Empress of the Sun (31 page)

He almost tripped in his haste to step back, hands up.

The velo was quick, agile and stupidly good fun to ride. Charlotte Villiers hitched up her skirt a few centimetres to free her legs, twisted the throttle and skidded off along the footpath. The horn was a petulant buzz, but the sight of the moped charging towards them made pedestrians scatter. She clapped her hat to her head, pulled down the net veil. Along the pavements, weaving through the traffic jammed across intersections, driving at full speed, the little klaxon blaring at the stupid sheep people milling around
lost confused not knowing what to do. Past the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus beneath the shining neon signs, up Shaftesbury Avenue, dodging under the awnings of Theatreland – all the shows still advertised their wares in neon and glitter. Above her the underside of the Jiju cityship crawled with blue electric fire. Charlotte Villiers drove on, north by east, Oxford Street to Theobalds Road, Finsbury to Shoreditch, ever closer to Stoke Newington, followed every metre of the way by a strong smell of pepperoni and double cheese pizza from the delivery box.

The pinpoint of blinding light opened into a disc opened into a gate. The crew charged out into the Sun Chamber. The Heisenberg Gate closed behind them. Sharkey swept the room with his shotguns. Captain Anastasia dropped into savate stance. Sen menaced with the battlestaff.

‘Feeling a wee bit exposed here,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘An old Punjabi–Scots fruit wi’ anger-management issues; it’s no exactly a superpower, is it?’

Sharkey threw him a shotgun. ‘The end with the two holes points away from you,’ he said.

‘Where is it?’ Everett stood in the centre of the chamber. ‘The Infundibulum – where is it?’

The chamber was empty. The control desks, the Jiju who had operated them, the model of Diskworld’s sun and the Sunlord mechanisms that had finally destroyed it: all gone.

The thin stand that had supported the Sunlord Infundibulum; the tablet computer itself: gone.

There was nowhere it could be, but everyone looked, everyone searched, everyone scanned the room.

‘Maybe, like, if the Empress of the Sun came out of the floor, maybe it went back in the floor,’ Sen suggested.

‘Sen, you’ve got a …
connection
with the Jiju,’ Captain Anastasia said, as if the words tasted like dogshit in her mouth. ‘Can you work something?’

Sen pressed her hand to the floor. ‘I can feel something,’ she said. ‘It don’t like me. I’s the enemy. The Genequeens … !’ Sen stood up quickly, eyes wide. ‘They’re all dead! Oh the Dear, all of them.’

‘Sen, here.’ Captain Anastasia held out a hand. Sen took it. The moment of contact was love, reassurance, hope. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

‘Maybe Kax?’ Sharkey said. ‘She’s royal blood and all that.’

‘Aye, like you’d trust yon lizard,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘She’d never have arranged all this just to lure us in here and spring some sort of trap, would she?’

‘Kax stays on the bridge,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Everett …’

‘Simple,’ Everett said. While Sen had been searching, he had been looking at his phone. The mobile network might be down, but there were other ways that phones and tablet computers could communicate. It all depended on how
slavishly the Sunlords had copied Dr Quantum. A few taps. He almost yelled with delight when the DEVICE AVAILABLE icon lit up. Everyone else held their weapons. Everett held up his. ‘Bluetooth! Oh yeah! Brilliant or what?’

‘Blue what?’ Mchynlyth said.

‘It’s a phone thing,’ Everett said.

‘This is a strange and perverse plane,’ Mchynlyth said.

Sharkey held up a hand. ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something Jiju this way comes,’ he said, aiming his shotgun single-handed at the door to the Sun Chamber.

‘Everett, how much time do you need?’ Captain Anastasia asked.

‘I need to get into the Infundibulum and then write some code,’ Everett said.

‘Time!’ Captain Anastasia shouted.

‘Five … six minutes?’

The adults looked at each other. Captain Anastasia shook her head. ‘Sharkey, Mchynlyth …’

‘Aye, ma’am,’ each of the men said.

‘Sen, keep him safe.’

‘Ma?’

‘Keep him safe. Everyone is expendable here, except Everett.’

Now Everett could hear the drumbeat of running claws, a swelling choir of bird voices. He would never hear the dawn chorus of songbirds the same way ever again.

White light flooded the Sun Chamber: a blazing atom
exploding to a circle of white light. Kax dropped out of the Heisenberg Gate into a crouch on the floor. Her halo spun like a buzz-saw.

‘What?’ Everett said. ‘How?’

Kax tapped his iPhone with a fighting claw, then her head.

‘Clever, but not so clever, Everett Singh. Earth 10 stuff is easy. Captain, my sisters will cut you to pieces. Leave them to me. We are eggs, we are blood, we are princesses. Save yourselves.’

‘But your people—’ Everett said.

‘You waste thought, Everett Singh!’ Kax hissed. ‘We are bad, we have done the greatest wrong any creature ever did, but we do not deserve to die. The Sunlords need to find a better way. Maybe apart, we can find it.’ Then she bowed in the human way to Everett, and touched her crest in the Jiju way and charged down the corridor.

‘Kax!’ Everett yelled. ‘Kax!’

‘Code!’ Captain Anastasia commanded. Everett’s fingers flew over the key display. He hissed and swore at every miss-key. Stupid stupid fiddly smartphone keypads. For thick people who pointed at things. The jump codes were easy: a simple arithmetical function could generate the coordinates for each of the cityships in a fraction of a second. Like in movies, getting out was the tricky bit. Done. But there was one last piece he had to write himself. He had to close and bolt the stable door. He had to make sure that the Sun-lords stayed in their billion different exiles.

‘Everett …’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘Just one last piece of code.’ No time to test it, of course. He had one shot: one shot made up of three parts, and each of those parts had to work the first time.

Then he heard something. Not a noise – something in his head like a noise, but more like an absence of noise. He could not say what it was, but the un-noise was louder than any of the noises and voices in the Sun Chamber.

Everett snapped his head up from his iPhone to the corridor.

‘Kax.’

He knew. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. Something was gone out of him. Something forged in a forest clearing in the shadow of thousand-foot trees: all ashes now, and the terrifying, magnificent creatures that lived among them. Dust. Gone. Something that touched mind to mind, Jiju to Human. Gone.

‘Kax!’

‘Everett …’ Captain Anastasia said gently.

‘Sorry. Yes. No. The return gate should be here about …’ Once again, blinding light as a disc of light opened into a Heisenberg Gate on to the welcome bridge of
Everness
. ‘Go go go, I have to send the code. There’s a five-second delay. And I put in a command that will erase the Infundibulum files on every Jiju computer. Just to make sure they can’t come back. Or when they do, we’re ready for them. Go!’

Sen was last through the gate. Her on the bridge, Everett
in the Sun Chamber. Rattling claws: close now: the bird-song was a war shriek now. He hit the send button as Jiju warriors burst into the Sun Chamber. Their haloes were rings of fierce blades. Everett saw a whirlwind of swords fly at him. Sen lifted the Genequeen battlestaff, then threw it at the Sunlords and with her two free hands grabbed Everett by the waistband of his ship shorts and hauled him back on to the ship. Everett hit the deck hard.

The Heisenberg Gate closed.

‘Three,’ Everett counted, struggling to his feet. ‘Two. One …’

A thousand people stood motionless on Green Lanes. Schoolkids, grandparents with baby buggies, young women with plastic shopping bags, Hackney Council workers in yellow high-vis, street runners and old ladies. Cars stopped, trucks and buses came to a standstill. Cyclists paused to stare. From down the road came the bang and crunch of one car shunting into another. Drivers and passengers got out. People came out of shops and cafes, businesses and offices. Everett M could see workers at upper windows all along the street, all staring upwards.

Everett M looked full on the thing in the sky. Black stalactites, upside-down towers, buttresses and inverted domes; millions of glowing windows – this was a thousand Gothic cathedrals, ten thousand Disneyland castles turned upside down and mashed together. In an instant the world of
every one of those thousand people on Green Lanes, those millions of people all across London, was turned upside down. Whatever they were thinking, whatever they were feeling, their problems their joys, their heartaches their heartbreaks and the hearts they had broken, were all swept away. There was a thing in the sky so big it hid the sun. He clenched his fists, willed energy into the Thryn weapon systems. The power excited him as it always did. Everett M’s hands flew open. The power ebbed away. The thing hanging over London blacked out the entire sky. It was miles across. He had finger lasers, EM pulsers, speed, strength and enhanced senses. All of those made him as effective against the invader in the sky as anyone else on Green Lanes. There was nothing he could do. But he had to do something. He was supposed to be a hero.

‘Screw you, Charlotte Villiers,’ Everett M said.

Whatever he did, it would not be what she wanted.

Everett M’s phone played Swedish House Mafia: Ryun.

‘It’s the Jiju, isn’t it?’ Ryun said.

‘It’s the Jiju.’

‘The size of that thing …’

‘Ryun, I need to call my mum. I don’t know how long the network will stay up.’

‘Sure, sure.’

‘Ry, get everyone you can and get them out of London.’

‘My dad’s at work …’

‘Do what you can, Ry. Have to call Mum. I’ll be in touch.’

Everett M thumbed Laura’s number.

‘Everett, where are you? Are you all right? Come home right away.’

‘Mum, is Vicky – Victory-Rose at Bebe’s?’

‘No, she’s with me, love. Everett, get home.’

‘I’m coming. Mum, we should get out of London. Go down to Aunt Stacey’s.’ On Earth 4 Laura’s sister lived in Basingstoke, a place Everett M had always found so boring that it reversed into being weirdly interesting. Right now it was the safest place he could think of. Aliens never invaded Basingstoke. But first they had to get out of London. And that could be the big problem.

An argument had broken out where the cars had crashed. The window of a charity shop suddenly shattered and collapsed into sugar-glass. The noise aroused the crowd. Car horns blared, drivers tried to manoeuvre their trapped vehicles free. A cyclist clipped a wing mirror as he tried to weave a careful route through the clogged traffic. Another argument broke out. An old lady gave a cry, a woman shouted about her baby, mind her baby! Voices were raised. Unease spread from person to person and suddenly the thousand people on Green Lanes gelled into one thing: a crowd. They wanted out, they wanted away, they wanted home. The mob milled, then surged. Another shop window went in. Through the heads Everett M glimpsed Noomi’s face, scared, trapped by the press of people in the porch of the Mermaid Cafe.

‘Mum, I’ll be there in a minute. There’s something I need to do first.’

‘Everett …’

‘I’ll look after you. Really.’

Everett M closed his eyes, thought power into his enhancements and in a single bound jumped on to the top of the nearest car.

‘Hey!’ the driver of the Peugeot yelled as Everett M leaped lightly from car roof to car roof.

‘What the …?’

‘What’s he doing, what’s he doing?’

‘You can’t do that …’

But most people were yelling at each other, pushing and shoving and stretching arms between jammed bodies, reaching for … reaching for what? Everett M couldn’t see anything they could seize hold of, grip as a strong anchor. A distraught woman with a double buggy was marooned in a shop doorway, weeping openly, terrified. Green Lanes was littered with shattered glass from shop fronts and car windows.

Why are they doing this?
Everett M thought.
There’s an alien cityship in the sky and they’re smashing everything up
. He raced from car to car, fast and light and strong on his Thryn enhancements.
The Jiju are up in there in whatever that thing is, and we turn on each other. Everyone for her- or himself
.

‘The kid …’

‘Stop the kid …’

‘He can’t …’

Everett M dropped off the roof of a Mini in front of the Mermaid Cafe, pushing people out of the way. A shaven-headed man in a zip-up jacket over a hoodie rounded on him, shoved him hard. Everett M stood firm as a mountain. The man boggled, then tried to push Everett M over. Everett M planted a single hand on his chest and held him off.

‘No,’ Everett M said. He fed power to his enhancements and pushed the crowd apart as if they were water.

‘Noomi!’

She looked up at the sound of her name. Everett M arrived in the cafe doorway.

‘Are you all right?’

‘They all left me,’ she said. Her eyes were wide with shock. ‘My GFs. They just … left me. They just left me.’

‘I’ll get you home,’ Everett M said. ‘I promise. Noomi … all those things I said – I had to say them. But they’re not true. I only said them to make you safe.’

‘Everett, this is not a good time.’

The crowd was jammed solid now and descending into panic. Panicked mobs were terrifying things. People could get hurt. People could get killed. The screaming old lady, the scared mother with her twins, how Everett M wished he could help them. But he couldn’t save everyone. That was the other side of power: guilt. For the ones you can’t do anything to help.

‘Noomi, put your arms around my neck.’

She did it without question. Everett M scooped her up in his arms and with a flicker of Thryn technology jumped back up on to the roof of the now-abandoned car.

Noomi’s eyes were wide with amazement. ‘Everett … you can’t do that. People can’t do that.’

‘Hold tight.’

With Noomi in his arms, Everett M ran from roof to roof, between the surging, scared people, down Green Lanes. The big junction at Newington Green was a mass of clogged traffic and panicked people, surging, pressing, trying to find a way out. As Everett M made a jump to the top of a bus the street lights went out. The screaming started.