Empress of the Sun (11 page)

‘What is it you want, Ibrim?’

‘You lead them.’

And you are a very clever man
, Charlotte Villiers thought.
I can’t refuse. If I succeed, no one will ever know. If I fail, you will have removed your rival. But I will not fail, and war is openly declared between us, and when I return I shall have dealings with you, Ibrim Hoj Kerrim
.

‘I’ll require proper equipment. Heavy weapons. Access to a military jump-gate. And a recall relay. If things go wrong, I want my people out of there.’

‘You will be carrying the recall relay?’

‘I am everything you think I am, Ibrim, and worse, but I do not needlessly waste human life.’

‘So glad you said “needlessly”.’ Ibrim Hoj Kerrim pushed his bowl and saucer away from him and stood up. ‘Of course, you won’t want to delay. Every second that passes puts the Plenitude in peril.’

‘The Plenitude will not find me wanting,’ Charlotte Villiers said. She watched Ibrim Hoj Kerrim vanish into the swirling snow. She left some shillings in a saucer and
crossed Sant Omerhauplass to the Nenin Bridge. The snow was sharp on her cheeks and lips, and the bells of the Cathedral of the Brothers Christ chimed the half hour. Behind her the twin waiters took in the chairs and pulled the shutters over the Blond Bear Cafe.

Everett would never understand people. A real, genuine alien – a living dinosaur – and not one member of the crew was excited.

Mchynlyth was dismissive.

‘How many “Ka”s?’ He shook his head as Everett repeated the name. Kakakakaxa squatted on one of the branches number-two impeller had brought down in its fall through the canopy. It looked up at the sound of its name, a very human reaction. It blinked its eye-membranes. A very inhuman reaction. ‘Buggerello to that. Kax.’ Mchynlyth went back to examining his engine, running his fingers over the casing and alternately hissing in horror and cooing in love. Kakakakaxa – Kax – studied him, head cocked first to one side then the other.

Captain Anastasia was suspicious. ‘What do we know
about this creature … person? How did it learn our language? What is that thing around its head? What’s it doing here? Where did it come from?’

She left no room for answers, for which Everett was glad because he realised that in the time he had spent waiting for the crew to arrive with shifting gear, Kax – the name was stuck now – had found out a lot about him, and he had found out almost nothing about Kax, except that its people called themselves the Jiju, a two-tone bird-whistle. And the thing around Kax’s head – the Jiju name was three descending trills – was some kind of swarm of micro-robots that could take any shape Kax willed. And could affect minds, including the carnosaur’s, and read minds – including his. The heat in the forest clearing was incredible, but Everett felt a stab of cold in his stomach. What else, other than his languages, had Kax taken from his mind?

Sen was hostile.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

Kax turned a blade of its halo into a little robot-fly and sent it buzzing around Sen’s head.

‘What? I don’t know. Does it matter?’ Everett said. ‘It saved me from getting bitten in half by some kind of T-Rex. That’s what matters.’

‘Matters a lot more than that,’ Sen declared. She swatted the robot-fly away.

‘Bona riah,’ Kax said. Not only had it absorbed Palari, it spoke it in a Stoke Newington accent.

‘It’d better not be a girl, ’s all,’ Sen said sullenly.

Kax wore sturdy boots that reached the knee and several belts festooned with pouches and pockets. Nothing more. Everett wasn’t familiar enough with reptile sex to know where even to start looking, let alone what he was supposed to look for – supposing lizardmen (or lizardwomen) had visible parts. Supposing that after sixty-five million years of evolution they even reproduced like the lizards in the biology lab tank. Kax in return was very interested in human sexual features, as far as the Jiju could make out beneath the layers of clothing.

The robot-fly buzzed over to land on Captain Anastasia’s breasts. Mchynlyth and Sharkey tensed. Sen was a heartbeat behind them.

‘What are these physiological features?’ Kax asked. Its halo was rotating. Everett had a theory that this meant it was absorbing information and feeding it to Kax.

‘At ease, omis. And polone,’ said Captain Anastasia. ‘They are female human sexual features. They enable us to feed our babies with milk. We call them willets, in our Palari speech. Breasts, in King’s English. There are a lot of slang names for them. Most of them made up by men, who historically have found them attractive and fascinating.’

‘Willets,’ Kax said. ‘Will. Ets.’

‘It touches my willets, it gets a knife in its whatever-its-got,’ Sen hissed.

Now the fly buzzed in Mchynlyth’s face. He flicked at it,
and it buzzed away, then danced in closer. With a furious roar Mchynlyth lunged, caught the fly in his gloved hand and crushed it. A sudden cry and a Govan oath. Mchynlyth opened his fist. Blood leaked from the slashed palm of his heavy work glove. A golden blade dropped from his open hand and slashed across the clearing to rejoin the halo around Kax’s head.

Kax whistled a cluster of fast and furious notes at Mchynlyth.

‘Aye, tweet tweet, my friggin’ lovely, to you too,’ Mchynlyth glowered back.

Kax raised its crest of fine quills and uncurled from its perch. The halo rippled. Everett moved in between Mchynlyth and Kax, hands raised.
Back off, people
.

‘Stand back, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia ordered. She pushed Everett sharply out of the way and took his place. ‘I’ll have no fighting here. Mr Mchynlyth, let’s get this back to the ship. Kax … put them blades of yours to some use. Can you clear us a path through the undergrowth?’

The Jiju flared its nostrils, blinked membrane across yellow eyes.

‘I shall do that.’

*

Mchynlyth’s scheme was simple. Hook the impeller pod to cables. Fix each cable around the trunk of a tree. Ratchet ratchet ratchet ratchet. Impeller moves five metres. Repeat one hundred times.

Everett’s biceps burned. His shoulders ached. His chest throbbed at every twist or turn. Even his stomach muscles twitched painfully. But again Mchynlyth yelled,
Pull!
And Everett pulled on the ratchet. Pulled with all his strength. Pulled until his hands were raw. Pulled until the red dots swarmed in his vision.

‘Haul off!’

Everett collapsed, lay on his back panting, staring up at the dappled light through the red leaves.

Only sixty left to go.

He got back on his feet again.

Kax tilted its head from one side to the other in that curious bird look it did.

‘But you’re exhausted, Everett Singh,’ it said. ‘You need to recover your strength.’

I need to do right
, Everett thought as he unshackled the ratchet from the tree, slung the cable over his shoulder and hauled it to the next tree. I need to do more right than anyone else. I need to be ten times the crewperson of anyone on
Everness
and maybe then I can live with myself.

He hauled the cable around the massive tree trunk and hooked it on to the hasp. And hissed in pain as the metal ratchet rasped the raw skin of his palms.

‘Cha break, Everett.’ Captain Anastasia stood at his shoulder. Her black skin shone with sweat. Everett pulled on the ratchet. ‘That’s an order, Mr Singh.’

She gently pushed Everett away from the ratchet.

‘You don’t need to prove anything,’ she whispered for Everett’s ear alone. Then, aloud, ‘Sen, on break as well.’

‘Ma—’

‘Take a break. Kax!’ The Jiju uncoiled from its perch, flared its nostrils at Captain Anastasia’s tone of command. ‘Get clearing.’

‘What’s the little word?’ Kax said.

Captain Anastasia’s eyes were wide with outrage. Her nostrils flared. ‘Get clearing,
please
.’

‘Yon lizardy’s got way too much Everett in it for my liking,’ Mchynlyth muttered.

It’s not just got the accent and the vocabulary, it’s even starting to sound like me
, Everett thought. Captain Anastasia was right: how much did Kax know?

Kax clearing undergrowth was worth watching. A thought turned the halo into a disc of whirling knives, shredding everything before them, scything a clear path between the trees. Leaves, stems, briars and thorns, even whole branches were reduced to a whirlwind of woodchips and red sap. Fragments of leaf fell like red snow around Everett and Sen. Sharkey, Mchynlyth and Captain Anastasia fell to the ratchets.

‘Why can’t it build an engine and do the hauling for us?’ Sen said. She was unashamed of her dislike of Kax. ‘Do something useful.’

‘She is doing something useful.’

‘She?’

‘It, I mean.’

‘You said she,’ Sen hissed. ‘What do you know? What do you know? What did she tell you?’

Everett did not know why he had called Kax she, but he had a vague sense in his head, maybe put there by Kax herself during the scan of his mind that had given her both English and Palari, that this Jiju was female. And young. Startlingly young. He didn’t want to be drawn into one of Sen’s jealousy games. He knew what those were like from the girl cliques at Bourne Green School. There were rules you had to guess and people you could and could not talk to but you had to guess that too, and it was all about whose side you were on, not what was right or wrong.

‘Never mind that,’ Everett said. ‘What I want to know is where the power comes from. Nothing runs on nothing. It’s not physics.’

Bad science ruined science-fiction movies for Everett. Starships that could go some place in under six parsecs. A parsec was a unit of distance not time. Momentum was conserved. Why did that starship make a whooshy noise when there was no air in space to carry sounds? When Luke Skywalker pulled all those moves and turns in the X-wing, why didn’t the g-forces rip his spine out of his back? Those zappy space-fighters – what did they run on? Space fighters and nanorobots didn’t run on invisible magic power. There was no magic.

He still didn’t understand how the Heisenberg Gates worked though.

Sen was practical about it. ‘Does it matter?’

‘It matters because the only way I can get them to work without breaking the laws of physics is if they pick up electricity. Like it’s beamed in. I’m thinking, if they can pick it up from anywhere, then it has to be everywhere. Like, right under our feet. If you’re going to build a whole Alderson disk, you might as well wire it at the same time.’

‘And? God, Everett Singh, the stuff that runs around in your head.’

‘If the Jiju can tap it, so can we.’

‘Oh,’ Sen said. And, ‘Ah!’

Shouts. Sharkey came sprinting up the cleared avenue between the trees, Mchynlyth behind him, Captain Anastasia on his heels.

‘They’re back!’ Sharkey shouted. ‘Sauve qui peut!’

Kax gave a long rising whistle of alarm. She drew herself up to her full height. Her crest rose to make her even taller. The halo stopped its combine-harvester shredding and flew to form a crown around Kax’s head. She flicked up her thumbs. A curved blade appeared at the tip of each thumb. Then Everett saw what the crew were running from. They were back – the reptile swarm that had chased Sharkey and sent them racing up the drop-lines to the safety of the ship. Fast, close and getting closer, and more. A lot more. A flash
flood of bodies, breaking over the impeller pod like a wave, twining along the hauling cables.

‘Oh the Dear!’ Sen shouted, then went sprawling to the ground as Kax pushed past her.

Everett hauled Sen to her feet but the infestation was on top of them. Everett saw teeth, lots and lots of tiny, sharp teeth. And claws.

Kax stood before the wave of creatures. She raised her arms, snicked in her thumb claws. Whistled a long, melodious tune. The whole of the great red forest seemed to pause and listen to her song. The reptile-swarm stopped dead. Each lizard-thing went up on its hind legs, curled its long tail around it and raised its front paws. Everett almost giggled. They looked just like meerkats. Alien rainbow lizard meerkats – and thousands of them. The forest rang with song, from Kax, from the lizard-swarm. Then, in a flicker of rainbow colour, they were gone.

‘You were lucky,’ Kax said. ‘They were my sisters.’

‘Can’t see the family resemblance,’ Sharkey said.

‘My hatch-sisters,’ Kax said. ‘We are different broods, but we are all eggs of the Empress of the Sun.’

‘I knew she was a girl!’ Sen blazed. ‘You is completely utterly totally and forever banned from doing anything with her, ever, Everett Singh.’

‘They’re all … like young versions of you?’ Everett asked. He ignored Sen.

Kax blinked, ruffled her crest. The quills ran shades of red, then settled again.

‘Ick. All that … sex stuff. No. Nasty.’ Kax hid her face in her hands for a moment.

‘Where did she …?’ Captain Anastasia asked.

‘From me,’ Everett said. He touched a finger to his head. ‘What do you do?’ he asked aloud.

‘So many hatch-sisters, but only one survivor,’ Kax said. Everett found it disconcerting listening to his own accent and intonation from the thin lips of the Jiju. ‘We go through many shapes but there is only one rule: the strong rule. You’ve crashed your dilly ship in the middle of a crechewood. Of my hatch, only two of us remain now. I will find my hatch-sister, and I will challenge her to single combat. Then I will kill her and so I shall become Heir to the Sun Throne of the Sunlords.’

‘I knew it,’ Sen hissed. ‘And a princess too.’

‘Some princesses are made, not born,’ Everett whispered.

Sen flared her nostrils in rage. ‘Are you saying that I’m a princess?’ She tailed off. The rest of the crew were looking at her in a way that said,
You’re being a princess
.

‘You’re safe now,’ Kax said. ‘Word’s passed among the Sunlord hatchlings. They’re not intelligent like the way I am, or even you are, but once something gets into their little heads, it stays there. There is one problem …’

‘You’re not the only ones in this … crèche forest,’ Everett said.

‘All the great clades have hatcheries in this crechewood,’ Kax said. ‘And if you’re a friend of the Sunlords …’