Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (9 page)

Little Helper
was falling free, unable to reduce its velocity and make a direct or orbital rendezvous with Vesta’s little moon and the city of Fei Shen. Behind it,
Easy Does
It
came on inexorably. It would close on
Little Helper
a few hours after both gigs had passed the asteroid.

Hari wasn’t going to be aboard when that happened.

He pulled on his pressure suit and passed through the airlock, clambered around the sharp curve of the lifesystem’s sphere, swung into the lifepod and shut its hatch. The crash couch
adjusted around him and his bios synched with the lifepod’s systems. A gentle puff from the lifepod’s attitude jets sent it drifting away from the gig; then, at a distance of two
kilometres, its motor lit up.

Little Helper
dwindled into the black sky. The lifepod curved inwards, decelerating, falling down Vesta’s gravity well. Hari had been planning to swing
Little Helper
around Vesta in an elliptical orbit that would take it close to the edge of the atmosphere and then back out towards Fei Shen, but the lifepod didn’t have enough reaction mass to complete the
manoeuvre. There was only one place it could reach before Hari’s pursuers caught up with it.

The lifepod’s motor cut off. He was committed now. He couldn’t risk opening the comms and contacting Fei Shen’s traffic control because his pursuers might piggyback the
transmission and hack into the lifepod’s control system. He had to assume that he was being tracked.

Vesta flattened into a landscape stamped with craters, raked with grooves and ridges. Hari saw fleets of giant dunes rippling across inter-crater plains. He saw three craters of diminishing size
stacked one on top of the other like a cross-section of
Little Helper
, slanted away from the equator. He saw a circular crater capped with a broken dome two kilometres across. He saw the
sharp fleck of the little moon, the rock on which Fei Shen perched, rise above the horizon, hopelessly beyond reach.

He made the final adjustments to the lifepod’s trim, and then it hit the outer edge of Vesta’s atmosphere and was enveloped in a shell of shock-heated gas, sullen red brightening to
shocking pinks and oranges. Heat pulsed through the lifepod. Hari sweated inside his pressure suit, crushed into the crash couch by the brutal force of deceleration, shaken by a drilling vibration.
The optical feeds showed only flowing glare. And then there was a long moment of free fall and the burning envelope around the lifepod died back and he saw that it was dropping towards a rumpled
landscape.

A curved ridge flew past, the rim wall of a crater. Another ridge came up from the horizon. Hari closed his eyes, an ancient hardwired reflex. Crash balloons inflated with a sharp crack. Cased
in twelve tough spheres, the lifepod struck the crest of the ridge, spun through the air and bounced across a garden of thorny plants spread across the crater’s floor, shedding momentum with
every impact. Inside, in the grip of the crash couch’s holster, Hari was jarred and inverted and thrown from side to side. Every bounce a crunching wham! crash! followed by a moment of
soaring grace, then wham! crash! again.

He was unconscious long before the lifepod’s lumpy parcel struck a terraced cliff at the far side of the crater and rebounded and came to rest in the middle of a run-out of tumbled
boulders. And woke to find himself marching with a stiff bounding gait across a gently rumpled plain. The sun hung just above the horizon behind him and a single lamp burned high in the dark blue
sky, so that he walked at the apex of a double shadow.

The cryoflask containing Dr Gagarian’s head was hooked to the belt of his p-suit and bumped his left hip with every other step.

He slowed by degrees, came to a halt close to a spatter of rocks flung from a small impact crater. According to the p-suit’s eidolon, he was in the low northern latitudes, some twenty-two
kilometres north-east of the crash site. He had been walking for more than six hours. His breathing was laboured and his legs ached. His whole body hurt, in fact, bruised and battered by the hard
landing. The pain was a remote, not unpleasant throb, pushed away by something the p-suit had given him.

‘Talk to me,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you did.’

The eidolon appeared beside him, a sketch in light and shadow, the two stars of her eyes level with his. She said, ‘You were unconscious. I could not wake you. And because our pursuers
must have tracked our descent I decided it would be best to put some distance between us and the lifepod as soon as possible.’

‘The authorities in Fei Shen would have tracked it, too. I was relying on them to rescue me.’

Hari was angry at the eidolon’s presumption, humiliated at the thought of being turned into a meat puppet. And he’d lost the lifepod, his last link with his family’s ship . .
.

The eidolon apologised for her presumption, picted a map. ‘You require replenishment of power and other supplies, and a place to rest. There is a shelter seventeen point four kilometres
away. It will supply everything you need.’

‘Is that where I was heading before I woke up?’

‘You were walking straight towards it.’

‘This shelter, does it have a direct link to Fei Shen?’

‘I believe so.’

‘You have it all figured out.’

‘I am trying my best to be of service.’

‘Don’t ever help me again unless I ask for your help. Is that clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Now let’s find this shelter.’

Hari walked on. Using craters as waypoints, comparing them with the eidolon’s map, trying to keep to the line she had drawn to the shelter. He discovered that he was not afraid. He was
determined to survive this. He would not give up his life easily: dying would mean that he had failed his family. He had survived a hijack and a kidnap attempt and a spaceship crash. He would
survive a short stroll across the surface of Vesta.

The sun set inside a kind of shell of hard, pinkish light that slowly faded out of the darkening sky. The lamp swung overhead and another rose ahead of Hari, followed by Vesta’s moon, a
pale splinter of bone with a tiny diamond glinting off-centre: the city of Fei Shen, tantalising, unreachable.

Hari set a rhythm, walking for twenty minutes, resting for ten, squatting on his haunches, sipping water, moving on. The dusty plain was punctuated by small craters, thickets of wiry grey
plants, stray boulders, rippling aprons of black sand. It reminded Hari of his father’s viron. He would not have been surprised to see the old man walking towards him, opening windows in the
air, preparing a campaign to recapture his ship.

But this ashy desert was still and silent, and there was no trace of habitation. No structures, no roads or paths or tracks. The Free People of Fei Shen, Vesta’s self-appointed guardians,
did not allow any permanent settlements on the surface. They’d once been Martians, the Free People. A gypsy race of environmental engineers and gene wizards living off the land, travelling in
caravans of construction machinery, mobile soil factories and greenhouses. Descendants of a Gaian cult, they believed that the mother goddess of Earth was merely one aspect of a deity who had
quickened and spread life into every possible niche: every living thing, from archaebacteria to human beings, was part of that divine presence. When Trues had gone to war against Mars, some of the
Free People had gone underground, preserving their genome libraries, while the rest had gone up and out. Riding ships in slow, low-energy paths, spreading through the forgotten places of the Belt,
colonising and repairing abandoned gardens, settling on uninhabited rocks and seeding their surfaces with vacuum organisms, burrowing into them and creating gardens in tunnels and voids. A great
and holy work that would end only when every rock in the Belt, every moon of the outer planets, every kobold in the Kuiper belt, had been quickened with some kind of life.

Vesta was their holiest shrine. Their great cathedral, their omphalos. An alliance of baseliners from Earth and Jupiter’s moons had begun to terraform it a thousand years ago. A
superstring injected into its core had deepened its gravity well; sun lamps and fusion engines had raised its surface temperature and pumped heat into its frozen regolith; engineers had mined and
released carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon. Boreal forests and bogs planted inside craters, and dense blooms of cyanobacteria in meltwater lakes, had fixed most of the carbon dioxide and raised
the partial pressure of oxygen. The atmospheric pressure had stabilised at a little over two hundred millibars at zero elevation point. Tweaked animals had been introduced. Once, the little world
had been the hunting grounds of True suzerains; now, it was a curated wilderness. No one was supposed to land there without permission. Hari hoped to be arrested for trespass, so that he could
escape his pursuers and explain his predicament.

Vesta’s deepened gravity, 0.2
g
, was twice the maximum acceleration of
Pabuji’s Gift
. Even with the help of the p-suit’s pseudomusculature, Hari found it hard
going. He walked and rested, walked and rested. His legs grew heavy, his feet slow and uncertain. His perspective narrowed to the ground ahead. To the next step, and the next. The hiss of air in
his helmet. The thump of blood in his head.

Vesta’s rotation period was short, less than six hours. The lamps and the moon chased each other to the western horizon and the sky brightened above a crescent of hills directly ahead. As
the sun rose, Hari climbed a long slope that ended in a crest of shattered stone. The bowl of the crater stretched away below, filled edge to edge with a dense forest, obscured here and there by
streamers of mist. A far-off gleam of water.

The eidolon glimmered beside Hari. ‘You could walk around it,’ she said.

Hari checked the map. The shelter was two klicks beyond the far side of the crater. If he circumnavigated the crater’s rim it would more than triple the distance, and the terrain was cut
by blocky upthrusts and crevasses that would be difficult to negotiate.

‘Best to keep going forward,’ he said, and crabbed down a run-out slope that pushed a long ridge into the forest. Trees closed in on either side; their canopy closed up overhead.
There seemed to be just two species. Tall dark green pines forming long rows in every direction, punctuated by stands of even taller vacuum-organism trees, their slim black columns topped with
filmy parasols supported by delicate arching ribs. The parasols meshed like the clockwork of vast and unfathomable mechanisms, and the tips of their ribs divided into fingerlike projections that
swelled and spurted misty jets of carbon dioxide and water vapour drawn from frozen reservoirs deep underground.

It was a strange, spooky place. Shadows slowly shifted as the sun tracked across the sky. Vacuum-organism trees moaned and whistled. When a low ridge of pockmarked basalt cut across Hari’s
path he scrambled to the top and saw a mirror-smooth plane stretching away, gleaming with a steely sheen in the level light of the setting sun. A lamp was rising to the east, blurred by a stretch
of thin mist.

He had reached the shore of the lake at the centre of the crater. Strange to see so much water, enough to drown
Pabuji’s Gift
and a hundred ships like her. Strange to see it lying
there flat, submitting to gravity.

Hari followed the ridge clockwise around the lake. The sun set; a second lamp rose. The ridge grew broader, descended to a swampy delta of sluggish streams braided between low islands and
stretches of reeds. On the far side, a giant monolith stood on a kind of platform or apron of bare rock, taller than the ragged fringe of pine trees behind it. Hari waded through muddy water,
scrambled over folds of basalt overgrown with shaggy black moss. He was more than halfway across when a ragged chorus of high-pitched hooting started up, drifting across the delta from the trees
behind the monolith.

The eidolon brightened in front of him. ‘Be careful,’ she said.

‘What is it?’

She flung out an arm, pointing towards stooped figures emerging from shadows under the trees. Small, barrel-chested, bandy-legged, clad only in dark pelts. Human eyes gleaming under ridged
brows. A species of man-ape derived from the human genome, according to Hari’s bios, with an enhanced lung capacity and tweaked haemoglobin.

There were twenty, thirty, forty of them. Advancing past the monolith to the edge of the apron of rock, stamping, slapping their hands over their heads, raising their heads and pant-hooting.
Hari, pleased by this exuberant greeting, waved and ploughed on through knee-deep water.

‘Incoming,’ the eidolon said.

A reticle popped up in the visor of Hari’s helmet, tracking a small object falling towards him. He sidestepped it, but more projectiles were dropping out of the sky. Most splashed into the
water around him, but one banged into the chestplate of his p-suit and dropped at his feet. He stooped, felt around in the muddy water, scooped it up. An obsidian cobble, flaked into a point at one
end.

A stone struck his shoulder. A stone glanced off his helmet. He felt the impact through the padding.

The man-apes were capering in front of the monolith. Feet slapped rock. Long arms swung, flinging stones in high arcs.

‘We should have gone around the crater, not across,’ the eidolon said.

‘It’s too late to go back,’ Hari said.

A volley of stones fell around him. His helmet was struck again, hard enough to stun him for a moment. Several man-apes had climbed to the tops of the trees to one side of the monolith.
Silhouetted against the deep indigo sky, gripping branches with prehensile toes, they shrieked and hooted and beat the drums of their chests with their fists. Around the base of the monolith,
man-apes thrashed broken branches over their heads or ran up to the edge of the apron and flung stones and retreated. One, a head taller than the others, broad-shouldered, pelt streaked with
silver, splashed into the water and advanced towards Hari with uncompromising determination.

Hari stood his ground and switched on his helmet lamp, aimed its beam at this imposing challenger. The man-ape squinted against the glare, black lips twisted back from stout incisors, then beat
his chest and stamped his feet, spraying water and mud, shrieking defiance, coming on.