The Thousand Emperors (2 page)
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.
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
?’
‘Master Marroqui, I’ve spent half my damn life trying to find Winchell Antonov, and there’s no way he’d wind up here without
some
kind of an exit strategy in
place. Right now, my guess is that your missing mosquitoes have something to do with it.’
Marroqui’s expression became incredulous.
Exit strategy?
Luc could almost hear him thinking.
Exit to where?
Snoop hunters hid in Aeschere’s shadow cone, ready to
challenge anything emerging from the moon’s surface, while a fat-bellied intercept platform orbited above Grendel’s dark side, its deep-range scanners sweeping the whole of 55
Cancri’s inner system. And that wasn’t even counting the autonomous units scattered throughout the rest of Grendel’s moons.
And yet the fact remained that Antonov had managed to evade capture or assassination for nearly two centuries. Luc wanted desperately to be the one who finally caught the Tian Di’s
greatest fugitive, but the defeats and setbacks he had suffered over the years had taught him the value of caution.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Marroqui said quietly. ‘Of
course
we can’t hear from all of the ‘skeets; solar storm’s fucking our comms up.’
Which was entirely possible, and yet Luc couldn’t avoid a nagging doubt that lingered in the pit of his stomach. It might have been safer for all concerned to pull back to the intercept
platform and wait the storm out, but Luc felt sure that Antonov, if he
was
still alive, was waiting for just such an opportunity to slip past them. They had to make their move sometime in
the next twenty hours, then escape before the storm reached its peak and lashed Grendel and its moons with fiery whips billions of kilometres in length.
It was Luc’s call, of course, as expeditionary leader. If he was wrong, he’d pay for it with his career.
‘It’s going to be most of a day before the storm reaches its peak,’ said Luc. ‘If we’ve hit him as hard as you say, then we still have time to figure out why
we’re having comms problems before we go any further.’
Marroqui stepped up close enough to Luc that their noses were almost touching. ‘You’re just a bureaucrat,’ he said, his voice soft. ‘No, less than that: a glorified
clerk. I have the safety and the honour of my Clan to consider.
I
say we go ahead and clear this damn place out
now
.’
‘If you go against my orders,’ Luc replied, ‘you’re going to find yourself in a shitstorm of trouble.’
‘Like I give a damn,’ Marroqui snapped, turning back to his soldiers and ordering them to split into separate teams, each to make its way down a different shaft before meeting up
again at the reactor room.
Most of the soldiers voiced their affirmatives and made their way back out of the prayer hall, while a few stayed behind. Luc’s hands tightened into fists by his sides, the frustration
pooling inside him like a hot lava tide.
‘How many of our ‘skeets are primed with explosives?’ Marroqui asked his second-in-command, a pale-skinned woman with a scar on one side of her nose.
‘We’ve used up two, but we still have three left,’ the woman replied.
‘Fine. Once we’ve established line-of-sight with those missing ‘skeets, let’s send those three all the way down to the bottom and have them focus on taking out any
automated defences or hunter-killers Antonov might have left waiting for us.’
Marroqui glanced back at Luc. ‘You’ll wait here, Mr Gabion. Someone has to monitor the uplink with the lander.’
‘Your mosquitoes can monitor things just fine without my help. I’m coming with you and your men.’
Marroqui regarded him with distaste. ‘You’re from Benares, right?’
Luc stared back at him. In that moment, he finally understood the reason for Marroqui’s unrelenting hostility. It had nothing to do with the rivalry between the Sandoz and SecInt; it was
because he came from Benares.
‘I don’t know what they taught you in those combat temples they trained you in, Master Marroqui, but coming from Benares doesn’t make me a traitor.’
‘I never said—’
‘So you can either take me down there with you,’ Luc continued regardless, ‘or take the risk of having to explain to our superiors why you let Antonov escape a
second
time, right on the eve of Reunification. Your choice.’
A muscle in one of Marroqui’s cheeks twitched. For a moment Luc thought the Clan-leader might strike him, but instead the other man nodded curtly, his face impassive.
‘You follow
every
order I give you while we’re down there, instantly, and without question, until the moment the lander comes back to pick us up. Is that clear?’
Luc nodded. ‘As crystal.’
‘Shit. We’ve lost another mosquito,’ said Marroqui’s second in command, waiting by the entrance. ‘No, hang on . . . that’s another three out of contact, all
in just the last minute.’
‘What about the rest of the ‘skeets?’ asked Marroqui.
‘They all check out,’ she replied.
‘We’d better get moving,’ said Marroqui, abruptly businesslike. ‘Anything out of the ordinary’ – and with this, he glanced reflexively towards Luc –
‘report it
immediately
.’
The entire complex turned out to still be pressurized. By the time they reached one of the shafts, mandalas and statues had given way to rough undecorated surfaces barely
visible in the near-lightless gloom. Luc’s IR filters showed an open elevator platform dead ahead, ringed by a steel rail. According to the map, the shaft went straight down for almost a
kilometre. A faint breeze drifted up from below.
‘How come these are working when the power’s out?’ he asked.
‘They run on localized emergency power supplies,’ said Marroqui. ‘They have to, or there’s no way out during a power failure. We shouldn’t have to worry about
getting down or back up.’ He nodded to another woman, with chestnut skin, who had bent down on one knee to examine the interior of a control panel embedded into the wall close by the rail.
‘How’s it looking, Triskia?’
The woman made some final adjustment and snapped the panel shut before standing once more, her suit’s servos whining faintly. ‘It checks out, sir. No sabotage. We’re good to
go.’
Luc tried not to think about the Stygian depths beneath them as he followed Marroqui and four others onto the elevator platform. Even so, his heart nearly skipped a beat when the platform began
its descent with a sudden, jerking motion.
Halfway to the next level down, updates from the mosquitoes flowed in through Luc’s CogNet interface. His maps automatically reconfigured themselves according to their incoming data,
displaying rooms and corridors that had clearly not been part of the original complex.
‘Any idea what Antonov might have been building down there?’ Marroqui asked, referring to the new layout.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Luc replied.
‘Could be weapons caches,’ suggested the woman called Triskia. ‘Maybe he’s still planning on fighting his way past us.’
Marroqui shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. He’d need bigger fabricants than the ones our mosquitoes have seen so far. If he’s still alive, he’s down to light
weapons, nothing more.’
‘Two of the other teams just called in, sir,’ said one of Marroqui’s men. ‘They’ve reconnoitred at the reactor room, so they should be able to get the power going
any—’
As if in answer, rows of lights stretching the length of the shaft blinked into sudden life. Luc squinted, bright phantoms chasing each other across the back of his eyelids. The next time he
managed to open them properly, Marroqui and the rest were grinning and chuckling. As far as they were concerned, this was going to be a cakewalk.
The platform slowed, and Luc felt a tightening in his chest. He had the uncanny sense they had passed beyond some undefined point of no return. He glanced down through the metal grille beneath
his feet, seeing twin rows of lights racing to meet each other in the shaft’s murky depths.
