The Thousand Emperors (44 page)

‘There’s something seriously wrong with you,’ Luc gasped.

‘Let’s just stick for now to what’s important,’ she muttered darkly. ‘You were right. Cripps hid that data-cache on board that orbital station himself, without
Cheng’s knowledge. I also persuaded our friend here to give me the name of the agent responsible for transporting a weaponized Founder artefact back through the Darwin–Temur
gate.’

‘And?’

‘His name is Jacob Moreland.’ She turned her gaze back to Luc. ‘Unfortunately, he’s already returned to the Tian Di.’

‘And Cripps told you all this?’

‘Once he understood what I’d do to him if he
didn’t
tell me, yes.’

Luc glanced back at Cripps, then just as quickly turned away when one of the hovering mechants reached towards his eyes with sharp-looking instruments. ‘God in hell, Zelia –
you’re telling me what you’re doing to him now is
better
than what you might have done to him otherwise?’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘What I’m doing to him is exactly what I threatened to do.’

Luc felt the blood freeze in his veins. Just a few hours before, he and Zelia had broached some kind of barrier, and he’d caught a glimpse of someone beneath the mask – a living,
feeling human being. Now he understood just how badly she had fooled him.

‘So you did it to him anyway, even after he confessed,’ Luc spat. ‘Is that how much anyone should trust you at your word?’

‘He deserves no better. Now listen, so you understand the important facts. Moreland made his way back down from orbit to Temur in just the last few hours.’

‘Do we know exactly what it is he brought back?’

She nodded. ‘Something called a “quantum disruptor”.’

‘A
what
?’

She glanced back at Cripps with a thoughtful look. ‘Apparently the device can pull time and space apart like moist tissue paper.’

Luc recalled the war he had witnessed when Sachs had taken his hand, and felt his blood chill.

‘So far as I understand it,’ Zelia continued, ‘Moreland is on his way here, to Vanaheim, to present the artefact in person to Cheng – assuming he didn’t get here
already. After that, the plan was to pass it on to Cripps so he could take charge of transporting it to Benares. Obviously
that
isn’t going to happen, but we still have only a short
window of opportunity while the artefact is here before Cheng finds someone else to finish Cripps’ job for him. That’s another reason I gathered everyone here – I figured there
was at least some chance one of them might turn out to have information that could help us pinpoint either Moreland or the artefact.’ She shook her head. ‘Unfortunately, we’ve had
no luck so far.’

‘I can find the artefact,’ said Luc. ‘Sachs gave me the means to track it. It’s in Liebenau, somewhere inside Cheng’s Red Palace.’

Zelia stared at him in surprise, then faltered. ‘That’s great, Luc – and I guess there’s nowhere it’d be more likely to be. But it does mean it’s going to be
surrounded by Sandoz security.’

‘Those people upstairs – do they have the resources to take Cheng on and win? Do
you
?’

She regarded him uncertainly. ‘As far as my own resources go, the Red Palace security have their own, dedicated communications network, which means I can’t tie them up in knots the
way I can the Sandoz elsewhere on Vanaheim. As for the rest, it depends. Some of them, I think, have been stockpiling weapons against a day like this, but as far as the rest go, all they have are
their personal mechants – not nearly enough to take on anyone’s army.’

‘You make it sound hopeless. Is it?’

She hesitated for a moment. ‘I watched your departure from the
Sequoia
remotely. I saw what happened to that Sandoz platform – was Ambassador Sachs responsible for
that?’

‘I did that,’ Luc said quietly. ‘You told me yourself that the lattice in my skull is like no other you’ve seen before, and you were right. Antonov got it from the
Coalition.’

‘So the Coalition really
have
been supplying technology to Black Lotus?’

Luc nodded, and reached a hand towards one of the mechants hovering above Cripps, concentrating. After a moment the machine wobbled in the air, then moved towards the centre of the
passageway.

Luc brought his hand sweeping down, and the mechant landed on the dusty flagstones with a thump, becoming dark and silent.

‘How could you do that?’ Zelia rasped, staring at the mechant with wide, frightened eyes.

‘To be honest with you,’ he said, turning back to her, ‘I don’t really know. But I’m pretty sure I can do a lot more than just that.’ He nodded back towards
the stairwell. ‘We need to figure out our next move before Cheng has a chance to get that artefact anywhere near Benares.’

The lights dotting the ceiling above them flickered, and they both felt a tremor run through the floor and walls around them, one that had nothing to do with the machinery lurking beneath
Zelia’s home. A commotion of voices and screams flooded down from the upper floor.

‘What the hell happened?’ Luc demanded.

Zelia ran towards the stairwell. ‘The networks are down,’ she shouted back at him. ‘I’ve lost control of them again. My guess is that the Sandoz have found us.’

They ascended the steps into chaos. Luc glanced up towards the sky, visible through the ruined ceiling, and caught sight of a couple of fliers rocketing upwards. Zelia’s
co-conspirators were making a run for it.

Something huge drifted between the escaping fliers and the clouds, blocking out the sky. A Sandoz cruiser, its underside studded with sensors and defensive systems.

Luc followed Zelia through the greenhouse and outside in time to see several more fliers erupting upwards. One disappeared in a blaze of heat and light before it had ascended more than a few
hundred metres. He glanced back up at the belly of the vast ship overhead, seeing a stream of tiny dots descending towards them. Mechants.

Zelia grabbed hold of his arm. ‘What you just did to that mechant – can you do it again?’

The dots had by now resolved into multi-armed silhouettes, approaching rapidly. A burst of incandescent light indicated the destruction of yet another flier.

Stop
, thought Luc, focusing on the approaching mechants.

As he watched, the mechants broke formation, spinning off in different directions. Several hit the dirt close by the mansion house, sending up clods of soil. Others span out of control, their
limbs flailing spasmodically.

‘Come on,’ said Zelia, tugging him by the arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

Luc stumbled after her and inside her own flier, which had barely enough room for the both of them. Luc’s insides lurched as he saw the ground dropping away from them with terrifying
speed.

The flier veered wildly, and Luc gasped as he was slammed against the curved upper hull. Several seconds of free-fall followed, then another sudden wrenching burst of acceleration. The ground
rushed towards them at gut-wrenching speed before suddenly spinning away once more.

‘Sorry,’ Zelia muttered. ‘Had to take evasive action. We were being targeted.’

‘Can we get away from them?’

‘Possibly,’ she replied. ‘Not that there’s that many places left to run to.’

‘Your friends,’ Luc gasped, ‘did the rest of them get away? Can they help us?’

‘I don’t know, Luc,’ she said, sounding hopeless. ‘It’s not looking good now. There’s fighting around the Red Palace now, but I don’t think we’re
winning.’

‘What about the Hall of Gates? Is there any way we could get through it and escape?’

She shook her head. ‘The last I heard, the Hall of Gates was in lockdown, and guarded by a heavy contingent of Sandoz on either side.’ She turned and glanced at him. ‘You do
understand, don’t you, just how bad things are? Cheng has all the cards on his side. What about Sachs? Would the Coalition be willing to help us?’

‘Sachs is gone,’ he told her. ‘He was on board the
Sequoia
when it was destroyed.’

‘But . . . you said he was still alive?’

‘You asked me if he was dead, and I said not in the way you meant.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘People in the Coalition maintain multiple iterations of themselves, Zelia – they jump in and out of bodies like we do fliers. Even if the particular instantiation of Sachs I met is
gone, I have no doubt there’s another one somewhere back on Darwin right now reporting on everything that happened here.’

‘Shit.’ Zelia slammed the console before her. ‘Then that’s it, isn’t it? The Coalition’s invading forces are on their way, and Cheng’s got all the
firepower on his side.’

‘No, that’s not it,’ said Luc, with a determination that surprised even himself. ‘We have to try, because if we don’t, all that’s left is to see who kills us
first – Cheng, or the Coalition.’

And I still have one more card up my sleeve
, he thought. One it might be best not to tell Zelia about.

The landscape below them curved in on itself as the flier carrying Luc and Zelia boosted upwards and into low orbit, the sky darkening and becoming filled with stars. They saw
brief flashes of light, like lightning, from somewhere over the horizon.

‘I’m guessing the fighting turned nuclear,’ Zelia said quietly from beside him when he turned to look at her. She studied the console. ‘No direct hits on any major
targets yet, but only because there are still enough functioning countermeasures to take out the missiles before they reach their targets.’

‘How many dead?’

‘Hard to say,’ said Zelia, pressed up close beside him in the tiny cramped cockpit. ‘A hundred, maybe more. The majority of the dead were on our side, I’m afraid to
say.’

A hundred, maybe more.
More deaths within a few hours than had occurred amongst the Temur Council in centuries.

‘You’re planning something, aren’t you?’ she asked quietly.

He regarded her. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Centuries of observational politics,’ she replied. ‘That, and the fact of what you did to that mechant in my laboratory, not to mention an entire Sandoz weapons
platform.’

‘Just before I left the
Sequoia
,’ Luc explained, ‘Sachs did something remotely to my lattice. He said he’d optimized it.’

‘“Optimized”?’

‘He said I wasn’t using its full potential.’ He glanced at her. ‘It’s also how I know where the stolen artefact is.’

She turned away from him, looking unsettled. ‘I just hope whatever it is you’re planning is good, because we’re going to need nothing short of a miracle if we’re going to
get out of this alive.’

A sombre silence settled over them, and Luc distracted himself by keeping an eye on the flier’s screens. He didn’t want to tell her that survival wasn’t part of his plan;
he’d given up any hope of surviving Antonov’s lattice some time ago.

‘I’ll tell you what, though,’ said Zelia, suddenly. ‘If, by some fucking miracle, I actually get out of this alive, I’m going to go a long, long way away and never
come back.’

He glanced at her. ‘Where would you go?’

She waved a hand towards the cockpit’s ceiling. ‘Out there, somewhere. With the right instantiation equipment and a growth-tank for clone bodies, I could extend my lifespan to
thousands of years, maybe even longer. I’d travel out into the galaxy and see what I could find.’

‘You mean you’d travel through the Founder Network?’

She gave him a bemused look. ‘No, I’d build a ship, one that could take me out amongst the stars as close to the speed of light as I could push it. The Founder Network is a
trap.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m not saying it was intentionally built for that purpose, but I have a theory that once a species finds its way inside the Network, they either stumble across something that wipes
them out, or they . . . they lose themselves inside it.’

‘How?’

‘Think about it. How big is the Network, really? Some of the earliest expeditions into it travelled as far as a
hundred trillion years
into the future. That’s an unimaginable
length of time. Think of what might happen to a civilization with access to the Founder Network over thousands of years, and not just centuries, like the Coalition. I wouldn’t give it more
than a couple of millennia at the outside before civilizations become sufficiently fragmented as they spread through the Network that they wind up forgetting where they came from. Plus, it explains
the Fermi Paradox.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s a question that used to get posed before they discovered how to build transfer gates,’ she explained. ‘If you make the assumption that there must be intelligent
life somewhere out there in the universe, and if you also assume it’s inclined to spread out through space as we have, then why didn’t our ancestors on Earth ever encounter
them?’

‘If there are aliens, then why aren’t they here?’

‘That’s it exactly. But what we know now is that the Founder Network’s been in existence for billions of years, apparently vacuuming up every intelligent race that comes across
an entrance to it. That’s why we never encountered living aliens before – because they discovered the Network first.’

‘What does that have to do with not wanting to take a shortcut through the Network?’

‘There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, Luc, with God knows how many intelligent civilizations out there who never had either the luck or the misfortune to stumble across
the Network. None of us have any idea just what’s out there, because as soon as we discovered a way inside the Network’ – and here, she put a hand out in front of her chest, palm
forward – ‘we more or less came to a dead stop as far as the rest of the universe was concerned.’

‘I guess it makes sense when you put it that way.’ The flier was already tilting nose-up as it dropped out of orbit, shaking as it hit the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Luc glanced at a screen and saw it would not be long before they reached Liebenau. The stars were fading from sight once more, and before long they were racing towards the rising sun, the
terrain beneath them becoming increasingly mountainous the lower they dropped. Vast swathes of green and blue to the south marked the confluence of several rivers on their long journey to the
coast.