The Fractal Prince

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,