Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (34 page)

‘Your suit is presently heading sunwards,’ she said. ‘I did some serious damage to its comms back on the ship, and launched it from the escape-capsule tube. Don’t expect
your neural net’s security to help you, by the way. It works through your bios, and I’ve been neutralising that ever since you boarded my ship. What do you find so funny?’

‘Everyone but me seems to know what’s inside my head.’

‘I spotted it the first time we met. When you met my avatar. A simple neutron backscatter scan revealed it. I wasn’t interested in it at the time, and neither were my clients. But
things have changed. Very soon, I’m going to tell their representative where you are. And I’m going to tell your friends, too.’

‘They’re the Saints, aren’t they? Your father’s clients.’

The girl’s smile, a quick, cold flicker, reminded Hari that she wasn’t what she appeared to be.

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ she said.

‘And the head. Dr Gagarian’s head. Did you and your father sell that to them, too? Is that why he was killed?’

‘I didn’t try to sell the head to anyone,’ the girl said. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t check the integrity of its files? I paid one of Gun Ako Akoi’s
granddaughters to take a look as soon as I arrived here. When she told me that the files were irrevocably corrupted, I realised that I was bait for your trap. It was clever, by the way, to let me
think I’d got away with the theft, so that I would draw out the people who wanted the head.’

‘I thought so,’ Hari said.

‘But not quite clever enough. I knew you were chasing me. I knew you would come here, to find out who wanted to buy the head from me. When I told my clients that Dr Gagarian’s files
were corrupted, I offered them your neural net. After that, all I had to do was wait. And here you are. I won’t stick around to watch the fun, when the representative of my clients meets your
friends, but you’ll have a grandstand view. And there’s a good chance it will kick off something amongst the local inhabitants. When there’s trouble in the free zone, people come
running. And not to help.’

‘If this is because you think I’m responsible for your father’s death—’

‘You made many mistakes, but that’s your biggest. Believing that someone killed him because of that head.’

‘Then who did?’

The girl flashed her quick, cold smile again.

‘You,’ Hari said.

‘Care to guess when? I’ll give you a clue. It wasn’t here.’

‘Not on Ophir either, I suppose.’

‘The problem with being a tanky is that you are stuck in a tank,’ the girl said. ‘You have to rely on avatars, and the kindness of strangers. Like many tankies, the old man
fettled up someone to act as his eyes and ears in the real world. She did all his dirty work, and guarded him against those who wanted to harm him. But then he tried to cheat some bad people, and
they found out, and they killed his little helper. She was blameless, but she was on the spot and he was a long way away, safe in his tank. So then he had to make a new little helper. Who was just
as skilled, and just as loyal. At least, to begin with. Because the old man didn’t learn from his mistake.

‘That’s another thing about tankies, you know? They are semidetached from the world. After a while, it all seems like a saga to them. They forget that actions have consequences, that
you can’t reboot and start over when things go wrong. So the old man tried to swindle someone else, his new little girl barely escaped with her life when it all went wrong, and she began to
wonder if he’d made the same kind of mistake before. She wanted to help him because that was how she’d been made, and the best way to do that, she thought, was to learn how to save him
from himself. She broke into the old man’s files, and found out about her predecessor. Saw the pict that the bad people had made after they’d caught her, saw what they’d done to
her. And she began to realise that the old man considered her to be disposable.

‘So, when he started to plan another dubious deal, his little helper tried to persuade him out of it. She was trying to save him from himself, and save herself, too. But he didn’t
see it that way. He thought that she was rebelling against him, thought she was being disloyal. And he punished her. Hurt her badly. After she recovered, she decided that things couldn’t go
on like this. She didn’t kill him. Not immediately. First, she locked him down in his tank. She took control of his avatar and his business. She let him know what he was doing, and told him
why, and tried to reason with him. But he managed to open a back channel to a former associate, and the associate tried to kill me. So what could I do? I killed the associate and I killed the old
man, and because I had no other way of earning a living, I continued to run his business.

‘I moved to Ophir, set up the old man’s tank as if he was still alive inside it, and went into business with your uncle, supplying exotic biota which he sold on to his contacts on
Earth. I dealt with Tamonash through the avatar. He had no idea it was me and not the old man. And it was good, for a while. A nice, simple little business, with the promise of some real profit
down the line. And then I heard about Dr Gagarian’s research, that people thought he’d discovered something significant about the Bright Moment. Something valuable. My clients mislaid
you and that head, but their carelessness gave me the opportunity to sell it to them again. And here we are.’

‘You told them. The hijackers. You’re the one who told them about Dr Gagarian. I thought it might have been my uncle, but it was you.’

‘Let’s put it this way: this is the second time I’ve sold you to them. That’s why we aren’t doing the handover directly. For some reason, they blame me for your
escape the first time around. And I think they think I had something to do with those corrupted files in the tick-tock’s head. The credit is already deposited with the bourse. It will be
released when their representative takes custody of you. Your friends will create a distraction when they try and fail to rescue you, and I’ll be on my way to somewhere else. Somewhere far,
far away. And since you cut a hole in my ship’s hull and futzed its systems, I believe I’ll take the Ardenist’s ship.’

‘I don’t think so,’ a voice said close by, and a small drone dropped out of the dark air and aimed a brilliant light at Hari and his captor.

The little girl kicked away from Hari, somersaulted in midair, and drew her pistol and shot the drone, all in one fluid movement. Its light went out and Hari tried to blink
away swarming after-images, glimpsed the girl skimming away above fields of rubble, saw someone swoop down and smash into her.

It was Rav. As the girl tumbled away, he beat backwards, steadied himself in the air, and pointed at her. A thread of intense blue light flicked out from his fist and she burst into flames,
kicking, writhing, dwindling cometwise into the dim volume of the cylinder. There was a brief shower of sparks when she struck a finger of stone, and then she was gone.

Rav swept in towards Hari with three swift strong beats of his wings, neatly reversed, and caught hold of the edge of the wall.

‘She liked to talk, didn’t she?’ he said. ‘I thought she’d never get to the point.’

‘You shouldn’t have killed her.’

‘Why not? She tried to kill me. And caused me a good deal of inconvenience, too.’

‘Even so. It wasn’t right.’

‘We’re in the free zone. There’s no right or wrong here. And I don’t believe in little weaknesses like mercy or forgiveness.’

The Ardenist flourished a knife and began to saw at the strip that pinned Hari’s ankles. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but I’m having a serious case of
déjà vu
.’

Hari saw a dark wet gleam on Rav’s bare shoulder. ‘You’re hurt.’

‘It’s only a scratch. My boy won’t be growing hair on his balls just yet. It was a nice trick, firing off your p-suit. Good enough to fool the trader and her friends,
anyway.’

‘But not you.’

‘But not me. When you broke into the ship, I suited up and went outside as fast as I could. I saw her sneak out of an access hatch in the stern, towing a storage pod. She was fast. Almost
got away from me. Almost, but not quite. You know the rest,’ Rav said. He cut the last of Hari’s bonds and caught him by one arm and smiled into his face. ‘You also caused me a
good deal of inconvenience, youngblood, but all’s well that ends well. I won’t let you out of my sight again, I promise.’

Hari pulled off the cap that Mr Mussa’s daughter had clamped over his scalp. His bios rebooted; the volume of the cylinder immediately gained scale and clusters of names and other
signifiers.

‘Mr Mussa’s daughter told me that the representative of her clients will be here soon,’ he said.

‘You would like to work up some kind of ambush. Ordinarily, I’d like nothing better, but we’re exposed here, and almost certainly outgunned,’ Rav said, and clasped Hari
to his chest and kicked away from the stub of wall.

As they arrowed through dim air towards the little galaxy of lights at the far end of the cylinder, Rav told Hari that it was time to regroup.

‘I’m not ready to leave until we’ve found Ang Ap Zhang,’ Hari said.

‘I’m not ready to leave, either. But we’ve been compromised, thanks to your little adventure with the tanky’s spawn,’ Rav said. ‘The assassin has had more
than two hundred days to establish herself here. We’re right in the middle of her territory. She knows about us; we haven’t had time to find out about her. It won’t be easy,
getting you out alive, but I’m going to do my best. We’ll get back to my ship, and work out what to do next.’

‘What about Riyya? Where is she?’

‘Oh, I made sure she’s safe, although I don’t expect she’ll thank me for it.’

‘I confess that I’m not very happy either,’ Hari said.

‘Your pride is hurt. Look at it this way. You weren’t the first to be fooled by that little girl, but you were definitely the last.’ Rav looked at Hari. His sharp smile and
green gaze very fierce, very close. ‘You really
are
upset because I killed her. You shouldn’t be in the revenge game, youngblood. You’re too sentimental.’

‘I know what she was, and what she wanted to do,’ Hari said. ‘And I also know that you didn’t have to kill her. If only because she could have told us who her clients
were. Whether they were the Saints, or someone else.’

‘Forget about that for now,’ Rav said. ‘Let’s concentrate on getting out of here alive. I’m going to do my best to save you, but you’ll have to work with me.
Do what I say when I say it. Can you do that?’

‘I can try.’

They were skimming over hills and valleys of broken flowstone, bright shards of plastic, twisted rebar. Here and there rubble-pile islands floated like baby asteroids, lashed together by nets
and tethered by cables. Hari tried to imagine what it must have been like when the habitat had stopped spinning and centrifugal forces had torn everything loose. Buildings ripped apart, smashing
into other buildings. A whirling hurricane of debris plastering itself against the cylindrical wall . . . Amazing that the habitat’s sleeve had survived. Amazing that anything recognisable
had survived.

Rav pointed out latticework spheres scattered across a bowl of pale green grass. Most were ten or twenty metres in diameter, but one was easily as big as
Pabuji’s Gift
.

‘Combat cages,’ he said, ‘where the good citizens of the free zone thrash out their differences. I’ve taken down a few braggarts there, over the years. Maybe we could set
you up with the mastermind behind the hijack.’

Lights thickened ahead. Archipelagos of rafts, erratic piles of cubes, towers that leaned out of the rubble at improbable angles, girdled with platforms or scabbed with the bubbles of small
tents. Free-fall settlements of scavengers and dacoits, outlaws and pirates. Places where a person could buy any kind of mod or tweak, satisfy every kind of sexual desire, every appetite.

Hari and Rav flew through a passage that twisted and turned between anarchic free-fall architecture, lit by dabs of luminescence, signs and images hung in garishly coloured blocks of light, the
glow of gardens enclosed in transparent spherical tents like small, erratic moons. People moved in every direction, swimming along cableways, riding scooters and varicopters and jetbikes, towed by
hand-held fan-motors, navigating the air with judicious squirts of propellant from a variety of pistols and jets. Children riding airboards burst from a narrow space between two square towers like
a flock of birds, shouting taunts as they split around Hari and Rav. The air seemed thicker and warmer, tainted with the sweet stink of garbage.

‘We’re almost there,’ Rav said, and a moment later changed course with a single strong beat of his wings.

Hari looked around. A scooter was turning back towards them, ridden by a woman with long black hair and a familiar face. It was Deel Fertita. It was Angley Li. It was Ang Ap Zhang.

Cold shock jolted through Hari. His bios popped warnings as his heart rate and blood pressure increased; a sliver of icy pain pierced his left eye. The djinn was waking up. Blue light exploded
as he and Rav swept through a huge sign hung in the air; Rav told him to curl up as tight as he could, and gave him a hard shove.

Hari flew through an open window, skimmed across a room where two women were tending rows of plants bristling from hydroponic tubing, shot through a window on the far side. A slab wall loomed
dead ahead, and then Rav caught him and they stalled with a clap of wings and rose towards the underside of a platform. Rav caught at its edge and swung around. Everything flipped, and then Hari
was clinging to one of the tethers stretched across a garden patched with dozens of different crop plants. His pulse was pounding in his skull and there was a dagger twisting behind his eyes and a
feeling that something stood at his back.

‘That was intense,’ Rav said, and laughed.

He was aiming a pistol here and there with sharp precise flicks, looking for and failing to find a target.