Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  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 foun
d 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 …’

  ‘We’re the enemy of everyone else,’ Everett said.

  ‘It’s the Jiju way.’

  ‘Well, that’s it decided then,’ Captain Anastasia interrupted. ‘There’s nothing keeping us on this world, so we’ll be off it quick smart. Thank you for your hospitality, Kax, but we’ve places to be and things to be at. I want that impeller ready for lifting by sundown. All hands to the ratchets. Includes you, Mr Singh and Ms Sixsmyth. Kax, shred.’

  ‘Here’s an idea,’ Sen whispered as she and Everett went back to the ratchets. ‘Let’s never tell her that we ate one of her sisters.’

  ‘I didn’t actually eat it,’ Everett protested.

  ‘No, but you curried it,’ Mchynlyth said, overhearing. ‘Here, wear these.’ He threw Everett a spare pair of heavy engineering gloves. Everett thought he caught a glimpse of a smile. The forgiving was begun. Everett pulled on the gloves and grasped the ratchet. Fifty-nine left to go.

  *

  Cicadas? Those things that go whirr and click in the night in the warm bits of the world? They’re big. Bigger than you think. A family holiday villa in Turkey, just outside Kusadasi. One main bedroom for Laura and Tejendra, a put-up bed in an alcove by the open fire for Everett. He loved it – a little nest hidden in the stonework. Victory-Rose hadn’t been there, hadn’t even been thought of. Everett had fallen asleep in his little hidden place listening to the chirr whirr of a Mediterranean insect that said: warm evenings, smells of sage and rosemary, turquoise sea at the end of the lane. On such thoughts he drifted into sleep. Woke up screaming as whatever made that noise dropped out of the stonework on to his face. Legs and crisp chittery bits and little pricking spurs and spines, clawing at him. And big. Everett was still screaming as he ran with his mattress into Mum and Dad’s room, threw it and himself to the floor and skidded to a stop against the wall. A cicada, he later learnt. Giving a name to the horror didn’t make it any less horrible. He still got the shivers at the thought of crispy, chitinous bugs with long scrabbling legs.

  So when the thing dropped on to his face, Everett Singh woke up. Yelled. Fell out of his hammock. Yelled again at the impact, yelled as muscles agonised from the Big Haul protested, yelled at the skittering bug-thing still in the latty. Everett hit the lights and saw a golden spider-thing with too many legs running along the crack between latty door and frame, trying to find enough of a gap to squeeze through.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Everett said and grabbed it by a leg. He lifted it, its legs thrashing, up to eye level. Not an insect. Not. An. Insect. Then he gave another yell and dropped it. It had nipped him. As it headed across the floor, hunting for a way out of the latty, Everett seized one of Mchynlyth’s heavy gloves and clapped it over it. He felt the insect-thing buzzing under his hand. He carefully slid his hand into the glove, then pulled on the other one. It was all timing. He opened his trapping hand and, before the golden-spider could flee, slapped the other hand over it.

  Everett opened the latty door with teeth and a shoulder and clattered along the corridors to the galley. There were jars and bottles and secure tins in there.

  ‘Right you …’

  At the table sat Mchynlyth, Sharkey, Captain Anastasia. In front of each on the table was a jar or a pot. Each container held a little golden spider.

  ‘Join us, Mr Singh,’ said Captain Anastasia.

  Everett found a Kilner jar, shook the spider-thing into it and shut the lid even as the creature made a leap for freedom. He locked the fastening. Wire-thin legs scrabbled at smooth glass.

  ‘What …?’

  Captain Anastasia raised a finger to her lips.

  The yelling and hullabaloo could be heard in every part of Everness’s two-hundred-metre body. Fast footsteps, clanging on metal mesh. Sen burst into the galley, hair mad and spiky, eyes wild and startled. One hand was clasped over the mouth of a glass.

  ‘Full house,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Lady, gentlemen, we have intruders.’

  Sen deftly upturned her glass on the galley table. The thing inside rattled and spasmed.

  ‘“The Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night,”’ Sharkey said.

  ‘Mr Singh, fetch Kax,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘I would have words with her.’

  *

  Captain Anastasia slapped the jar down on the cargo-deck floor. The things trapped inside jerked and scrabbled at the curving glass wall of their prison. She stood back, arms folded. Everett had seen her face this way before: when Mchynlyth had caught him stowing away on Everness, brought him to her and she was about to throw him from the hatch as a saboteur of the Iddler.

  ‘We found your bijou mates,’ Captain Anastasia said.

  Kax crouched low, joints and muscles flexing in ways no human body ever could. She peered long and hard into the jar on the deck. Sharkey whipped out a shotgun and in a flash pressed the barrels to the back of Kax’s neck. Her halo flashed red.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ Sharkey said. ‘“Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger.” Care to wager I can’t blow the back clean off your head before you can lay a blade on me, lizard-girl?’

  Kax raised her hands, an eerily human gesture.

  ‘If I could have a moment?’

  The crew stood in a circle around Kax and the jar of golden spider-things. She looked long and hard with her golden, vertically slitted eyes at each crew member, Everett the longest.

  I’m not the traitor, he thought. Is there still a trace of me in you, you in me – whatever those tiny machines orbiting behind your head did? If there is, you have to know I trust you.

  Everett had been sent down alone on the drop-line, down into the dark, calling forest. He looked up to see light spilling from Everness’s open cargo hatch. The faces of the crew looked down at him. Sharkey tipped the brim of his hat. Everett knew what that meant. Everett was his enemy again. A threat to the safety of the ship.

  He called out into the forest, spinning slowly as he descended.

  ‘Kax! Kakakakaxa!’

  Shrieks, whoops, flutterings and crashings as he spun lower.

  ‘Kax!’

  Then far below Everett saw a wisp of gold moving beneath the leaves, like a trail of stardust.

  ‘Everett Singh?’ The words drifted up from far below.

  ‘Kax! Captain Sixsmyth wants to see you. On the ship. There’s a drop-line coming down.’ He added the Airish warning for unpredictably moving overhead objects: ‘Tharbyloo!’ There below!

  ‘Coming up!’

  And that’s why I know you didn’t send those little halo-bots crawling all over Everness, Everett thought as Kax turned her attention to the Kilner jar. If you had, why would you agree to come up and have Sharkey stick his gun in the back of your head? And I don’t think he’s quick enough to beat you either. You can do more things with those halo-bots than throw missile-knives at people.r />
  ‘They’re not hers,’ Everett said, speaking the doubts in his heart. ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘Your advocacy is admirable, Mr Singh, but what has Kax to say for herself?’ Captain Anastasia said.

  Kax lifted the jar and held it so close to her face the breath from her flickering nostrils steamed the glass. ‘These are not mine.’

  ‘Keep your weapon strictly trained, Mr Sharkey. Explain.’

  ‘I know instantly, but I could never explain to humans,’ Kax said. ‘It’s like an aura, or a personal smell. Like the way we instantly know each other’s clade, where you would sense nothing. Like an extra colour.’

  ‘She would say that,’ Sharkey said.

  ‘Why?’ Everett blurted out. ‘If Kax was spying on us, why would she come up here? She puts herself right into our hands.’

  ‘To get her wee spy-beasties back,’ Mchynlyth said.

  ‘If she can scan my brain, she can download straight from her bots.’

  Everett could see the Everness tarot hidden in Sen’s hand. She cut the cards without thought, one-handed; a Hackney card-sharp’s cut. Everett saw her flip up the top card. She pursed her lips. He caught a glimpse of the card as she flipped it back face down. A fat smiling woman on a throne, a rod in each hand, and a starburst at the tip of each rod. He didn’t catch the name.

  ‘I can demonstrate,’ Kax said. Captain Anastasia looked at Sharkey, who gave a tiny shake of his head, at Mchynlyth, who tightened his lips. At Sen.

  ‘Let her do it,’ Sen declared. ‘I believe her.’

  ‘Do it,’ Captain Anastasia ordered.

  ‘Stand back,’ Kax announced. She drew herself up to her full height, which was a head taller than Sharkey, opened the Kilner jar and upended it. The crew leaped back as halobots fell to the floor and started to scurry. They were met by a shower of bots from Kax’s halo that formed a circle around them. The spy-bots halted. The encircling bots all took a step inwards.

  Everett held his breath.

  In the blink of an eye the spy-bots formed into a wedge and tried to charge the encirclement. The siege wall bowed but held. Kax’s bots responded instantly, reinforcing the weak point and closing in around the spies. Tiny battle was joined on the floor of Everness’s cargo deck.