Jon Grimwood - Effendi

“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.