The Fractal Prince

didn’t think they would use a local agent like Nuwas, but then I must admit I did not really understand Sirr.

‘It was a bonus that they actually sent me here to go after the Axolotl.’

Tawaddud feels empty and weak. She closes her eyes. There is the faintest echo of the Axolotl in her head, somewhere far away.

‘I trusted you,’ Tawaddud whispers.

‘I told you, you shouldn’t have,’ le Flambeur says. ‘Hush now. No talking. I just have some business with your boyfriend, and then I’ll be on my way.’

He spins the mind-bullet between his fingers deftly, like a magician.

What the hell do you want? whispers the Axolotl.

‘I want the secret, the one you got from the Aun. That’s what I really came here for. The algorithm for turning minds into stories. The same thing you used to make all the other body thieves. But be careful. Any more tricks, and Lady Tawaddud here will become noise in the wildcode. Or I may decide to use the hsien-ku tactics: I can do mind surgery too. Your choice.’

Let him shoot, the Axolotl says in Tawaddud’s mind. Let him shoot. We can still be together.

‘It’s too late,’ Tawaddud says. ‘It was always too late.’

When it’s done, I give them both a bow. Then I plug into the Gourd communication systems in the upload temple. The scan beam comes down from the temple’s dome, a shower of white, cleansing fire. I leave Sirr in a burst of modulated neutrinos. An eyeblink later I’m in my old body in the main cabin. I stretch: it feels strange after days in Sumanguru’s massive frame.

You are a real bastard, Jean, the ship says.

‘I know, but sometimes that’s what it takes.’ I pass it the algorithm – a bizarre image the Axolotl imprinted in my mind, encoded in what I can only assume is a recursive Penrose tiling.

‘Give this to the pellegrini and tell her to test it on a few gogols in the Gourd systems. I’ve seen it working firsthand, but just to be sure. And I think it’s going to require a lot of computational power.’

Sir, yes sir. Anything else?

‘I have some good news and bad news. The good news is that everything is ready, as long as Mieli gets into that jannah. Is she in Abu Nuwas’s fleet?’

Yes.

‘Good.’ I squeeze the bridge of my nose. ‘I need a drink.’

Why do I have the feeling that I’m not going to like the bad news?

‘Yes, well.’ I take a deep breath. ‘The Hunter is coming.’

Tawaddud sits alone in the upload temple with the mind-bullet for a long time. When the Repentants find her, she is holding the barakah gun against her forehead. They take it away. When she falls asleep in her cell, she can no longer remember if she was going to to pull the trigger.

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