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

riding through the trackless
forests of the Hellas Basin when she discovered a circular lake with a slim, bone-white tower rising from its centre. As she approached the slender bridge that arched between shore and tower,
another rider came out of the trees and challenged her: a rogue paladin whose armour, like hers, had lost its devices and beacons to battle-damage and sandstorms. They drew their vorpal blades and
spurred their chargers and flew headlong into combat. Their chargers bit and mauled each other and collapsed; the paladins fought on into the night. Sparks and flames from their clashing blades lit
up the lake and the tower, and the red rain of their blood speckled the stones of the shore. Both were grievously wounded, but neither would yield. At last, the paladin dispatched her enemy with a
killing thrust, but when she wrenched off his helmet she discovered that he was her own brother. As she wept over his body a man dressed in black furs appeared. He gathered her into his arms and
carried her across the bridge, into the tower. She glimpsed the armill, a slim platinum bracelet set on a bolster inside a crystal reliquary; then its guardian carried her down a spiral stair to a
basement room, stripped off her damaged armour, and lowered her into the casket of an ancient medical engine.
    When the paladin woke, she was hungry and thirsty, and very weak. The room was dark, the stairs were blocked by rubble, her armour was gone. After she clawed her way out, she discovered that the
tower was in ruins. There was no sign of the reliquary and its guardian, and the lake was dry and the forest all around was a wasteland of ash and charred stumps.
    She had been asleep for a century. Mars had fallen to the Trues. The Czarina and her family were long dead; her battalions and her ships were destroyed or scattered. The last paladin dug up the
grave of the brother she had killed, put on his armour, and went out into the world and waged a long and terrible war against the conquerors of Mars. She was a fierce and relentless enemy, driven
by remorse and guilt. She killed everyone who pursued her, including five suzerains, and raised an army of brigands and sacked the ancient capital. But nothing could atone for the mortal sin that
had derailed her quest. When she and the tattered remnant of her army were at last cornered in the Labyrinth of the Night by five squadrons of elite shock troopers, she died with her dead
brother’s name on her lips.
     
    Hari’s broken arm healed, aided by scaffolding laid down by mites that the gig’s medical kit injected into his bloodstream, and he built up its strength by careful
exercise. Vesta grew from a point of light to a small lopsided disc, one half illuminated by direct sunlight, the other in shadow. And then, just after
Little Helper
had begun the
manoeuvre that would insert it into orbit around the little world, the interface with its motor blazed with overload and failure alarms, and the reaction chamber flamed out.
    Hari’s first thought was that it was sabotage. That his pursuers had managed to find an open, unsecured port and slip in a djinn or transmit a command string that had executed some kind of
fail-safe procedure. But a quick inspection revealed that the motor hadn’t simply shut down: it was badly damaged. The feeds to the reaction chamber were out of alignment and its ceramic
casing was cracked.
    He pulled up recent footage of
Easy Does It
, looking for a flare or sudden spark that would betray the launch of some kind of drone, but it turned out that the hijackers had been more
subtle than that. Just after he had initiated the insertion burn sequence, the faint star of the pursuing gig had begun to flicker with coherent, high-energy pulses from a maser.
    ‘They needed to get in range,’ he told the eidolon, ‘but they didn’t need to get too close because it didn’t require much energy to do the damage. The maser’s
frequency lock-stepped with the