Empress of the Sun (12 page)

‘We’re the enemy of everyone else,’ Everett said.

‘It’s the Jiju way.’

‘Well, that’s it decided then,’ Captain Anastasia interrupted. ‘There’s nothing keeping us on this world, so we’ll be off it quick smart. Thank you for your hospitality, Kax, but we’ve places to be and things to be at. I want that impeller ready for lifting by sundown. All hands to the ratchets. Includes you, Mr Singh and Ms Sixsmyth. Kax, shred.’

‘Here’s an idea,’ Sen whispered as she and Everett went back to the ratchets. ‘Let’s never tell her that we ate one of her sisters.’

‘I didn’t actually eat it,’ Everett protested.

‘No, but you curried it,’ Mchynlyth said, overhearing. ‘Here, wear these.’ He threw Everett a spare pair of heavy engineering gloves. Everett thought he caught a glimpse of a smile. The forgiving was begun. Everett pulled on the gloves and grasped the ratchet. Fifty-nine left to go.

*

Cicadas? Those things that go whirr and click in the night in the warm bits of the world? They’re big. Bigger than you think. A family holiday villa in Turkey, just outside Kusadasi. One main bedroom for Laura and Tejendra, a put-up bed in an alcove by the open fire for Everett. He loved it – a little nest hidden in the stonework. Victory-Rose hadn’t
been there, hadn’t even been thought of. Everett had fallen asleep in his little hidden place listening to the chirr whirr of a Mediterranean insect that said: warm evenings, smells of sage and rosemary, turquoise sea at the end of the lane. On such thoughts he drifted into sleep. Woke up screaming as whatever made that noise dropped out of the stonework on to his face. Legs and crisp chittery bits and little pricking spurs and spines, clawing at him. And
big
. Everett was still screaming as he ran with his mattress into Mum and Dad’s room, threw it and himself to the floor and skidded to a stop against the wall. A cicada, he later learnt. Giving a name to the horror didn’t make it any less horrible. He still got the shivers at the thought of crispy, chitinous bugs with long scrabbling legs.

So when the thing dropped on to his face, Everett Singh woke up. Yelled. Fell out of his hammock. Yelled again at the impact, yelled as muscles agonised from the Big Haul protested, yelled at the skittering bug-thing still in the latty. Everett hit the lights and saw a golden spider-thing with too many legs running along the crack between latty door and frame, trying to find enough of a gap to squeeze through.

‘No, you don’t,’ Everett said and grabbed it by a leg. He lifted it, its legs thrashing, up to eye level. Not an insect. Not. An. Insect. Then he gave another yell and dropped it. It had nipped him. As it headed across the floor, hunting for a way out of the latty, Everett seized one of Mchynlyth’s heavy gloves and clapped it over it. He felt the insect-thing
buzzing under his hand. He carefully slid his hand into the glove, then pulled on the other one. It was all timing. He opened his trapping hand and, before the golden-spider could flee, slapped the other hand over it.

Everett opened the latty door with teeth and a shoulder and clattered along the corridors to the galley. There were jars and bottles and secure tins in there.

‘Right you …’

At the table sat Mchynlyth, Sharkey, Captain Anastasia. In front of each on the table was a jar or a pot. Each container held a little golden spider.

‘Join us, Mr Singh,’ said Captain Anastasia.

Everett found a Kilner jar, shook the spider-thing into it and shut the lid even as the creature made a leap for freedom. He locked the fastening. Wire-thin legs scrabbled at smooth glass.

‘What …?’

Captain Anastasia raised a finger to her lips.

The yelling and hullabaloo could be heard in every part of
Everness
’s two-hundred-metre body. Fast footsteps, clanging on metal mesh. Sen burst into the galley, hair mad and spiky, eyes wild and startled. One hand was clasped over the mouth of a glass.

‘Full house,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Lady, gentlemen, we have intruders.’

Sen deftly upturned her glass on the galley table. The thing inside rattled and spasmed.

‘“The Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night,”’ Sharkey said.

‘Mr Singh, fetch Kax,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘I would have words with her.’

*

Captain Anastasia slapped the jar down on the cargo-deck floor. The things trapped inside jerked and scrabbled at the curving glass wall of their prison. She stood back, arms folded. Everett had seen her face this way before: when Mchynlyth had caught him stowing away on
Everness
, brought him to her and she was about to throw him from the hatch as a saboteur of the Iddler.

‘We found your bijou mates,’ Captain Anastasia said.

Kax crouched low, joints and muscles flexing in ways no human body ever could. She peered long and hard into the jar on the deck. Sharkey whipped out a shotgun and in a flash pressed the barrels to the back of Kax’s neck. Her halo flashed red.

‘Uh-uh,’ Sharkey said. ‘“Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger.” Care to wager I can’t blow the back clean off your head before you can lay a blade on me, lizard-girl?’

Kax raised her hands, an eerily human gesture.

‘If I could have a moment?’

The crew stood in a circle around Kax and the jar of golden spider-things. She looked long and hard with her
golden, vertically slitted eyes at each crew member, Everett the longest.

I’m not the traitor
, he thought.
Is there still a trace of me in you, you in me – whatever those tiny machines orbiting behind your head did? If there is, you have to know I trust you
.

Everett had been sent down alone on the drop-line, down into the dark, calling forest. He looked up to see light spilling from
Everness
’s open cargo hatch. The faces of the crew looked down at him. Sharkey tipped the brim of his hat. Everett knew what that meant. Everett was his enemy again. A threat to the safety of the ship.

He called out into the forest, spinning slowly as he descended.

‘Kax! Kakakakaxa!’

Shrieks, whoops, flutterings and crashings as he spun lower.

‘Kax!’

Then far below Everett saw a wisp of gold moving beneath the leaves, like a trail of stardust.

‘Everett Singh?’ The words drifted up from far below.

‘Kax! Captain Sixsmyth wants to see you. On the ship. There’s a drop-line coming down.’ He added the Airish warning for unpredictably moving overhead objects: ‘Tharbyloo!’ There below!

‘Coming up!’

And that’s why I know you didn’t send those little halo-bots crawling all over
Everness, Everett thought as Kax turned her
attention to the Kilner jar.
If you had, why would you agree to come up and have Sharkey stick his gun in the back of your head? And I don’t think he’s quick enough to beat you either. You can do more things with those halo-bots than throw missile-knives at people
.

‘They’re not hers,’ Everett said, speaking the doubts in his heart. ‘Can’t you see?’

‘Your advocacy is admirable, Mr Singh, but what has Kax to say for herself?’ Captain Anastasia said.

Kax lifted the jar and held it so close to her face the breath from her flickering nostrils steamed the glass. ‘These are not mine.’

‘Keep your weapon strictly trained, Mr Sharkey. Explain.’

‘I know instantly, but I could never explain to humans,’ Kax said. ‘It’s like an aura, or a personal smell. Like the way we instantly know each other’s clade, where you would sense nothing. Like an extra colour.’

‘She would say that,’ Sharkey said.

‘Why?’ Everett blurted out. ‘If Kax was spying on us, why would she come up here? She puts herself right into our hands.’

‘To get her wee spy-beasties back,’ Mchynlyth said.

‘If she can scan my brain, she can download straight from her bots.’

Everett could see the Everness tarot hidden in Sen’s hand. She cut the cards without thought, one-handed; a Hackney card-sharp’s cut. Everett saw her flip up the top
card. She pursed her lips. He caught a glimpse of the card as she flipped it back face down. A fat smiling woman on a throne, a rod in each hand, and a starburst at the tip of each rod. He didn’t catch the name.

‘I can demonstrate,’ Kax said. Captain Anastasia looked at Sharkey, who gave a tiny shake of his head, at Mchynlyth, who tightened his lips. At Sen.

‘Let her do it,’ Sen declared. ‘I believe her.’

‘Do it,’ Captain Anastasia ordered.

‘Stand back,’ Kax announced. She drew herself up to her full height, which was a head taller than Sharkey, opened the Kilner jar and upended it. The crew leaped back as halobots fell to the floor and started to scurry. They were met by a shower of bots from Kax’s halo that formed a circle around them. The spy-bots halted. The encircling bots all took a step inwards.

Everett held his breath.

In the blink of an eye the spy-bots formed into a wedge and tried to charge the encirclement. The siege wall bowed but held. Kax’s bots responded instantly, reinforcing the weak point and closing in around the spies. Tiny battle was joined on the floor of
Everness
’s cargo deck.

It’s like in the Napoleonic War
, Everett thought. All charges and close-in action. Only on the scale of insects. Claw-to-claw combat. Halo-bots! Thousands of ’em!

The spy-bots fought hard but were overwhelmed by Kax’s forces. They went down; legs flailing, they went under.

Everett saw tiny machine mandibles take the spy-bots apart, hack them finer and finer until no visible trace remained. They were only machine, but the death struggles of the spy-bots disturbed him.

Kax’s halo-bots recombined, sprouted wings and flew up to join her own halo. The crew waited as Kax’s halo ran with rainbow colours. Her eyes were closed. Sharkey held the shotgun ready in his hands.

Kax’s eyes flashed open. ‘It is as I feared, Anastasia Sixsmyth. The Genequeens know you are here.’

‘I still don’t believe—’ Sharkey began, but Captain Anastasia cut him off.

‘The Genequeens?’

‘The Worldwheel is ruled by six clades: the Water-Born, the Stormsingers, the Genequeens, the Grain Queens, the Strong-Against-Asteroids, the Sunlords. Each controls one vital function of the Worldwheel. Water, weather, biology, agriculture, space-defence. The sun itself is the territory of my clade, the Sunlords. The Worldwheel is arranged so that it can’t function unless all of us work together. But there will always be … rivalries. This crechewood was designed by the Genequeens; their bots are all over it. They are aware of your ship, that it’s from somewhere outside the World-wheel, and they would claim it as their property.’

‘Mr Mchynlyth, Sen, I don’t care how much you’re hurting, but all efforts to get us airworthy. Mr Sharkey, Mr Singh, as soon as it’s light you get down there and find
that final engine. I want off this world quick smart. Kax, I apologise for doubting you. Please help my crew.’

The Jiju riffled her crest.

‘To work,’ Captain Anastasia commanded.

‘Sen,’ Everett called her back as the crew went to their posts. ‘What was the card?’

‘Dunno what you mean, Everett Singh.’

Why did everything with Sen come down to a denial or a challenge or a game or a lie?

‘I saw you playing with the tarot.’

Everett could see no possible space to hide the Everness tarot in Sen’s tiny clothing, but she produced the deck as if by her conjuring skill and flipped up the top card: the fat jolly woman on the throne, holding stars on sticks. Everett could read the title now: the Sun Empress. He shivered. Coincidences, he was beginning to believe, were not coincidences, but subtle leaks and links between universes. Everything was connected.

‘What does it mean?’

‘A generous host. An unexpected visit or an invitation. ’Ware the powerful.’

‘Just two of you left?’

‘Temporarily. Then two become one.’

The engine hunters were ranging deep into unknown terrain. Number-one impeller had sheared off first and so lay furthest from
Everness
’s crash site. Sharkey strode ahead, the great white explorer, jaunty hat on his head and a shotgun cocked over his shoulder, but Everett knew that he had no idea where he was going. Finding pod one would be as much stumbling over it as jungle navigation.
We could be anywhere
, Everett thought. The forest looked different from every angle; they could be many miles or just footsteps away from the drop point and never realise it. Kax assured them she would not let them get lost. Her halo was an external memory that logged every image, every footstep. Jiju satnav. It also contained a vast amount of forest lore. On
every side were plants, bugs, mini-lizard-birds and things that lurked in the perma-shadows on the far sides of the trees that could bite sting poison blind burn trip-out infect infest and outright kill. Plus Sunlord hatchlings, hatchling hordes of other, hostile clades and Kax’s rival for Princess of the Sunlords status. Poor old ’Appening Ed never stood a chance. If that same little geometry problem that crashed
Everness
hadn’t dropped him from Earth 3 screaming into a kilometre of open air.

‘If you don’t mind me asking, how many of you were there originally?’

‘Three or four thousand.’

Everett’s imagination reeled. This was death on an industrial scale.

‘That’s … That’s horrible. That’s megadeath.’

Kax cocked her head at Everett in the way he had learnt meant,
You are so alien to me
.

‘How can something die that isn’t properly alive?’

‘But, they’re
you
.’ And the look Everett gave Kax said exactly the same thing.

‘Do you worry about megadeath every time you masturbate?’

Everett tripped over a non-existent root.

‘Dah … wha … what?’

‘It’s a male ape thing, I understand.’

‘I … don’t … never …’

‘Really? From my understanding, that is almost unique.’

‘Kax, omis don’t talk about that sort of thing.’

‘Why not? They should. But my point is, all those billions of sperm, do you worry about them dying? Of course not. You only worry about them when they become complex, living, thinking things. We’re like that with hatchlings. Thousands come out of the hatching ponds but only a very few become Jiju. All the stuff that you apes do inside you, we do out in the world. The fastest sperm, the toughest hatchling – it’s no different.’