Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (47 page)

He tried to read in his book, a long story about a young man trying to escape a vast, ancient, populous city, but the words and sentences wouldn’t stay put. He’d look away for a
moment, distracted by some stray thought, and discover that he’d lost his place. He’d find himself reading the same paragraph or line for the second or third time.

Thirty minutes passed. An hour. The clock counted down to zero, began to count up.

Hari supposed that condemned men knew how this felt. How it felt to watch the approach of the preordained moment of your death.

At last, without warning, a window opened and Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters were there, leaning in the black water.

An inset opened too, showing a chunky cylinder throwing out a long violet spear of fusion light.
Pabuji’s Gift
’s motor, flying free. Hari felt a clean shock of relief. His
plan had worked. Either because the Saints had tried to start the motor, or because the clock he’d set up in the motor’s mind had been triggered. In any case, the explosive charges had
severed the motor’s cables and spars, and the motor had fired up and aimed itself at a particular spot in Enceladus’s south pole.

‘You will stop it,’ the weird sisters said.

Hari stowed the book in his p-suit’s pouch, saying, ‘I can change its course, if you let me speak to it.’

‘Speak, then.’

Channels opened in Hari’s bios.

He said, ‘I’ll order it to miss Enceladus on this pass, but it will swing around Saturn and come back. And it won’t change course a second time. If you let me go, I’ll
send a command as soon as I return to my gig. The motor will destroy itself. Flare its reaction mass and blow itself into harmless fragments. There may be some damage to surface structures, but the
roof of your little world will protect you. But if you don’t let me go . . .’

‘You will die too.’

‘I’m prepared to die. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come here. But I wanted to meet you. To talk, face to face. To tell you about what I did, yes, but also to make my offer. And if
you let me go, I hope you’ll think about that offer. I hope you’ll think about it seriously, and I hope that we will be able to discuss it seriously. I want to honour my father’s
memory by continuing his work. As I think you want to honour your mother’s memory.’

‘We will talk about this when you have done what needs to be done.’

‘Of course,’ Hari said, and opened a link to the motor.

For a moment, he inhabited its control system. He saw that it was burning harder than it should be and that it was much closer to Enceladus than he’d anticipated. Very much closer:
alarmingly close. He called up the eidolon, but something else leaned towards him and smiled in his face. His father’s sly, shrewd smile, worn by the djinn.

‘As always, I do your father’s will when you will not,’ it said.

The connection snapped shut. Hari tried and failed to reopen it.

‘It still comes,’ the weird sisters said.

‘Wait,’ Hari said. His thoughts fluttering like a panic of wings as he tried to understand what had just happened. The eidolon was supposed to be riding the motor, driving it towards
Enceladus, towards the weak spot that Hari had mapped in the icy floor of the rift; the djinn was supposed to be aboard
Pabuji’s Gift
, harrying and distracting the Saints . . .

‘You lied,’ the weird sisters said, and turned as one and swiftly swam away.

The moon pool burst open and two assassins shot through, masked, dressed in supple skintight black. At once, a churning ghost light filled the pod, alive with snapping jaws and burning eyes. The
cleaning bot sprang at one of the assassins and she knocked it aside and it smashed into the pool and sank. The ghost light snapped off and both assassins dived at Hari.

He barely had time to close up the visor of his helmet before he was dragged through the pool into open water beyond. The assassins spun him, crammed him into a net, scrambled onto a scooter and
took off, dragging him behind them.

Down, down.

All around, rafts were sinking through the water, seeking refuge in the depths. A school of pods scattered away into darkness. There was a flash of light far above, a concussion like the door to
another universe slamming shut. Hari saw bright lines whipping through black water. Shock waves. Then they hit.

The scooter was wrenched sideways and went tumbling end over end. Hari slammed into it, was jerked away, slammed into it again. His p-suit’s tethers whipped out and fastened to the
scooter’s flank and he clung there, still wrapped in the net. The two assassins were gone, ripped away. He tumbled in a wild welter of bubbles and clashing currents.

Then the last of the shock waves passed. Debris sank all around him, silhouetted against a wedge of weak light.

The scooter, obeying some kind of survival tropism, was rising. A collapsed chain of rafts, crumpled as if squeezed by a giant hand, frames stripped of weed, drifted past. Debris spun in
cross-currents. The p-suit’s collision warning flashed and Hari looked all around, expecting to see a raft or pod bearing down on him, saw by deep radar a complex shear surface rising through
black water – the reflections of the shock waves from the floor of the pocket sea.

A strong and pitiless force caught him and spun him, and he was suddenly rushing upwards. Smashing through a seething shudder of water boiling at less than zero degrees Celsius. Hari’s
p-suit stiffened to protect him as the scooter bucked and slammed, rising between ice walls on a seething wave that broke and dropped it with a precipitous lurch. The scooter skidded and slewed in
a receding wash. Hari saw something looming out of a freezing fog and closed his eyes. The scooter slammed into it. And stopped.

All around, a furious froth of water was draining from a broad setback littered with fragments of ice large and small. It bubbled and boiled, exploded into storms of ice crystals, feeding a fog
that thickened in veils and blew sideways to reveal glimpses of smashed and broken ice.

A fresh wave broke, caught Hari and the scooter, dragged them towards a seething churn that slopped at the edge of a long gash in the ice.

The net was wrapped tightly around him, binding his arms and legs. He extruded cutting edges from the fingers of his gloves, sawed at the mesh as best he could. Water washed over him, pulled him
closer to the gash, coated his p-suit in a glaze of ice that crackled and broke as he wriggled and sawed. At last, he freed one hand, quickly cut himself out of the net and pushed to his feet.

He had washed up on a tilted slab of ice jammed amongst a shattering of shards and blocks. Everything was obscured by restless billows and sheets of icy fog. Radar showed the footings of the
great cliff of the rift’s wall rearing up three hundred metres away, but there was no sign of the tented settlement or the cableway, and chunks were falling from the cliff in swooning slow
motion and bursting on impact. The slab shuddered and bucked; there was a general grinding vibration. The fog blew aside for a moment and Hari glimpsed a vast rushing column leaning into black
space, rooted at the close horizon of the little moon, the point of impact of the motor of
Pabuji’s Gift.

Anyone watching Enceladus would have seen a new geyser rising from the south pole.

The p-suit’s radar pinged. Shapes were sliding towards him through the streaming rush of fog. Two, three of them, platforms perched on squat reaction motors, ridden by people in antique
p-suits. Assassins.

As they manoeuvred close, calling to Hari, telling him to surrender, something fell out of the sky. At first Hari thought that it was some great shard of the cliff; then he realised that it was
a ship.

His p-suit’s radar showed a figure detaching from its bulk, flying with astonishing speed and accuracy at the assassins. They peeled away, and the figure bounded after them, leaping from
point to point in the shattered, restless chaos, launching in a long and graceful arc, colliding with one of the platforms and embracing its rider in a quick vicious struggle, leaping away as the
platform spun towards the cliff.

A quick blink of fire lit the fog. Rav’s son howled in triumph and chased after the two remaining assassins.

Now something else detached from the ship: a figure riding a broomstick scooter that swooped past Hari, halted with a flourish of reaction jets, sidled back.

Riyya leaned towards him. ‘Climb on,’ she said.

Far off in the fog, two tiny stars bloomed and died. Rav’s son howled again.

‘Wait,’ Hari said.

A copy or fragment of the djinn had tried to use the cleaning bot against the assassins. And he knew where it was lodged.

He stepped towards the edge of the long lead of boiling water. A wave washed to his knees, a seethe of froth and fog. When he pulled the book from the pouch of his p-suit, the fog lit up and his
father stood there. Dressed as usual in a white dhoti, bare-chested, lips moving in his white beard.

‘Don’t be foolish, Gajananvihari. I’m here to help you.’

‘It was never about me,’ Hari said. ‘It was always about you.’

Faces crowded in, long-jawed, red-eyed, raving. Warnings popped across the display in Hari’s visor: something was forcing its way through his comms. Within moments, it would be trying to
get inside his head. Hari raised the book, skimmed it towards the water. Burning faces screamed at him, and then it smacked into the churning flood and whirled and tilted and sank, and the faces
guttered out.

Hari turned away, and walked back to where Riyya was waiting for him.

PART SIX

DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH

Three years after Hari’s confrontation with Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters on Enceladus, the Saints mounted a second crusade against the seraphs. By then, Hari was
working with a tanky free trader who called himself Rubber Duck, on the shifting triangle run between the Flora Wolds, the Koronis Emirates, and Ceres. They’d just left Ceres when Riyya,
presenting as an eidolon in the cramped lifesystem of Rubber Duck’s dropship, contacted Hari and gave him an account of the crusade. She was working with Rav’s son, helping to refurbish
an old garden that orbited in the Cassini Division in Saturn’s rings, and had more details of the debacle than any of the news services.

She showed Hari several views of Levi’s argosy, accompanied by a small constellation of gigs, lumbering towards the seraph’s vast, gauzy blossom, told him that the gigs had aimed
transmissions packed with so-called holy algorithms into the seraph’s information horizon. Based on her father’s work, the algorithms had been meant to paralyse the seraph with
topological hallucinations so that mind sailors could infiltrate and vasten themselves.

The plan had failed, spectacularly. Hari watched three tiny capsules, each containing the stripped personality of a mind sailor, fly out from the argosy. They fell free on diverging
trajectories, spiralling down the funnel-flower of pastel veils towards the dark star at its root. But long before they reached the seraph’s information horizon, the capsules began to slow,
ploughing up shock waves that thickened around them in layers of nacreous luminescence. Corona discharges flickered around the capsules and they grew hot and bright, miniature novas that burned
through their pearlescent shrouds before flaring and fading. Beyond the seraph, the argosy and its retinue of gigs were flung abruptly sideways towards the ring plane, as if struck by a hurricane
blast. One view tracked the argosy as it ploughed through mountainous clouds of material at the outer edge of the B ring. The fat ship jolting and spinning as a hail of icy pellets hammered into
it, sections of its hull peeling away, debris spewing from ruptured compartments, until at last it collided with a bolide twenty metres across and disintegrated in a flash of superheated gases.

Riyya’s eidolon said that Levi and his Ardenist advisers had been aboard the argosy. ‘Also Eli Yong. She’d been working with the Saints for the past two years.’

‘She had a knack for choosing the wrong side,’ Hari said.

The eidolon said that the Saints had not given up their holy mission. ‘They claim that Levi was instantly reincarnated. They are preparing a mission to find the vessel of that
reincarnation and install him in their wheel habitat.’

‘I feel sorry for them,’ Hari said. ‘They won’t ever give up because they really do believe that history is on their side. That something elsewhere or elsewhen, some
impossible ideal, is shaping their destiny.’

‘None of us can escape who we are,’ Riyya’s eidolon said, reminding Hari of their quarrels before they had agreed to part company.

After the Saints had abandoned it, Hari had sold salvage rights to the wreck of
Pabuji’s Gift
to the government of Paris, Dione. He had briefly returned to the ringship, but had
found no trace of either the eidolon or the djinn. The ship’s mind and control systems had been ransacked and destroyed by the Saints, and they had futzed the power systems, too, and left the
lifesystem open to hard vacuum. And because the Saturn system had a surplus of wrecked and obsolete ships, the sale hadn’t yielded as much credit as Hari had hoped. It had been barely enough
to purchase citizenship on Ceres for himself and Riyya; he’d used most of what was left to purchase Dr Gagarian’s head from the synod of Tannhauser Gate, which had confiscated Mr
Mussa’s ship and its contents in lieu of docking fees. He’d sent a message to Gun Ako Akoi, asking if she wanted to take custody of the mortal remains of her grandchild, and when it
became clear that she wasn’t going to reply he’d had the head and its scrambled files incinerated, and one bright day he and Riyya had hired a skiff and scattered the ashes on the
frigid waters of Ceres’s Piazzi Sea.

Riyya had taken up a position with the biosystem management of one of the dwarf planet’s floating cities, but Hari had found it hard to settle down. He’d been convinced that either
the Saints or Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters would try to kidnap or assassinate him, had spent too much time chasing down rumours about them. He’d tried his hand at various menial jobs,
tramped all the way around the equator on what the locals called a wanderjahr, and at last had taken up with Rubber Duck. Shortly afterwards, Riyya had returned to the Saturn system. She had never
really forgiven Hari for betraying her and trying to deal with Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters on his own, and after their adventure had ended there had been little to keep them together.