Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (8 page)

Hari landed the lifepod by remote control and walked out across the surface of Themba for the last time. The sun had set and he navigated by enhanced starlight. Reviewing the
brief conversation with the hijacker over and again as he crossed grainy, monochrome vacuum-organism pavements. Trying to work out where he’d gone wrong, what he should have said.

‘I failed them,’ he told the eidolon. ‘I failed my family. I screwed up. It was a simple transaction. Her freedom in exchange for the answer to a single question. It should
have been an easy sale. Absolutely straightforward. But I failed.’

‘You told me that she was a fanatic,’ the eidolon said. ‘It is my understanding that such people are not amenable to reason.’

‘Nabhomani would have persuaded her. He told me that you start making a sale when the customer turns you down. You have to make them want what you’re selling. You have to lead them
to the decision. That’s what I failed to do.’

‘She was willing to pay with her life, and yours,’ the eidolon said. ‘Even if she had been dealing with someone who possessed superior negotiating skills, it would not have
changed the logic of the situation.’

‘You don’t really understand people,’ Hari said.

But as he walked on, examining his conversation with the hijacker from every angle, he couldn’t see how it could have ended up at a different place. The ruthless logic of self-sacrifice
scared him. It would make another encounter with the hijackers extremely risky, but he knew he had to find them, had to talk to them. He had get off Themba and reach Tannhauser Gate, and Rember
Wole and Worden Hanburanaman. He had to save Agrata and his brothers, if they still lived. He had to negotiate their return, and the return of the ship. And he still wanted revenge. Now more than
ever.

He wished he knew why the hijackers wanted the head. Something Dr Gagarian knew. Something he had discovered. Something to do with the traces left by the Bright Moment. He should have paid more
attention to the tick-tock philosopher’s work.

The lifepod had landed some way beyond the slim rectangle of the monolith, squatting at the centre of a circle of scabbed char. Hari shuffled due south from the monolith to a small, shallow
crater packed with tangles of fine wire. The eidolon watched as he knelt at the edge of the crater, tangled threads gleaming shocking scarlet in the beam of his helmet lamp, and pulled from its pit
of loose dust a cryoflask wrapped in radar-absorbent cloth.

He carried it to the lifepod and wriggled inside, acquired his destination, pressed the big red button that floated in the virtual keyboard. Twenty minutes later, he was climbing into the
airlock of
Little Helper.

The gig was a stack of three spherical modules of diminishing size. A simple, sturdy design. The smallest module housed the lifesystem; the one in the middle was an
unpressurised cargo hold; the largest contained the motor, fission batteries, and tanks of air, water, and reaction mass. The gig slowly revolved about its long axis as it swung around
Themba’s battered sphere, with the lifepod’s blunt cone nosed into the open hatch of the cargo hold.

The two hijackers hadn’t bothered to change the security profile. Hari worked up a course, ignited the motor. Themba’s lopsided profile shrank into the starry black. Dwindling to a
fleck, a faint point, gone.

For several days,
Little Helper
fell sunwards on a free-fall trajectory, heading for a waypoint that would slingshot it towards the outer edge of the main belt and Tannhauser Gate. Then
attitude thrusters ringed around the joint between its motor and equipment hold modules popped and stuttered, aiming it towards a new destination, and its motor ignited and kept burning.

Hari had discovered that he was being followed.

PART TWO

MAROONED OFF VESTA

The pursuer came trolling out of the outer dark at a steady 0.1
g
.
Easy Does It
, the largest of
Pabuji’s Gift
’s gigs. When Hari had first
spotted it, it had been more than fifty million kilometres away. Twenty days later it had closed half that distance, and was still coming on.

Hari had given up on Tannhauser Gate. It was a long way around the outer edge of the main belt, and
Easy Does It
would catch him long before he reached it. Instead, he’d altered
course, driving
Little Helper
towards a waypoint on the far side of the 3:1 Kirkwood gap.

Easy Does It
altered its course, too. Hari made no attempt to contact his pursuers. Opening a channel risked infection by the same species of djinn that had compromised the comms of
Pabuji’s Gift
. His pursuers didn’t attempt to contact him directly, either, but soon after they matched his new course the eidolon reported persistent attempts to locate and
utilise open ports in
Little Helper
’s comms, and Hari was forced to shut everything down. The gig running dark and silent as it crossed the Kirkwood gap, falling towards the
waypoint.

The prominent gap, one of several swept clean by orbital resonance with Jupiter, divided the Belt into two unequal halves: the populous main belt, close to Mars, and the more diffuse outer belt
and its outlying clusters. More than ten thousand gardens and habitats constructed from materials mined from rocks and comets orbited within the main belt; there were more than a million and a half
rocks with a diameter of more than a kilometre. A few, like Vesta and Pallas and Hygiea, had diameters of several hundred kilometres; Ceres was almost a thousand kilometres across. There were
cratered rubble-piles blanketed in deep layers of dust and debris. There were mountains of nickel-iron, stony mountains of pyroxene, olivine and feldspar. There were rocks rich in tarry
carbonaceous tars, clays, and water ice. Some orbited in loose groups, or in more closely associated families of fragments created by catastrophic shatterings of parent bodies, but most traced
solitary paths, separated by an average distance twice that between the Earth and the Moon, everything moving, everything constantly changing its position relative to everything else.

Little Helper
closed on the waypoint and swung through its steep gravity well, changing course and gaining velocity, racing towards Vesta and its artificial moon, Fei Shen. It was an
old trading city, Fei Shen.
Pabuji’s Gift
had visited it several times after Hari had been born. There would be people who knew his family and their ship, people who might help
him.

Easy Does It
swung past the waypoint, too.

Hari made his plans, unmade them, remade them. He read in Kinson Ib Kana’s book. It was a slim black slab that woke when he tapped its surface three times. There was no index, no method of
making any kind of input or connection to whatever spark of intelligence it possessed. Each time he woke it, it displayed a random sample of unadorned, unaugmented text, usually an aphorism or a
brief verse or a praise song:

They lingered for ten minutes or for an hour or more before they faded and were replaced by another random sample. Hari supposed that he was meant to study them and unpack and contemplate every
possible meaning; instead, he short-circuited the process by switching off the book with three quick taps and switching it on again. Tap tap tap, tap tap tap. On/off, on/off, on/off. Skipping
through poems and songs and sayings until the book presented him with something more substantial. Stories about the long ago, before human beings had quit the shelter of Earth’s skies;
stories about the Age of Expansion or the True Empire; stories about dream worlds, or worlds of other stars.

Some were as long and intricate as any saga. The story of a Martian paladin’s quest during the rise of the True Empire, for instance. The Trues had conquered Ceres, the Koronis Emirates,
and half a hundred lesser kingdoms and republics, and as they began to probe the defences of Mars the Czarina dispatched twenty of her paladins to search for the armill of one of her ancestors,
which was believed to augment the wisdom of its wearer and control secret caches of powerful weapons and squads of shellback troopers from the long ago.

After adventures in the deserts and mountains of the red planet, fighting bandits, dust ghouls, and rogue gene wizards and their monstrous offspring, the paladin was riding through the trackless
forests of the Hellas Basin when she discovered a circular lake with a slim, bone-white tower rising from its centre. As she approached the slender bridge that arched between shore and tower,
another rider came out of the trees and challenged her: a rogue paladin whose armour, like hers, had lost its devices and beacons to battle-damage and sandstorms. They drew their vorpal blades and
spurred their chargers and flew headlong into combat. Their chargers bit and mauled each other and collapsed; the paladins fought on into the night. Sparks and flames from their clashing blades lit
up the lake and the tower, and the red rain of their blood speckled the stones of the shore. Both were grievously wounded, but neither would yield. At last, the paladin dispatched her enemy with a
killing thrust, but when she wrenched off his helmet she discovered that he was her own brother. As she wept over his body a man dressed in black furs appeared. He gathered her into his arms and
carried her across the bridge, into the tower. She glimpsed the armill, a slim platinum bracelet set on a bolster inside a crystal reliquary; then its guardian carried her down a spiral stair to a
basement room, stripped off her damaged armour, and lowered her into the casket of an ancient medical engine.

When the paladin woke, she was hungry and thirsty, and very weak. The room was dark, the stairs were blocked by rubble, her armour was gone. After she clawed her way out, she discovered that the
tower was in ruins. There was no sign of the reliquary and its guardian, and the lake was dry and the forest all around was a wasteland of ash and charred stumps.

She had been asleep for a century. Mars had fallen to the Trues. The Czarina and her family were long dead; her battalions and her ships were destroyed or scattered. The last paladin dug up the
grave of the brother she had killed, put on his armour, and went out into the world and waged a long and terrible war against the conquerors of Mars. She was a fierce and relentless enemy, driven
by remorse and guilt. She killed everyone who pursued her, including five suzerains, and raised an army of brigands and sacked the ancient capital. But nothing could atone for the mortal sin that
had derailed her quest. When she and the tattered remnant of her army were at last cornered in the Labyrinth of the Night by five squadrons of elite shock troopers, she died with her dead
brother’s name on her lips.

Hari’s broken arm healed, aided by scaffolding laid down by mites that the gig’s medical kit injected into his bloodstream, and he built up its strength by careful
exercise. Vesta grew from a point of light to a small lopsided disc, one half illuminated by direct sunlight, the other in shadow. And then, just after
Little Helper
had begun the
manoeuvre that would insert it into orbit around the little world, the interface with its motor blazed with overload and failure alarms, and the reaction chamber flamed out.

Hari’s first thought was that it was sabotage. That his pursuers had managed to find an open, unsecured port and slip in a djinn or transmit a command string that had executed some kind of
fail-safe procedure. But a quick inspection revealed that the motor hadn’t simply shut down: it was badly damaged. The feeds to the reaction chamber were out of alignment and its ceramic
casing was cracked.

He pulled up recent footage of
Easy Does It
, looking for a flare or sudden spark that would betray the launch of some kind of drone, but it turned out that the hijackers had been more
subtle than that. Just after he had initiated the insertion burn sequence, the faint star of the pursuing gig had begun to flicker with coherent, high-energy pulses from a maser.

‘They needed to get in range,’ he told the eidolon, ‘but they didn’t need to get too close because it didn’t require much energy to do the damage. The maser’s
frequency lock-stepped with the ignition pulses in the reaction chamber, and ramped them up uncontrollably and chaotically.’

The eidolon, dressed in a simple white jumpsuit, a white cap fitted close to her shaven skull, sat cross-legged in the air like one of the saints of the long ago. She said, ‘
Easy Does
It
is still moving faster than we are. I calculate that it will catch up with us long before the repair mites can fix the motor.’

‘Yes. And meanwhile the window for orbital insertion is closing.’

It had the grim logic of one of the old stories in which heroes fail to overcome the iron laws imposed by their gods.

‘I’m sorry, Gajananvihari,’ the eidolon said. ‘I see no alternative to surrender.’

‘I have another idea,’ Hari said.

Details began to resolve in and around Vesta’s half-disc. Its sun lamps were a chain of bright stars tilted around its equator. The enormous crater stamped into its south
pole was aimed towards the sun – it was summer, there, the middle of a year-long perpetual day. The rounded peak of the mountain at its centre punched through the atmosphere, its flanks and
the smashed terrain around it partly obscured by a fragmented girdle of wispy clouds.