Empress of the Sun (30 page)

‘“And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings,”’ Sharkey said.

‘Try not to touch anything,’ Captain Anastasia shouted.

‘Aye, right,’ Mchynlyth muttered.

‘Captain.’ Everett’s voice was small and quiet and almost lost in the blazing thunder inside the bridge, but his tone turned every head to him. ‘The sun just exploded.’

‘How long have we got?’ Captain Anastasia asked.

‘Eight minutes, twenty-six seconds,’ Everett said.

‘What’s the state of our batteries?’ Captain Anastasia asked.

‘Twenty per cent,’ Mchynlyth said.

‘Sen, hold position.’

Everness
lurched and dropped. Sen yelped as her feet left the ground. The ship yawed as she fought to regain her grip on the steering yoke.

Sharkey was scanning those monitors that still worked.

‘We’re arcing from the lightning array to the hull. Burn-through in section Upper 6.’

‘Hold her steady, Sen.’

‘Thirty-three per cent,’ Mchynlyth said.

‘Mr Singh, make whatever preparations you need. I want Heisenberg Jump the instant we have the power.’

‘Aye, ma’am. Sunburst plus two minutes.’

Captain Anastasia bit back an oath.

*

Lightning danced around Everett floor to ceiling as he powered up his equipment, computer by computer. The Panopticon. The Infundibulum. The jumpgun. Slow and steady. One careless move in this electrically charged environment could cause a short. A short circuit could burn out the processors in his computers. Dead computers was dead Everett, dead everyone. Slow and steady and try not to think of the wall of light and heat racing at the speed of light across the innermost edges of Diskworld. Everett could imagine it all too well. He had touched the very stuff of the sun, turned it to a weapon in his hand and its power awed him. He had loosed the tiniest piece of it on Imperial University in Earth 1. This was the entire sun blasting off its outer layers. The light and heat would be enough to kill – there would be no warning, not even a flash of light racing towards you across the world. The wall of sun-stuff would blast everything to free-floating atoms. Trees, living creatures, seas rivers lakes, cities, the rocks themselves. Could even the fantastically
strong substance of the Diskworld resist the energies of Sunburst? The Sunlords believed so: after the lava cooled and the water vapour rained out, they would return and reseed and restock their world.

Everything dying, everything twisting and burning in the killing light.

‘Sunburst plus four,’ Everett said. The Panopticon was live. Everett blinked as the screen filled with Heisenberg Jump points. Thousands of them. Millions of them. More than the stars in the sky. On every one of the Known Worlds of the Plenitude. An invasion on a billion fronts. His world, his home: he had to know. Everett tapped up the parameters for Earth 10. They were all over it. Every single human city had a Sunlord cityship hovering over it. And Palatakahapa, the centre of it all, stood over London. His London.

The Infundibulum was active now. Everett looked from Infundibulum to Panopticon, Panopticon to Infundibulum.

‘Sixty-two per cent,’ Mchynlyth intoned.

‘Burn-throughs in lower and upper hull quadrants,’ Sharkey said.

‘Hold her steady, Sen.’

Everett glanced at Sen. Her face was tight, her muscles rigid as cables as she fought to hold the bucking, quaking airship in the plasma stream. Sweat ran into her eyes, she flicked it away.

‘Ma’am, I have an idea!’ Everett said,

‘Make it a good one, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia replied.

And the Jump Controller went from grey to green. The controls were live. Everett swept code from the Panopticon into the controller. The JUMP button lit up.

‘Heisenberg Jump in five …’

‘Four minutes to spare, Everett,’ said Captain Anastasia. ‘You’re losing your touch.’

‘Three …’

The wall of killing light, racing towards him across the endless plains of the Worldwheel, flashing everything to vapour. Billions of deaths.

‘Two. One.’

Everett hit the JUMP button. Light from beyond the universes flooded the bridge.

And
gone
.

No
voom
.

Everness
departed,
Everness
arrived.

Palatakahapa hung over London. Cold clear January light showed it in all its might and monstrousness. Pinnacles and buttresses like a thousand mashed-up cathedrals; spines and spires like some creature from the bottom of the darkest sea; ribs and spars and vents like the oily body of some obscenely elegant movie alien. An iron crown ten miles across: from Acton to Canary Wharf; from Hampstead to Streatham. London: conquered. Three million people cowered in its shadow.

‘Coms are crazy,’ Sharkey said. ‘Two hundred channels of screaming.’

‘Belay coms, Mr Sharkey,’ Captain Anastasia ordered.

Everyone on the bridge flinched as fighter aircraft flashed
over the airship, close enough to set
Everness
trembling with their jet exhaust.

‘Are those
air-o-plans
?’ Sen said.

‘Mr Singh, where have you brought us?’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘My world,’ Everett said. ‘My home. I’ve got a plan – but it only works if I can get to Palatakahapa. And that’s here. Over my London.’

Everyone was drawn from their posts to the great window. The sight was awesome.
That’s a word we use too much
, Everett thought. A new phone or a movie trailer or hi-tops and we’re like: that’s awesome. That’s just stuff. A flying palace of parallel-universe smart-o-saurs hovering over London. Now that’s
awesome
. I look, and I feel awe.

Everett had jumped
Everness
in over White Hart Lane football stadium. He had done the math quickly but carefully: far enough away from Palatakahapa to avoid the danger of jumping one material object inside another; close enough to be able to see pieces of snapped bridge and sheared architecture crumble and fall to the streets of Stoke Newington a thousand metres below. Everness hung half a kilometre from the north-east sector of the Jiju palace. It dominated the great window. Abney Park, Stoke Newington, Clissold Park, the Emirates Stadium, Bourne Green School, all lay under the shadow of the Empress of the Sun.

‘My mum is down there,’ Everett whispered. ‘My sister, my bebe and my cousins. All my friends …’

‘My mum is in there,’ Kax said. She blinked at Everett. Her halo was obsidian dark. ‘I felt them all, Everett. I heard them, in here.’ She touched the corner of her jaw where the Jiju small ears sat. ‘Everything that walked or swam or flew or burrowed. One short cry, and gone. Turned to ash, the ash turned to dust, the dust to atoms. Every story and song and building and poem and game and toy and painting, every piece of knowledge and wisdom: gone in the blink of an eye-membrane. Sixty-five million years of Jiju civilisation. We are the last of the Jiju!’

As Kax spoke the skin of her face darkened into a deep indigo stripe that ran from the edge of her crest to her chin, and around each eye.

‘Kax, your face …’ Everett said.

‘It’s what you call crying.’

Captain Anastasia beckoned Everett away from the great window, summoned her crew with the crook of a finger.

‘Everett,’ she whispered, ‘what is your plan?’

‘Do you remember the Battle of Abney Park?’ Everett said. ‘Do you remember how we got away from it, Sen?’

‘You called up a gate on your telephone–comptator thing. You dialled it up behind a tombstone and we jumped through,’ Sen said.

Everett held up his iPhone.

‘The Jiju copied the Infundibulum. Exactly. In every detail. Which means …’

‘You can control their Infundibulum,’ Mchynlyth said.
‘But there’s a muckle of them Jiju cityships out there. And that’s just your world here, laddie. Buggerello for our world.’

‘They’re all routed through the one command point,’ Everett said. ‘That’s how they all jumped at the same time. Because they got the command from the Empress.’

‘You’d just need to send the command to the one …?’ Sharkey said.

‘And they’d all go,’ Everett said. He waggled his phone. ‘And I have a signal!’

‘Go where?’ Captain Anastasia said. Her voice was flat and hard. ‘Where would you send them?’

Everett swallowed.

‘Back,’ he said.

Everett saw Kax’s face change colour and her crest lift the split second before the halo fired an arrow at him. A flash, a loud clang and the arrow was embedded in the ceiling. Sen clenched her fist. A boomerang flew back to her hand. A wave of the hand and the boomerang came apart into its component bots and fused with the buzzing swarm of bots at the head of her Genequeen battlestaff. She rounded on Kax.

‘You will not send my people to the fire,’ Kax said. ‘My mother, my sisters. You will not send them back there.’

‘You don’t touch Everett!’ Sen shouted. Kax hissed and dropped into combat crouch. Sen grabbed the battlestaff double-handed and lifted it above her head. ‘I can work
your toy. Good as you. And there’s only one princess on this ship and guess what. Ain’t you.’

‘I will cut you and gut you from top to bottom, ape,’ Kax shrieked.

‘Mr Sharkey, restore order!’ Captain Anastasia shouted.

The shotgun blast was deafening in the confined space of the bridge. Woodchips and shotgun pellets snowed down on Everett. The air reeked of spent cartridge. He had fired one gun into the ceiling. The other he trained on Kax.

‘There is no cutting, no gutting and absolutely no princesses on my ship,’ Captain Anastasia thundered. ‘There has been enough violence. Enough killing. Enough blood. I am sick of it. Mr Singh: I will not be party to genocide. You would send billions back into the exploding sun. You would exterminate the entire Jiju race – all except one. She’s there, in front of you. The last Jiju. Everett, you would be no different from the Empress of the Sun. No different at all. There has to be some solution that doesn’t kill billions. Come on, Everett. Think fast. Think better.’

Sen held the battlestaff level. Kax’s halo rippled. Sharkey’s gun was steady and sure.

Think, Everett, think.

Everett stared at the weapons he held. The Panopticon. The Infundibulum. His phone. The jumpgun.

Not a thing in his head. Just staring, not seeing.

Ten worlds. Billions of lives. Human and Jiju.

No one moved. Time chilled and froze over.

Think, Everett. Think!

And then he saw it. It was right in front of him. It always had been.

‘I can do it,’ he said. ‘It still just takes one phone call.’

‘My people,’ Kax said.

‘I won’t send them back. I promise you.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll send them everywhere. The jumpgun. That was the clue. It sends objects to random parallel universes. I can do that. I can send a command through for the Empress’s Infundibulum to send every single one of the Jiju cityships into a random parallel universe.’

‘Do it, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said.

Kax growled deep in her throat.

‘You move, you so much as twitch, and my wrath shall wax hot against thee,’ Sharkey said.

‘They’ll live,’ Everett said.

‘Can you promise that?’ Kax asked.

‘No one can promise that,’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘I dinnae ken if this is important,’ Mchynlyth said, ‘but the lights are going out.’

‘What?’ Everett raced to the great window. The shadow of the Sunlord mothership was so deep and profound that London’s street lights had switched themselves on. Now, before Everett’s eyes, the city was blacking out, street by street, district by district. Islington to Canonbury, all along
the Balls Pond Road. Shacklewell to Albion Road. Stoke Newington High Street.

‘My mother is drawing on your power grid to keep Palatakahapa aloft,’ Kax said.

‘No!’ Everett shouted. ‘No no no no!’

The phone in his hand flashed signal bars. They dwindled to one bar, then went out.

‘No!’ Everett stared at the dead phone.

‘Your tone concerns me, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘I’ve lost signal. I can’t do it remotely! I’ll have to open up a jump point right into the Sun Chamber.’

‘And go in there,’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘Yes. But. I have to be the one does it.’

‘I will be with you,’ Captain Anastasia declared.

‘“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,”’ Sharkey said.

‘I’m with ye,’ Mchynlyth said.

‘I’m not being left out of this,’ Sen said. ‘We’s
crew
.’

‘I need your velo.’

The unshaven young man in the yellow motorbike helmet stared at Charlotte Villiers as if she had beamed down from the Jiju cityship.

‘Your bike, whatever you call it, I need it.’

It was a small, light motorised bicycle, with a boxy cargo area behind the seat. Domino’s Pizza. Some kind of fast-food delivery service. The shock of the Jiju cityship’s appearance had passed and now Piccadilly was coming to life again as a hundred drivers and a thousand pedestrians each decided that they needed to get away, get home, get to family and loved ones. Get out of London. Engines revved, cars moved and shunted, horns blared. The street was locking up into a massive, panicked traffic jam. There would be violence soon. Charlotte Villiers could not be trapped here. Everett
Singh and the Infundibulum could have already arrived over Stoke Newington. This time she would not need soldiers or force of arms. She would not need Everett’s treacherous alter, or to threaten his family. She would not even need to take it from him. When she told him what she could do with it, things he had not even dreamed, how she could destroy the Jiju, he would give it to her. But she needed to get there. She needed to get out of gridlocked Piccadilly. Then she saw, five cars down, the startled pizza-delivery guy with his moped.

‘Give me the velo!’

‘Is not mine. The pizza company will fire me,’ the pizza man said. He had a strong Russian accent. He gripped the handlebars firmly.

‘You stupid, stupid man. The fate of universes hangs in the balance.’ Charlotte Villiers took the gun from her bag. ‘I need your velo.’