Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (33 page)

‘Now you’ll be able to see how a real hunter works,’ Rav said. ‘We’ll head for the free zone and flush out this so-called assassin, and we’ll ask her some
hard questions about who she works for, and how we can talk to them. How you can talk to them, Hari. How you can negotiate the release of your family and their ship.’

‘First,’ Hari said, ‘we should deal with our good friend Mr D.V. Mussa.’

‘If he came here to sell the head to Ang Ap Zhang, she probably killed him when she discovered that its files were corrupted,’ Rav said. ‘Him and his daughter. Forget them.
They’re dead meat.’

‘I would know if anyone entered or left his ship,’ Khinda said.

‘Give me ten minutes, and I’ll prove you wrong,’ Rav said.

‘Mr Mussa stole something from me,’ Hari said. ‘I want it back.’

‘It’s worthless,’ Rav said. ‘We hoped it would flush out the Saints, but it didn’t work. And now we have other quarry.’

‘Dr Gagarian was a passenger on my family’s ship,’ Hari said. ‘I owe him a duty of care. Before we do anything else, I want to talk to Mr Mussa. I want to work out a deal
for the return of the head. My family has credit here. I’ll pay Mr Mussa for the head, if he still has it, and for the name of the person who wanted to buy it.’

And he wanted to have a serious conversation with the tanky about his uncle.

‘We know who wanted to buy it,’ Rav said. ‘The Saints. And Mr Mussa won’t be able to talk to you because he’s dead. Killed by their hired assassin after he tried to
sell her a head full of futzed files. Forget about him. We need to find Ang Ap Zhang.’

‘We don’t know that he’s dead,’ Hari said. ‘And it won’t take long to find out.’

Riyya said to Khinda Wole, ‘This is usually where they get their dicks out, and start comparing length and heft.’

‘Not for the first time, you mistake me for someone who hasn’t evolved much beyond his ape heritage,’ Rav said.

Riyya said, ‘I may be second cousin to an ape, but I’ve thought of something you missed.’

Rav said, ‘I doubt it.’

Riyya said, ‘If this assassin, Ang Ap Zhang, did somehow get on board Mr Mussa’s ship, if she killed him and his daughter – well, don’t you think that she might be hiding
there?’

Afterwards, after Hari had called Mr Mussa’s ship, after he had talked to the tanky, or to someone using the tanky’s avatar, after a long discussion about tactics,
after everyone was finally talked out, Khinda Wole drew him aside.

‘I found out something else about Deel Fertita. Something I think I should tell you privately. You asked me how Rember found her, when he hired specialists to help your family at
Jackson’s Reef.’

‘And you told me that his work files had been purged,’ Hari said.

‘His assistant kept a duplicate set,’ Khinda said. ‘According to her, Nabhomani chose Deel Fertita and the other specialists.’

Hari said, ‘Nabhomani hired them?’

Khinda said, ‘He asked Rember to hire them. Rember drew up their contracts and arranged for the bottle rocket that took them to your family’s ship, but your brother asked for them by
name.’

Hari asked Khinda if she could be certain that the assistant was telling the truth.

‘She is completely reliable.’ Khinda paused, then added, ‘I dug into the backgrounds of the specialists. At least one of them, Odd Samuelson, was a reiver. He traded in
biologics, but he also hired out as freelance security. He was part of the crew that took over Thor Five thirty years ago.’

Hari thought about that. He said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Nabhomani could have met Deel Fertita long before we took Dr Gagarian aboard. He met many people. He knew many people.
And it’s no secret that my brother liked women. They met, she seduced him, and asked him to remember her the next time he was recruiting specialists.’

Khinda said, ‘I’m sorry if it’s bad news.’

Hari thanked her for her discretion. ‘One thing is clear. My enemies have been planning this for a long time.’

‘I’m at the front door,’ Rav said. ‘Ready to do my best to kick it down. How about you? Are you ready? Are you able? Are you willing?’

‘Absolutely,’ Hari said.

He was floating in the shadow of a service module close to the hull of Mr Mussa’s small, sagittiform ship. The eidolon of his p-suit glimmered beside him. Beyond, the combs of the docks
dwindled towards a curved, prickly landscape crowded with domes and tents, blockhouses and bunkers, towers and turrets and steeples and spires. Most of the spires were wrapped in gold foil and
topped with golden crosses or giant picts of bleeding hearts or crowns of thorns. The League of Christ Militant believed only the fittest could attain Heaven, and that fitness was measured by
accumulation of wealth – most especially the accumulation of gold, which they believed to be as incorruptible as the justice of their prophet.

‘Of course, it’s not too late to switch our roles,’ Rav said. ‘I admire your pluck, youngblood, but I’ve done this kind of thing before and you haven’t.
I’d take it badly if you got yourself killed.’

‘Neither Mr Mussa nor the assassin want to kill me,’ Hari said. ‘They both want what’s inside my head. Let’s do this before I lose my nerve.’

Khinda Wole cut in, told Hari and Rav that her friends were ready to intercede if the police were called; a few moments later Riyya said that she had established contact with Mr Mussa’s
ship.

‘An eidolon is screening calls,’ she said. ‘Do you still want me to go ahead?’

‘If someone is on board, they’ll be listening in,’ Hari said.

Rav said, ‘You know what would really distract them? Blowing a big hole in their airlock and storming aboard.’

‘Start knocking,’ Hari said. ‘I’m going in.’

As Riyya began to explain that she had discovered a vacuum organism capable of extracting and concentrating vanadium from very low levels, Hari sculled across the short gap to Mr Mussa’s
ship and attached the emergency airlock package that Khinda Wole had located in her stores of miscellaneous salvage.

Riyya said, ‘It’s a fast-growing variation of the old RUR-three-eighty strain.’

‘I’m not interested in purchasing vacuum-organism strains at the moment,’ Mr Mussa’s eidolon said.

The package unfolded into a disc that clamped to the hull with billions of microscopic hooks and sticky pads. A puff of gas, enough to create a pressure of less than a hundredth of a millibar,
inflated its dome and triggered a charge that flowed through two hoops of memory wire and configured its airlock.

‘I also have a robust ten-sixty-eight-dash-em strain,’ Riyya said. ‘It grows true.’

‘I have no interest in it.’

Hari unsealed the flap of the outer hatch, scrambled inside, and resealed the outer hatch before pushing through the inner hatch into the little dome of the tent. So far, so good. It was a
standard method for entering a pressurised vessel or habitat whose locks were in some way compromised, employed routinely during salvage work. Nabhoj had taught Hari the technique, but Hari had
never before tried to solo it, and he was using it to gain entry to hostile territory.

Riyya said, ‘Do you have anything to trade in exchange? I have a client who is looking for a specialised sunflower strain. I heard you might have a culture line that doesn’t have the
usual cis-em-dash senescence error.’

‘Your information is not accurate,’ Mr Mussa’s eidolon said.

‘How about a germanium accumulator?’

‘I do not have any accumulator lines in stock at this time.’

Hari unwrapped the rope of polarised explosive from his waist and began to lay it in a circle.

Riyya said, ‘You do trade in vacuum organisms.’

‘Of course.’

‘But not only in vacuum organisms.’

Hari flinched. Riyya had gone off-script.

‘I am fully occupied with other business at the moment,’ Mr Mussa’s eidolon said.

‘There’s talk that you have a tick-tock person’s head,’ Riyya said. ‘I know a collector who’d pay good credit for it.’

Silence, while Hari glued a strap of flexible fullerene across the point where the two ends of the rope overlapped. He felt a jittery static in his body. Then another voice said, ‘I assume
you’re working with the Ardenist.’

Riyya said, ‘I’m a sole trader.’

‘An Ardenist is attempting to force the hatch of the jetty to which my ship is moored. Tell him to desist.’

Hari triggered the explosive rope. There was a faint tremor as the polarised explosive sliced through a circular section of the hull, and then the circle hinged up, pushed by air rushing out of
the ship to fill the tent’s blister. Hari triggered the cylinder of incapacitating agent and sent it spinning through the narrow hole, then threw a flashbang grenade. There was a percussive
blast and brief stutter of fierce light, and he swarmed head first through the hole, trying to look everywhere at once.

As planned, making use of a model created by a single pass of the deep radar of Rav’s ship, he’d entered some kind of hold or storage area. A cramped cylindrical space, walls dappled
with the flittering shadows of debris shaken loose by the detonation of the grenade and tumbling and bumping around a coffin-sized tank cradled in a web of pipes and hoses and pumps.

Hari realised that it must be the tank where what was left of Mr D.V. Mussa’s corporeal body was maintained. He started when the p-suit’s eidolon appeared beside him.

‘Tell me what you see,’ he said.

‘I cannot detect any movement. But waste heat from the tank is interfering with my infrared imaging, and the noise of the pumps is affecting my motion detectors.’

‘Switch everything off,’ Hari said, and someone swam up from the far side of the tank. A small figure in a black p-suit, aiming a pistol with a flared muzzle. The eidolon shot past
it, vanished into a bulkhead.

Lights snapped off; the churn of the pumps slowed, stopped. Dull red emergency lighting kindled.

‘You’re early.’

It was a young girl’s voice, soft and calm. Mr Mussa’s daughter.

Hari said, ‘Why don’t you put away that pistol? Then I’ll restore your ship’s systems, and we’ll be able to have a sensible conversation about our common
interests.’

Rav had patched the system-killing routine into the eidolon. He claimed that he’d tricked a dacoit into giving it to him years back, said that he’d always wanted to try it out. Hari
hadn’t been certain that it would work, and wasn’t sure that he could undo the damage, but it was the only bargaining counter he had. So far, there was no sign that the djinn was going
to come to his aid. He hoped it was a good sign, hoped that it meant he wasn’t in any real danger.

‘I can fix anything on this ship myself,’ Mr Mussa’s daughter said.

‘Then you had better get to work. The tank that keeps your father alive has been knocked out.’

‘He’s already dead.’

Hari was reflected in the mirror of her helmet visor. The muzzle of her pistol seemed to be about the size of a cargo lock.

‘I’m sorry about your loss,’ he said.

‘No, you’re not,’ the girl said.

The eidolon appeared behind her. ‘Her suit is hardened,’ she said.

Hari told the girl, ‘I admit that you appear to have the upper hand at the moment, but your ship is crippled, and I have friends outside.’

‘The Ardenist, and the girl pretending to be a trader? Or the crew of amateur sleuths who have been keeping watch on me ever since I docked?’

‘We can help you find the person who killed your father.’

‘Take off your helmet,’ the girl said.

There was a hard, unforgiving tone in her voice. It reminded Hari that she was much older than she appeared to be. He wondered why the djinn hadn’t taken an interest in her. Because he was
negotiating with her, perhaps. Or because she was a little girl . . .

He said, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘But I do,’ the girl said.

The eidolon merged briefly with the girl’s p-suit, backed out, spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

A sudden glow was reflected in the visor of the girl’s helmet. Hari turned, saw Mr Mussa’s avatar floating in front of him. Its luminous sphere broke apart into a cloud of little
needles, microbots, that swarmed over him. The row of indices and virtual switches under his chin blinked out; the p-suit’s musculature hardened around his arms and legs; the latches in his
neck ring clicked back and the helmet rose away from his head. There was a strong, sweet odour – the incapacitating agent – and the red glow of the emergency lighting deepened to
darkness.

Hari jolted awake with a chemical taste burning in his mouth and pain pulsing behind his eyes. He was held fast by bands across his chest, hips, knees and ankles, lashed to a
fragment of wall that stuck up from a field of rubble like a grave marker. He had been stripped to his suit liner, something was clamped over his scalp, and his bios was blocked. He could not tell
where he was or how long he had been unconscious, could not reach out to anyone. It was like being back on Themba. It was like being deaf and half-blind, like being unable to read or to recall the
proper names of things.

He sucked spit into the foul cavern of his mouth and softly called to the p-suit’s eidolon. Nothing.

A smashed ruin of rubble curved up on either side and stretched away into a dim vastness. Little sparks glimmered far off in the unresolved distance. One or two were moving, but most were set in
scattered clusters, thickening towards a hazy and irregular disc like a primordial galaxy. Hari began to understand where he was. Inside Tannhauser Gate’s cylinder. In the free zone, where
anything could be bought or sold, where there were no laws except the tithe law.

He called to the eidolon again, softly, urgently, and something moved at the edge of his vision.

The little girl, Mr Mussa’s daughter, floating down through the air.

She still wore her black p-suit, but she had taken off its helmet and hung it on her hip. She looked about eight years old. She planted one hand on the fragment of wall and leaned in close.