Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (7 page)

Hari decided to call her bluff. ‘I can’t walk away from my family. But I can walk away from you. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to take the
gig you stole and leave you to strangle in your own waste heat.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ the woman said, and there was a red flash and something struck Hari and knocked him backwards. He flew a long way, bounced once, twice, ground and sky
wheeling past, and smashed into a clump of dark red wires and was caught there, dazed and breathless. After a little while, the p-suit’s eidolon bent over him, asking him if he was all right,
if he could remember his name, if he could at least talk.

‘She blew herself up,’ Hari said stupidly.

His head sang, and when he began to extract himself from the wires he discovered that he couldn’t move his left arm. Downslope, the spires stood quiet and still under the black sky.

‘I sustained no significant damage,’ the eidolon said, ‘but I’m afraid that the humerus of your left arm is fractured. I have numbed and set it, but it will require
further medical attention.’

‘I’m all right,’ Hari said.

‘I would have prevented her if I could,’ the eidolon said.

‘It was my mistake. I thought I could talk to her. I thought I could make a deal.’

‘She tried to kill you by killing herself. Why would she do that?’

‘Because she was a fanatic. Because she was no ordinary dacoit.’

The eidolon was silent for a few moments, as if processing this. Then she said, ‘What will you do now?’

‘I can’t stay here. I have to assume that she was telling the truth. That her sisters are on their way.’

‘How can you leave? The gig is still in orbit. And so is the broomstick that the woman and her sister used to reach the surface. I will try to command it to return, but I cannot guarantee
that it will listen to me.’

‘I have a better idea,’ Hari said. He used his bios to send a brief command string, and pointed out the brief flicker of motor exhaust to the eidolon.

‘That is not the gig,’ the eidolon said. ‘I would know if you were flying the gig by wire.’

‘It’s the lifepod.’

‘You destroyed the lifepod.’

‘It flared off a couple of hundred grams of reaction mass through a safety valve, and ignited it with a brief pulse of its motor. As if it had been fatally damaged when I tried to escape.
We’ll use it to reach the gig.’

‘Do you think you can outrun her sisters?’

‘I’m going to try,’ Hari said.

Jackson’s Reef was a froth of bubble habitats wrapped around a shaped sliver of rock some ten kilometres long. Half its volume was ravaged, open to vacuum; the rest had
devolved to low-diversity, low-energy ecosystems dominated by tough, slow-growing chlorophytes, blue-green algae, and archaebacteria. There were hundreds of similar bodies within the Belt and
beyond; Jackson’s Reef was distinguished from all the others by its eccentric, long-period orbit.

It had once been the centre of the Golden Mean, a kingdom of gardens and settlements in the outer belt that had flourished several centuries before the rise of the True Empire. When they’d
been deposed by a vicious civil war, the last members of its ruling family had hastily converted their capital city into a multigeneration starship and aimed it at 61 Cygni, but its mass drivers
had failed before it could acquire solar escape velocity. It had become trapped in a cometary orbit with a period of more than six hundred years, taking it out above the plane of the ecliptic and
across the Kuiper belt to the edge of the Oort Cloud before swinging back towards the sun. Its original inhabitants were either dead or long gone by the time it first returned to the Belt. A crew
of rovers laid claim to it, tried and failed to revive its ruined biomes, abandoned the project. And now it was returning to the Belt for the second time, and Nabhomani and Nabhoj had devised a
plan to strip out salvageable machinery and artefacts, and mine what was left of its ecosystem for useful biologics and unique genomes.

Aakash surprised Hari and his brothers by making only token objections. But really, Nabhomani’s and Nabhoj’s case was more or less airtight. The family had spent more than two years
collaborating with Dr Gagarian, they were low on credit and the consumables required to make up for inefficiencies in the ship’s recycling systems, and their current course, cruising above
the plane of the ecliptic, meant that they were well placed to reach Jackson’s Reef with a minimal change in delta vee.

While four specialists recruited by the family’s broker in Tannhauser Gate zipped towards
Pabuji’s Gift
in a bottle rocket, Hari and his brothers readied the gigs and bots,
prepped refineries, separation tanks and mass chromatographs, grew up bacterial cultures and suspensions of halflife nematodes, surveyed the reef using a swarm of fast flyby drones, and planned a
schedule of work. Dr Gagarian kept to himself, analysing the results of his experiments and keeping watch on his chain of detectors. It was a busy, pleasant time.

The specialists arrived, unpacked their equipment, familiarised themselves with
Pabuji’s Gift
’s systems. The ship was making its final approach to the reef, and Hari was in
one of the storage bays, sourcing a replacement for a failed component in the motor of one of the gigs, when a brief tremor set tools and small machines and machine parts rocking and chiming in
their racks. The link between Hari’s bios and the ship’s commons fell over. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t talk to anyone else. And then he discovered that the
bay’s hatch had locked itself.

He thought at first that it was one of Nabhomani’s stupid pranks. His brother had locked him in, and now he had to figure out how to escape. He tried and failed to force the hatch to
respond to his commands, tried and failed to dig into the security shell that had sprung up around its stubborn little mind. Shouting at it was equally useless, although it relieved the sudden hot
pressure of his anger. He swam up and down the storage racks, looking for another way out and failing to find it, came back to the hatch, studied its mechanism, went to search for a couple of
tools.

He was dismantling the hydraulic latch when the hatch’s clamshell halves parted with a juddering groan, seizing up before they were fully open, and someone in a red pressure suit eeled
through the narrow gap.

It was Agrata. Her helmet hung on one hip, a fat cryoflask hung on the other. She gripped Hari’s hands in hers and drew him close and asked him if he was all right.

‘What happened?’

The old woman’s grim, haunted gaze frightened him. She smelled strongly of smoke.

‘We have been hijacked,’ she said, and told him that one of the members of the specialist crew had sabotaged the ship’s comms system and its mind, picted a clip showing a storm
of sparks sweeping out from the reef: sleds ridden by hijackers, a small fleet of drones and bots. They had swarmed through cargo hatches and airlocks, Agrata said, securing the ship module by
module, hunting down its occupants. Aakash’s viron had been infected by djinns and erased; she hadn’t been able to contact Nabhomani and Nabhoj. Their bioses were down. She believed
that they were dead, that she and Hari were the last of the family. They had lost control of the ship and were outnumbered and outgunned.

Shock blanked Hari’s mind. He asked several stupid questions. Who had locked him in? Why did she think that Nabhomani and Nabhoj were dead? How had they died? Where was Dr Gagarian?

Agrata gave him a stern and tender look that pierced him through and through. ‘You have to be ready to do a hard thing,’ she said.

Something was caught in Hari’s throat. ‘You want to surrender.’

‘I want you to follow me.’

The four-way junction outside was hazed by drifting layers of smoke. The pungent odour made Hari sneeze. He recoiled against the frame of the hatch, clung there, saw a body floating overhead. It
was one of the specialists, a thin pale man named Odd Samuelson. Slowly turning, arms and legs askew, a dark patch of blood seeping across the chest of his blue suit liner. One of the maintenance
bots hung close by. It was dead too.

‘Let’s go,’ Agrata said, and they arrowed through ripples of smoke and dove through a hatch into the long corridor that ran parallel to the hold where Hari assembled Dr
Gagarian’s experimental apparatus. In the airlock at the far end, Agrata fastened her helmet and helped Hari pull on and check the systems of an unfamiliar pressure suit that popped and
creaked as it adjusted to fit him. Its eidolon greeted him and cheerfully asked what he would like to do today. He ordered her to be quiet with absent-minded curtness. There was the quick vibration
of pumps, a brief flash of mist as moisture condensed from the last of the air, and the external hatch opened to raw vacuum and sunlight.

He chased Agrata around the ship’s ring. They flew from shadow to shadow as if playing a game of tig, pausing, looking all around, moving on. One of the storage bays was venting a plume of
vapour, but otherwise everything looked absolutely normal. Sunlight glared on the sides of modules, on stretches of hull. Hari’s blank shock was beginning to be coloured by fear and
excitement. He saw the irregular shape of the reef beyond the twist in the ring and the tower of the command and control module, then realised that something was wrong with the tower – its
skin was punctured and torn open in several places and a cloud of debris was expanding away from it . . .

Agrata grabbed his arm and pulled him into a scuttle hole. A hatch slammed shut, lights came on, air hissed as the lock pressurised. Agrata told Hari to keep his suit sealed, and he followed her
out into a small, red-lit, spherical space he’d never seen before: rows of small flatscreen panels set amongst quilted padding; three acceleration couches jutting from the walls.

It was the old emergency bridge, according to Agrata. She shucked her helmet, stuck a gloved hand in a slot in the wall, twisted something. A square hatch slid open beside her and she turned to
Hari and told him that it gave access to a lifepod, told what he had to do.

He refused, shocked and dismayed.

‘You want to fight the hijackers,’ Agrata said. ‘But it wouldn’t do any good. The security systems fell over. We were unable to implement internal defence protocols or
activate the reaction cannon. We lost control of manikins and bots and drones. Your father is gone. I believe that Nabhoj and Nabhomani are gone, too. The ship is lost. Pay attention! You have to
reach Tannhauser Gate. This lifepod will get you there, but it will take more than two hundred days – you’ll have to spend most of the trip in hibernation. When you arrive, you’ll
contact our broker and his partner. Rember Wole and Worden Hanburanaman. No, don’t ask questions. There’s no time. You will also take this with you.’

She unhooked the insulated flask, told Hari what was inside.

‘We were lucky. Lucky that you were working in a place where you could be isolated from the fighting. Lucky that I found Deel Fertita before she could finish cutting off Dr
Gagarian’s head.’

‘She was doing what? Why?’

Deel Fertita was a proteome specialist, one of the people the family’s broker had recruited to help the family strip Jackson’s Reef.

‘Deel Fertita and the others were in league with the hijackers. They sabotaged the security and comms systems, infected your father’s viron and the ship’s mind with djinns. And
Deel Fertita killed Dr Gagarian, and I killed her before she killed me,’ Agrata said flatly: a blunt statement of fact. ‘I killed her, and then I finished what she’d been doing.
One thing is clear. Dr Gagarian’s head is valuable to the hijackers. Its files must contain something they or their employer badly want. You will take it, use it to bargain for the freedom of
anyone left alive. And for the ship.’

‘What about you?’

Hari found it difficult to get the words past the obstruction in his throat.

‘The lifepod can carry only one person,’ Agrata said, ‘and it is the only one still active, because it isn’t connected to the commons. Aakash installed it when the ship
was refurbished. A last-ditch measure for an emergency he hoped would never come. But here it is, and here we are. Don’t worry about me, Gajananvihari. I am a hundred and twelve years old. I
was born in Thrale, Mars, and left as soon as I could. I worked for a biotech merchant in Iron Mountain. Learned enough to start my own export business. Lost everything, wrote librettos for two
operas, made enough to start my life over. I have visited all of the major cities in the Belt. I have been to Earth. I have been partnered three times. I had two children. My son died in an
accident more than seventy years ago, but my daughter is still alive, and I have three grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. One of my granddaughters is the mayor of Thrale. Another is a
famous composer of aeolian symphonies. I have had a long life, Gajananvihari. A good life. I’ll keep the hijackers distracted for as long as I can, and if I die it will be with few regrets.
You will get to Tannhauser Gate and find Rember Wole and Worden Hanburanaman. Rember will help you get in contact with the hijackers and negotiate the return of the ship. Worden will help you
understand Dr Gagarian’s work, and how to carry it forward.’

‘What if the hijackers won’t talk to me?’

‘They’ll want to talk because of who you are, and because you have what they want. You’ll understand everything when you get to Tannhauser Gate.’

Agrata gave Hari a card that would allow him to draw on the credit the ship had deposited in Tannhauser Gate’s bourse.

‘I know that I am asking a hard thing of you,’ she said. ‘But you are the only one who can do this. There it is.’

There it was. No chance to make a last glorious stand, or fight the leader of the hijackers in hand-to-hand combat. Instead, ignominious flight, exile from everything he knew and loved, and an
impossible mission.

‘I won’t disappoint you,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Agrata said.