of his wings – that made him so formidable. It wasn’t just his talons and his teeth. It was his
unassailable assurance. His bombproof self-confidence.

Hari said, ‘I’ll do my best.’

In the bonded store of Down Town’s elevator terminal, in the close confines of a privacy module, a storekeeper with golden fur and a severe manner confirmed Hari’s
identity and accepted a fee that bit a sizeable chunk out of what remained of his credit. Less than two minutes later, a bot delivered the cryoflask that contained Dr Gagarian’s head.

Outside, Rav watched as Hari examined the flask’s seal. ‘Few things are what they once were, in these debased times,’ the Ardenist said, ‘but you can still count on the
integrity and discretion of the bonded stores. There’s a story that one of the last of the True suzerains put his family in storage to save them from assassination. He was killed the next
day, but the storekeepers fought and defeated the mercenaries who came after his family. Their descendants are still living in storage, waiting for someone to pay a redemption fee that’s by
now so astronomical that the entire Solar System wouldn’t suffice as collateral.’

‘You have a story for every occasion,’ Hari said.

‘You don’t like my stories? They’re better than any you’ll find in that book of yours.’

‘When it comes to business, I prefer plain facts to fantasies.’

It was something his father sometimes said whenever Nabhomani’s reports of his negotiations and deals became especially florid.

‘To put it plainly,’ Rav said, ‘not even I could figure out a way to look inside that head while it was in store.’

Hari paid a public maker to spin a kitbag, so that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that he was carrying the cryoflask, and he and Rav caught a car travelling west, or antispinward,
along Ophir’s equatorial railway. According to Rav, they were heading towards a religious festival where the sect which owned the trinket coveted by Gun Ako Akoi was presently camped.

The car ran at a leisurely fifty kilometres per hour along a track that clung to the overhead. Hari and Rav had it to themselves. They sat in the nose like kings of the world, sweeping through
sector after sector, each separated from the next by a transparent bulkhead. A sea of white sand dunes. An intricate puzzle of lakes and forest. Thick, unbroken jungle. Old towns and palaces hung
from the overhead; newer settlements were scattered across the floor. Banyan patches, strings of half-buried blockhouses, clumps of flimsy shacks circled by defensive walls, villages straggling
around pele towers of various heights and degrees of ruin: remnants of the war games Trues had liked to play, great slaughters organised for the entertainment of jaded suzerains and optimates. One
tower, at the centre of a craggy canyonland, was as big as a town, the concentric rings of defences around its base broken and pitted by the wounds of an ancient bombardment and overgrown by trees
and a shawl of creepers from which a swirl of black birds rose as the car passed by high above, hurtling onwards around Ophir’s great curve, above towers and villages and towns and fields and
wilderness, above woods and fields, above stretches of deadland stripped to the fullerene strands of the world city’s rind.