Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) Read Free

family’s broker, contact the hijackers and offer to trade Dr Gagarian’s head for the release of any hostages, and the ship. But he was late, so very late, and it was highly probable
that only he had survived. Agrata had said as much. His father’s viron had been erased; she had lost contact with his brothers and their bioses had fallen silent. It was possible that the
hijackers had taken her alive, but when he’d left her, when he’d been shot out of the ship in the lifepod, she had been getting ready to fight them to the death. He’d get to
Tannhauser Gate, he’d try to negotiate with the hijackers, but if there were no survivors, if they didn’t want to give up the ship, he’d crack open the files cached in Dr
Gagarian’s head and sell them. He’d mine old databases, locate a trove of ancient treasures in the outer dark, and convince some freebooter to enter into a partnership and make his
fortune. He’d pull off a coup in a city bourse, become the bodyguard of some rich trader and save her life, work ten or twenty years in the docks, do everything and anything he could to raise
enough funds to hire a gang of reivers and track down the people who had murdered his family and wrecked his life. And then, oh then, he would have his revenge . . .
    Another day passed, and another. Early one morning, he woke to find the eidolon bending over him, the twin stars of her eyes gleaming above the sketch of her smile.
    ‘I have news, Gajananvihari! I have good news! It is Agrata! It is Agrata Konwas! She is alive! And I have a message from her!’

 
     
     
     
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    In the long ago, in their motherland on Earth, Gajananvihari Pilot’s family would have been called kabadiwallahs. Junk peddlers. They located derelict gardens and
settlements, salvaged machines that could be refurbished or repurposed, isolated and cultured novel vacuum organisms and biologics, concentrated and refined rare earths and metals. They burrowed
through the remains of grand schemes abandoned in place or wrecked by war. They ransacked homes and public spaces. They were not sentimental about their work. They were grateful to the dead, but
did not try to appease them. The dead no longer had any claim over what they’d left behind, no longer needed it.
    There were thousands of derelict settlements, gardens and habitats in the Belt, tens of thousands of abandoned way stations, refuges, supply dumps, observatories, quarries, strip mines, and
refineries, but salvage was not an easy way of making a living. Most of the ruins whose orbits brought them close to the remaining cities and settlements had been stripped out long ago; those so
far untouched traced distant or eccentric paths, and were often laced with lethal traps and unexpected dangers.
    Forty years before Hari had been quickened, his mother, Mullai, had succumbed to a rogue prion that had infected her while she had been cataloguing the feral biosphere of an ancient garden, and
converted her brain to tangles of pseudo-organic fibrils. His father, Aakash, after surviving radiation poisoning, six different cancers, and injuries caused by two serious accidents, had passed
over fifteen years later, and migrated into a viron. And then Mullai and Aakash’s first son, Rakesh, had been killed when he was caught up in riots sparked by one of the end-time cults.
    This was several years after the Bright Moment, when everyone everywhere, awake or asleep, baseliner or posthuman, had been struck by the same brief vision: a man on a bicycle turning to look at
the viewer as he glided away into a flare of light. It was generally agreed that this vision had been caused or created by an ancient gene wizard, Sri Hong-Owen. At the beginning of the Great
Expansion she had left the Solar System in a ship fashioned from a fragment of one of Saturn’s moons, and after a troubled voyage of more than fifteen hundred years had arrived in the middle
of a war between colonists over control of