Free Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) by Paul McAuley

is my understanding that such people are not amenable to reason.’
    ‘Nabhomani would have persuaded her. He told me that you start making a sale when the customer turns you down. You have to make them want what you’re selling. You have to lead them
to the decision. That’s what I failed to do.’
    ‘She was willing to pay with her life, and yours,’ the eidolon said. ‘Even if she had been dealing with someone who possessed superior negotiating skills, it would not have
changed the logic of the situation.’
    ‘You don’t really understand people,’ Hari said.
    But as he walked on, examining his conversation with the hijacker from every angle, he couldn’t see how it could have ended up at a different place. The ruthless logic of self-sacrifice
scared him. It would make another encounter with the hijackers extremely risky, but he knew he had to find them, had to talk to them. He had get off Themba and reach Tannhauser Gate, and Rember
Wole and Worden Hanburanaman. He had to save Agrata and his brothers, if they still lived. He had to negotiate their return, and the return of the ship. And he still wanted revenge. Now more than
ever.
    He wished he knew why the hijackers wanted the head. Something Dr Gagarian knew. Something he had discovered. Something to do with the traces left by the Bright Moment. He should have paid more
attention to the tick-tock philosopher’s work.
    The lifepod had landed some way beyond the slim rectangle of the monolith, squatting at the centre of a circle of scabbed char. Hari shuffled due south from the monolith to a small, shallow
crater packed with tangles of fine wire. The eidolon watched as he knelt at the edge of the crater, tangled threads gleaming shocking scarlet in the beam of his helmet lamp, and pulled from its pit
of loose dust a cryoflask wrapped in radar-absorbent cloth.
    He carried it to the lifepod and wriggled inside, acquired his destination, pressed the big red button that floated in the virtual keyboard. Twenty minutes later, he was climbing into the
airlock of
Little Helper.
     
    The gig was a stack of three spherical modules of diminishing size. A simple, sturdy design. The smallest module housed the lifesystem; the one in the middle was an
unpressurised cargo hold; the largest contained the motor, fission batteries, and tanks of air, water, and reaction mass. The gig slowly revolved about its long axis as it swung around
Themba’s battered sphere, with the lifepod’s blunt cone nosed into the open hatch of the cargo hold.
    The two hijackers hadn’t bothered to change the security profile. Hari worked up a course, ignited the motor. Themba’s lopsided profile shrank into the starry black. Dwindling to a
fleck, a faint point, gone.
    For several days,
Little Helper
fell sunwards on a free-fall trajectory, heading for a waypoint that would slingshot it towards the outer edge of the main belt and Tannhauser Gate. Then
attitude thrusters ringed around the joint between its motor and equipment hold modules popped and stuttered, aiming it towards a new destination, and its motor ignited and kept burning.
    Hari had discovered that he was being followed.

 
     
     
     
1
     
     
     
     
    The pursuer came trolling out of the outer dark at a steady 0.1
g
.
Easy Does It
, the largest of
Pabuji’s Gift
’s gigs. When Hari had first
spotted it, it had been more than fifty million kilometres away. Twenty days later it had closed half that distance, and was still coming on.
    Hari had given up on Tannhauser Gate. It was a long way around the outer edge of the main belt, and
Easy Does It
would catch him long before he reached it. Instead, he’d altered
course, driving
Little Helper
towards a waypoint on the far side of the 3:1 Kirkwood gap.
    Easy Does It
altered its course, too. Hari made no attempt to contact his pursuers. Opening a channel risked infection by the same species of djinn that had compromised the comms of
Pabuji’s Gift
. His pursuers didn’t