The Thousand Emperors fd-2 Read online

  Luc swallowed.

 

  Luc felt his shoulders sag. ‘Pretty much all of it,’ he said out loud.

  She stared at him with frightening intensity. ‘I could have you killed. Tell me, how did you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just . . . picked up everything. It wasn’t anything I did, it just happened.’

  ‘I felt sure of it, from the moment you stepped inside that miserable hovel of Sevgeny’s.’

  ‘You already said your security networks might have been compromised in some way,’ he reminded her. ‘Maybe that’s got something to do with it?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s not it.’

  Luc made an exasperated sound. ‘Look, I have no idea how I could have picked up what you were all scripting to each other. I mean, I realized I wasn’t meant to at the time, but how could I have told any of you? I was too . . .’ Too frightened.

  ‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But only because I’m scanning you on a number of levels right now, all of which tell me you’re not deliberately obfuscating the truth.’

  ‘Okay then, so how could I have picked up everything you were saying?’

  She raised both eyebrows. ‘That’s a question that can’t have anything but an interesting answer. For instance, would you care to tell me exactly who put an instantiation lattice inside your skull?’

  Luc gaped at her dumbly before answering. ‘No one. I don’t have any such thing.’

  She smiled enigmatically. ‘Oh, but you do, Mr Gabion. Look.’

  Images of the interior of a skull – his skull, he guessed – blossomed in the air around them. One showed a lump of pinkish-grey flesh encased in fine silvery lines, while another depicted a messy tangle of pulsing blue light rendered in three dimensions, overlaid with a secondary, more orderly grid of red.

  ‘That,’ said Zelia, ‘is what an instantiation lattice looks like, in the very early stages of settling into its owner’s cortex – your cortex, to be precise. I had my house AI remotely analyse the inside of your head as soon as I realized what you had in there. But there are differences between this and any other kind of lattice I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Differences?’

  ‘What you’ve got in there, unless my AIs are sorely mistaken, is more advanced than anything used even by the members of the Council, including myself. It has . . . functions I can’t begin to decipher.’ She took a deep breath and shook her head, her eyes bright and feral. ‘The question, then, is how the hell did it get inside your head?’

  Antonov.

  Luc’s blood ran cold and he knew, in that instant, that everything he remembered from Aeschere was real, and not a hallucination. Antonov had done something to him: booby-trapped him in some way, placed a ticking bomb inside his head for reasons he hadn’t bothered to explain beyond a few cryptic statements.

  He shuddered to think of what might have happened to him if he’d fallen into the hands of Victor Begum or Karlmann Sandoz following his seizure in the library or – even worse – Cripps. He might well have disappeared into some Sandoz stronghold, never to be seen again.

  Not that he was necessarily any safer in de Almeida’s hands, he reminded himself. Unlike Cripps or Karlmann Sandoz, she was still an unknown quantity.

  ‘I swear to you, I have no idea,’ Luc replied, almost begging.

  Zelia glanced towards the projections as he spoke, her lips twisting into a thin line. ‘Now you are lying, Mr Gabion: it’s all there in the flow of blood in your capillaries, and the unconscious reactions of your autonomic nervous system.’ She studied him with angry eyes. ‘If you lie to me again, I’ll know straight away. Think you can get that through your head?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied carefully.

  ‘Good.’ Her shoulders relaxed a little. ‘Now tell me how this came about.’

  ‘Antonov implanted it inside me. We were on Aeschere hunting for him, when our mosquitoes turned on us, killing all of—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped, interrupting him. ‘I’m already familiar with everything that took place on Aeschere.’

  ‘Not everything that happened is in the official report.’

  She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  Luc took a deep breath. ‘When I told Director Lethe of SecInt what really happened, he warned me he was going to leave some of the details out of the official report.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was worried that what I told him might give an investigative committee reason to call my sanity into question, especially since I couldn’t prove much of what I said happened down there.’

  She folded her arms. ‘Then I take it back. Start from the beginning, and tell me what really happened.’

  He told her everything that had taken place after he had found his way to the lowest level of the Aeschere complex, leaving nothing out.

  ‘And when you encountered Antonov on the ship, he was still alive?’

  Luc nodded. ‘He managed to take me by surprise and knocked me out. When I came to, he was in the process of putting some kind of mechant inside me.’ He shuddered at the memory. ‘It was tiny, like a metal worm. It crawled in through my nose and dug its way through my skull.’

  She arched an eyebrow. ‘Delightful.’

  ‘So what happens after I finish telling you all this?’ asked Luc miserably. ‘Are you going to hand me over to the Sandoz for more questioning?’

  ‘Let’s just keep all this between the two of us for now.’ She paused, looking thoughtful. ‘What happened next?’

  Luc remembered terrible pain. ‘As soon as he was done, Antonov put me back under. The next time I came to, he was dead. I did what I had to do in order to get out of the complex and save my own life.’

  ‘And then they brought you to Temur, where they found no trace of your instantiation lattice?’

  Luc nodded.

  Zelia regarded him speculatively, then made a gesture. In response, the floating images around them blurred and shifted, and were replaced by new ones, this time of Luc’s body in the hospital’s regeneration tank shortly after his return from Aeschere. He winced at the sight of his seared and ruined flesh.

  She glanced back to him with an expression that almost bordered on sympathy. ‘They had to do a lot of work on you, didn’t they?’

  ‘When I had that first seizure, they ran scans on me to see if there were any abnormalities in my skull. But they found nothing. The medicians told me everything looked like it should.’

  ‘I’d agree with you that the worm-like mechant you described must be the means by which Antonov got the lattice inside your head. But if that’s the case, it doesn’t answer the question of why it showed up on my machines, but not those at the hospital . . .’

  Her voice trailed off, and she leaned back against a table, drumming her fingers against its edge. ‘Instantiation lattices are just about the single most advanced form of technology in the whole of the Tian Di, apart from the transfer gates. Theoretically, a sophisticated enough lattice could fool certain analytical devices into thinking it wasn’t there. I can’t think of anything else that could possibly make sense. But it also begs the question – why would Antonov want to place such a sophisticated piece of technology inside your head?’

  She looked at him as if he might be able to give her an answer.

  ‘If I could tell you the reason,’ he said, ‘I would.’

  She nodded to the images floating around them. ‘Whatever Antonov had in mind for you, it wasn’t for your benefit. You’ve already had two serious seizures in a row, and I’d be an idiot not to think that lattice of yours is the reason why. Is there anything else you should be telling me?’

&nb
sp; Luc told her about his strange dream-encounter with Antonov.

  ‘But you’re saying it wasn’t a dream?’ asked Zelia, once he’d finished.

  ‘I don’t know what it was, but he told me that if I survived, I had to open a specific record in Archives and make a small alteration to it.’

  De Almeida nodded, her face neutral. ‘Go on.’

  Luc shrugged. ‘He told me I had to add in a line about calling in a favour, then save and close the file.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Luc nodded. ‘I wanted to see if it was real. If it didn’t exist, then that would have proved the whole damn thing really was just some terrible nightmare.’

  ‘What was the file’s reference?’

  ‘Thorne, 51 Alpha, Code Yellow.’

  She breathed out through her nose, her mouth making a chewing motion. ‘Tell me what you found in the file.’

  ‘It described an incident on Thorne more than a century ago – some kind of illegal biotech research that brought about a number of deaths.’ He glanced at her. ‘You were the Director in charge of Thorne at the time.’

  ‘You’ve been looking into me?’

  ‘Not as such, but your name was attached to the file.’

  ‘I remember that investigation all too well,’ she said. ‘Tell me, Mr Gabion, have you discussed the details of this file or how you altered it with anyone else?’

  ‘Hell, no.’ He laughed nervously, wondering if she had any idea how terrified he really was. Almost certainly, he decided. His palms were clammy with sweat, his heart thudding in his chest. ‘If I’d told anyone what I just told you, they’d have locked me up and thrown away the key.’

  Zelia nodded and stepped around to the other side of the slab, looking thoughtful. She reached up to brush a strand of hair back from her face. As she did so, Luc noticed her hand was shaking very slightly.

  He glanced towards the sunlit door, beyond which lay the greenhouse. ‘If the others found out what I’ve just told you,’ he asked her, ‘what would happen to me?’

  ‘To you? To be brutally frank, Mr Gabion, dissection would be the first obvious step. Molecular tools would be used to tease your lattice apart, atom by atom, and highly invasive scanning routines would be used to try and decrypt whatever data or auto-suggestive routines Antonov might have implanted inside you. Assuming, that is, he hadn’t also booby-trapped the lattice to kill you the instant anyone tried to fool with it in any significant way.’ She shrugged. ‘To put it even more bluntly, Mr Gabion, I would not expect you to live for very long.’

  Luc got halfway to the greenhouse entrance, his shoes slapping loudly against the tiles underfoot.

  Something flashed past him in a blur, and the next thing he knew he was looking up at the outline of a mechant, hovering directly between him and the painted ceiling.

  Zelia stepped over, gazing down at him with an expression of contempt.

  ‘Promise me,’ she said, ‘that you won’t waste any more of my time with stupid stunts like that.’

  ‘You just told me I’m going to have my brain picked apart,’ Luc groaned. ‘What the fuck would you do?’

  ‘I already told you nothing would happen to you so long as nobody else found out you were in possession of a lattice.’ She gestured towards the mechant, and it drifted back out of the way. ‘I keep my word, Mr Gabion.’

  ‘You’re serious?’ He pushed himself up into a sitting position on unsteady hands, staring up at her with desperate hope. ‘You’re not going to hand me over to them?’

  ‘I want to know just what Antonov was up to when he gave you that lattice. If I shared what you’ve told me with Father Cheng or anyone else in the Council, the first thing they would do is take the matter out of my hands. However, I have very good reasons for not wanting that to happen.’

  He decided not to ask her what those reasons might be. There was something unsettling about her eyes, about her whole demeanour, the way she carried herself as much as the way she looked at him, as if he were an object rather than a human being.

  ‘So what happens now?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing for the moment, Mr Gabion,’ she said, her eyes bright, ‘except that you’ll finish the job I brought you to Vanaheim to carry out. And if you ever – ever – think of telling anyone about our conversation here, believe me when I say there would be consequences.’

  ‘You’re not exactly giving me much choice.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ She reached out a hand and he took it, standing up. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

  ‘Now that we’re clear on our relationship,’ she said, ‘I want to know if there’s anything else you want to tell me. Any other apparent hallucinations or memories you think might be pertinent.’

  ‘Nothing that really made any sense to me,’ he admitted.

  The mechant drifted closer to him, instruments unfolding from its belly.

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ said Zelia, her eyes slitted like a hungry cat.

  Luc stared at the mechant and licked his lips. ‘Okay. I had this dream a couple of times where I found myself looking into a mirror – or what I thought was a mirror, at first, but turned out to be a mask someone wore over their face. Except instead of seeing my own reflection in the mirror, I saw Antonov’s.’

  De Almeida stared at him intently. ‘You’re certain of this?’

  Luc shook his head helplessly. ‘How can I be certain about anything? It was just some crazy nightmare. But it felt . . .’

  ‘What?’ she demanded.

  ‘Real. It felt real.’

  ‘I think Antonov planted some of his own memories in your head,’ she told him. ‘I’m going to be honest with you. Once a lattice is in, it’s in for good, and the means by which Antonov placed it inside you strike me as extremely crude compared to how it’s usually carried out. The whole process has to be carefully monitored under laboratory conditions from beginning to end, and it can take weeks, even months, for a lattice to properly meld with the surrounding tissues. But what he did to you will almost certainly kill you, probably within weeks, sooner if left unattended.’

  Luc nodded dumbly. ‘Isn’t there some way to, I don’t know, reverse the process? And if I’ve got an instantiation lattice in my head, doesn’t that mean you’d be able to create a backup of my mind?’

  ‘A backup couldn’t be made at this early a stage of your lattice’s growth, no. It simply wouldn’t work. And a mature lattice is precisely what will kill you. But in return for your aid in finding Sevgeny’s killer, I’ll do my best to reverse any damage brought about by your lattice until I can figure out some other, more long-term solution. The whole affair will remain our secret, yours and mine alone.’

  She stepped a little closer to him. ‘But while you’re searching for Vasili’s killer, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can hold anything back from me. Not anything – is that clear?’

  ‘That’s clear,’ he said. ‘But if I’m going to do what you want me to, I need to be able to speak candidly with you, and without fear of repercussion.’

  ‘Why? Was there something you had on your mind?’

  ‘I need your reassurance first.’

  She sighed and waved a hand. ‘Fine. Go on.’

  ‘It doesn’t take any great skill to work out that some of your fellow Councillors think you’re guilty as hell when it comes to Vasili’s murder. Based on what I heard back in that library of Vasili’s, you’re one of the few people around with the necessary access to Vanaheim’s security systems and the expertise to be able to carry it off.’

  ‘I can give you my personal reassurance that I did not kill Sevgeny. For one, I have no possible motive – as I believe I already pointed out to Ruy Borges.’

  That remains to be seen, thought Luc. ‘Nobody got round to telling me what would be a good motive. Why would someone want to kill Sevgeny Vasili?’

  ‘A desire to hinder Reunification,’ she said immediately.

  ‘There are people in the Council who would go that f
ar?’

  Her face coloured slightly. ‘The fact of Sevgeny’s murder suggests that some might. Sevgeny was the architect of Reunification with the Coalition worlds, but most of his fellow Eighty-Fivers stood against it. Cheng put him in charge of the process of negotiation once he and the Eighty-Five were forced to concede to Reunification, under pressure from the general members of the Council.’

  ‘Could that be why one of them might have murdered him? Because they were against Reunification?’

  She sighed. ‘It can’t be ruled out.’

  ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘How do you feel about Reunification?’

  She glared at him. ‘What does my opinion of it matter?’

  ‘I just want to get a sense of where everyone stands,’ he said.

  Her answer was hesitant, and reminded Luc vividly of just how very, very old people like Zelia de Almeida really were, appearances to the contrary. ‘Back in the days before the Schism, I thought completely severing contact with the Coalition was a mistake. It wasn’t like they were taking chances with any of the advanced technology they found in the Founder Network, so there was no risk of another Abandonment. Instead they were taking a slow and cautious approach, studying everything they discovered in situ and only allowing it back through the transfer gates to their own worlds once they were absolutely sure they properly understood what they had.’

  ‘But people had reason to be scared, didn’t they? The human race came very close to extinction because of the things we’d discovered in the Founder Network.’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘But I think reunifying with the Coalition is a good thing, even necessary.’

  ‘Why?’

  She stared off into the distance before answering. ‘It’s my belief that without Reunification, the Tian Di is in serious danger of becoming stagnant. Perhaps dangerously so.’

  Luc nodded, thinking. ‘Can you think of any other motives Vasili’s killer might have had apart from a desire to stop or slow down Reunification?’

  She smiled humourlessly. ‘That’s for you to figure out, Mr Gabion, isn’t it?’ She stepped away from him, her manner suddenly brisk as she made towards the raised slab he had earlier found himself on.