Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (15 page)

Hari couldn’t look away from the image of his family’s ship. Wondering if any of his family were still alive, wondering who was piloting it, where it was now.

Vazy told him that it had long since passed beyond the volume monitored by Jupiter’s traffic control system. ‘Still, I hope it is useful, the information. I give it to help you and
your family out of friendship. And in the hope that you might return the favour, should you find anything about the death of Ivanova Galchan.’

‘Vazy is a good person,’ Rav told Hari, ‘but he has one weakness. His sentimentality.’

‘Lucky for you I have this so-called weakness,’ Vazy said. ‘You are a very long way from the definition of a “good person”, but for sentimental reasons I still
consider you my friend.’

Hari thanked him, and the Europan talked briefly with Rav about people and places Hari didn’t know, then wished Hari luck and said that he hoped they would meet again in happier
circumstances. ‘Please give your father my regards, if it is ever possible.’

Coming back through the luminous park, Hari pulled up the charges for sending messages to the Saturn system. They were startlingly exorbitant. Even if he managed to trade his rights to the
lifepod, he would be able to afford only a few minutes’ access to the commons of any of the cities and settlements of Saturn’s moons.

He said, ‘We should go there. Right now.’

‘It’s a long old trip,’ Rav said. ‘And what would you do, when you arrived?’

‘Take back my ship, of course. Free my family.’

‘If they are alive.’

‘Take back the ship and have my revenge, if they are dead.’

‘Take it back by force, against an unknown number of opponents? I’m good, but not quite that good.’

‘What about your friends?’

‘It’s the Republic they want to liberate, not your ship. We need to find out what the hijackers want, to begin with,’ Rav said. ‘Find out what’s inside Dr
Gagarian’s head, find out why they want it, what they want to do with it. Once we know that, we can work out what to do next. There’s no point plunging into a cloud in the hope that
some tasty morsel is hiding inside it. If you want to track something down, you must first learn its habits—’

‘What is it?’

Rav had stopped, was looking all around. ‘Someone is following us,’ he said, and ran full-tilt at a tree and scrambled up its trunk, vanishing inside a shadowy cloud of leaves that
suddenly shattered as he launched himself into the air. And twisted sideways, wings folding, and tumbled head over heels into a dense stand of bushes.

As Hari started towards him, Rav thrashed out of the bushes, clutching a bouquet of red flowers to his chest. Falling to his knees, looking at Hari, his mouth working, holding out the flowers
like a suitor in a dance.

‘Run,’ he said. ‘Run while you can.’

Something struck Hari’s chest. A red flower had sprung up from his jerkin. No, it was the fletching of a dart, similar to the darts with which the ship’s security bots were armed.
Hari pulled it out and showed it to Rav, but the Ardenist was sprawled under the cowl of his wings, and the world was swaying wildly. Hari lost his balance and sat down hard, and everything swung
around him and fell away.

Hari’s father hung in the air above a circular pool of water that reflected with absolute fidelity the argosy of white clouds that sailed the blue sky. His bare feet,
toes pointing down like a sadhu in an ancient pict, almost touched their reflection. All around, the stony desolation of the desert. And now Aakash Pilot revolved and looked at Hari and told him
that he could walk out across the water. All he needed was faith. Believe in me, his father said. Trust me. Everything follows from the first step.

But Hari, standing on a slab of rock at the edge of the pool, somehow regressed to age four and dressed in pantaloons and a vest as blue as the sky and decorated with six-pointed silver stars,
was too scared to take that step. Hot and slick with embarrassment and shame and fear. Fear of failure. Fear of falling. His father was explaining the physics of his viron, but he spoke in a
mumbling whisper and it was difficult to hear what he was saying, and something was stalking through the desert, shaking it with huge, regular footfalls. The pool’s mirror shattered. Rocks
jumped and rolled. And Hari was on his back, looking up at clouds and sky, trying to tell his father that it wasn’t his fault he had fallen . . .

Drums. The sharp pulse of a headache behind his eyes, filling his head, crowding out thought. His blood beating in his ears. The pitter-patter of small drums rapped by fingertips, echoing in a
large open space.

Hari tried and failed to open his eyes. He tried and failed to move his hands, his arms.

His head felt as if it had been pierced by razor-edged skewers and then kicked down every corridor of the ship by a manic crew of futzball players. He scarcely noticed the tight feeling in his
shoulders and back and buttocks, the cold damp air on his skin. He was naked, hanging naked somewhere, arms stretched up above his head. He could hear the drums. Water dripping into water.

He tried to speak, but his mouth was sealed. Tried again, using the back of his throat and his nasal cavity, shaping words that were mostly vowels. ‘Uh mmm ah? Oo ah u?’

No one answered. And with a swooning falling feeling that gripped him from fingertips to feet Hari realised who his captors must be. Somehow, the hijackers had infiltrated the city and made
their move. They’d avoided the trap set by Ma Sakitei, the trap for which Hari had been bait, and now he was in their power, aboard
Easy Does It
or some other ship (which must be
accelerating, because there was a definite sense of up and down), or somewhere else far, far away. Beyond Jupiter. Orbiting Saturn, or even further out. Beyond any hope of rescue.

‘He’s ready,’ a woman said.

Something wet was swiped across Hari’s forehead and cheeks. A brief cold spray on his eyelids dissolved the glue that had held them closed; fingers pried them open. He saw a shadowy figure
withdrawing, saw a flock of small shapes move in.

He was hung vertically on some kind of board, glued there like a specimen, naked and vulnerable. A swarm of drones hung in front of his face, little white balls slung under the blurred halos of
tiny rotors. He couldn’t turn his head because it was glued to the board. His arms were glued above his head. His legs were glued together. When he tried to blink he discovered that his
eyelids, once glued shut, were now glued open.

He used his peripheral vision to look around. A distant overhead speckled with bright stars. Small islands scattered across a black flood, low and flat and covered in white moss, long tendrils
floating out from their edges. He was raised up at the centre of one of these islands. And it was cold, so cold that his breath plumed from his nostrils and his naked skin felt tight and
frozen.

The little drones began to flash stuttering patterns of light. A constellation of novas exploding in his face. Pain pulsed: jagged screeches of tearing metal. Cold hummed in his ears. The
insistent pitter-patter of the drums prickled across his flanks. Pale mosses tasted like icy grit; black water like burnt plastic. Synaesthesia cross-wiring his senses until everything went blank
and for a moment he hung in the still centre of silent and absolute whiteness before sight and hearing, touch, taste and smell, returned.

Figures moved beyond the stuttering stars of the drones. Four, five, six of them. Two appeared to be children. They were dressed in long white coats and their faces were masked with luminous
green dots and dashes and swirls, and they carried poles topped with swaying bouquets of skulls. The skulls were hung from coloured threads strung through holes drilled in their bony caps, and
painted with the same luminous patterns as the faces of the pole-bearers, who stepped forward one after the other, planting their burdens in the soft ground and stepping back and clasping their
hands before their chests and beginning to sing. A polyphonic chant founded on the insistent patter of the drums, slowly building and falling away and building again.

The lights of the drones began to pulse in time to the pulse of the chant. The luminous patterns painted on the skulls and on the faces of the celebrants of this strange ceremony were pulsing
too. And with each throbbing beat Hari’s sense of self expanded outward. Dissolving by steady increments into the pulsing chant, the pulsing patterns of light. He felt questing intelligences
drift past his unknotting thoughts, felt them sink into the substrate of his mind . . .

And then, all at once, everything stopped. The chant broke off in the middle of a phrase; the beat of the drums was suspended; the patterns of light winked out and the drones fell out of the
air. Hari’s senses, abruptly unconstrained, expanded like gas escaping from a punctured p-suit. He saw the module entire, like a transparent model of itself. He saw a city stretching away
above it, and realised with a quick sharp stab of hope that he must still be in Fei Shen. He could see the radial pattern of its avenues and the outlines of its buildings, a honeycomb of virtual
rooms and spaces. And in one of those rooms the ghost of the p-suit’s eidolon turned to him and asked him why he had taken so long to get in touch.

Help me
, he said. And with a falling feeling he was back in his body, hung naked on the board. Something was picking its way through the twilight towards him. It was inhumanly tall and
thin and radiated a fell menace, but he could not move, could not shut his eyes, could not look away. He could only watch, heart banging in his chest, sweat pricking over his entire body, as it
grew closer. Then a pale translucent figure leaned past him and swept up the fallen drones. It turned and smiled at him, a sly, shrewd, familiar smile, then spun and hurled the drones into the
twilight beyond the skull-laden poles. Someone screamed, a sharp cry of rage and fear that echoed off the overhead. The figure smiled at Hari again, and faded into the dark air like a sketch
erasing itself.

The patterns painted on the skulls were likewise fading. People in white coats sprawled on the mossy ground, eyes rolled back, faces contorted in rigid grimaces as they twitched and fitted and
at last passed into something like sleep. One was the proctor, Gabriel Daza. Two more were Free People.

Hari hung there a long time. Shivering, passing in and out of consciousness. His eyes dry stones. At last, he glimpsed a movement far off in the scatter of pale islands: a low and narrow boat
gliding across the water, poled by two upright figures. As it drew nearer, he recognised Rav and the neuter Taqi Koothvar. He tried to call out, but his mouth was still glued shut.

The boat nosed through the fringe of moss at the island’s edge and Rav sprang ashore and cantered towards Hari, telling him everything would be fine. Behind him, Taqi Koothvar’s
anxious expression betrayed the lie.

Rav and Taqi Koothvar lowered the board to which Hari was fastened, found a canister of spray, and used it to dissolve the glue. Hari sat up, moving slowly and carefully. His
back felt as if it had been flayed. His shoulders and arms ached stiffly. His hands throbbed as blood began to circulate in them again.

While Rav moved from pole to pole, methodically crushing the skulls hung from them, Taqi Koothvar used a cloth wetted with spray to remove the glue that sealed Hari’s mouth and held his
eyes open, wiped green stuff from his face, and pasted several patches on his chest that eased his pain and turned the world as soft as a daydream.

Taqi Koothvar helped Hari to stand and walk about. His former captors were still unconscious or asleep, sprawled in their white coats. They were skull feeders, according to Rav. An antique cult
that practised a peculiar form of amortality.

‘They infect themselves with mites that construct molecular archives in the bones of their skulls, and record every moment of their lives. They feed the skulls of their ancestors with
infusions necessary for the survival and operation of these archives, and every skull,’ Rav said, mashing one between his hands with a dry, snapping crunch, ‘is plugged into a network
via patterns of tweaked bacteria, so that they can communicate with each other and with their keepers.’

‘They painted the same stuff on you,’ Taqi Koothvar told Hari.

‘They were trying to link your bios with their network,’ Rav said.

‘I know one of them,’ Hari said. ‘He approached me when I visited the bourse, helped me gain access to my family’s credit, made inquiries on my behalf. He pointed me
towards a head clinic, too. I suppose that if I had followed his advice I would have been taken here directly. Instead, they kidnapped me.’

‘This one is different,’ Taqi Koothvar said. ‘Also, she is dead.’

The neuter was standing over a slender woman dressed in a black, close-fitting bodysuit, sprawled face down on moss tinted by her blood. She had been pierced many times in the back and head.
When Taqi Koothvar and Rav turned her over, Hari recognised her at once. Her hair was cut close to her skull and dyed white, but her pale, angular face was the spit of Deel Fertita’s, the
proteome specialist who, according to Agrata, had murdered Dr Gagarian.

There are many of us, one of the hijackers had told Hari, on Themba. Many sisters.

Hari told Rav and Taqi Koothvar who she was. ‘She must have followed these . . . What did you call them?’

‘Skull feeders,’ Rav said. ‘It looks like she tried to sneak up on them, and something sneaked up on her instead.’

Hari remembered the face of the translucent figure. His father’s face, his father’s sly smile.

He said, ‘There was a djinn. It took control of the skull-feeders’ drones and threw them at the woman and killed her.’

Rav said, ‘This was while the skull feeders were opening you up, or while they were trying to unlock the tick-tock’s head?’