Yes.
‘Good.’ I squeeze the bridge of my nose. ‘I need a drink.’
Why do I have the feeling that I’m not going to like the bad news?
‘Yes, well.’ I take a deep breath. ‘The Hunter is coming.’
Tawaddud sits alone in the upload temple with the mind-bullet for a long time. When the Repentants find her, she is holding the barakah gun against her forehead. They take it away. When she falls asleep in her cell, she can no longer remember if she was going to to pull the trigger.
24
MIELI AND THE SOUL TRAIN
Mieli watches the progress of the soul train from the sky. It is a silver worm glinting in the sun. The updraft carries her up lightly, and if it wasn’t for the constant chatter of Stanka the ursomorph, she would almost be enjoying herself.
‘—and then they came at us with some re-animated tanks, would you believe that, old drones they dug up from some military base, and Tara detonated them in a sequence that spelled FUCK YOU in the sky, poor bastards—’
While she can see why the Teddy Bears’ Roadside Picnic Company’s groupware matched them together as a combat team, sometimes she wishes the outcome had been different.
The train is sleek, all analog tech, made by Sirr craftsmen to give as little as possible for wildcode to infect. It always comes anyway, but it takes longer for the ancient nanotech to dig into simple machinery than smartmatter or more complex systems. Mieli herself is covered in Seal armour: words, flowing on her skin and face. It makes her wings look like pages of a book.
‘Are you listening, Oortian?’ Stanka says. ‘I said I hope we see some action today.’
The ursomorph mercenary is a fierce sight with her spiky enhancements visible, riding on the roof of the train. She has a point. They are approaching the Wrath region where a lot of Sobornost ships fell, twenty years ago. There have been several attacks here by anti-Sobornost jinni, and Mieli is not sure what to expect. She has been through a few skirmishes, and so far they have been quick and confusing. Unlike in Sirr, the wild jinni in the desert can be vast and powerful, like living storms.
The wildcode desert confuses her. Seen from above, on visible wavelengths, it does resemble a desert: mountains, valleys and here and there a cluster of abandoned buildings. But in the spimescape view, or in what the people of Sirr call athar, it is like looking at the surface of the Sun. Aerovore formations like protuberances, tiny nanites moving in complex patterns. Matter assembled into large unnatural configurations by invisible forces. She saw a patch of the desert full of tiny smiling faces, painstakingly assembled from individual grains of sand, propagating through the landscape like a flood.
‘It’s like inside my cubs’ dreams here, sometimes,’ Stanka said when they talked about it. ‘You get used to it eventually.’ Stanka’s people had been hit badly by the Protocol War: she left her offspring asleep back in the habitat inside their home asteroid. While they hibernated, she tried to win them a better life by working as a mercenary.
The desert makes many things difficult, including communication. Mieli can barely keep in touch with Perhonen through their neutrino link. The ship is moored in the Teddy Bears’ makeshift base in the Gourd, trying to get in touch with the thief and negotiating its way through the complex Sobornost systems with the help of the pellegrini – whom the thief has apparently managed to insert into the hsien-ku infrastructure in the sky.
Mieli does not know who they are working for – one of the muhtasib families of Sirr – but it does not matter as long as they are provided with Seals. The souls, stored in Sirr-made jars and transported in the trains, also belong to them. Mined from the hidden jannahs beneath the desert and the hardware in the Wild Cities, they are either sold to Sobornost or put to work as jinni slaves in the city to earn their freedom.
She prays to Kuutar and Ilmatar every night, begging their forgiveness for being part of such dirty work. She asked Stanka how she could do it, one night.
‘It’s easy,’ the bear-woman said. ‘I think of the cubs.’
As they approach a valley between two gigantic Sobornost craft – oblasts that now look more like mountains, overgrown with strange, twisted trees and bushes – Mieli swoops down.
‘We should slow down,’ she tells Stanka. ‘Too many opportunities for ambush.’
‘Don’t be silly. I doubt we’ll even see a chimera after the beating we gave them last time—’
There is writing in the desert, in huge letters. There is a tickle in Mieli’s forehead when she looks at it. An alarm goes off in her head. Body thieves. She instructs her metacortex to blank out the message in the sand and prepares for combat.
‘What do you make of that?’ she transmits to Stanka. She calls for recon support, deploys two Fast Ones from her backpack. Tzzrk and Rabkh dart forward. The mercenary companies deploy the fast-living creatures as scouts and native guides. For her, using quicktime makes it easier to communicate with them.
‘. . . serpent queen. . .’ mutters Stanka in her ear. Her voice sounds strange. And then the ursomorph is standing on her back legs and firing her heavy cannon at the train tracks ahead.
The boom of the weapon mixes with the groan of twisting metal. A fountain of sand and rubble erupts in front of the train. The momentum of the huge silver vehicle carries it into the rain of rock and dust, and for a moment Mieli thinks it’s going to make it through. Then it twists, slowly, thrown up by the broken tracks like a snapped silver whip. The cars tumble over each other, ricochet from the walls of the valley, kick up dust. Finally, they come to rest in disarray, like a child’s toys tossed aside. The bear-woman screams incomprehensible words in Mieli’s ears.
Powering up her combat systems, Mieli dives down, just as a jinn storm of dust and glinting sapphire comes down the side of the old oblast ship. I’m getting paid to protect the cargo. Let’s just hope the backup gets here in time.
She fires attack software at the storm, with no effect. She powers up her multipurpose cannon reluctantly – with a wildcode infection, she’ll only get a few shots in – and puts quark-gluon plasma charges in the storm’s path. Dust and sand and nanites fuse into a sharp rain of glass.
A crowd of chimera animals inside the storm swarms over the train, sleek, catlike creatures with a glinting sapphire carapace and sharp, sharp claws. Mieli dispatches the Fast Ones to call for backup from the Teddy Bears and lands, hard. She gets off one batch of q-dots that take out the first swarm of the sapphire cats like a scythe. Then her weapon goes hot. She tosses it aside and goes for hand-to-hand with a q-blade. She runs the microfans in her wings as hard as she can to disperse the foglet storm raging around her.
Then Stanka comes at her from the ruins of the train.
A swipe of a diamond-clawed paw throws Mieli aside like a rag doll and tears one of her wings into tatters. Then the ursomorph is upon her, pinning her down, enhanced teeth going for her throat. Her q-enhanced muscles scream as she gets her legs beneath the bear woman’s bulk and kicks as hard as she can. There is a surprised look in the ursomorph’s eyes as she flies into the air.
Mieli rolls, grabs the multipurpose cannon, squeezes the trigger, praying. The weapon gives her one more shot. An x-ray laser blast takes off half the bear’s torso, and the rest rains down on top of her.
And then the rukh ships and the Teddy Bears are there, driving away the storm.
The mercenary camp is a cluster of muhtasib-sealed temporary bubble buildings between the Wrath area and the Wall, a few kilometres from Sirr. On the evening of the battle of the train, Mieli is taken to see the commander. Odyne is a skeletally thin woman from the Belt, living in a medusa-like exoskeleton, made bulky by the thick layers of Sealed material around it. Her narrow face inside the globe-like helmet makes Mieli think of the fish in Grandmother’s spherical lake in Oort.