Arabesk (80 page)

Not fireflies, Avatar realized, his enemy, far off across the hangar, working their way down open steps in practiced formation. The fireflies nothing but a faint splash of warmth between the bottom of a half-face night mask and the buttoned collar of a standard-issue jumpsuit.

“How many in total?” he demanded.

All he got was silence.

“How many?” Avatar hissed.

Again silence, cold as the darkness. The Colonel was gone, along with the distant strip of lights. The cold pipes strung just above the deck no longer rattled. And the riveted plate below Avatar’s feet was still, missing its heartbeat from the engine room beneath. Only the fireflies kept coming from far away across the deck.

Sliding himself through the open doorway, Avatar stepped rapidly sideways several times until he ended up behind a steel pillar. When he leant against it, the pillar felt no colder than his arm.

Cold was good if you got shot, according to the Colonel. It reduced internal bleeding. Of course, it also slowed your concentration, which made it easier to get hit in the first place.

Three in here, how many more outside?

Avatar tried to call up the picture Colonel Abad had shown him of that tiny helicopter just after it landed, doors popping open and dark-suited toys spilling out onto the deck. Six soldiers in all, maybe seven. Or was that eight…?

Avatar shook his head, to free up his frozen thoughts, and knew that if he didn’t act soon, the fireflies would be here and there’d be no time left to unravel that one either.

Until he knew where the rest of the enemy were positioned, silence was more or less the only real weapon he had. Silence and surprise. Silence and desperation. Or how about silence and being too cold to care?

No one was going to argue with that one.

Back hard to the pillar, Avatar flipped open the revolver he’d stolen from the Khedive. Seven fat brass circles evenly spaced in a ring, one of them already used. As he pushed the cylinder back into place, Avatar realized this was it. Whatever that actually meant.

The hammer pulled back with a muffled click, an internal lever spinning the cylinder so that a fresh brass case presented itself under the hammer’s fall. Extending his shivering arm and gripping his right wrist with his left hand, Avatar sighted along the barrel at a firefly.

They were close now. Closer than he’d realized.

Time slowed and in the gap between the flash of the revolver’s muzzle and its sharp bark, the vacuum of a passing slug dragged a man’s voice from his ruptured throat. The man Avatar killed was at the back, the last of the three. It was luck, not skill. He’d been trying for a body shot.

Instinct made the two remaining fireflies turn in horror to stare behind them. By the time the first man glanced back, Avatar was pulling his trigger again. This time Avatar’s slug took the man under his chin, deflected slightly on the inside of his jaw and ripped apart his tongue, before liquidizing the man’s cerebellum. What was left of his occipital lobe splashed against the back of his helmet. For all that, the soldier still landed on his knees, then crashed forward to head-butt the steel deck.

The reek of shit mixed with the stink of cordite.

Roll,
Avatar told himself, suddenly aware of the aftertaste of vomit in his mouth. That was what he should do. Avatar rolled, barely feeling the rivets that ripped into his shoulder. Then he rolled some more, stopping only when he clanged hard against a snaking pipe, the noise so loud it rang through the open area like a bell.

Instantly, a muzzle flared to his left, three quick flashes that sparked off the deck close to Avatar’s leg, way too close. Rolling up and over the pipe, Avatar scrambled along its edge until he had thirty seconds of blind panic between himself and where the bullets had landed.

Adrenaline was flooding his body and for the first time in hours Avatar felt properly awake. Maybe that was what it took, what he should have done from the start; get someone to shoot at him… Now if he could just get them to give him their combat rations as well.

The gun the other man carried was squat, with a long magazine that curved away from him. Its barrel was the length of Avatar’s thumb. Colonel Abad would have known the make, rate of fire and market price. Avatar just knew it looked dangerous.

Three shots, then another three. Each blip of the rifle’s trigger registered in three fire fountains as the soldier swung his gun at random and bullets ricocheted in tight triplets from the floor. The man’s big problem was that, despite the bug eyes of his official-issue combat mask, he fired blind. Avatar was just too bloody cold to show up on screen.

“So maybe I should be grateful,” thought Avatar sourly. Then he decided not to waste the energy and rolled back over the pipe. All he had to do was keep going towards the stairs. Twenty paces later, Avatar stopped to look back and again changed his mind. The soldier was still there, facing away from Avatar and staring intently at nothing much.

Avatar’s options were keep crawling or else do the deed. Only he couldn’t do that when the man’s back was to him, though it was hard to know why turning round to die might be an improvement.

“Hey…behind you.”

Bursts popping through the darkness above Avatar’s head. Different fireflies. When the man’s clip finally hit empty, Avatar clambered to his knees and took a shot of his own.

28th October

“I’m finishing a story…” Hani looked up, her head
balanced on one hand and her elbow resting on her knee. “But I can always end it now…?”

She had her back to a wall and was sitting in late-afternoon sunlight, on a small balcony recessed into the sloped glass roof of the
bibliotheka
.

“No need.” The chief librarian looked momentarily flustered, as if having caught herself being unforgivably rude. Which wasn’t something that usually worried Madame Syria. “I just didn’t see you come in.”

“Are you sure you don’t need the machine?” insisted Hani, holding up her borrowed laptop, its solar panels still outfolded.

“Mmmm?”

Madame Syria had been going to check the status of the library’s electronic texts, when she noticed the balcony door was open. Obviously she had plenty of better things to do than this. And even if the core was dead and every e-book missing, as she rather suspected, she was still responsible for 1.25 million real books, the kind people opened and held in their hands.

And anyway cultural vandalism was nothing new. Seven hundred years after the original
bibliotheka
began, Christian fanatics had destroyed all five hundred thousand of its manuscripts, including original works by Sophocles and Aristotle.

Even before that, the razing of the annexe on the orders of Theodosius had lost forever the
Alexandrian Geographica
and condemned Europe to a thousand years of the belief that Jerusalem was the centre of the world and that the world was flat.

“Madame Syria?”

The woman blinked to find Hani still patiently holding out the machine.

“No,” the woman said hastily. “That’s quite all right. I need to do something downstairs anyway.”

It was easy to forget a small girl, what with the chaos in the city as well as in the library, particularly when the child was so quiet and beautifully behaved. And Madame Syria didn’t really begrudge the girl use of the computer. There were two non-Web machines working downstairs, both outdated leather-bound models. Just why only the three laptops out of seventy-five varied machines still worked was anyone’s guess, though Madame Syria put it down to the fact that they’d been redundant models, stacked in a box in the lower basement, awaiting disposal. Originally there’d been five, but one had died almost immediately and one early yesterday. Fatal errors of memory, apparently, but then everyone had a few of those.

“I’m going to get a coffee,” said Hani. “Would you like one?”

The chief librarian nodded without thinking, then frowned. “I don’t think your voice is programmed into the coffee machine,” she said apologetically, remembering too late that this was an irrelevance, the Zanussi was dead.

“There’s a stall.” Hani looked round, as if about to impart a heavy secret. “At the top of Boulevard Zaghloul. It’s much better than the coffee here. When there
is
coffee here,” she added to clarify the matter.

“And His Excellency allows you to cross the road by yourself?” The librarian glanced over the edge of the balcony to the avenue below and suddenly realized just how stupid a question that was. Apart from an elderly man in a souf sitting on a bench, the road outside was completely empty of traffic. Though a makeshift donkey cart sporting wheels borrowed from a motorbike was approaching from one direction, followed by a horse-drawn calèche, its leather roof raised against the possibility of rain.

She thought it was further proof of the child’s good manners that Hani didn’t point out that traffic problems were unlikely. Instead, the girl just nodded.

“Oh yes,” said Hani, “I’m allowed to cross roads. In fact the bey allows me to do what I like.”

Madame Syria smiled and decided to go with the bey’s niece to buy coffee. It was true that she really needed to use the child’s machine but that could wait until Lady Hani finished her story.

28th October

The glass girl was up ahead. Avatar saw her backlit
through a halo of smoke that was his own cold breath. Her blue eyes watched him stagger up out of the gloom and, as he stumbled, she tossed her head, so that long blonde strands of her hair flicked through the air.

Avatar nodded his reply, the hard band of pain across his forehead tightening its grip, still held in place by invisible screws. His fingers were so numb he couldn’t tell where the dead man’s rifle began and his own flesh ended. Both of his weapons seemed a part of him, or he them; it didn’t matter which way round, the result was the same.

He left the girl without saying good-bye, turning his back on the stained-glass memorial to a future not on offer to those like him, whatever his half sister thought. In the Delta and along the river, the
felaheen
still used hoes rather than tractors. The only blonde girls he’d seen were rich tourists, out of their skulls on clubnite and still stuck at home in everything but actual place.

Avatar shot the next soldier without even noticing he’d seen the man. A single bullet shredding a larynx in a reflex action that saw Avatar’s arm extended and the trigger pulled before Avatar’s guts had time to knot with fear at what he was about to do; take his total up to four.

Another two soldiers swam into vision, radiating anxiety. They stood in the aquarium dark, arms stiff and bodies tensed. Wired into a command network as they all undoubtedly were, they’d have heard the others die.

Try mixing that… Avatar didn’t doubt that he would, should he ever get back to his decks alive.

Stepping out from behind a pillar, Avatar raised his rifle and aimed at the nearest man. All the soldier had to rely on was equipment. Avatar had emptiness.

He pulled the trigger and felt his rifle buck. A second blip and the man behind tried to step forward on a shattered knee, only to stumble, pitching sideways as the remaining leg slid out from under him.

No prisoners.

Avatar walked forward and sighted along the barrel of his Taurus. The fallen figure shrinking into the deck, shoulders hunching as instinct kicked in and the man’s body curled up to protect its vital organs from attack. Instinct based on millennia of experience. Instinct that hadn’t yet adapted to guns.

Revolver in hand, Avatar crouched down and saw the figure flinch. The buckle at the side of the man’s mask was a simple ceramic affair, tinted black as not to catch the light, the helmet’s strap a fat strip of neoprene stitched to the lining. There were electrodes attached directly to the scalp of the person wearing the mask, though their purpose was uncertain.

Not that Avatar gave them much thought. He was much too busy staring into the pale blue eyes of a girl little older than he. Her broad face was set into something Avatar recognized instantly as acceptance. She still thought he meant to kill her.

As if he’d first bother to remove her mask. Except Avatar wasn’t sure why he’d done that; unless, because it was the kind of thing Raf might have done? Certainly not because Avatar expected to find some blonde Soviet corn-daughter hidden underneath.

And she was Soviet. No other Army in Europe used women in frontline combat. A Soviet
Spetsnaz
ranger on an ex-Soviet liner come face-to-face with some Delta street bastard.

“Not even full Delta,” muttered Avatar to himself. Maybe half-Abyssinian or Danakil. It was hard to know. If a mug shot did exist of his mother, it was probably in the files of the UN or the Red Cross, along with blood type and a tissue sample.

“What a fucking mess.”

Some flicker of recognition in the blue eyes watching him told Avatar that the wounded girl had logged the meaning, half-recognizing his tone in what passed for consciousness amid all that endocrine stink of hope and fear.

And all the while, unanswered questions, mute but frantic, hissed from within the empty mask Avatar now held in his hand. They spilled out in a language he didn’t understand, from a world he understood even less.

“Give me your rifle…” Avatar kept his own words simple. And though she didn’t understand them, she followed his gaze until she saw what he saw and knew what he meant. But her hands remained white at the knuckle where they held her weapon tight to her body, one finger curled around the trigger and less than a shudder away from smashing her other knee, because that’s where the muzzle pointed.

“Come on.”

A bullet to her head would have been Colonel Abad’s solution, Avatar realized that, as he waited impatiently for the girl to process his demand and reach her decision. And in combat terms the Colonel was probably right. Of course, if she did something stupid, then that would be Avatar’s solution too… But all the girl did was uncurl slightly and push her gun away from her, leaving it to Avatar to kick the rifle away across the metal floor. Then he smiled apologetically and stamped on her good ankle, to cripple her other leg as well.