Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (42 page)

The rings were not what they once had been. Centuries of human activity and interference had altered them. The Cassini Division, between the two major segments, the A and B Rings, was much
wider, and there were new gaps in the spiralling lanes of the rings. As the ship sailed inwards, Hari glimpsed black flecks orbiting within the bright ring segments: manufactories the size of
shepherd moons which had once swept up icy chunks of ring material and digested them and used their water and primordial soot to construct bubble gardens. A pharaonic project begun long before the
rise of the True Empire. And there were hundreds of gardens orbiting inside the rings, too. Most, like the gardens in the Belt, were dead. Yet some still lived, and the stars of their chandelier
lamps glittered in little constellations along the edges of ring segments and within gaps swept clean by the manufactories. Hari wondered if anyone lived there; wondered if anyone marked the
passing of
Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
.

And then the inner edge of the rings slipped past and they were falling towards the blurred butterscotch pastels that banded Saturn’s vast globe. The feathery swirls of an equatorial storm
lay dead ahead. The motors cut off again and for a few minutes they were in free fall, and scrambled for the acceleration couches that extruded from the floor of the big pod. Gravity returned, grew
steeper and steeper as the aerobraking manoeuvre converted the kinetic energy of the ship’s excess velocity to heat. Windows showed a shell of ionised gases flaring from rose to white,
incandescent flecks of fullerene foam tumbling away from the heat shield, as
Brighter than Creation’s Dark
scratched a thin bright chord across the outer edge of the planet’s
deep ocean of hydrogen and helium. Slowing, slowing, slowing . . . and at last its motors fired up to drive it above the atmosphere and out across the rings towards apogee, a hundred and seventy
thousand kilometres distant, out beyond the orbit of Titan.

Hari and Riyya shared a meal and searched for the Saints’ cutter. It hadn’t been able to copy the aerobraking manoeuvre, had instead shot past Saturn, decelerating hard. Riyya
spotted its bright star far beyond the little constellation of the seraphs, which floated above the apex of the ring-arch.

Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
swung around the night side of the gas giant. The pale, shrunken sun dawned beyond the sweep of the rings and the seraphs lay ahead. Blossoms of
filmy veils hundreds of kilometres long, insubstantial and beautiful, funnelling out from the dark stars of their information horizons, where minds vastened beyond all human measure were rooted in
boundless arrays of knotted and linked optical vortices. Standing waves twisted and non-linearly modulated around fundamental solitons that, according to some philosophers and the beliefs of many
cults and sects, tunnelled into other universes where exotic physics supported supernal forms of intelligence.

Five hundred years ago, at the height of its pomp, the True Empire had declared war on the seraphs. They were the final enemy, the last redoubt of unconquered and uncurbed posthuman
intelligence. They had to be eradicated. A battle fleet matched orbit with them, bombarded them with hordes of djinns, blitzed them with fusion pinch bombs, raked them with exotic particle beams.
One seraph was destroyed; the rest retaliated. Djinns emerged in the nervous systems of every ship and drone in the fleet, fired up their motors, and sent them hurtling out of orbit on random
trajectories. Many plunged into Saturn, or shot across the plane of the rings and were torn apart by impacts with icy bolides. The rest drove outwards until the reaction mass in their tanks was
exhausted, flying beyond the orbit of Neptune, beyond the Kuiper belt, beyond the bow shock of the sun’s heliosphere, dead ships crewed by the dead, dwindling into the outer dark of
interstellar space.

A little over seventy minutes after the battle fleet was scattered, Earth’s day side dimmed. A warp or twist in the fabric of space-time had appeared beyond the orbit of the Moon,
absorbing fifty per cent of the sunlight that passed through it. Earth lay in the cone of its shadow. The Long Twilight had begun. After two years, most of Earth’s cities had been destroyed
by food riots and insurrection, and suzerains and scions were fighting each other for control of Mars and the Belt and the moons of the outer planets. After ten years, as ice marched out from
Earth’s poles, the True Empire fell; weakened by civil war and massive and futile efforts to re-engineer Earth’s global climate, it was unable to resist a ragged alliance of posthumans,
reivers, and rebel baseliners. After fifty years, with much of Earth mantled in snow and ice and ninety per cent of its population dead, the sunshade warp vanished.

Earth was still locked in a new ice age. The seraphs appeared to be unchanged. They occasionally swatted a drone or ship that approached too close, but otherwise seemed indifferent to human
affairs, and to the prayers and petitions of their flock of followers.

As
Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
swept past them, maintaining a respectable distance, Hari opened a window, centred it, zoomed in. He wasn’t interested in the seraphs, but
in their followers. Little stars brightened, resolved into the cylinders and cones and discs of ships and orbital platforms, fled beyond the margins of the window. At last, only one was left. A
tiny twisted ring:
Pabuji’s Gift
.

Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
sidled through the scattered cone of supplicants amidst a flurry of chatter and crosstalk. Rav’s son answered direct
enquiries with a bland statement about a resupply mission, fended off several attempts to probe his ship, matched
Pabuji’s Gift
’s orbital velocity and her slow rotation. The
two ships turning like partners in a dance, just a kilometre apart. The ring ship’s hatches were shut. Its running lights were dead and its beacon gave out only its false identity; it did not
respond to pings or to family code.

After Rav’s son had tried and failed to detect any movement inside it, Hari explained that its paint job reflected radar, microwaves and neutron backscattering.

‘My father made her combat-ready because we worked in remote and lonely places,’ he said.

And it hadn’t made any difference, in the end, because they’d been betrayed from within.

‘Sketch the internal layout,’ Rav’s son said. ‘I can’t resolve any detail.’

Hari pulled down a window and captured an image of the ship and quickly limned the main corridors, the cargo spaces, the levels and partitions in the crew and passenger quarters. Rav’s son
examined the diagram, asked questions, agreed that the service airlock next to the cargo hatches would be the best entry point.

‘I’ll wait here,’ Eli Yong said. ‘I have no experience of free fall. I’ve never even worn a pressure suit.’

Rav’s son studied her for a few moments, then said, ‘Work on Dr Gagarian’s files. The ship’s systems are locked, and I’ll know if you try to open them.’

‘I wouldn’t know where to begin,’ Eli Yong said.

‘I hope not,’ Rav’s son said, and flared his wings and smiled a sharp-toothed smile.

Eli Yong almost managed not to flinch. She drew on her dignity and said, ‘Suppose the worst happens? Suppose you don’t come back?’

‘You think I care about what happens after I die?’

They crossed to
Pabuji’s Gift
on two broomstick scooters. Riyya rode with Rav’s son; Hari rode solo, carrying his book inside his p-suit. He hadn’t
told anyone what it contained, or how he planned to use it. He still hadn’t told anyone that one of his brothers had collaborated with the assassins, either.

Family secrets. Family business.

He studied the ring ship’s familiar contours and landmarks as they grew closer. Spars and tethers anchoring the motor pod in the centre of the ring ship’s Möbius strip. Cubical
modules and domes of various sizes scattered over the surface. The two big rectangular hatches of the starboard garages. The cluster of dish antennae where he’d done his first work on the
ship’s skin, helping Nabhoj swap out a frozen servo. The workshop blister where he’d assembled much of Dr Gagarian’s experimental apparatus. The hatch for the garage that housed
his utility pod,
09 Chaju
, a tough little unit with pairs of articulated arms either side of the diamond blister of its canopy. The hours he’d spent in the couch that took up most of
the pod’s cramped cabin, ferrying and assembling components, welding . . .

Everything looked the same. Everything had changed.

No one challenged them as he led Rav’s son and Riyya towards the inner surface of the ship, opposite the control and command tower. He brought his broomstick to a halt with a little
flourish and shot anchoring tethers fore and aft and without waiting for word from the others kicked away from it, caught a grab rail next to a small square hatchway, popped the cover of the manual
controls, and threw the power switches. He felt a brief vibration through his gloves. Silently, smoothly, the airlock’s outer hatch slid back and lights flicked on inside.

The three of them made a tight fit. The outer hatch closed; the lock pressurised with a hiss that grew in volume and cut off with a sharp crack; the inner hatch opened on a spherical staging
area. As soon as he was inside, Hari attempted to access the ship’s control systems and the family commons, and wasn’t surprised to discover that the codes had been changed. The
passenger commons was down, too, but he was able to force a connection between his p-suit’s comms and the little mind of the airlock.

He told Rav’s son he was shut out of the ship’s systems, said that he would need to reach the access point to perform a manual reset.

‘Where is this access point?’

‘In the command and control tower.’

‘Where any hijackers are most likely to be.’

Rav’s son’s stare was sharp and vivid behind the visor of his helmet. Hari wondered for the fifth or tenth time if the Ardenist suspected that he was withholding information.

‘If there are any hijackers on board, I expect they will be coming to greet us,’ Hari said. ‘We should find them before they find us.’

‘Wait here,’ Rav’s son said, and kicked off across the staging area, falling neatly through the hatch on the far side.

Hari called up the eidolon, told her it was time to get to work. ‘Try to keep the djinn quiet until I ask you for help.’

The eidolon said that she would do her best. ‘It is good to be home, Gajananvihari.’

She had claimed that she did not know when or how a limited copy of herself had been ported into the book, had become flustered and sulky whenever Hari pressed her about it. She didn’t
know how a copy of the djinn, also much reduced, had been ported into the book either. Hari suspected that the original in his neural net had been responsible, and was using the eidolon as an
interface, as it had used other machine intelligences to defend him elsewhere. He also suspected that the djinn had made the copy long before he’d escaped from Themba. It had mostly remained
dormant, escaping detection by the commissars in Fei Shen and the tick-tock matriarch, but Hari believed that it had manifested itself at least once: after he’d left the book with the ascetic
hermit in Ophir, it had frightened the man into throwing the book away, so Hari would retrieve it.

The eidolon hadn’t been able to tell him if the copy of the djinn had influenced the book’s mind, whether it had chosen the stories he’d read, but she had assured him that it
would help him take back the ship. He had broken the procedure down into a series of steps and constructed a simple virtual model, and he and the eidolon had rehearsed what needed to be done a
score of times. The eidolon had always been dutiful and compliant, but despite her assurances Hari did not trust the djinn. It was his father’s agent, after all. Some of its objectives
coincided with his; some, he suspected, did not.

Now he said, ‘This isn’t like the time on Themba, with the drone. Or the time I was being held prisoner by the skull feeders. I’m in no immediate danger. And I may be able to
take back control of the ship manually. The best way of protecting me is to stay in the background until I ask you for help. And then – and only then – to do everything I told you to
do, in the order we agreed.’

‘We both understand,’ the eidolon said.

‘I can’t access the commons, so I’ll have to port you into the airlock’s mind. After that, you’ll have to do a point-to-point migration. Leave a link in the
airlock’s comms node. Listen out on the common band.’

‘As we rehearsed.’

‘Yes. Exactly as we rehearsed,’ Hari said, and opened the channel.

‘We will not fail you,’ the eidolon said, and then she was gone.

Riyya asked if he was all right; he told her that he had been trying to find a way into the ship’s systems. She hadn’t been privy to his conversation with the eidolon, and he hoped
that Rav’s son hadn’t been able to eavesdrop either.

She said, ‘You really aren’t going to tell me what you’re going to do, are you?’

Hari was watching the data flow through his comms as the copies of the eidolon and the djinn migrated from the book to the airlock’s mind. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to
do until I find out what I need to do,’ he said.

‘And I was hoping for some kind of plan.’

Hari liked the way she said it. Trying to keep it light, trying to pretend that taking back the ship was a harmless game. He felt a pang, a little pinch of guilt and sorrow, hoped that
she’d forgive him.

Rav’s son returned and said that he had released a swarm of drones but so far hadn’t found any trace of activity. ‘It may not mean anything. The internal walls and bulkheads
are as opaque as the hull. We’ll have to hunt down any hijackers in the old way.’

The idea seemed to please him. He was his father’s son, all right.

They kept their suits sealed as they sculled along the curve of the corridor. Familiar scuffed, off-white wall quilting. Familiar insets glowing with soft light. But here was a long scorch mark;
there was a rachet spanner slowly turning in mid-air . . .