The Fractal Prince

24 MIELI AND THE SOUL TRAIN

Mieli watches the progress of the soul train from the sky. It is a silver worm glinting in the sun. The updraft carries her up lightly, and if it wasn’t for the constant chatter of Stanka the ursomorph, she would almost be enjoying herself.

‘—and then they came at us with some re-animated tanks, would you believe that, old drones they dug up from some military base, and Tara detonated them in a sequence that spelled FUCK YOU in the sky, poor bastards—’

While she can see why the Teddy Bears’ Roadside Picnic Company’s groupware matched them together as a combat team, sometimes she wishes the outcome had been different.

The train is sleek, all analog tech, made by Sirr craftsmen to give as little as possible for wildcode to infect. It always comes anyway, but it takes longer for the ancient nanotech to dig into simple machinery than smartmatter or more complex systems. Mieli herself is covered in Seal armour: words, flowing on her skin and face. It makes her wings look like pages of a book.

‘Are you listening, Oortian?’ Stanka says. ‘I said I hope we see some action today.’

The ursomorph mercenary is a fierce sight with her spiky enhancements visible, riding on the roof of the train. She has a point. They are approaching the Wrath region where a lot of Sobornost ships fell, twenty years ago. There have been several attacks here by anti-Sobornost jinni, and Mieli is not sure what to expect. She has been through a few skirmishes, and so far they have been quick and confusing. Unlike in Sirr, the wild jinni in the desert can be vast and powerful, like living storms.

The wildcode desert confuses her. Seen from above, on visible wavelengths, it does resemble a desert: mountains, valleys and here and there a cluster of abandoned buildings. But in the spimescape view, or in what the people of Sirr call athar, it is like looking at the surface of the Sun. Aerovore formations like protuberances, tiny nanites moving in complex patterns. Matter assembled into large unnatural configurations by invisible forces. She saw a patch of the desert full of tiny smiling faces, painstakingly assembled from individual grains of sand, propagating through the landscape like a flood.

‘It’s like inside my cubs’ dreams here, sometimes,’ Stanka said when they talked about it. ‘You get used to it eventually.’ Stanka’s people had been hit badly by the Protocol War: she left her offspring asleep back in the habitat inside their home asteroid. While they hibernated, she tried to win them a better life by working as a mercenary.

The desert makes many things difficult, including communication. Mieli can barely keep in touch with Perhonen through their neutrino link. The ship is moored in the Teddy Bears’ makeshift base in the Gourd, trying to get in touch with the thief and negotiating its way through the complex Sobornost systems with the help of the pellegrini – whom the thief has apparently managed to insert into the hsien-ku infrastructure in the sky.

Mieli does not know who they are working for – one of the muhtasib families of Sirr – but it does not matter as long as they are provided with Seals. The souls, stored in Sirr-made jars and transported in the trains, also belong to them. Mined from the hidden jannahs beneath the desert and the hardware in the Wild Cities, they are either sold to Sobornost or put to work as jinni slaves in the city to earn their freedom.

She prays to Kuutar and Ilmatar every night, begging their forgiveness for being part of such dirty work. She asked Stanka how she could do it, one night.

‘It’s easy,’ the bear-woman said. ‘I think of the cubs.’

As they approach a valley between two gigantic Sobornost craft – oblasts that now look more like mountains, overgrown with strange, twisted trees and bushes – Mieli swoops down.

‘We should slow down,’ she tells Stanka. ‘Too many opportunities for ambush.’

‘Don’t be silly. I doubt we’ll even see a chimera after the beating we gave them last time—’

There is writing in the desert, in huge letters. There is a tickle in Mieli’s forehead when she looks at it. An alarm goes off in her head. Body thieves. She instructs her metacortex to blank out the message in the sand and prepares for combat.

‘What do you make of that?’ she transmits to Stanka. She calls for recon support, deploys two Fast Ones from her backpack. Tzzrk and Rabkh dart forward. The mercenary companies deploy the fast-living creatures as scouts and native guides. For her, using quicktime makes it easier to communicate with them.

‘. . . serpent queen. . .’ mutters Stanka in her ear. Her voice sounds strange. And then the ursomorph is standing on her back legs and firing her heavy cannon at the train tracks ahead.

The boom of the weapon mixes with the groan of twisting metal. A fountain of sand and rubble erupts in front of the train. The momentum of the huge silver vehicle carries it into the rain of rock and dust, and for a moment Mieli thinks it’s going to make it through. Then it twists, slowly, thrown up by the broken tracks like a snapped silver whip. The cars tumble over each other, ricochet from the walls of the valley, kick up dust. Finally, they come to rest in disarray, like a child’s toys tossed aside. The bear-woman screams incomprehensible words in Mieli’s ears.

Powering up her combat systems, Mieli dives down, just as a jinn storm of dust and glinting sapphire comes down the side of the old oblast ship. I’m getting paid to protect the cargo. Let’s just hope the backup gets here in time.

She fires attack software at the storm, with no effect. She powers up her multipurpose cannon reluctantly – with a wildcode infection, she’ll only get a few shots in – and puts quark-gluon plasma charges in the storm’s path. Dust and sand and nanites fuse into a sharp rain of glass.

A crowd of chimera animals inside the storm swarms over the train, sleek, catlike creatures with a glinting sapphire carapace and sharp, sharp claws. Mieli dispatches the Fast Ones to call for backup from the Teddy Bears and lands, hard. She gets off one batch of q-dots that take out the first swarm of the sapphire cats like a scythe. Then her weapon goes hot. She tosses it aside and goes for hand-to-hand with a q-blade. She runs the microfans in her wings as hard as she can to disperse the foglet storm raging around her.

Then Stanka comes at her from the ruins of the train.

A swipe of a diamond-clawed paw throws Mieli aside like a rag doll and tears one of her wings into tatters. Then the ursomorph is upon her, pinning her down, enhanced teeth going for her throat. Her q-enhanced muscles scream as she gets her legs beneath the bear woman’s bulk and kicks as hard as she can. There is a surprised look in the ursomorph’s eyes as she flies into the air.

Mieli rolls, grabs the multipurpose cannon, squeezes the trigger, praying. The weapon gives her one more shot. An x-ray laser blast takes off half the bear’s torso, and the rest rains down on top of her.

And then the rukh ships and the Teddy Bears are there, driving away the storm.

The mercenary camp is a cluster of muhtasib-sealed temporary bubble buildings between the Wrath area and the Wall, a few kilometres from Sirr. On the evening of the battle of the train, Mieli is taken to see the commander. Odyne is a skeletally thin woman from the Belt, living in a medusa-like exoskeleton, made bulky by the thick layers of Sealed material around it. Her narrow face inside the globe-like helmet makes Mieli think of the fish in Grandmother’s spherical lake in Oort.

Odyne is sitting with a middle-aged portly man in lavish Sirr robes and rises to greet Mieli when she enters. A heavily armoured mercenary in mutalibun robes stands on guard behind them.

‘Please. Sit,’ Odyne says.

Mieli has been through extensive debugging by the company’s combat muhtasib, and her skin is still tingling. Odyne looks at her, tendril-fingers knotting together.

‘You have done well, Mieli,’ she says. ‘In fact, well enough that I would like to introduce you to our employer. This is Lord Salih of the House Soarez.’

The man acknowledges Mieli’s presence with a barely perceptible nod.

‘My thanks,’ he says in a flippant tone. ‘I understand that you played an important role in protecting my property. A warrior woman, how remarkable. My mother would approve.’

‘A comrade died for your property. A truedeath: backups do not work here,’ Mieli says. ‘She left cubs behind. I’m sure they would appreciate your gratitude more than me.’ When this is over, I’m going to make sure they are all right, she thinks.

Odyne waves. ‘Yes, yes, that is very noble of you, Mieli. The Company protects its own, have no fear, and Lord Salih has been very generous. However, there is another reason I have asked him here today.’

Salih raises his eyebrows.

‘I regret to inform you that our arrangement is coming to an end,’ Odyne says.

‘What?’ Salih sputters. ‘You are in breach of contract!’

Odyne sighs. ‘As it happens, we have reason to believe that the business we are presently engaged in will cease to be profitable in a very short amount of time. You’ll recall that our contract includes protecting your own person from any harm that might befall you or Sirr, from the desert or Sobornost. You may be surprised that, strictly interpreted, this dictates some drastic actions from our part. Mieli, please kill Lord Salih and make sure you thoroughly destroy his brain.’

Mieli hesitates. It is a dishonourable thing to do. But the Mieli she has become here would not hesitate, and this is a man who trades in gogols—

Lord Salih’s head disappears in a burst of flame.

‘Too slow,’ Odyne says, a zoku q-gun floating next to her head. ‘You will have to be faster in the service of our new employer.’

‘Dear Odyne, you will excuse me if I regard hesitating before executing her employer a positive quality,’ says the mercenary, drawing her hood back. A brass eye stares at Mieli. ‘You will have plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your talents where we are going.’

‘Mieli is one of my finest warriors,’ Odyne says. ‘Although she does seem to be having an off day.’

‘I am Abu Nuwas,’ the man with the brass eye says. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

The mercenaries sail over the wildcode desert in rukh ships, huge vessels kept aloft by swarms upon swarms of the chimera birds in vast blue clouds. The Teddy Bears have been joined by at least ten other companies, and the posthuman warriors carried by the vessels number in the thousands.

Some of them fly under their own power, in gliders and other analog craft custom-made to survive the hardships of the desert. Abu Nuwas’s two flagship galleons, Munkar and Nakir, are surrounded by a halo of Fast Ones. Their shadows race below them in the desert as the sun sets.

Mieli stands on the bridge of Nakir with Odyne, Nuwas and the other mercenary commanders. The lights of the Fast Cities dance in the distance, and the surface of the dark sea that used to be the Mediterranean has an eerie green sheen. They have lost a few craft already to sudden jinn storms, driven away by Nuwas’s muhtasibs, but the fleet pushes forward.

Mieli? comes Perhonen’s voice suddenly.

Thank Kuutar, Mieli whispers. Where have you been?

In touch with the thief. He knows how to get to the jannah. But so does a man called Abu Nuwas.

The ship fills Mieli in on the thief’s activities in Sirr. A conflict with hsien-kus and and the local authorities, and getting a girl into trouble. Why am I not surprised?

He thought you were going to be in a position to—

I am really going to kill him this time, Mieli says. Abu Nuwas has a whole damned army. It’s not like I can just slip into the jannah he digs up unnoticed and get our gogol.

He said you would be pissed off.

Well, he was right. Bastard.

Apparently, he got the other thing he needed from Sirr. It’s up to you now, he says.

Mieli sighs. Of course it is. Can you get me any imagery of this region?

It’s all pretty weird over there. On Old Earth, you would have been flying over Turkey now. Lots of good places there to bury something.

Whatever it is, it’s not going to stay buried for long, Mieli says.

What are you going to do? I’m sorry about this, Mieli, I wish I could do more to help. I’m in touch with the pellegrini, she has been doing something in the Gourd—

Mieli swears. This is not what was supposed to happen. The thief was not supposed to get involved in local politics, he just needed to get the location of the jannah. It was going to be a matter of sneaking away from her unit, retrieving the gogol and and transmitting it up to Perhonen.

Let me talk to him, Mieli says.

I hate to admit it, Mieli, but this did not go as well as I expected, the thief says. I was outmanoeuvred by a one-eyed merchant. If you think the situation down there is too difficult, perhaps we can cut our losses. It might be possible to use what I got, to get into Chen’s mind more directly—

But you would still need the Founder codes for that.

Yes, I suppose so, the thief says. And we don’t have much time. It sounds like there is going to be a straight-out war between the hsien-kus, vasilevs and the pellegrini sometime soon.

War, Mieli says.

Damn, the thief breathes. I’m just seeing your feed now. You would need a whole army to get to the jannah now. Leave it, Mieli. It was my fault, I screwed up. We’ll find another way.

An army, she whispers.

What are you talking about? the thief asks.

Mieli ignores him, closes her eyes and prays to the pellegrini.