Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) by Paul McAuley

ignition pulses in the reaction chamber, and ramped them up uncontrollably and chaotically.’
    The eidolon, dressed in a simple white jumpsuit, a white cap fitted close to her shaven skull, sat cross-legged in the air like one of the saints of the long ago. She said, ‘
Easy Does
It
is still moving faster than we are. I calculate that it will catch up with us long before the repair mites can fix the motor.’
    ‘Yes. And meanwhile the window for orbital insertion is closing.’
    It had the grim logic of one of the old stories in which heroes fail to overcome the iron laws imposed by their gods.
    ‘I’m sorry, Gajananvihari,’ the eidolon said. ‘I see no alternative to surrender.’
    ‘I have another idea,’ Hari said.

 
     
     
     
2
     
     
     
     
    Details began to resolve in and around Vesta’s half-disc. Its sun lamps were a chain of bright stars tilted around its equator. The enormous crater stamped into its south
pole was aimed towards the sun – it was summer, there, the middle of a year-long perpetual day. The rounded peak of the mountain at its centre punched through the atmosphere, its flanks and
the smashed terrain around it partly obscured by a fragmented girdle of wispy clouds.
    Little Helper
was falling free, unable to reduce its velocity and make a direct or orbital rendezvous with Vesta’s little moon and the city of Fei Shen. Behind it,
Easy Does
It
came on inexorably. It would close on
Little Helper
a few hours after both gigs had passed the asteroid.
    Hari wasn’t going to be aboard when that happened.
    He pulled on his pressure suit and passed through the airlock, clambered around the sharp curve of the lifesystem’s sphere, swung into the lifepod and shut its hatch. The crash couch
adjusted around him and his bios synched with the lifepod’s systems. A gentle puff from the lifepod’s attitude jets sent it drifting away from the gig; then, at a distance of two
kilometres, its motor lit up.
    Little Helper
dwindled into the black sky. The lifepod curved inwards, decelerating, falling down Vesta’s gravity well. Hari had been planning to swing
Little Helper
around Vesta in an elliptical orbit that would take it close to the edge of the atmosphere and then back out towards Fei Shen, but the lifepod didn’t have enough reaction mass to complete the
manoeuvre. There was only one place it could reach before Hari’s pursuers caught up with it.
    The lifepod’s motor cut off. He was committed now. He couldn’t risk opening the comms and contacting Fei Shen’s traffic control because his pursuers might piggyback the
transmission and hack into the lifepod’s control system. He had to assume that he was being tracked.
    Vesta flattened into a landscape stamped with craters, raked with grooves and ridges. Hari saw fleets of giant dunes rippling across inter-crater plains. He saw three craters of diminishing size
stacked one on top of the other like a cross-section of
Little Helper
, slanted away from the equator. He saw a circular crater capped with a broken dome two kilometres across. He saw the
sharp fleck of the little moon, the rock on which Fei Shen perched, rise above the horizon, hopelessly beyond reach.
    He made the final adjustments to the lifepod’s trim, and then it hit the outer edge of Vesta’s atmosphere and was enveloped in a shell of shock-heated gas, sullen red brightening to
shocking pinks and oranges. Heat pulsed through the lifepod. Hari sweated inside his pressure suit, crushed into the crash couch by the brutal force of deceleration, shaken by a drilling vibration.
The optical feeds showed only flowing glare. And then there was a long moment of free fall and the burning envelope around the lifepod died back and he saw that it was dropping towards a rumpled
landscape.
    A curved ridge flew past, the rim wall of a crater. Another ridge came up from the horizon. Hari closed his eyes, an ancient hardwired reflex. Crash balloons inflated with a sharp crack. Cased