The Thousand Emperors Read online

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  In brief, then, human history can be split into two parts: the period occurring before the destruction of all life on Earth in the year 2235 C.E., and that following those terrible, final days.

  At the time, a network of wormhole connections or ‘transfer gates’ linked Earth via its moon to its interstellar colonies, though few were aware that secret exploratory missions had uncovered the existence of a second, incomparably vast wormhole network, created by aliens we now call the Founders. Certain Founder artefacts were brought back to Earth with devastating results when one was somehow activated, leading to the sterilization of the Earth within days. If not for the deliberate destruction of the Lunar Gate Array, the same fate might also have been visited upon the colonies. It is this period we now call the Abandonment. The Western Coalition, as it was then known, having recognized that the Earth was doomed, initiated a rapid and successful military takeover of every colony apart from Galileo.

  The decades following the Abandonment were hard, lean times, but barely half a century later starships carrying new, retro-engineered transfer gates were already being sent out to reconnect the colonies one to another. It is in this period that the template for the modern political order was laid down.

  Although the Western Coalition – by this time, simply the Coalition – had seized political and military control of the colonial governments, the general populations of those worlds had been predominantly drawn from member nations of the former Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Coalition–Sphere relations were already deeply antagonistic prior to the Abandonment, and became more so, inevitably flowering into a full-fledged revolt a century after the Coalition’s takeover.

  The uprising proved to be bitter and protracted, but ended with several worlds finally achieving autonomy from Coalition rule. These worlds – Da Vinci (now Benares), Newton (now New Samarkand), Franklin (now Temur), Galileo (now Novaya Zvezda), Yue Shijie, and Acamar – became known collectively as the Tian Di, and were ruled from Temur by a council of revolutionary leaders numbering nearly a thousand. Although far from being a democracy, this Temur Council provided much-needed stability in the post-revolutionary period.

  While the Tian Di and the Coalition co-existed in relative peace over the next several decades, they rapidly diverged both culturally and technologically. The Coalition first renewed and then stepped up its exploration of the Founder Network, despite increasingly alarmed protests from the Temur Council, whose members were afraid of a repeat of the events leading to the Abandonment.

  It is undoubted that the Temur Council lacked for effective leadership in the years immediately preceding what we now call the Schism, and the power vacuum following Salomón Lintz’s forced resignation as the Council’s Chairman offered a clear opportunity for a man as ruthlessly determined as Joseph Cheng. Cheng soon swept to power on the wave of a popular coup, and the promise that he would sever all transfer gates linking to the Coalition to prevent any possible repeat of the Abandonment.

  Cheng soon fulfilled his promise and, within days of becoming Permanent Chairman of the Temur Council, the human race was effectively split in two. Those few members of the Temur Council who had openly opposed Cheng’s rise to power, including, most prominently, myself and Winchell Antonov, were either imprisoned, forced into exile, or executed on trumped-up charges.

  It cannot be denied that the period immediately following the Schism was marked by unprecedented peace throughout the Tian Di. The quality of life for our citizens improved by such leaps and bounds that there was, for a long time, little to no demand throughout the Tian Di for moves towards more democratic representation. The one real exception, of course, was Benares – a world of limited resources, cruelly under-represented within the Council. It was on Benares that Winchell Antonov, having escaped his imprisonment, founded the Black Lotus organization. Antonov is also credited with giving Cheng’s Council the less than flattering sobriquet The Thousand Emperors.

  At the time of writing, the Council continues to enjoy privileges unavailable to the wider population, most notably the instantiation lattices that grant them effective immortality through mind-state backups and cloned bodies. It is becoming harder for them to justify this exclusivity, now that the hardship of the post-Abandonment period and the violence of the Schism are little more than history lessons to the majority of the Tian Di’s citizens. At the same time, calls for greater public participation in the running of the Tian Di are slowly beginning to grow, even on Temur. There are even calls to reunite with the Coalition which, expectations to the contrary, appears from our limited communications with them to have flourished in the intervening two centuries.

  Such calls have long gone unanswered. Cheng has meanwhile begun to retreat more and more from public view, surrounding himself with a circle of trusted advisors known as the Eighty-Five, from whom little is heard bar the occasional official pronouncement.

  To this day, there is much concerning Cheng’s past that is dangerous to speak of publicly. The Council has worked hard to alter the facts of the past to suit its vision of our future, making it at times extraordinarily difficult to separate truth from fiction.

  I write these words with no certainty that they will ever be read. But I am an optimist, even here in my prison, and it remains my hope that I can present to you, the reader – when or wheresoever you might be – some approximation of our true history in the following pages.

  Excerpt from A History of the Tian Di: Volume 1 – From Abandonment to Schism by Javier Maxwell.

  ONE

  ‘Gabion.’

  Luc turned to see Marroqui stabbing a finger at him from across the hold, his face dimly visible within his helmet.

  ‘Close your visor, Goddamn it,’ said Marroqui, his voice flat and dull in the cramped confines of the hold. ‘Depressurization in less than thirty seconds. We’re landing.’

  Luc reached up and snapped his helmet’s visor into place, ignoring the smirking expressions of the armour-suited Sandoz warriors arrayed in crash couches around him. They were crammed in close to each other, bathed in red light.

  An alarm sounded at the same moment that the lander carrying them began to jerk with abrupt and sudden violence. Marroqui had warned him about this, explaining that the lander had been programmed with evasive routines designed to reduce the chances of their being shot down by hidden ordnance. Even so, the breath caught in Luc’s throat, and he pictured the craft slamming into Aeschere’s pockmarked face at a thousand kilometres an hour, scattering their shredded remains far and wide. But the shaking soon subsided, and he finally remembered to exhale, although his hands appeared unwilling to release their death-grip on the armrests of his couch.

  The lander lurched gently, and the alarm stopped as suddenly as it had begun. They were down.

  A ceiling-mounted readout showed the air pressure in the lander dropping to zero. The rumbling sounds of the craft’s internal workings soon faded away, leaving Luc with nothing but the sound of his own half-panicked breath.

  Their harnesses parted all at once, sliding into hidden recesses as one wall of the hold dropped down, becoming a ramp leading onto the moon’s
surface. Thick dust, kicked up by their landing, swirled into the hold as the suited figures surrounding Luc climbed out of their couches, looking like an army of armoured bipedal insects as they moved down the ramp with practised efficiency.

  The hydraulics in Luc’s suit whined faintly as he followed, stepping onto the dusty floor of a crater about thirty kilometres across. He glanced back in time to see the lander leap upwards before its ramp had time to fully snap back into place, quickly receding to a distant dark spot against Grendel’s cloudscape.

  Luc hastened to keep up with the Sandoz warriors hustling towards the wall of the crater just a few hundred metres away. All around him he could see dozens of black hemispheres scattered across the crater floor.

  Several black spheres thudded into the dust not far from him, dropped from orbit by some unmanned Sandoz scout ship. He saw one crack in half like an egg, disgorging a metal-limbed mechant barely larger than his fist. The machine span in a half-circle until it had acquired its target, then rushed ahead of him in a flurry of fast-moving limbs.

  Being this up close and personal with a Sandoz Clan reminded Luc just how little he’d enjoyed the experience on every previous occasion he’d had the privilege. It was like bathing in an ocean of testosterone and barely suppressed rage. He saw the way they looked at him: a mere Archivist, for God’s sake, some kind of jumped-up librarian from one of SecInt’s less glamorous divisions and, worse, a civilian.

  It was a common fallacy. He could have pointed out that rather than being a librarian, he was instead a fully accredited investigative agent, and that rather than being some minor part of SecInt, Archives was in fact that organization’s primary intelligence-gathering resource. But it would just have been one more opportunity for Marroqui to bitch about having him tag along.

  He had to remind himself that the Sandoz Clans looked down on everyone, not just him. Each Clan operated more like a family than anything resembling a traditional military unit, borne as they were out of a strange amalgam of religion, gene-tweaking and asceticism. They all spent their formative years training in the combat temples of Temur’s equatorial jungles, and took advantage of instantiation technology otherwise reserved for members of the Temur Council. That, plus their unwavering and very nearly fanatical devotion to Father Cheng, made them close to unstoppable.

  Luc’s CogNet informed him that sunrise was less than one hundred and eight seconds away. Marroqui was cutting it close.

  He stared ahead towards the crater wall, and the monastery entrance set into it. His eyes automatically moved up to regard the crater’s rim, already incandescent from the approaching dawn. Grendel rose above Aeschere’s horizon to the west, thick bands of methane and hydrogen wrapped around the gas giant’s equator, glowing with the reflected heat of the star it orbited at a distance of just a few million kilometres. The sight of it made his skin crawl.

  Marroqui scripted at him,

  And fuck you too, thought Luc, picking up the pace and racing to catch up with the rest. Grey dust like funeral ashes puffed up with every step.

  It had all started with Luc’s discovery of an insurgent data-cache in a vault on Jannah, an uninhabitable world of perpetual storms in the Yue Shijie system. Finding it had taken months of careful work, requiring the assembly of a team of specialists with experience in Black Lotus cryptanalysis. Before long a horde of Archivists had descended on the vault, and the information contained therein had led Luc finally to Grendel and Beowulf, two Hot Jupiters in the New Samarkand system.

  He remembered running through Archives and almost colliding with Offenbach, the look of confusion on the Senior Archivist’s face changing to one of delight once he realized Antonov had finally been cornered.

  Within days, Father Cheng had ordered Sandoz forces to Grendel and Beowulf. They found Black Lotus weapons fabricants seeded throughout Grendel’s sixteen moons, and machine had fought machine in a terrible war of attrition lasting months. Black Lotus’s own fabricants had been unable, however, to produce defensive mechants in sufficient numbers to stand against a nearly endless stream of Sandoz hunter-seekers.

  Luc was close enough now to the monastery entrance to see that its airlock had been blasted open, debris from the explosion fanning out across the crater floor. A long time ago, the complex on the far side of that airlock had been nothing more than a research installation. Much later, during the turmoil of revolution, it had been a prison, and finally a Lamasery in the peace that followed. The monks had called it Wutái Shan. Following that, it had been abandoned – or so it had been believed, until very recently.

  Marroqui sent over the CogNet. Luc thought he sounded preternaturally calm, given they were seconds away from being burned alive.

  someone else replied.

 

 

  Marroqui replied.

  Luc’s suit carried him through the blasted airlock with long, loping strides, then down a shadow-filled corridor. A few seconds later incandescent light flared behind him as 55 Cancri finally rose over the crater’s lip.

  Luc’s CogNet displayed the passageway in bright false colours, making the mandalas carved into the walls on either side appear lurid and disturbing. As he made his way further along, he saw that the mandalas alternated with blank-eyed statues set into recesses. Behind him, the corridor grew sufficiently bright that his suit’s filters were nearly overwhelmed. The outside temperature had just jumped by several hundred degrees.

  Dead bodies loomed out of the dark, frozen in their final death-spasms, mouths open to the vacuum. Luc saw they had died just short of a pressure-field stretching across the passageway. Its soap-bubble surface trembled as he passed through it and into pressurized atmosphere.

  He found Marroqui and the rest inside a derelict prayer hall. A golden-skinned Buddha sat cross-legged on a plinth at one end, holographic clouds drifting around its feet. A lotus blossom shimmered and unfolded in the statue’s outstretched hand. Dusty prayer wheels still stood in their holders, listless tapestries hanging on the walls. The air appeared to be a standard breathable mix, with no detectable toxins or phages.

  Marroqui was the first to retract his visor, soon followed by the rest. Luc breathed in freezing-cold air underlaid by a hint of sulphur. It wasn’t hard to imagine the hall as it had been, filled with droning chants and the scent of sandalwood. Marroqui addressed his Clan-members in a Slavic dialect far removed from Luc’s native Northam, his CogNet earpiece seamlessly auto-translating everything.

  Luc meanwhile called up a three-dimensional map of the entire complex and saw it was composed of nine levels, each portrayed as a flat grey rectangle connected to the rest by cylindrical shafts of varying length. A pair of shafts located at opposite ends of this top level linked it to the next two down, while a second and third pair of shafts laced the middle and bottom three levels together respectively.

  Luc dismissed the map once Marroqui had finished speaking to his troops. ‘Can the mosquitoes tell us if Antonov is still alive?’ he asked the Clan-leader.

  Marroqui turned to regard him with undisguised irritation. ‘They haven’t given us visual confirmation one way or the other, if that’s what you mean. Are you sure he’s even here?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ Luc said stiffly.

  Marroqui half-turned to look at his fellow Clan-members with a raised eyebrow and an expression of frank disbelief. Luc heard someone snicker.

  ‘Well, what the mosquitoes can tell us is that we hit this
complex a lot harder and faster than either Antonov or any of his Black Lotus fighters were clearly expecting,’ said Marroqui, turning back to face Luc fully. ‘Chances are we stepped over his corpse on the way in here. If you really want to be of help, you should stay behind and see if one of these bodies is his. The rest of us meanwhile can scout out the lower levels, and maybe figure out where those missing mosquitoes went to.’

  Luc felt his face colour. You can stay behind and clear up the litter while we do the real work, was what Marroqui really meant.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out he was desperately unwelcome. His temporary promotion to expedition leader had, he gathered, gone down very badly with Sandoz Command. But without his presence here, SecInt’s role in tracking Antonov down would be reduced to not much more than a footnote.

  And that would never do.

  ‘Isn’t assuming Antonov’s already dead something of a dangerous assumption?’ asked Luc.

  ‘Haven’t you seen how badly the ‘skeets tore this place up?’ Marroqui protested. ‘Look – even if he somehow survived the initial assault, he’s powerless. All his men are dead, and we’ve shattered his defences. Whether he’s alive or not, you need to stay back here, and let us take care of things from here on in.’

  Luc fought to keep his voice steady. ‘You weren’t at Puerto Isabel. I was there, with another Sandoz Clan. We had Antonov cornered, along with several Black Lotus agents. I made the mistake of listening to someone just like you telling me to step back and let them take care of things.’

  Marroqui stared back at him with dagger eyes. ‘And your point is?’

  ‘That he got away,’ said Luc, enunciating the words as if speaking to a recalcitrant child. ‘I’m not going to make that mistake a second time.’

  ‘If I’d been in charge of that raid, there wouldn’t have been any screw-ups.’

  ‘That’s funny, because I’m getting a powerful sense of déjà vu every time you open your mouth,’ Luc spat back.

  ‘You’re not seriously suggesting Antonov could escape?’