Empress of the Sun (17 page)

‘What …’

‘Shhh.’ Shots. Figures running along the tentacles. ‘This’ll hurt a wee bit.’ Mchynlyth’s hands on her shoulder, then a wrench and more pain than the universe could hold. Black.

Into Ma’s black face,

‘Sun. Gun. Sungun.’

‘Sen, don’t say anything. You’re hurt bad.’

‘Sungun. Earth 1. The black things …’

‘Captain.’ Mchynlyth’s voice. ‘That thing Everett did. It could get those bastards away from the ship. Sen, polone, can you work it?’

‘Saw what he did.’

‘Sen, no. Mchynlyth, help her.’

‘It’s the ship!’ Mchynlyth’s voice blazed with anger.

‘Mr Mchynlyth, control your anger.’ Captain Anastasia’s voice was as cold as Mchynlyth’s was hot. ‘It’s
my
ship. And
I will save my ship. But right now, my daughter needs me more. Help her, Mr Mchynlyth.’

A pause, a hiss of defeated rage.

‘Aye, ma’am.’

A crash so huge it jolted her out of the warm black. The bridge door was down, smoking. Jiju on the bridge. The deck beneath her lurched. The ship was moving. Mchynlyth was shouting. Ma was shouting. The Jiju were singing. But loudest of all was the black, and she answered it, and went deep down into it and let it cover her over.

*

Charlotte Villiers saw the soldier die in front of her. He clattered down the companionway to arrive breathless on the platform at the end of the main spine, gun covering the angles. Then the air between him and her curdled like heat-haze, and three Jiju were there. Each held a staff in her hand. One spread her long fingers wide and stabbed them towards the soldier. The globe at the tip of the staff dissolved into a dozen flying metal shafts that ran the soldier through and through. The Jiju curled her hand and the shafts vanished and reappeared on her staff.

The Jiju turned towards Charlotte Villiers.

She held the gun steady. She was the Empire Games Small Arms gold medallist, but even she could never take all of them.

Time slowed to a crawl. Every moment was frozen. This
was what death was like, time frozen, one final moment that lasted forever.

A Jiju extended her staff towards Charlotte Villiers.

Behind the Jiju, Zaitsev pounded up the companionway.

It was all over.

‘Forgive me,’ Charlotte Villiers said. She held Zaitsev’s eyes as she hit the relay on her arm. The Einstein Gate opened. She could still see the look on his face – betrayed, abandoned, left to die – as she dived into the white light.

The Sunlord ship turned in the air over the slash in Crechewood. There was no mistaking the site of
Everness
’s crash-landing – she had torn a path of snapped wood, torn branches, headless trees through over a kilometre of forest canopy.
Everness
herself: not a sign. She had vanished.

Looking down into the empty space from the observation bubble in the left hull of the Sunlord sky-catamaran, Everett was gripped by a terrible fear.
Everness
gone cleanly, completely, without a trace or a mark: exactly how it would look if she had made a Heisenberg Jump.

Sen had watched everything he did. She was observant, smart, a clever copycat. She didn’t need to understand how to calculate jump points; all she had to do was pull them out of the Infundibulum’s memory and hit JUMP. Marooned on Diskworld. She would never do that. Not Sen.
Captain Anastasia would never order it. Unless the ship was faced with something so terrible, so total, that the only option was to make a Heisenberg Jump. ‘Unless’: such a sneaky, mean little word.

*

Crechewood had shaken to a boom high in the air. Sharkey reached by instinct for his guns.
That’s a sonic boom
, Everett thought,
but you won’t ever have heard one
. Sharkey’s world had no jets, no rockets, no missiles, nothing that travelled faster than the speed of sound. Moments later the Sunlord skymaran arrived over the clearing. It was as nimble as a dragonfly. Everett could not tell what made it fly. Nothing as ordinary as lift gas or wings or jet engines.
There’s some physical principle at work here
, Everett thought.
It’s not sci-fi magic keeping it up
. Not antigravity either. That was just another kind of magic, one pretending to be science. Like time machines and transporter beams. But it was impressive, the way the machine folded up like an origami bird to descend down the shaft between the trees.

Kax’s halo was rippling silver-green: excitement, Everett guessed. The skymaran touched down light as a kiss. Two Jiju descended the ramp between the twin hulls. At the sight of the humans their crests rose, their haloes snapped into a ring of spikes. Kax sang a short song; the Jiju folded their hands together in a gesture that, to human eyes, looked half-prayer, half-worry: to Kax, then to Everett and Sharkey. Sharkey stowed his guns and returned the greeting
with a bow. Everett had never learnt any lessons in reptile etiquette.

‘We will go and find out what has happened to your ship,’ Kax said. The Jiju stood aside to let her and the humans board the skymaran.

These are the first adult Jiju you’ve ever seen
, Everett thought as Kax stalked proudly past. This is as new to you as it is to me. But it’s all in your halo: the wisdom of all your hatch, and the wisdom of all the Jiju.

‘This is some bona kit,’ Sharkey whispered as the flyer lifted. Through the port-side viewing blister Everett could see shy scavengers sneak out of the forest to pick and tear at the carcass of the dead Jiju. So end princesses, he thought. Above the trees the skymaran unfolded into flight mode. Kax took a proud position in the transparent bubble at the front of the starboard hull. At the centre of the craft, where the hulls joined, the Jiju crew moved their hands over a hovering projection of Crechewood. A gesture sent the skymaran over the forest canopy. It came to a halt over the
Everness
crash site without any discernible shift in acceleration.

‘“Thou art a stranger, and also an exile,”’ Sharkey whispered. Everett stared at the empty space where the airship had lain. He did not know what to do. He was out of ideas. His cleverness had come to an end.

The Jiju pilot sang something. Kax was in the other hull but her voice came clear to Everett and Sharkey.

‘We’ve picked up four contacts on our scanners: three skyqueens of the Genequeens and one human airship.’

‘
Everness
,’ Everett whispered. He hadn’t been abandoned. He wasn’t alone, marooned. The ship was still here, and the people he cared about. It had been taken by the Genequeens, but that was a solvable problem. He would think of something. He felt sick with relief. In the opposite pod Kax heard him whisper and glanced over. Everett hardly recognised her. Physically she was the same Kax, minus a few centimetres of crest, plus a few cuts and scars, but everything was different. It had been the same for the guys who had been in fights at school. Before, they had been his friends, his school-mates; after, it was as if the fighting had stained their skins. There was violence on them. They seemed less human to Everett.

‘Well, let’s get after them and visit some righteous wrath on their reptile asses, begging your pardon, ma’am,’ Sharkey said. ‘I mean, Your Highness.’

‘This is a Sunlord royal yacht,’ Kax said. ‘Those are three well-armed skyqueens. They would cut the bones out of our bodies.’

‘We can’t leave them!’ Everett shouted. The Jiju pilots’ crests shot up.

‘I won’t,’ Kax said. ‘I owe you, Everett. But for you, I would be me dead in the crechewood. Instead, I am a princess.’ Kax held out her hands. The deck opened, machine arms reached out, unfolded, draped Kax’s body in a richly
worked tunic and a heavy jewelled collar. ‘Clothes do make the woman,’ Kax said, admiring herself. ‘One needs to be properly dressed to visit my mother.’

*

Jiju faces. Nostrils flickering, eye-membranes blinking. Close enough to feel their breath against her cheek and taste its sweet, musky smell on her tongue. Sen cried out and surged up, hands slapping, beating them away. The Jiju reeled back, fluting in alarm.

‘Easy, easy.’ Hands on her shoulders. Jolting pain. She remembered Mchynlyth taking the shoulder in his hands. He swore constantly, softly, deeply, angry beyond any anger at what Charlotte Villiers had done. ‘This will hurt.’ He did something to her shoulder so painful it had been bliss to drop back into unconsciousness. She had put it out, broken it, done something. No, she’d done nothing. That polone, that Villiers, she had done it to her. Sen felt dirty, abused, violated. Someone else’s hands had worked their will on her body.

The middle one of the three Jiju lowered her staff towards Sen’s face.

‘You get your witchy shite away from that wee polone!’ Mchynlyth yelled. His face was tight with rage, the spit flying from his mouth.

‘Easy, easy.’ Ma’s voice.

The staff ended in an amber sphere the size of a fist. The sphere touched her forehead. And Sen saw …

Cities woven from forests. Skyscrapers made from living trees. Vehicles, factories, flying machines that weren’t completely machine, but half living. Wooden temples pouring out torrents of water and Jiju hatchlings. Prairies grazed by rainbow-coloured bird-dinosaurs the size of houses. Huge ocean waves that were sea creatures. Living clouds. All to a million voices singing and piping in her head.

‘Ah!’ Sen gasped. ‘Oh!’

Then the amber globe was lifted away from her forehead. The visions died, the song ended.

‘Are you well?’ the central Jiju said.

‘Aye, she’s only got cracked ribs, internal bruising and a dislocated shoulder,’ Mchynlyth growled. ‘And concussion. She’s as right as ninepence.’ The Jiju ignored him.

‘You stole my language!’ Sen said. ‘Like …’ Like Kax, she had almost said. Sen shut herself up.

‘Like?’ The three Jiju cocked their heads to one side. Also like Kax.

‘Like magic,’ Sen said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her ma smile.

‘I’m Jekajek Rasteem Besheshkek,’ the middle Jiju said. It had her voice, her accent, her way of speaking. ‘This is Deddeshren Seveyamat Besheshkek …’ The Jiju on her right pursed fingers together and dipped its head – ‘… and Kelakavaka Hinreyu Besheshkek.’ The Jiju on her left repeated the gesture. ‘You are under the protection of Her Exaltation the Marquise of Harhada. Hold still, polone.’

The three Jiju passed their staffs over Sen’s body. Their voices were like a conversation of birds.

‘The DNA is alien to us,’ Jekajek said. ‘There are limits to what we can do.’

‘Ma?’ Sen whimpered.

‘What are you doing?’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘Why, making her better,’ Jekajek said, blinking her eye-membranes. The staff tips unwound into streamers of golden dust that twined over Sen’s face, settling lower and lower until they flowed over her features like rivulets of liquid light.

‘What? No …’ They were up her nose, in her ears. Sen blinked as they wormed into her tear ducts. A gasp, and they were down her throat. She choked and sucked them into her lungs, gagged and they slipped into her stomach. After the moment of panic, of the horror of being invaded, there was no pain. Waves of warm pleasure pulsed out through her body, like the ripples meeting when many stones were dropped into clear water. ‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘Ah. Uh! Oh! Oh! Oh … !’ From her lungs down through her body, her kiki, down her thighs and out through her toes. Up through her heart, each valve pulsing glowing heat, like a steam engine; into her throat like the warm, warm brandy Sharkey gave her from his hip flask on the cold Baltic runs. Down her arms, like strength in every muscle. Her fingers tingled. She felt like she could play a piano.

‘Oh the Dear oh my word oh …’

Spasms of warmth inside. The Jiju stood upright and the streamers of gold snaked out of the orifices of her body and wound around the staff heads to once again form amber spheres.

Sen felt drunk. There was no pain. No pain at all.

‘Oh wow.’ She tried to get to her feet, wobbled. Captain Anastasia caught her.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ Sen was still woozy from the treatment. Then, ‘No!’ The cough came up from the very bottom of her lungs, a wracking, retching heave that dragged up all the clogged buried stuff deep down and wrapped it into a ball of vile phlegm. ‘It’s black!’ Sen yelped at the gob that came up from her lungs on to the deck.

‘I’m no cleaning that up,’ Mchynlyth protested. ‘Just so as you know.’

‘Your respiratory system was badly congested with carbon soot,’ Jekajek said. Years of flying through the Smoke Ring, the circle of coal-fired power plants that fed London’s burning addiction for electricity. Smogs and soots and smokes and vapours. Sen gulped, once, twice.

‘I can taste the air!’ She licked her lips. ‘It’s like … douce, bona, clean. Now I knows what Everett Singh was cackling on about.’

‘We also found a congenital deformity in one of your heart valves,’ Jekajek said. ‘It could have limited your life in later years. We repaired it. However, there was an imbalance
we did not heal – the levels of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin in your brain that were causing irrational behaviour. We believe they are connected with human emotions of attraction and attachment to the young male Everett Singh. If you want, we can remove them.’

What were they saying about her heart, and Everett? Didn’t matter: beyond the great window was something amazing: steel tentacles. Sen rested her hands on the glass.
Everness
was clasped in the embrace of three large flying devices – her mind went first to the word
machine
, but no machine ever moved so gracefully, with so much life. Armoured tentacles studded with suckers held the hull firm. Jiju images flashed through Sen’s brain, of lashing tentacles in a vast vat of dark, oily liquid: the Genequeens built machines that were half alive, living creatures that were half machine. But in her head cries rang out: those tentacles thrashed in pain.
It hurts, don’t it?
Sen thought, looking out at the huge armoured body of the flying machine/creature.
Every day, every hour, every minute. It never stops
.

And she hurt in a place Jiju medical technology could never touch. But Charlotte Villiers had touched it; Charlotte Villiers had stabbed a fist into the heart of it. Her violence had told Sen: you are nothing, no one, you have no value, you are just a thing and I crush you under my foot. Sen knew she would go on hurting there, every day, every
hour, every minute. It would never stop.
Until I cut your heart out
, Sen whispered under her breath. And that’s an amriya, polone.