Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (43 page)

Riyya snatched the spanner from the air as she passed. It was as long as her forearm, and the shift in her centre of mass spun her against the wall. She let go of the spanner as she tried to
steady herself, and Rav’s son caught it and flicked it away down the corridor.

‘What I am supposed to do when we meet the hijackers?’ Riyya said. ‘Charm them into submission?’

‘You will stay behind me while Hari and I deal with the situation,’ Rav’s son said.

They were only lightly armed. Rav had preferred to use his wits to get himself out of trouble, and his teeth and claws if talk and charm failed.
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’s maker lacked templates for hand weapons; its armoury consisted of an ancient pistol that Rav’s son wore on his hip. Hari carried a cutting wand he’d found in a
maintenance kit, and the shuriken he’d programmed the maker to manufacture on the voyage between Ophir and Tannhauser Gate, using the template he’d worked up back on Themba.

He asked Rav’s son what his drones were telling him.

‘That the way ahead is clear.’

‘That’s convenient.’

‘Isn’t it?’

As they neared the intersection with the main throughway that ran around the ship, a manikin, naked in its grey plastic skin, drifted out to meet them. It wore the face of Deel Fertita. She
smiled at them and the manikin opened its right hand and scattered a drift of little black pips in the air. The infiltration drones.

Hari sent the family’s distress code through the common band and Rav’s son fired his pistol, snap snap, and the manikin was knocked backwards and its chest burst open, spraying
shards of debris cased in little flames that flickered blue and yellow and snuffed out. Riyya drifted past, kicking and flailing as she tried to reach the wall, and Hari sensed a movement at his
back. A displacement of air. A shift in the shadowless light. Rav’s son must have sensed it, too. He turned with Hari, both of them somersaulting and planting gloved hands on the wall
quilting to steady themselves.

Manikins crowded the corridor. As Hari reached for his cutting wand they surged forward, moving so fast that Rav’s son managed to shoot no more than three before the rest swarmed over
them.

Stripped to their suit liners, manikins gripping their arms, manikins crowding ahead and behind, Hari and Riyya and Rav’s son were swept through corridors and
companionways to the omphalos, the heart of the section of the ship once given over to passengers. Sailing through the central shaft to a platform that jutted from the wall of architectural weave,
where a woman in an acid-yellow bodysuit was studying a clutch of windows. Eli Yong and a burly, black-bearded man slouched in sling chairs nearby.

Hari recognised the man at once. Nabhoj. His brother, Nabhoj.

Riyya was escorted to a sling chair; a manikin snapped tethers around the wrists and ankles of Rav’s son, tethering him to the platform. The Ardenist had been sedated, was curled up inside
the caul of his wings.

The woman gestured; the manikins dragged Hari towards her. She had the same pale skin and sharp, angular face as her sisters, her sister assassins. Her shock of black hair was brushed back and
stiffly lacquered into a hundred points.

‘Welcome home,’ she said.

Hari looked past her, looked at Nabhoj. He tried to speak, wet his lips, tried again. ‘Hello, brother. I wish I could say that it’s good to be home.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nabhoj said. ‘This is necessary.’

Hari saw a flash of movement in the corner of his eye. A boxy drone darting in, clamping a thin band around the top of his head. Something gross and irresistible shouldered through his thoughts.
His bios cut out; a window scrolled down in front of his face. It was black and infinitely deep, and a star twinkled in its centre, jittering around a fixed point with an engaging eccentricity. He
couldn’t look away, the star commanded his entire attention, and it was suddenly exploding towards him, a wavefront of searingly bright rapacious light . . .

When he came back to himself, the assassin was closing up windows one by one. He felt the functions of his bios begin to return, suppressed the urge to call out to the eidolon.

‘People keep doing this to me,’ he told the assassin. ‘It never ends well for them.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the assassin said. ‘We have Dr Gagarian’s files and we have you, and the files locked in your neural net. We have your friends and their ship,
too, and your brother will be of no help to you. You caused us a little trouble in the past, but now everything you are and everything you have belongs to us.’

‘They came through the hull,’ Eli Yong said, leaning forward in her sling chair, her voice sharpened by distress. ‘There was an explosion and a howling gale and I
couldn’t breathe, and a dozen manikins came crowding in. They shoved me in a box and told me they would expose me to vacuum if I didn’t give up the files. I won’t apologise. They
already had my cache, I was helpless, I didn’t have any choice. So I gave them the key and told them about the copy in the ship’s mind. I won’t apologise. They would have killed
me if I didn’t.’

‘Be grateful I didn’t kill all of you,’ the assassin said.

‘No more killing,’ Nabhoj said. ‘That was the agreement.’

Hari said to the assassin, ‘Where are your sisters?’

‘I need no help, as you can see.’

‘One of them, Deel Fertita, died here, on this ship. Two died on Themba, another died in Fei Shen. Two more killed themselves rather than surrender. Angley Li in Ophir; Ang Ap Zhang in
Tannhauser Gate. Are you the only one left?’

‘We are many,’ the assassin said, and turned to Nabhoj. ‘Your father’s backup is still in the boy’s neural net. We will unpack him and put him to the
question.’

Nabhoj said, ‘If you hadn’t trashed his viron, we could have restored him here.’

‘And if we did that, he would immediately attempt to take back the ship,’ the assassin said. ‘Given your unsatisfactory actions when we took control, there is a strong
probability that he would succeed.’

They stared at each other. Nabhoj was the first to look away. He said, ‘I will talk to my brother before you take him away.’

‘Talk, then,’ the assassin said, as if it meant nothing to her.

Nabhoj said, ‘I will talk with him alone.’

‘You’ll talk now or not at all,’ the assassin said.

‘This is a family matter,’ Nabhoj said, with a flash of his old authority.

He was dressed as usual in tan coveralls cinched by a utility belt. Sitting straight-backed in the embrace of his chair, elbows on knees, hands joined beneath his beard, hooded eyes gleaming
under tangled eyebrows.

Hari said, ‘I no longer have any family.’

‘Like you, I wish that things had taken a different course,’ Nabhoj said.

‘Wishes won’t bring back your dead,’ Hari said.

Nabhoj tried to stare him down. When Hari didn’t look away, Nabhoj said, ‘We did not know that it would lead here, Nabhomani and I. But we are where we are, and we cannot go back. We
must move forward. And we can do that together, Gajananvihari.’

‘You and Nabhomani have already done enough,’ Hari said.

‘We did what we had to do. Aakash was ruining our family, and he would not listen to reason.’

‘So you decided to kill him,’ Hari said.

‘No. No, no, that was never our intention,’ Nabhoj said. ‘We wanted only to depose him before he did more damage to our business. He was stuck, Gajananvihari. He was obsessed
with Dr Gagarian’s work. It had consumed him. It had driven him mad. You didn’t see it because you were too close to him. You lacked perspective and experience. And Agrata, well, Agrata
was always unquestioningly loyal. But we saw it, Nabhomani and I, and it was . . . so sad. So sad, so painful. Aakash thought he could revive the golden age of the Great Expansion. That’s
what he told you. That’s what he told us. That’s what he told himself. But he was wrong. The golden age is long gone. Nothing can bring it back. Our father was chasing a dream of past
glory, driving us in the wrong direction. We did what we had to do to save the family, and our business, and our ship.’

‘Aakash is gone. Agrata is dead. I almost died,’ Hari said. ‘And Nabhomani isn’t here, so I guess that he’s dead, too. And you tell me that you were trying to save
the family?’

Hanging above the platform, outstretched arms clamped in the iron grip of the two manikins, he was neither angry nor afraid, felt only a cold forensic pity. His brother was a prisoner too,
stripped of his competence and command, his potency. He had failed and he was trying to justify his failure, redefine it as an inescapable tragedy.

‘Nabhomani and I, we served the old man for almost fifty years,’ Nabhoj said. ‘We were loyal. We were faithful. We did everything asked of us. We agreed to allow Dr Gagarian
aboard. We agreed to help him with his research. But it was a bad decision. You know that. You know what happened. It was a bad decision. Two years passed. Our reserves of credit were almost gone.
We were losing the reputation we had cultivated over many years. And we had nothing to show for it. Nothing. Nabhomani and I endured the fiasco for longer than we should have done, out of misplaced
loyalty and respect for our father. We tried to persuade him to give up his obsession, but he would not listen to us. And when at last we realised that we could not persuade him to do the right
thing, we knew we had to act.’

‘You were too cowardly to do it yourself. You hired Deel Fertita and the reivers.’

‘They contacted us. When we put in at Porto Jeffre to pick up consumables and components for Dr Gagarian’s experiments, for those probes of his, Nabhomani was approached by a free
trader who told him that someone was interested in Dr Gagarian’s research.’

‘This free trader, she was a tanky, wasn’t she?’ Hari said. ‘She called herself Mr D.V. Mussa.’

‘I never met him. Or her. We started a conversation with the interested party, Nabhomani and I, and we came to an arrangement. We would give them Dr Gagarian and his partners; they would
give us control of the ship. We didn’t have the operating codes for the ship’s security, its reaction cannon and all the rest, and we didn’t have the expertise to neutralise any
of it. So we agreed to a plan that would allow experts to come aboard. People who could help us.’

‘You betrayed your family by making an agreement with these reivers, and then they betrayed you. It was their idea to head out to Jackson’s Reef, wasn’t it?’ Hari
said.

He’d been thinking about it ever since Khinda Wole had told him that Nabhomani had hired Deel Fertita and others. He was certain that he knew what had happened, but he wanted to hear
Nabhoj admit it.

‘We needed an excuse to bring specialists aboard,’ Nabhoj said. ‘Jackson’s Reef seemed as good a destination as any. It was a simple plan, but things went wrong. I admit
that things went badly wrong. The tick-tock fought back. Agrata and the old man fought back. We had cut the manikins and the drones and bots out of his control loop, but he found a way back inside
that we didn’t know about. Nabhomani was killed before I could trace it. And then I tried to find you, but you had escaped from the cargo hold. I had sent you there and locked it to keep you
safe, and you were gone, and so was Agrata.’

‘She rescued me. She saved my life, and she died trying to save the ship.’

‘I tried to keep both of you out of harm’s way while we dealt with the machines and the security systems,’ Nabhoj said. ‘But it did not work out.’

‘You didn’t try to keep Agrata “out of harm’s way”. You killed her.’

‘Not me.’

‘If not you, then your friend here, or one of her sisters. Don’t try to tell me that makes a difference. Because it doesn’t.’

‘She wouldn’t surrender. She killed Deel Fertita and two of the reivers, and she refused to surrender.’

‘Did she know? Did she know what you and Nabhomani did, before she died? Before she was murdered?’

Nabhoj opened his hands, palms up. A kind of shrug, one of Aakash’s gestures.

Hari said, ‘It must have broken her heart when she realised that you had betrayed our father.’

Nabhoj looked away, looked back. He said, ‘Our hearts were already broken. Mine and Nabhomani’s . . .’

Hari was no longer listening. The eidolon had pushed into his bios, breathless and happy. Suddenly, he was in the commons and he was in other parts of the ship.

Riyya was saying to Nabhoj, ‘Do you know what you did to Dr Gagarian’s colleagues? To their families?’

‘You will stay out of this,’ Nabhoj told her.

‘I am already in it,’ Riyya said. ‘My father was murdered by one of this woman’s sisters. You’re responsible for that, too.’

‘You should have come alone, Gajananvihari,’ Nabhoj said. ‘You shouldn’t have involved other people in this.’

Hari made himself pay attention to his brother. He said, ‘They were already involved, thanks to you and Nabhomani.’

‘I have explained why that was necessary.’

‘And now strangers control our ship. And you’re their prisoner. Bait to lure me back. Was it your idea to send those messages, or theirs?’

‘The ship is mine.’

There was a familiar congestion in Nabhoj’s face, a force pushing through his impassive calm.

‘Prove it,’ Hari said. ‘If you’re in charge of the ship, order these manikins to free me.’

‘You’ll be freed once the files have been extracted from your neural net.’

‘Is that what they told you? You’re a fool if you believe them. They killed everyone else who had anything to do with Dr Gagarian’s research. They’ll kill us,
too.’

‘We have an agreement,’ Nabhoj said.

‘Of course we do,’ the assassin said. ‘Have you and your brother finished?’

‘Absolutely,’ Hari said.

The floating lights around the platform snapped off. In the sudden darkness, panels of emergency lighting kindled, dim red glows pulsing like hearth fires in the wiry thickets of the
architectural weave, amongst the shadows of rooms and platforms, pulsing faster and faster, strobing, spraying sparks into the dim air of the central shaft. Firefly constellations whirled and
thickened, coalesced into spidery figures with hinged jaws and blazing eyes that flung themselves at Nabhoj and the assassin.