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.