Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

hijackers. It was his duty to make sure that his heart did not overrule his judgement.
    ‘I suppose there is a small chance that Agrata might be a prisoner. Saying whatever the hijackers tell her to say because they are holding hostages they have promised to hurt of kill if
she does not cooperate. But I don’t think she is a prisoner,’ Hari said, and felt a freezing pinch in his heart again. ‘I think she’s a djinn, probably generated from her
bios. It is a good copy, but not quite good enough.’
    He was trying to quantify an instinctive feeling of wrongness, searching for an explanation of something deeper than reason. Because what is the mass of a feeling? What is its wavelength, its
position on the electromagnetic spectrum?
    ‘But if it’s really the hijackers,’ the eidolon said, ‘why would they want to talk to you? Why would they warn you that they were coming here?’
    Hari had to remind himself that this artless simplicity was a feature of her mindscape, not a bug.
    ‘They spotted the lifepod, and knew I was here. And they also knew that they were within range of the lifepod’s radar. They knew I would know they were approaching Themba. So they
tried to convince me that I was going to be rescued rather than be captured or killed. Because if they stayed silent, I would know at once that I was in danger.’
    Hari had finished checking the alignment of the last of the traps; now he pushed off towards the floor. Picts flared as he dropped past murals, wrapping him in momentary sensations of colour and
movement, triggering fleeting emotions he couldn’t quite name. Strange cousins of wonder and awe and agape. Nostalgia for things he’d never seen or experienced. A profound and
disorientating déjà vu. He hoped the murals would distract his enemies. If they did, he’d build a shrine to honour the memory of Kinson Ib Kana.
    He hit the floor, swaying as his boots stuck and waist tethers shot out and anchored him, and the eidolon appeared at his side, saying, ‘Isn’t that why you made all this? Because you
knew you were in danger?’
    Hari watched the glow of the murals die back into darkness. Scattered lamps shone out of the shadows around him. He could see the wires and rigging of the traps around the hatch, told himself
that he could see them because he knew where to look. Told himself that even if the hijackers spotted them, they would think they were part of the spire’s internal construction.
    Now he knew that they were coming for him, he was excited and scared. Excited because he would soon have a chance to confront them. Scared because he might fail. This was this, as Professor
Aluthgamage had liked to say. There were a trillion trillion trillion alternate versions of the universe, a trillion trillion trillion realities, but this was the only one Hari inhabited, the only
one he knew. And his only defence against his enemies was a handful of childish tricks and traps built from junk.
    ‘I wasn’t one hundred per cent certain that they would find me,’ he said. ‘I hoped that they wouldn’t. I really did. But it made sense to prepare a little welcoming
party just in case. And besides, it kept me busy. It passed the time.’
    The eidolon shrugged. An unsettlingly human gesture. ‘You will look foolish if you are wrong, and catch Agrata in your traps.’
    ‘I will be dead if I’m right, and don’t do anything.’
    Hari ducked out of the hatch at the base of the spire, and shuffled across the dusty ground towards the lifepod. Jupiter was following the sun down towards the western horizon. The spark of the
hijacker’s ship hung high above. It was one of the brightest stars in the sky now. It would reach Themba in a little under three hours.
    The eidolon drifted beside him, saying, ‘Are you are planning to escape? I thought that the lifepod lacked sufficient reaction mass.’
    ‘I have another use for it,’ Hari said.
    He reached into the hard-code matrix of the lifepod,