Effendi

CHAPTER 48 28th October

Avatar wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Maybe a whole deck given over to the Colonel’s quarters. PaxForce guards doubling as prison officers. Certainly daylight-perfect lighting tied to a season-specific twenty-four/seven clock, some trees, birdsong and an artificial stream; even the most basic clubs had those these days. At least they did in the circadian/chill-out zones.

And if not warders, then exile in splendid isolation. Imposing staterooms run to seed and ruin. Once fabulous tapestries grimed with dust. Avatar imagined it like something from a newsfeed novella. Golden Youth, In Place of Trust, Forbidden Fortune. . . Somewhere suited to murderous fathers, flirtatious mothers, drug-addled uncles and teenage schemers who usually wanted either their parents or siblings dead, if not both.

He didn’t think of Hamzah like this. Hamzah was a villain, not pure but pretty simple, and his money wasn’t knotted up in trusts and he had only one heir, Zara.

Avatar had no illusions about that. No real problems with it either.

All the same, he’d been expecting more from the Colonel’s lair. Actually, even that wasn’t accurate, he hadn’t so much been expecting more as been expecting something. Something other than a vast hangarlike emptiness, filled with acrid dust and lit by distant portholes that lined the gloom on either side of him, like tiny holes punched out into the real world.

His feet left tracks on the carpet in dust that was undisturbed by any other sign of human passage. Just because something made no sense didn’t make it untrue, however; Avatar knew that. Knew too that he needed to find a way down to the deck below, where there would be no portholes at all, unless the liner had a level designed to look out underwater. Which was possible.

“Lights . . .”

The futile command echoed back from steel walls, making him feel more alone than ever. Avatar’s problem was that silence irritated him and always had done. It scared him, if he was being honest. From the grinding of gears in the narrow street outside his children’s home and the jewels of music heard through other people’s windows to the hammering of water pipes each night in the dorm, noise had been his comfort from the start.

“Fuck it all . . .” Avatar pulled a twist of paper from his pocket and crunched the crystals. He’d have snorted the pinch, like snuff, but his nostrils were still recovering from a batch of ice that had given him twenty-four hours’ worth of paranoia and a week of nosebleeds.

The sulphate tasted sour as vomit but it did its job. Melting into his saliva and sending shivers down his neck. Life improved in a rush.

“Hani?”

There was no answer. But then there’d been no answer last time he asked either, or the time before that. No answer, no sounds . . . Put him down in any back street in the city and, chances were, he could navigate his way to a café in Shatby blindfolded, just by listening to the noise from different souks and the rattle of trams.

Here there was only the engine’s slow heartbeat beneath his feet, which he felt rather than heard, like being in the belly of a whale. This was more Raf’s territory than his, Avatar decided as he took another few crystals, just to be safe. That was the obvious difference between them. The only dark Avatar liked came wrapped up with neon, sound systems and strobes. For the rest, he’d take daylight and warmth every time . . .

Moving through the cold aquarium gloom, Avatar made for a distant strip of colour that turned out, minutes later, to be one long, elaborate, stained-glass window spanning the whole width of the liner’s stern. On it, heroic miners swung glass pickaxes at coal seams of purple glass, fishermen pulled elaborate nets loaded with cod from dark glass waves, and a plump girl with blonde hair and impossibly blue eyes stood dead centre with a glass sun behind her, a sickle at her bare feet and a sheaf of wheat held proudly above her head. She looked as warm and happy as Avatar was cold and miserable.

Beneath the wide window, an ornate sweep of double stairs led into even deeper gloom below, looking as if it had been ripped from a New York hotel—brass stair-rods and all—and bolted between decks. A long Art Nouveau rail, verdigrised with age and missing an occasional banister, had been fixed around the edge of the drop to protect Avatar and the ghosts of passengers long dead from falling to the deck below.

Beyond the dim pool of light at the foot of the stairs stretched icy blackness, growing colder and more inklike the further in Avatar went. He already knew, from having walked the full length of the deck overhead, that the gloom extended for more than a kilometre in front of him. Somewhere in the emptiness would be a door leading down to a level below this. All Avatar had to do was find the right door.

Whether the door Avatar found was right or not was hard to guess. True enough, it opened and had stairs leading down. Those were both plus points. Unfortunately it was also two hundred paces after where Hani had told him it should be and on the wrong side of the ship. Avatar was still worrying about these discrepancies when he came out onto the deck below and stumbled upon his first freezer pipe, promptly tripping over it.

“Oh f—” Picking himself off carpet tiles so chilled their nap was brittle with ice, Avatar let his long low variation on the theme of fuck segue slowly into silence.

Not his day.

Having adjusted the rucksack on his shoulder, he headed on, moving towards a point in the far distance that might as well have been hidden behind his eyes for all Avatar could really see it. And a hundred or so paces later, he tripped over his second pipe.

Fucking. . .

Echoes of swearing gave way to silence and an awareness that both shins now hurt so badly he was moving beyond the ability to curse. Tentatively, Avatar wrapped one hand around his ankle, half from gut instinct/half to check for real damage and felt warmth ooze from beneath frozen skin. Somehow, finding blood returned his ability to swear.

“You could always try turning on the lights,” said a voice behind him.

Ankle bleeding or not, Avatar spun on the spot and flipped his gun to firing position, thumb already ratcheting back its hammer. The only thing that stopped Avatar from doing what he intended, which was ram the barrel into the gut of whoever stood directly behind, was that no one stood directly behind. The darkness was empty.

“To your left,” said the voice. “Over near the wall . . . Follow the pipe until you hit a pillar. The control is on the nearest side . . . Oh,” it sounded darkly amused, “and try not to trip over anything else.”

The switch was where the voice said it would be. A simple square of cracked white plastic that, once clicked, lit a single bank of strips from one side of the low ceiling to the other, leaving Avatar standing in a dimly lit hold. At his feet, a frosted pipe vanished through the floor. There was a new pipe every hundred paces or so, rising out of the deck on one side of the hangarlike space, crossing the floor and disappearing again. Most of the pipes were frosted for their entire length with ice.

“It was cheap,” said the voice. “From a decommissioned power station outside Helsinki. You’re probably wondering why the Soviets didn’t use something better suited.”

Avatar wasn’t. He could honestly say the question had never occurred to him.

“Inefficiency. Plus they had to take what they could get at the time. That’s a good maxim for politics, you know. Take what you can. Let free what you can’t . . .”

“Sounds like shit to me, man,” said Avatar.

“Oh.” The voice sounded puzzled, the puzzlement breeding a long pause that left Avatar time to look round the hold. And Avatar remained there, hung inside that pause, until he grew bored with waiting and decided to demand a few answers of his own. Get the basics, Raf had once said. Most people didn’t, but then, as Raf pointed out, most people were dead.

“Where am I?”

“Where . . . ?”

“Yes,” said Avatar. “That’s what I said. Where am I, exactly . . . ?”

The voice thought about that. “You’re on Dminus7, a third of the way into krill processing. Well, what used to be processing before the partitions were bulldozed and the vats dismantled.”

“Right,” Avatar said flatly, “and where are you?”

“Exactly?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“I’m exactly close enough to make contact.”

Avatar smiled, despite himself and in spite of air so cold that it leached heat from his arms and dragged the questions from his mouth in wisps of smoke.

“You can do better than that.”

“And if I can’t?”

“I’ll leave you facedown with a bullet through the back of your head.”

“You’re not Ka, are you?”

“No,” Avatar said slowly. “You can safely assume I’m not Ka.”

“But you are armed?”

“Oh yes.” Avatar waved his borrowed Taurus in the air, so whichever camera was watching through the gloom could get a clear view. “That’s me. Always ready. Armed to the teeth.”

“Good,” said the voice. “Though personally I’d recommend an HK/cw, double-loaded with kinetics and 20mm fatboys, explosive and airburst.”

Silence.

“Looks like a pig and weighs like one too,” added the voice. “Heckler & Koch, plastic and ceramic job. Kill anything. Really useful if you’re an amateur.”

“If I’m an . . .” Avatar snapped off a shot in the direction of the insult, then ducked as sound waves swamped the low hold, deafening him.

“Are you sure you’re not Ka?” The voice sounded amused.

“No,” said Avatar. “I’m, um, Kamil ben-Hamzah . . . More famous as DJ Avatar,” he added quickly, refusing to compromise totally.

“Kamil . . . eh? Tell me, not-Ka, why exactly are you here?”

“To claim a debt.” That seemed to be the only way to put it.

“You mean to kill me?”

Avatar took a deep breath. Every hour since Hani first called him up he’d spent riffing this moment. He’d done what a lifetime of street smarts suggested he do, which was introduce himself. Only now Avatar couldn’t remember in which order he was supposed to make his points.

“My father’s on trial . . .”

No, Avatar shook his head, that wasn’t where he was meant to start.

“My name is Kamil. My father’s name is Hamzah Quitrimala. I’ve come to . . .”

“How old are you?” demanded the voice.

“Old enough,” said Avatar.

“I had tank commanders younger than that.” The voice sounded almost regretful, as if the man speaking wished Avatar was less than his fourteen years. “Hell, by your age most of my tank commanders . . .”

“Were dead.” Relief cascaded over the boy as he realized that he’d done it right and found the Colonel; but all he said was, “Yeah, I heard.”

If silence could have shrugged, it did.

“Everybody dies,” said the Colonel. “Well, almost everybody.”

“You’re alive . . .”

“And so, it seems, is little Ka.”

“Ka?”

“Kamil. The boy who hated war so much he gunned down everyone who wanted to take part, including the whole of his own platoon, if you believe the reports. And officially I always make a point of believing official reports . . .”

“He actually killed all those people?”

Avatar lowered his revolver and shook off his rucksack. He felt sick, sick and empty, like someone had ripped open his stomach and taken his guts when he wasn’t looking. “I thought you were meant to be Dad’s alibi . . .”

“I think,” said Colonel Abad carefully, “you’ll find I’m meant to tell the truth.”

“You’ll do it?” Avatar sounded shocked. “You’ll stand up in court?”

The way Hani explained it, the SS Jannah functioned as an autonomous micronation. That was, so long as the liner stayed within international waters it ran to its own laws. So why would someone like Colonel Abad put himself in danger by offering to come ashore?

“You thought you’d have to kidnap me?” The Colonel’s voice was sour. “No chance. This is my Elba. You remember Napoleon needing to be forced off that island at gunpoint?”

Avatar didn’t remember anything about Napoleon at all. Zara was the one with the expensive education.

“You’ll find me on Dminus9, right at the bottom of the pit. You do know that the last and deepest circle of hell is ice-cold, don’t you? In the fourth round, Judecca. And the ninth circle, Cocytus. That’s the problem with being captured by someone with a classical education. They want to get all clever on your arse.”

As there wasn’t an answer to that, Avatar turned his attention to reaching the far end of the hangar, though now the Taurus was heavy in his combats pocket and most of his attention went on not tripping over the trip-wire pipes.

“How do I get through this?” Avatar asked, when he hit a steel wall thrown across the point of the liner. In it was a door, also steel, with three heavy, old-fashioned locks. Since this was the first door he’d seen on the entire level, apart from the one he’d used to get in, Avatar figured it had to be right.

“Try opening it . . .”

Avatar did, and the heavy door swung open in a cascade of metal dandruff as its hinges creaked and popped fat flakes of rust. A twist of riveted steps fed down to the coldness below and then kept on going to the level below that, bypassing the turbine rooms.

Old-fashioned switches waited for Avatar at every landing but the bulkhead lights were empty of bulbs, so he felt his way through the darkness, until the fingers following the icy rail ceased to be his and vanished into a dull ache.

The deeper Avatar went, the colder it became until every inward breath froze in his throat or plated the inside of his nostrils and every outward breath condensed at his lips. The cold had a physicality that was new to him. And with the cold came a tiredness and the need for sleep.

Heat he’d lived with all his life. It arrived with late spring, sometimes earlier if a khamsin hit, with its fifty days of hot dry wind, and trickled away into the end of autumn. With it came catlike lassitude and pointless quarrels. But this was more than heat’s opposite. Every twist of stair Avatar descended took him further inside himself, folding him into lethargy.

“What’s the temperature?” Avatar demanded.

“Cold,” said the voice. “Cold enough to shut down your core.”

“And you live in this?”

“It makes no difference to me,” the voice said. “And Saeed Koenig wanted to discourage sightseers.”

His teeth chattered uncontrollably and his feet were a memory beyond feeling. The black T-shirt and combats he’d put on that morning now seemed less of a fashion statement and more of an absentmindedly written suicide note.

“Where now?” Avatar asked, knowing he’d been followed on camera every step of his descent.

“Straight ahead. Use the door . . .”

Still cursing the lack of a flashlight, Avatar inched through the darkness until his outstretched hand found a handle, low down and on the right. He gripped it tight with shaking fingers and everything started to go wrong. Disbelief giving way to panic as he tried to yank free his hand and heard skin rip. What panicked Avatar wasn’t pain but its complete absence.

He was frozen fast to a subzero metal door handle.

“Piss on it,” said the Colonel.

Avatar ignored the comment and tugged again.

“Piss on it,” Colonel Abad ordered crossly, his voice echoing from two places at once. “Go on. Do it now.”

The man meant it, Avatar realized. Using his good hand, Avatar fumbled at the nylon zip of his combats.

“Now piss on the other hand. Get some warmth into those bones.”

Avatar did as Colonel Abad ordered, fastened his fly and stepped through to the Colonel’s quarters, fingers still dripping. He didn’t imagine the Colonel would want to shake hands.

The room was in darkness.

“Lights,” said the Colonel, and a strip lit overhead. What it revealed was an empty space like all the others Avatar had passed through; just smaller, narrower and less high. The walls, which curved on both sides, were blasted back to bare steel and riveted plate. Obviously enough, there were no portholes. Also no furniture, apart from a low metal table, and no cooking equipment. No sign of human habitation and no Colonel.

As jokes went, it was a bad one.

“How are your fingers?” asked a voice behind him. “I’ve just checked my libraries and you may need a skin graft, when we get ashore . . . If we get ashore, ” the voice amended, as if suddenly concerned not to push the bounds of accuracy.

Avatar looked round until he spotted a speaker, attached to the ceiling over in the corner of the room. It was so out-of-date that its grille was cloth, set into a case that looked like it might actually be wood. Soviet-made, from the look of things. “Where are you?”

“I’m the housekeeping routine on the table.”

“You’re what?” Avatar looked across to see a small radio wired into a feed socket on the wall. At first glance the radio looked to be covered with grey suede, but that was just dust fallen from the ceiling or carried in through a ventilation duct on the Arctic wind. Beside it, by themselves, stood an ugly-looking pair of spectacles.

“Yeah,” said the Colonel, “that’s me.” A CCTV camera on the wall swung slowly between Avatar and the table. It looked like nothing so much as a duck shaking its head. “Not what you expected, huh?”

Avatar shook his head in turn. “No, it’s not.” All the same, he felt he needed to clarify the position. “You’re my dad’s boss? Colonel Abad?”

“‘But in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. That is, destroyer. Angel of the abyss, he that brings God’s woes upon his enemies . . .’

“Revelation,” added the voice, when Avatar looked blank. “I’m either the true angel of God or his deadly enemy. Unfortunately, no one can decide which, though theologians once wasted a lot of time trying.” The Colonel’s tone made clear what he thought of that.

Revelation? That was the nasrani political endgame, at least Avatar thought it was. He wasn’t big on politics. “You believe this stuff . . .”

“What do you think?”

He thought not.

“Either it was a geek joke,” explained the Colonel, “or they needed to find a framework in a hurry . . . Lash-ups are always easier than starting from scratch, take a look at religion or computer games. My guess is the shapers fed in a couple of terabytes of world myth plus Jung. It didn’t worry them if the deep background was suboptimal. I was only there for the duration of the war. And that was only meant to last a few months.”

“I’m dying of cold,” said Avatar, “and you’re talking shit . . .”