The Thousand Emperors fd-2 Read online

  ‘But the scans must have found something,’ Luc demanded, turning his attention back to the mechant.

  ‘Nothing of note was found,’ the machine replied, its voice soft and neutral.

  He turned back to Eleanor. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not possible.’

  She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Luc . . . what else should there be?’

  ‘Antonov put something inside my skull,’ he replied, then halted in amazement. The last time he’d tried to say those same exact words, he had been subjected to more pain than he thought was possible. It didn’t make sense.

  He told her everything he remembered about his encounter with Antonov, leaving nothing out this time, and she listened with one hand over her mouth. It felt like cauterizing a wound. Once he’d finished, she called the mechant back over and asked it more questions of her own.

  In response, it displayed projections of the interior of his skull. Beyond some minor lesions that might have triggered a grand mal fit, nothing untoward or unexpected had been found.

  Luc listened in grim silence, and began to wonder if perhaps he really had imagined the whole thing.

  ‘If you think I’m crazy,’ he said after she had sent the mechant away, ‘try and keep it to yourself, will you?’

  She regarded him with something like pity. ‘You mean, no crazier than you were before?’

  He sighed. ‘What happened to Lethe?’

  ‘I told him I’d stay with you and let him know once you came to.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  He shrugged. ‘For scaring you like that.’

  She nodded, reaching out to brush her fingers across the new fuzz of hair growing on his scalp. ‘You scared us both pretty badly.’

  He squinted at her. ‘But do you believe me?’

  She hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ she said truthfully. ‘You saw those scans. Do you believe what happened was real?’

  ‘I don’t know any more. Still . . . I’m glad you came.’

  ‘Why? You thought I wouldn’t?’

  He laughed softly. ‘After that argument we had?’

  ‘Luc, it wasn’t because my feelings for you had changed. You know that. But you were taking unnecessary risks, walking into a Black Lotus stronghold.’

  ‘Yeah, but in the company of an entire squadron of—’

  ‘Stop.’ She pulled her hand back. ‘I saw you, when they brought you back from Grendel. I couldn’t even recognize you.’ A brittle edge crept into her voice. ‘Sandoz warriors can be re-instantiated, but you can’t, Luc. There’s only ever going to be one of you. That’s why I didn’t want you to go.’

  But I didn’t have a choice, he remembered saying to her just a few days before, and that was all it had taken for things between them to start unravelling.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ said Eleanor, breaking what had become an awkward silence, ‘Lethe thinks he might have to discount your evidence concerning what happened on Aeschere. He’s not sure an investigation would accept your story about a transfer gate without solid proof.’

  ‘Then what am I supposed to tell people?’ he asked. ‘Maybe I can’t prove it, El, but you’ve got to believe me when I tell you that the transfer gate was real. All of it was real.’

  She sighed and sank down onto the edge of the bed, spreading her long fingers on the blankets. ‘Let’s say it’s all real, then. Remember what Lethe asked you – why didn’t Antonov just kill you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Luc replied truthfully, then remembered what Antonov had said: Access Archives, then open a record with the following reference – Thorne, 51 Alpha, Code Yellow. ‘I’m calling in my favour.’

  It occurred to him that there was a way to prove his story was true. But if he really had imagined it all . . .

  ‘There must have been some reason,’ she insisted.

  ‘If I could give you an answer that made any sense, I would.’

  If that record really did exist, he’d find it in his own time. He decided not to say anything until he was sure one way or the other.

  Eleanor shook her head and stood. ‘I need to go. Lethe says the Temur Council are snapping at Karlmann Sandoz’s heels, wanting to know how things could have gone so badly wrong. As you can imagine, Lethe’s pretty happy about that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Aeschere was a fucking disaster for the Sandoz. And that’s good for SecInt.’

  ‘Technically, I was in charge of that expedition,’ Luc reminded her. ‘They could blame me too.’

  She shook her head. ‘The comms records they managed to retrieve show that Master Marroqui went out of his way to countermand your orders every step of the way. He kept pushing to go deeper into the complex when you said it might be safer to pull back until you knew what had happened to those mosquitoes.’

  ‘So I guess we’re in the clear.’

  Eleanor regarded him with pity. ‘I don’t understand you. Lethe only put you in nominal charge of that expedition so the Sandoz wouldn’t grab all the glory. He didn’t care about the danger he was putting you in. And yet you jumped at the chance like a puppy that doesn’t know it’s about to be drowned.’

  Luc bristled. ‘I knew the risks going in. It was still something I had to do.’

  If you aren’t there, Lethe had said, no one’s going to remember all the work you did finding Antonov.

  ‘And that’s why I said what I said to you before. You don’t even care when you’re being used.’

  ‘I was using Lethe just as much as he was using me.’

  ‘Did nothing I say get through to you?’ she shot back. ‘You’re filled with survivor guilt. You wanted to get killed on that damn mission, just so you could feel better about not dying along with the rest of your family.’

  He stared at her, shocked at what she had said. She reached up to pat the bun at the back of her head as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with her hands, her expression flustered and her chest rising and falling from barely suppressed emotion.

  ‘I’m going to retire,’ he said abruptly.

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘From active service, at least,’ he continued. ‘I’m serious. With Antonov gone, there’s no reason not to let other people deal with whatever’s left of Black Lotus.’

  ‘You never said anything about this before.’

  ‘Because I didn’t know just what was going to happen on Aeschere. I couldn’t discount the possibility I was wrong, that Antonov wouldn’t be there.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘But he was.’

  ‘Then . . . you’re serious? No more risking your neck?’

  ‘I’ll stay on in Archives, but if I do any more field-work, I’ll stick to the kind of low-risk background investigations you and me used to do. But nothing like Aeschere,’ he added, shaking his head. ‘That was more than enough for this lifetime.’

  Eleanor looked almost dizzy with relief. ‘I can hardly believe you’re saying this. You were always so’ – she searched for the right word – ‘driven.’

  Monomaniacal, he remembered her screaming at him once. Obsessed. He couldn’t really deny the charge.

  ‘All I’m saying,’ he said, reaching out for her hand, ‘is that things are going to be different from now on.’

  He half expected her to pull away from him, but instead she laced her fingers through his. Luc felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest.

  ‘There was another reason Lethe came here,’ she said. ‘You’ve been invited to the White Palace for a ceremony.’

  ‘Ceremony?’

  ‘They want to make you a Master of Archives, Luc.’

  He blinked at her in confusion and surprise. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Director Lethe thought you might like to hear it coming from me. Assuming you’ll actually accept a promotion this time.’

  Well, I’ll be damned, thought Luc. ‘The last time they tried to give me a promotion was different. They wanted to boot me up to the Security Divisio
n.’

  ‘But this time,’ she said, her mouth softening into a smile, ’you get to stay where you want to be.’

  It took time for Luc to learn how to control his freshly grafted muscles, but progress was fast. Further treatments sped up the reconnection of nervous tissues, and simple tasks that at first represented an enormous struggle rapidly became smooth and natural. Even the food Luc ate tasted different. After just a couple of days his skin had lost much of its patchwork appearance, and the next time he looked in a mirror, he saw someone who appeared to have suffered nothing more than mild sunburn. He touched his new face, marvelling at the wonder of it all.

  On the day his treatments came to an end, he made his way along a series of narrow paths that sliced through a small courtyard at the centre of the hospital grounds. The courtyard was filled with small patches of greenery interspersed with koi ponds, their waters glittering under a noon sun. At first a mechant trailed after him, but he shooed it away.

  He sat on a concrete bench and took a small case from out of a jacket pocket, opening it and extracting a new Archives CogNet earpiece. He fitted it carefully to the lobe of one ear. During his therapy, he’d been forced to rely on a general-purpose piece rather than the secure model normally used by Archives staff.

  He activated it, immediately sensing the pulse of humanity in the streets beyond the hospital’s perimeter, and soon found himself deluged with data-ghosted messages from colleagues and well-wishers in Archives, including Offenbach and Hetaera. There were so many that their animated images jostled for space around him, some appearing to hover above the nearby koi ponds. He listened to a few before dismissing them all. He’d have plenty of opportunity to go through them all later.

  And besides, what he had in mind might be better done without witnesses.

  Linking into Archives for the first time since his return from Aeschere, he ran a search for any files with the reference Thorne, 51 Alpha, Code Yellow – and stared numbly at the fish circling in the pond before him when the search returned an immediate hit.

  It was real.

  The file in question contained a report detailing an incident on Thorne more than 125 years before. Out of all the worlds of the Tian Di, Thorne was both the least hospitable and the most recently colonized, a scrap of rock with a few bare lichens to its name orbiting on the outer edge of a red dwarf star’s habitable zone. It was a far from suitable candidate for terraforming, but a penal colony had been set up there following the Schism, and later a series of biological research stations had also been established there. That community of scientists, along with those unlucky enough to be sent there to live out their sentences, huddled in shielded biomes or in deep sheltered caves.

  The report detailed the accidental deaths of hundreds of prisoners following a containment breach in a biotech station, but any more specific details had been flagged as restricted. The only name he even vaguely recognized amongst those attached to the incident was that of Zelia de Almeida – a minor member of the Temur Council who had, at the time, been Thorne’s Director of Policy.

  The report also mentioned that de Almeida had been removed from her post following the incident, while an investigation blamed the whole incident on criminal negligence. There was nothing to connect any of it with Winchell Antonov; nothing to explain why he had asked Luc – in a dream, of all things – to come looking for this particular file.

  Or maybe he’d come across the file in the past and forgotten about it, until he had incorporated it into a trauma-induced fantasy about secret transfer gates.

  He stared hard at the report, visible only to him where it hovered in the air. You have a choice, he told himself. You can either decide the dream was just that, or you can act like it meant something real.

  Luc stared past the report and at the upwards-thrusting skyline of Ulugh Beg, feeling as if he were balanced on the edge of a precipice. He had requested, and been granted, further scans, but there was nothing inside his skull that shouldn’t have been there. If there ever had been, it was long gone.

  He reached out, meaning to dismiss the record. Instead he opened it for editing, adding in five words: I’m calling in my favour.

  He saved and dismissed it, feeling like a fool. With any luck, he’d never have to think about it ever again.

  Luc found himself back home within another few days, staring around his apartment like he’d never seen it before. It might as well have been a million years since he’d last stood upon its threshold.

  He ordered the blinds to open. They parted to reveal the city spread out before him, the fat spindle of the White Palace dominating the evening skies where it floated above Chandrakant Lu Park. The Palace itself was constructed from a series of stacked tiers, with a number of biomes arranged around its upper surface, each filled with the native flora and fauna of any one of a dozen worlds. The whole thing hovered above the park on enormous AG pods. Few people outside of the Temur Council were granted the opportunity to visit the White Palace, and fewer still got to pass through the private transfer gates in its upper levels that led to Vanaheim, an entire world reserved for the sole use of the Council.

  Further out from Chandrakant Lu, bridges like spun diamond straddled Pioneer Gorge and the small, cramped buildings from the original, pre-terraforming settlement that had once been located there. People came from all corners of the Tian Di just to see a view like this.

  Even though Reunification was still a few weeks away, holographic images of dragons and other mythical beasts were already being projected into the void of air surrounding the White Palace, along with images of the orbiting Coalition contact-ship that carried aboard it a transfer gate linking back to the Coalition world of Darwin. The park beneath was already a hive of activity as final preparations for the gate’s ceremonial opening were carried out.

  The world had changed while he’d been looking the other way. Antonov was dead, and two centuries of enforced isolationism were coming to an end with the official sanctioning of this single, tentative but nonetheless permanent wormhole link with the Coalition.

  Of all the times he wanted Eleanor with him, this was it. But this close to Reunification, everyone in SecInt was working overtime, including her. So Luc had his apartment form a chair facing towards the Palace, and collapsed into it, staring out into the early evening sky and wondering if the rest of his life was going to feel as much of an anti-climax as he was beginning to suspect it might.

  Stop being so morose, he chided himself, and asked the house mechant to bring him a glass of warm kavamilch, sipping at it until he drifted off into an exhausted sleep.

  He came awake sometime in the early morning, and realized he wasn’t alone.

  ‘You look surprisingly well for a man who’s been burned alive,’ said a voice from behind him.

  The house had dimmed the lights some time after he had fallen asleep. He brought them back up, twisting round in his seat to see a man with short-cropped hair standing facing him in the middle of the room, his face maddeningly familiar.

  Luc stared at him. ‘Who . . .’

  ‘I’m disappointed,’ said the man. ‘You don’t recognize me. Bailey Cripps.’

  ‘Bailey . . .’

  ‘I’m here on behalf of the Eighty-Five, Mr Gabion.’

  The Eighty-Five. Father Cheng’s inner circle within the Temur Council, all of whom had been by his side since the days of the Schism.

  Luc squinted. He could just about see the hair-thin line of rainbow interference surrounding Cripps like a halo that indicated he was talking to a data-ghost – nothing more than a projection, but an unauthorized intrusion for all that. Anger began to overwhelm his initial feelings of shock.

  Luc stood, flustered, and turned to face him. ‘Of course I recognize you. You chair the Council’s Defence Subcommittee. But I have a right to privacy, even from—’

  ‘Sit back down,’ Cripps ordered him. ‘I’m here to ask you some questions, Mr Gabion. Necessary questions.’

  Luc held h
is ground and remained upright. ‘If you wanted to talk to me, you could have just arranged an interview through SecInt.’

  ‘That isn’t possible,’ Cripps replied. ‘This meeting has to be strictly off the record.’

  ‘Why?’

  Cripps’ eyes narrowed. ‘I think you’re forgetting your place, Archivist. I came here to ask you questions, not the other way around.’

  ‘How do I know you really are who you say you are? I could be speaking to anyone behind that data-ghost.’

  Cripps nodded as if satisfied. ‘An excellent point. Feel free to check.’

  Luc asked his house to trace the source of the projection, and soon learned that it originated from somewhere deep inside the White Palace itself. Further, the signal had been processed via a channel used exclusively by high-ranking members of the Council’s vast bureaucracy.

  The chair reformed around Luc as he sat back down, facing Cripps. ‘Okay. You check out. So what exactly is it that’s so damned important you’d come into my house uninvited?’

  ‘I want you to tell me,’ said Cripps, ‘whether you think the Thousand Emperors should be in power.’

  Luc felt his face grow red. ‘You mean the Temur Council, don’t you?’

  Cripps raised an eyebrow. ‘Does the name bother you?’

  ‘It’s a highly pejorative term, used in Black Lotus propaganda.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered the question,’ Cripps replied, his eyes hard. ‘There are people, and not just Black Lotus supporters, who claim the Council has been running affairs throughout the Tian Di for much too long. Is that a view you agree with?’

  Luc felt his stomach curl into a tight knot. ‘Have there been questions over my loyalty, Mr Cripps?’

  ‘You come from Benares, I understand.’ The way he said it, it sounded more like an accusation than a polite enquiry.

  ‘I think,’ Luc replied, struggling for calm, ‘that what I did on Aeschere proves where my loyalties lie.’

  Cripps gave him a humourless smile. ‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ he said. ‘That whole mess left more than a dozen Sandoz dead, their supposedly secure network compromised. Then there’s you, the sole survivor, with your miraculous escape and no clear explanation for just what happened to you while you were down in that complex. Given your background, it’s inevitable that people are going to start wondering if perhaps you were in league with Antonov in some way.’