The Thousand Emperors (39 page)

She stared at him, her eyes becoming round. ‘But you
must
have known,’ she said. ‘You have his memories. You must . . .’ her voice trailed off.

He remembered he had dreamt of making love to her, that night she had data-ghosted into his home. Everything about it had felt real, far more like an actual memory than a mere dream, and now the
reason was obvious: it
was
a memory - but Antonov’s, rather than his own.

‘I think maybe I suspected,’ he said.

‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, close enough to him in the cramped quarters that he could smell her skin. ‘A very long time ago, even before he met Ariadna. But we . . .
saw things differently. There were things we left unsaid, things I wanted to say to him but never could.’

‘I had no idea.’

She drew back slightly, peering at him with curiosity. ‘How much is there left of him inside you, would you say?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe just a little.’

‘But I saw the way you looked just now, when I told you we had once been lovers. You looked like you remembered something.’

‘I did,’ he admitted. ‘Just not my
own
memories.’

‘And he still . . . speaks to you?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘But does he hear things?’ she asked haltingly. ‘Does he understand what’s going on around you – around him?’

Luc thought about it. ‘I think he does, yeah.’

Just for a second the mask slipped, and Luc saw a part of de Almeida he never had before, vulnerable and soft and yielding. Despite his fear of her, the sight and smell of her commingled with
Antonov’s own memories until they were very nearly impossible to distinguish.

Some instinct made him reach out to her. He half-expected her to react with anger, but instead she responded with unexpected hunger. Their mouths mashed together, Luc’s hands curling
around the back of her neck to grip her by the hair, pulling her close enough that he could feel her heartbeat thrumming through her chest.

She stood, first pulling off her jacket, and then her thin blouse, revealing small, high breasts, before sliding into the narrow alcove containing the mattress. He followed, sliding one hand
under her back, but then she locked her ankles around his waist and flipped him around in the zero gravity until she was straddling him.

He reached up to cup her breasts with his hands, eliciting a soft moan from her, while she reached down to his waist, tugging at his belt.

Soon he was struggling out of his clothes with some difficulty, unsurprising given the exceedingly cramped nature of the alcove. Zelia lifted herself up and out of the way, taking the
opportunity to wriggle out of the rest of her clothes before again straddling him, her breath coming in small, nervous gasps.

Luc could feel his erection pulsing against her belly. Taking hold of her hips, he lifted her slightly, as she reached down between her legs and manoeuvred him inside her.

He started to move. Zelia gripped him hard with her knees, grinding herself against him, the fingernails of one hand digging into his chest while she kept the other pressed flat against the
ceiling of the alcove. Luc held off as long as he could, holding her tight with both hands, her gasps becoming shorter and higher-pitched.

Somewhere in the back of his thoughts, he could hear Antonov laughing.

‘Now,’ she gasped, her voice ragged. ‘Please.’

He looked up at her naked form with fascination. Her skin glistened with perspiration, while her long dark hair had come undone from the loose knot she’d had it in behind her head. It
floated around her face like something alive. Her back arched in tangent with his own, increasingly urgent movements until, finally, he came.

‘Wait,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t move.’

Holding still, he watched as she rocked her hips back and forth with a gentle, barely detectable motion. Then her mouth opened wide and she let out a tiny, bird-like cry before pulling herself
down and forward, letting her head rest against his chest. He felt himself slide back out of her.

They lay there together for what felt like a long time. Almost without realizing, Luc pictured Eleanor as she had been in Maxwell’s prison, side by side with Bailey Cripps, but found he
felt nothing whatsoever.

‘The question,’ he finally managed to say after an indeterminate amount of time had passed, ‘is whether you were fucking me, or him.’

He felt her fingernails stroke against one shoulder as she brought her head back up to regard him. ‘Both, I think,’ she said with a faint smile.

‘You said that there were things you’d wanted to say to him, but never did.’

She was silent for a minute before answering. ‘I wanted to tell him that I’m sorry.’

He twisted his head up slightly to look down at her. ‘Sorry for what?’

‘Betraying him,’ she said quietly, then dropped her head back down against his chest.

Luc frowned. ‘Zelia . . . what exactly happened between you two?’

He felt her move into a slightly different position. ‘Does it matter? We saw things differently, and I was stupid and foolish and inexperienced enough to let that matter to me more than it
should have. And you know what the worst thing was?’

‘What?’

‘He forgave me.’

He felt her tears dampen his chest.

‘But you still wanted to tell him you were sorry.’

‘Once I realized what he’d done to you, I knew there’d never be another chance.’

For the next few minutes, Luc was content to remain where he was.

‘When I was in Maxwell’s prison,’ he said at last, ‘he showed me things that made me re-evaluate what I thought I knew about Antonov. But what I saw when I opened the
data-cache here on this station made me realize my whole life isn’t worth a damn unless I do everything I can to finish what Antonov started.’

She sat up and regarded him with eyes wide. ‘Did you even
hear
what you just said?’

‘Everything’s different now, Zelia.’

‘Different how?’

’Because of what I learned from that data-cache.’

‘So you
did
get something from it.’

‘Father Cheng,’ said Luc, ‘is planning to destroy Benares.’

She blinked as if she hadn’t quite heard him right. ‘What?’

‘I saw it all, through his own eyes.’ He let out a small, soft laugh at the thought of just how much of his life had been wasted chasing the wrong people. ‘Do you know Cheng
sent agents all the way to Coalition space, on ships that took decades to get there? He wanted them to find some artefact the Coalition had recovered from the Founder Network, so he could use it to
wipe out every living thing on Benares.’

Zelia stared at him. ‘But . . . why Benares? What possible benefit is there to doing any such thing?’

‘Apart from it being a hotbed of anti-Council sentiment? Once he’s dealt with Benares, he’s going to blame Black Lotus for its destruction. He’ll say the Coalition
supplied them with advanced weapons technology, but they screwed up, destroying Benares by accident instead of Temur.’

Her expression now shifted from indignant disbelief to outright horror. ‘Please tell me you’re lying,’ she said.

‘After that,’ said Luc, ‘he’ll close down the Darwin gate forever, declare martial law throughout the Tian Di, and use the Sandoz to assume total power prior to
dissolving the Council. And then there won’t be a Thousand Emperors of the Tian Di – just one.’

Zelia stared past him as she worked through the implications. ‘He’s trying to turn the clock back, to the days of the Schism.’

‘That’s not even all of it,’ Luc continued. ‘Cheng’s been playing a very,
very
long-term strategy ever since the idea of Reunification was first mooted. Once
he realized he had no choice but to go along with it, he started laying the groundwork for a plan that wouldn’t just wipe out Benares, but would have the whole of the Tian Di
begging
him to stay in power.’

‘What else did you find?’

‘More than you ever wanted to know.’ No wonder Vasili had been so frightened. ‘Back at that funeral service, Ruy Borges came up to you, and mentioned a rumour about Cheng being
in negotiations with the Coalition. Remember?’

Zelia nodded. ‘Well, they weren’t just rumours,’ he continued. ‘Before Cripps murdered him, Javier Maxwell told me the reason the Coalition Ambassador had been to see him
was to prevent a war with the Coalition – and it has to do with a second entrance to the Founder Network, discovered decades ago, here in the Tian Di.’

‘No.’ Zelia shook her head. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Ever since, Cheng’s been sending teams of Sandoz in through that entrance, to carry out secret explorations of the Network.’ He shrugged. ‘We always knew there were
gates leading inside the Network scattered all over time and space. It’s hardly surprising that Cheng, or exploration teams working on his behalf, stumbled across another in one of our own
systems.’

‘I would have . . .’ her words drifted off.

‘You’d have known about it?’ he guessed. ‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

She didn’t meet his eyes.

‘Cheng even kept it secret from most of the Eighty-Five,’ Luc continued, ‘restricting the knowledge to a very few members of his inner circle. Vasili was as in the dark about
all of this as you or anyone else, at least until Antonov persuaded him to come here and open that data-cache. And that’s where Ariadna Placet comes into it.’

‘In what way?’

‘She found out about the secret entrance to the Network, and Cheng had her murdered before she could tell anyone else what she knew.’

She shook her head in dismay. ‘Poor Sevgeny. So the crazy son of a bitch wasn’t really that crazy after all.’

Luc sighed and slid out from under her, and began to pull his clothes back on. He turned to look at her, still naked, and felt a touch of amazement at what had just taken place between them.

‘But where is this Founder Network gate?’

‘It’s in the Thorne system, Zelia. Cheng found it while you were still its Director of Policy.’

Her face grew fractionally paler. ‘Go on.’

‘After you were replaced by Ariadna Placet, she figured out there was a cover-up, and was murdered on Cheng’s direct orders to stop her telling anyone else.’

Zelia stared at him, clearly outraged. Luc finished dressing, then heard a thump as she picked up one of her boots and threw it towards a wall. It bounced back, somersaulting through the air
before rebounding from the ceiling.

Luc reached out and managed to catch it, handing it back to her.

‘I hope you weren’t throwing that at me,’ he said, ‘because if you were, you’re a lousy shot.’

‘All right,’ she said at last, her voice flat, ‘I believe you. I don’t
want
to, but I do. Except there’s one thing that doesn’t make much sense to me
– if Cheng really had access to the Founder Network for all this time, why bother sending agents to the Coalition to recover Founder artefacts, if he can just go and get them at the source?
And after going all that way, how’s he going to bring them back to . . .’

She halted and looked at him, then closed her eyes. ‘The new transfer gate.’

‘That’s just about the only reason he agreed to let the Coalition bring the transfer gate here,’ Luc confirmed. ‘As for why he’s sending agents to Darwin, the part
of the Network he’s been able to access was cleared out long ago by some other long-gone race. He hasn’t been able to find anything he could use as a weapon.’

‘Dear God,’ said Zelia. ‘Cheng’s data-cache told you all
this
?’

‘Yes,’ he said triumphantly. ‘But Cheng didn’t place it here – Cripps did.’

‘What?’

‘Maxwell told me before he died that some of the Eighty-Five sometimes hid sensitive or incriminating information in his library, against the day that Cheng might turn against them. Cripps
is Cheng’s right-hand man, but I think he knew the day might come when he knew too much for Cheng to want to keep him alive.
He
placed the data-cache here, without Cheng’s
knowledge, against the day he could use it for a bargaining chip. But he wasn’t quite clever enough.’

‘Meaning, Antonov found out about it?’

Luc nodded. ‘The cache might have self-deleted once I’d accessed it, but the evidence is still around, even if it is locked up inside my head. When Cheng first sent those agents to
Darwin, it was only intended to be a backup plan in case his reconnaissance teams failed to find an appropriate weapon inside the Founder Network.’

‘But he never did find anything, so now the backup plan is the
main
plan.’

‘Which works out better for Cheng, since this way he can lay the blame for Benares on the Coalition as well as Black Lotus.’

‘We need to talk to Ambassador Sachs,’ she said, suddenly decisive, ‘and tell him everything you just told me. Maybe his own people can find some way to stop this from their
side of the gate.’

Luc recalled childhood nightmares, of witnessing Benares consumed by flames. He had decided not to tell her what else he had discovered; that everything Antonov and, later, Maxwell had told him
was true – Cheng really had ordered the Benares raid that changed his life, in order to discredit Black Lotus.

And now, with Antonov out of the way, there was nothing to stop Cheng from delivering the final coup de grâce to a world that had offered nothing but resistance since the beginning of his
rule.

‘The only problem,’ he said, ‘is that we don’t know whether one of Cheng’s agents hasn’t already brought an artefact back from Darwin.’

Zelia nodded, as if to herself. ‘Perhaps I should go and find Cripps and ask him that question myself.’

‘What? How could you—’

‘Just leave it to me,’ she snapped, a wild look in her eyes. ‘That man’s had a reckoning coming to him for a long, long time, and I want to be the one who finally gets to
deliver it to him.’

She got up and started to pull on her own clothes.

‘Listen,’ said Luc, suddenly feeling awkward. ‘I . . .’

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she replied without meeting his eyes. ‘It was just something that happened. Besides . . . it wasn’t really about you.’