The Thousand Emperors

TWO
Luc dreamed.
He was six years old again, running through a field beneath a curving transparent dome, the sun dropping towards the peak of Razorback Mountain and dazzling his eyes. His hands brushed against stalks of wheat as he ran, ignoring the field-mechant that kept pace with him, warning of the consequences of trespassing.
Something huge flitted through the sky above the biome’s ceiling, moving so fast he barely had time to register its passage. He stopped to stare, seeing the dark silhouettes of Council stinger-drones following in close pursuit. A copse of seaweed bushes beyond the biome’s transparent wall stirred beneath a sudden breeze, sending startled lizard-wings spinning upwards from their perches to scatter across the sky.
Light flared on the horizon, a second sun rising to meet the first. He saw the peak of Razorback Mountain melting as the firestorm engulfed it.
The ground beneath Luc’s feet shook, and he turned to run back the other way, back to the safety of home.

Luc became aware of bright smears of light that made his eyes hurt. Round, pink blobs that might have been faces hovered indistinctly before him. He took a breath, and realized his lungs were filled with some form of liquid, thick and viscous. Panic seized him until he realized he wasn’t drowning. Someone had put him into a recovery tank.
I’m still alive, he realized. The dream was still fresh in his mind. It was an old one, but it had never happened in reality. If he’d really been home on Benares during the Battle of Sunderland, he’d have died along with millions of others.
He could make out just enough of his reflection in the tank’s transparent wall to see that something was terribly wrong.
<Antonov. Where . . . ?>
One of the pink blobs came closer, resolving into a sallow-faced man with a close-shaved skull, wearing the uniform of a Temur medician.
<Good. You’re responding.>
Luc twisted his head back, seeing bright lights shimmering overhead. <Aeschere. I need to know what—>
<There’ll be time for that later,> the medician scripted in reply, then turned to someone behind him. <Put him back under.>
<No, wait—>
Any further protests died on Luc’s lips.

There were several more such brief episodes of lucidity, each one slightly longer than the last, including one in which Luc found himself being questioned by a medician who never bothered to give his name. He showed Luc CogNet-mediated video of his extraction from the twisted wreckage of the cryogenic unit that had saved his life, but only just.
He couldn’t recognize the raw, burned slab of meat in the video, couldn’t connect it to himself. The medician allowed him to see himself through the eyes of lenses dotted around the recovery room. He was submerged in a fluorocarbon-rich gel, his body half-hidden amongst a tangle of sensor leads, his flesh burned and flayed. Shoals of tiny black things like tadpoles swarmed around his legs and lower back with apparent purpose, while his face had been reduced to little more than sheets of exposed muscle laid over the skull beneath.
The medician asked questions that Luc tried to answer, sticking to script-speak since Luc’s newly-grown throat and larynx hadn’t quite finished healing. He learned the cryo-unit had put most of its energy into protecting his head and brain once the temperature of the plasma began to push it beyond its operational parameters. As a result, many of Luc’s organs and muscles had been replaced using fast-track tissue work. Even so, the work was going fast, and it might only be another day or two before they were able to lift him out of the tank.
The medician departed, and Luc soon drifted back into a drug-induced sleep. A new dream came to him, disturbing because it felt more like a memory than anything else. He found himself staring into a convex mirror surrounded by folds of dark cloth, but instead of his own face, he saw that of Winchell Antonov reflected there. Antonov’s lips moved in silence, his expression full of bitter anger.

The rapidity with which they healed him was astonishing. Each time the medicians brought him back to consciousness, Luc found the pain was a little less than it had been, until finally it was reduced to not much more than a dull ache.
The Chief Medician had Luc decanted from his tank and moved to a room with an actual bed. His new skin felt ridiculously soft and delicate, as insubstantial as rice-paper origami that might come undone in the slightest breeze. The sensation of soft linens against his body was a wonder in itself.
It wasn’t long before he got his first visitors. Eleanor Jaq walked into the room, her lithe form wrapped in a SecInt uniform, long brown hair tucked into a small bun at the back of her head. The last time he’d seen her, she’d told him they were finished, and so her arrival was more than a little unexpected.
She wasn’t alone. Her companion was Isaak Lethe, SecInt’s Director of Operations, his brow marked by worry-lines. He took a seat to one side of Luc’s bed, the corners of his mouth jerking up in a half-smile as if this were the same as any other debriefing. Eleanor remained standing, her expression carefully neutral.
‘Mr Gabion,’ said Lethe. ‘You’re looking a lot better than you did when they first brought you in here.’
‘I’ve had better days,’ Luc croaked, his voice scraping like rusted razors. He tried to catch Eleanor’s eye, but she glanced away. ‘Just how long have I been here?’
‘You got back to Temur just a couple of days ago,’ Lethe replied. ‘Medician Merlino told me how much work they had to do on you.’
‘Apparently,’ said Luc, ‘they had to replace pretty much everything.’
‘They also rolled your age back about a half-decade or so. My understanding is that made things easier for them.’
‘You were lucky,’ said Eleanor, eyes finally settling on him. Her nostrils flared slightly, a sure sign she was still angry at him, despite everything he’d been through. ‘Really lucky.’
‘I know you’re only just out of the tank, but I need to talk to you about what happened on Aeschere,’ said Lethe, his expression becoming apologetic. ‘I know you probably don’t feel ready for it.’
Luc shook his head. ‘It’s fine. What do you need to know?’
‘Sandoz Command are facing questions over how they managed to lose an entire Clan on what should have been a straightforward operation. And it’s not like we can ask Marroqui or any of the rest of them what happened.’
‘Why not? They’ll be re-instantiated, won’t they?’
‘Yes, and Karlmann Sandoz has already given the order to prep their clone bodies. Unfortunately, since the explosion that destroyed the complex left no trace of them . . .’ Lethe regarded him from beneath shaggy eyebrows.
Meaning, Luc guessed, that their instantiation lattices had also been destroyed. ‘So they won’t be able to reboot them from the point when they were actually killed,’ Luc finished for him. ‘I get it.’
‘Which makes you our only material witness to what happened down there,’ Lethe continued. ‘The version of Master Marroqui they’re about to shovel into a new body hasn’t even heard of you. That means at some point you’re going to find yourself standing in front of an investigative committee, possibly several of them. And they’re all going to ask difficult questions.’
‘And that’s why you’re here?’
Lethe smiled stiffly. ‘Actually, it concerns Antonov. You told a Sandoz investigator he was still alive when you reached the lowest level of the complex.’
Luc shook his head. ‘I don’t recall speaking to anyone from the Sandoz.’
‘They sent one of their own here to interrogate you without getting our clearance first,’ Lethe explained. ‘You were still only half-conscious at the time. One of the medicians told me it’s unlikely you’d recall any of it. I filed a protest and managed to get the details of what you told the investigator. So Antonov – was he still alive?’
Luc nodded. ‘He was, yes.’
‘You also told him Antonov compromised Marroqui’s mosquitoes.’
‘Also correct.’
‘Mostly correct. It turns out those mosquitoes were still transmitting some data back to the orbital platform parked around Grendel.’
Luc sat up with extreme care. ‘So you managed to recover at least some data?’
Lethe nodded. ‘Enough to prove your version of events. Up to a point.’
Up to a point. ‘Go on,’ said Luc, sensing Lethe was leading up to something.
‘Your CogNet link stopped recording just before you reached the lowest level of the complex, and didn’t start again until you contacted Master Siedzik. That means we have no idea what happened during the period it wasn’t functioning.’
‘You think Antonov compromised it in some way?’
Lethe ignored the question. ‘Apparently you told this investigator that after your encounter with Antonov, you headed straight for the cryo units, but not before sending a warning to Siedzik. Why?’
‘Antonov told me he was going to destroy the complex. He even told me the cryogenic pods were my best bet at staying alive.’
‘Let me just be clear on this. Antonov told you he was going to trigger a detonation?’ asked Lethe.
Luc shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a bomb or anything like that. Antonov had a transfer gate set up down there on the lowest level, connected to a ship orbiting close to 55 Cancri’s photosphere. He set the ship to dive into the sun before knocking me out. When I woke up he was dead, and I checked the readings in one of the navigation booths for just long enough to see he hadn’t been lying.’
They both stared at him like he’d started barking profanities.
‘Didn’t I tell the investigator . . . ?’
‘No, you didn’t,’ said Lethe, looking outraged. ‘A transfer gate? How the hell could Antonov get his hands on technology like that?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Luc, ‘but I swear to you it’s the truth. He was badly wounded, dying.’
Luc stopped, his head throbbing with sudden, unexpected pain. It wasn’t hard to guess Lethe didn’t believe a word.
‘How badly wounded?’ asked the Director.
Luc swallowed with some difficulty. Sharp spikes of pain radiated from inside his skull, getting worse with every passing second. ‘He had a deep chest wound. At first I thought he was too weak to be any danger. But he fooled me. He managed to dose me, then drag me through to the ship’s bridge.’
‘Why in Heaven didn’t Antonov just kill you?’ asked Lethe. He had a look on his face like a man trying to figure out a particularly intractable puzzle, one he was sure contained some central flaw that, once identified, would cause all the rest to fall apart.
‘I don’t know. By the time I came to, he was dead and the ship was locked into its course. All I could do was get the hell out. I made my way back through the gate and up to the higher levels.’
‘And the rest of Antonov’s people?’ asked Eleanor. ‘The Black Lotus insurgents?’
Antonov put something inside my head, Luc wanted to say, but as soon as the thought crossed his mind, sweat burst out all over his newly-minted skin, the pain in his skull doubling.
It felt almost like something was trying to stop him talking about it. He gripped the bed sheets, twisting the soft cotton around his fingers.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Eleanor, stepping around the side of his bed and placing one hand on his upper arm. The sensation of her fingers against his skin was almost unbearably sensual. She glanced back at Lethe. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t . . .’
‘No,’ Luc gasped. ‘It’ll pass.’
He saw Eleanor and Lethe exchange a look.
‘Look,’ said Lethe, ‘if we go to an investigative committee and try and tell them Antonov had transfer gate technology without any proof, there’s going to be hell to pay. There are already questions about how badly you might have been affected by the trauma of what happened to you.’
‘You don’t believe me,’ Luc said hollowly.
Lethe sighed. ‘It’s not a question of whether I believe you or not.’
‘Just other people.’
‘Even if there really was a transfer gate down there, Aeschere’s got a low enough average density that the explosion, or whatever the hell it was, brought the roof down on half the complex. It’d take months, maybe years to dig down far enough before we could even begin to verify your story. Come to think of it, it was probably sheer damn luck you didn’t wind up buried under half a million tons of rock along with everything else.’
‘So you think Antonov was never there, that I hallucinated the whole damn thing. Is that it?’
‘No, he was definitely there,’ Lethe replied. ‘We managed to get visual corroboration of that much, at least, from Black Lotus’s own security networks just prior to the raid. It looks like he died there as well. Whether I believe there was a transfer gate or not doesn’t really matter, not without hard evidence. With no CogNet data and no proof to the contrary, any committee you wind up in front of is going to dismiss every word that comes out of your mouth.’
Luc opened his mouth to protest, but then realized that if their roles had been reversed, he’d have said exactly the same damn thing. He’d have assumed the story about the transfer gate was a delusion, triggered by the dreadful trauma of having half his body burned away.
But it had been real. He could feel it, deep in his bones. The proof was in his skull, put there by Antonov. All he had to do was tell them, but even the thought of doing so filled his head with a furious ache.
‘I was pretty torn up, right?’ Luc managed to blurt. ‘When they pulled me out of that cryo unit, they must have scanned me pretty thoroughly, inside and out.’
Lethe frowned, then gestured at something behind him. A mechant drifted forward until it hovered just centimetres above the bed, its sensors directed at Luc.
The ache grew worse. It took all Luc’s strength just to force the next words out.
‘Listen to me,’ he gasped. ‘In my head. Antonov put—’
The pain escalated beyond all endurance. His body snapped rigid as something tore at the inside of his head. He was vaguely aware through the haze of agony that two human orderlies had come rushing into the room.
The mechant reached out and did something to his arm where it lay on top of the sheets. Everything began to recede, as if he were seeing the hospital room and its occupants from down the far end of a long, dark tunnel. The pain wasn’t any less, but he found he no longer cared about it.
He experienced a kind of fugue, and the next thing he knew lights were slipping by overhead as he was taken somewhere else. Then there were more mechants, and other, unfamiliar faces, and finally another room where he was given into the care of a machine that pressed in close all around him.
Whatever they’d pumped into his veins, it felt good.

He came to, and saw Eleanor standing by a window, staring out across the rooftops of Ulugh Beg. Night had fallen. There was no sign of Lethe.
‘What . . .’
She turned and blinked red-rimmed eyes at him, almost as if she’d forgotten he was there.
‘. . . the f*ck?’ he finished, his voice a harsh croak.
She came over to him. ‘You had some kind of seizure. They’re still not sure what happened.’
He managed to push himself upright in the bed, and saw he was back in the same room as before. ‘Well, that’s less than reassuring.’
‘They ran a bunch of scans on you to see what triggered it, but they didn’t find anything.’
Luc stared at her in disbelief. ‘What kind of scans?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You’d have to ask one of the mechants.’ She nodded towards one that hovered inconspicuously by the door.
Luc did. ‘Deep tissue and tomographic scans were carried out,’ it replied, drifting closer. ‘No lesions or other possible causes of a cerebral seizure were found.’
‘What about Merlino, the medician?’ Luc asked, turning back to Eleanor. ‘What exactly did he say?’
‘He said they can’t be sure of anything until they carry out further tests. He didn’t exactly say it, but from what I can tell they don’t have the faintest idea just what happened to you.’
‘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 f*cking 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 Division.’
‘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 his 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.’
‘If you want to ask me any more questions,’ Luc replied, his fingers gripping his knees, ‘you can do it in the presence of Director Lethe of Security and Intelligence.’
‘Let’s leave SecInt out of it and think of this as just being between friends. Haven’t you ever thought maybe the Council’s been in power too long? It’s been more than two centuries, now. Don’t you feel it’s time for some new kind of government to be put in their place?’
‘What I think, Mr Cripps, is that you’re testing me for some reason I don’t understand. I lost my family to Black Lotus when I was very young, so you’re out of your mind if you think I’m an agent for them. Go read my SecInt file. The word “exemplary” gets used a lot.’
‘That file also tells me the majority of people in the part of Benares you came from had sympathies for Black Lotus. When you came to Temur as a refugee, you lived in a part of Ulugh Beg with a strong Black Lotus presence.’
‘Black Lotus murdered a couple of million Benareans in a sustained assault that devastated half a continent. Believe me, Mr Cripps, I’ve got more reason than most to hate Winchell Antonov. Besides, everyone in SecInt gets psych-profiled to find out where their loyalties lie. So why are you really here?’
There was a reptilian quality to Cripps’ gaze, something in the way the skin wrinkled around the corners of his eyes that made Luc think of a predator half-submerged in some watering-hole beneath a baking sun.
‘Two reasons,’ Cripps responded. ‘For one, a couple of years ago you were given the chance at a promotion to SecInt’s security division, but you didn’t take it. Why?’
‘Because it would have taken me out of the Archives division, and away from my intelligence work,’ Luc replied immediately. ‘The job was mostly bureaucratic. If I’d accepted it, I might never have tracked Antonov down. I told Director Lethe that at the time, and he had no problem with my reasoning.’
‘Except that promotion would also have given you the authority to influence Archives’ lines of investigation,’ Cripps countered. ‘That could have made a lot of difference – maybe enough so that we wouldn’t be forced to re-instantiate an entire Sandoz Clan.’
‘You said there was a second point?’ Luc snapped, barely able to contain himself any longer.
‘I don’t think you have any more love for the Temur Council and Father Cheng than Winchell Antonov ever did,’ Cripps replied, a glint in his eyes. He nodded past Luc, towards the White Palace hovering in the air beyond the window. ‘Who’s to say you aren’t a sleeper agent, placed deep inside Archives, and who’s to say Antonov’s death wasn’t faked in some way? No body was recovered, and all we have is your unlikely testimony, delivered to a Sandoz investigator, which can’t possibly be corroborated since no CogNet records of your encounter with Antonov exists!’
‘With all due respect, sir,’ Luc spat back, ‘you don’t know shit.’
Cripps’ shoulders jerked briefly in a laugh. ‘Things are going to be very different from now on, Mr Gabion. I’m going to be keeping a very close eye on you. Remember that, when you start your investigation.’
Luc stared at him, baffled. ‘My what?’
‘We’ll meet again shortly. Just remember, in the coming days, that you are as much a suspect as anyone else.’
‘Suspect in what?’ Luc shook his head in befuddlement. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking ab—’
Cripps’ data-ghost vanished while he was still mid-sentence, leaving him staring at an empty room.
An investigation, Cripps had said. What kind of investigation?
He pushed both hands across his head, wondering if he hadn’t just imagined the whole thing. After everything he’d been through, he couldn’t even be sure how much he could trust his own senses. Maybe he was losing his mind. Maybe it was really that simple.
‘House,’ he asked, ‘was anyone else just here?’
‘Senator Bailey Cripps, by remote data-presence,’ the house replied.
He closed his eyes in silent relief and sank back into the chair, but soon found himself staring back out at the Palace, feeling nothing but a premonitory chill.

The next morning a mechant guided Luc from the metro station at the edge of the park and along a pathway that skirted the bronzed statue of Chandrakant Lu. The White Palace’s architect had been depicted with one hand reaching upwards, as if to catch the vast edifice floating half a kilometre above the city. He saw innumerable fliers arriving to decant yet more people to join the hundreds already milling about, a considerable number of whom wore the formal work clothes of Council bureaucrats, while the rest sported the uniforms of either SecInt or Sandoz.
Mechants, most of them conspicuously armed and bearing Sandoz markings, darted through the air, almost outnumbering the crowds. Their carapaces glittered under the bright arc lights that substituted for sunlight beneath the Palace’s vast bulk.
The mechant guided him towards an open plaza near the park’s centre. He felt a rush of pleasure when he sighted Eleanor standing amidst a gaggle of several other SecInt agents. The agents were gathered around an olive-skinned man wearing a long formal jacket; Luc immediately recognized him as Mehmood Garda, Director of Policy for Benares, and himself a member of the Eighty-Five.
The crowds moved and shifted, and a moment later Luc also caught sight of Vincent Hetaera, his immediate superior in Archives, engaged in what looked like an in-depth discussion with several of his junior research staff.
‘Mr Gabion!’ Garda exclaimed as Luc approached, stepping forward to clap him on the shoulder and pump his hand at the same time. ‘Congratulations on your success at Aeschere. I believe we all owe you a debt of gratitude.’
His voice boomed over even the noise of the crowded plaza. Several security-mechants clearly tasked with guarding Director Garda aimed their machine-gaze at Luc.
‘I appreciate that.’ Luc almost had to shout the words over the cacophony. He’d heard rumours Garda had participated in the torture and execution of Black Lotus agents, particularly when those agents had been female.
Garda lifted his chin towards the Palace. ‘You must be full of anticipation. This is the first time you’ve been invited into the Palace?’
‘It is,’ Luc shouted back. ‘To be honest, I think I’ll be glad just to get this over with,’ he added.
Garda drew himself up to his full six-foot-plus height, this time placing both hands on Luc’s shoulders and clapping one of them hard. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t think of anyone who could possibly deserve what’s coming to you any more than you do.’
Luc caught sight of Eleanor from out of the corner of his eye. ‘It’s certainly an honour,’ he replied.
‘And after this?’ asked Garda. ‘Black Lotus aren’t finished just because Antonov is dead. Are you going to help us wipe the rest of them out?’
‘I think that remains to be—’
To Luc’s considerable relief, one of Garda’s entourage approached, whispering in the Director’s ear.
‘I look forward to seeing you receive your honours in the Palace,’ said Garda, briefly turning back to Luc, but it was clear his mind was already somewhere else. ‘Affairs of state, I’m afraid.’
Luc nodded, and watched the Director step away and greet someone else.
‘Feel like washing your hands?’ asked Eleanor, moving up next to him.
Luc suppressed a grimace. ‘I guess I should have expected him to be here.’
‘You had a look on your face like you’d just drunk your own piss. To be honest, I think he noticed.’
‘If he did, I don’t think it bothered him a great deal.’
‘First Lethe, now Garda. Just when you thought you’d be able to relax a little.’
Luc shook his head wearily. ‘F*ck a*sholes like Garda. There’ll always be people like him.’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘I need to see you. Soon.’
She nodded. ‘Look, I’m sorry about last night, it’s just—’
‘It’s okay,’ he said, stopping her. ‘I seem to be about the only person in all of SecInt who isn’t on active duty right now.’ He shrugged. ‘And maybe it’s not such a bad thing that you weren’t there.’
‘Why not?’
He hesitated, wondering how she’d react to what he was about to tell her.
They had become lovers the year before, on a joint trip to Yue Shijie in the 94 Aquarii system to try and track down one of Black Lotus’s many sources of funding.
Like Aeschere, Yue Shijie orbited a gas giant, but unlike that desolate moon, Yue Shijie was well within its system’s habitable zone, and large enough to support a habitable biosphere. He remembered standing with Eleanor on the balcony of a ziggurat-like building that, like much of the rest of that world’s capital city, rose out of dense jungle stretching to the horizon in all directions. He remembered looking up to see the gas giant’s streaked atmosphere, marked here and there by outpourings from Helium 3 factories ploughing through its upper reaches.
They had been stuck there for the better part of a month, chasing after lines of enquiry that led nowhere. Demonstrations and riots stirred up by Black Lotus had made the city streets too dangerous to venture onto. Boredom and alcohol had combined with inevitable effect.
He recalled in vivid detail the curve of her small, high breasts beneath the thin blouse she wore that evening, the curve of her spine when she leaned against the railing beside him. Falling into bed had seemed the obvious thing to do on such a long and lonely night, but neither of them had anticipated how quickly and how deeply their feelings for each other would develop. He wanted to keep her at a safe distance from anything that involved Cripps, yet at the same time, he knew there was no one he could trust more than Eleanor.
‘I had a visitor yesterday evening,’ he told her. ‘Bailey Cripps. He spent the whole time quizzing me about my loyalties.’
Her eyes became round and she stepped back a little. ‘Bailey Cripps? Visited you where, here?’
‘He turned up in my home.’
She had a look in her eyes like she wasn’t quite sure she could believe him.
‘Listen, I swear on Cheng’s teeth he was there,’ Luc insisted.
‘He doesn’t strike me as the type to make impromptu house calls.’
‘There was nothing impromptu about it. He data-ghosted into my apartment without any warning. I guess Council privileges extend to home security overrides.’
‘He questioned your loyalties?’ Her eyes darted to the side and then back again, and he guessed what she was about to ask. ‘Are you sure it was really him?’
‘I checked. It was him, all right. He seemed to think I couldn’t be trusted because I’m from Benares. He also mentioned something about an investigation, but I have no idea what investigation he was talking about.’
Her expression became more alarmed. ‘Investigation? Into what? Aeschere?’
‘No, he seemed to mean something else, but he didn’t seem interested in telling me precisely what.’
‘We need to tell someone about this.’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
She shook her head in disbelief. ‘For God’s sake, why not?’
‘This is Bailey Cripps we’re talking about. There has to be a reason he approached me directly, instead of going through Lethe or Hetaera. If I tell them or anyone else, I might not get to find out what that reason is.’
She sighed, tilting her head back to stare up at the Palace’s illuminated underside. ‘I don’t like this,’ she said, bringing her gaze back down. ‘You should tell someone.’
‘I’m telling you, aren’t I?’
She shook her head in exasperation. ‘Don’t you think you’ve been through enough already?’
‘Look, maybe Cripps came to me in the way he did because he knows something about Black Lotus. Besides . . . he’s one of the Eighty-Five. What they want, they get.’
‘There are some members of the Council,’ she said, speaking to him as if he were dim-witted, ‘you don’t want to get tangled up with.’ Her eyes slid to one side, and he followed the direction of her gaze until he alighted on Garda, still working the crowd.
‘I just want to find out what Cripps wants. Then I’ll go talk to Lethe.’
He could sense the anger brewing behind her thinned lips. ‘Is that a promise?’
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ she replied, ‘because this is starting to feel like Aeschere all over again.’

Garda mounted a stage set up at the centre of the plaza and began to speak, while mechants from half a dozen different news agencies buzzed through the air, jostling for the best vantage point.
Luc’s attention soon drifted back to the Palace floating overhead. Something about the sight of all those millions of tons of metal floating unsupported in the air always felt like a test of one’s faith in technology. He wondered, not for the first time, just how many seconds he’d have left to live should the AG pods holding it in place suddenly fail to function.
Glancing at Eleanor beside him, he saw she had an expression like she’d swallowed something nasty. She hadn’t taken the news about Cripps well. But during his recovery, left with little to do but think, it had come to Luc that so much of his life had been devoted to finding Antonov that there hadn’t been room left for much else. He’d sometimes wondered what kind of life he might have led if the Battle of Sunderland hadn’t brought everything to a crashing halt at such a young age.
Maybe now was the time to find out. And as much as he hated to admit it even to himself, Cripps’ vague allusion to an unspecified investigation had awoken within him a sense of purpose he had not felt since his departure for Aeschere.
Garda’s speech finally came to an end, and Luc realized he hadn’t taken in a single word. Two massive doors in the Palace’s underside, positioned directly above the plaza, slowly swung apart on cue. All around the park, fliers thrummed into life while low, sonorous music flowed out of hidden speakers.
The interior of a docking bay became visible beyond the doors. Dozens of mechants rose towards it, as if the Palace were in actuality a moon, the mechants drawn upwards by the tug of its gravity.
‘This is it,’ said Eleanor, taking his arm and flashing him a smile that looked only half-genuine.
A mechant approached and asked them to follow it. They trailed after it towards a sleek-looking craft onto which at least a dozen other people were already filing.
They boarded and took their seats, Eleanor taking his hand and holding it tightly.
‘Nervous?’ she asked.
‘A little,’ he admitted. He wondered if Cripps would be present during the ceremony. He leaned back, half-listening to the people chattering around them as the flier waited for clearance. Most of them were ordinary citizens, on their way to be granted privileges and rewards for services rendered. It was all part of the Temur Council’s unceasing public relations campaign designed to remind people how good life was under Father Cheng.
The upper part of the hull was transparent, and Luc watched as other fliers scattered around the plaza took off, one after the other, rising straight up and disappearing into the blaze of the docking bay’s lights. Then, finally, they were on their way, landing inside the Palace after a trip that lasted barely a minute.
Once they disembarked, more mechants, decorated in the gold and blue livery of the Temur Council, took care of guiding the flier’s passengers towards an auditorium located on the Palace’s lowest tier. One of the mechants flew towards Luc and Eleanor, coming to a halt immediately before them and bringing them to a startled halt.
‘Mr Gabion,’ said the mechant in a smooth contralto. ‘If you would follow me, please.’
Luc saw the curious glances of the other passengers as they passed by. He felt strangely embarrassed, as if he’d been caught gatecrashing.
‘Why?’
‘It concerns a matter of the utmost seriousness,’ the mechant informed him. ‘One that requires your absolute discretion.’
‘Required by whom?’ asked Eleanor.
‘I am not at liberty to say, but the request comes from within the Temur Council.’
‘Then we’ll both come,’ said Eleanor.
The mechant’s AG fields buzzed quietly for a moment before it answered. ‘I’m afraid this is a matter for Mr Gabion only, Miss Jaq. Director Lethe has been informed of your necessary absence from the ceremony. Mr Gabion, please follow me.’
Eleanor opened and closed her mouth, then stared at Luc with a concerned expression.
‘I don’t like it,’ she finally said in a low voice. ‘Why now, of all times?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he said, reaching out to squeeze her arm.
She tried to force a smile, but the strain was clear on her face.
He nodded to the mechant and it led the way, gliding towards an AG platform at the far end of the bay. The platform began to accelerate upwards as soon as he stepped onto it, the mechant rising at the same rate in order to keep even with him. He glanced down once to see Eleanor looking back up at him, and tried to ignore the deep unease lurking at the back of his thoughts.
The platform kept rising, and Luc realized with a shock it was going all the way to the top, to the Hall of Gates. He made a point of not stepping too close to the edge of the platform. Its AG fields would prevent him from falling off, but he had little desire to see just how far he had risen.
‘The matter for which your presence has been requested rates a C category under the Security review of 285 P.A.,’ said the mechant, turning towards him as the platform began to decelerate. ‘You may not disclose the nature, location or any other pertinent aspect of your final destination to anyone with a less than C-category security rating, under penalty of the permanent loss of all granted privileges, and possible detention or permanent discorporation at the pleasure of a court assembled from select members of the Temur Council. The same penalties also apply to anyone with whom you share this information, and anyone amongst their immediate family, social or work groups suspected of coming into possession of this information.’
Luc nodded dumbly, thinking: a C-level security rating. There weren’t many that were higher.
‘Please acknowledge, before we reach our destination, that you understand and accept these terms,’ the mechant finished.
‘I don’t have the rank for that level of security rating,’ said Luc. ‘I’m not sure I’ve even met anyone who does.’ Outside of members of the Council, anyway.
‘You have been granted a temporary C-rating security clearance,’ the mechant replied. ‘Do you agree to the stated terms?’
Luc stared at the machine. ‘I do.’
The platform passed through a circular opening in the atrium’s ceiling before finally coming to a halt at the centre of a low-ceilinged circular hall. Luc saw more than a dozen transfer gates spaced equidistant from each other set into the walls: private transfer gates, each one leading to a major Tian Di colony and reserved for the sole use of members of the Temur Council. One other gate led to Vanaheim.
The mechant moved towards the Vanaheim gate. Luc hesitated once he realized where it was leading him.
‘I just want to be clear on this,’ he called after the machine. ‘I’ve been requested to travel to Vanaheim?’
‘Yes,’ the mechant confirmed, pausing briefly before gliding onwards and through the gate. Luc followed, feeling increasingly out of his depth.
He felt some of his weight fall away when he stepped through a pressure-field on the far side of the gate. Vanaheim’s gravity was almost a fifth less than that of Temur.
He had never been to Vanaheim before; few outside of the Temur Council ever had. The air felt dense, almost soupy, and had a curiously honeyed scent to it. He glanced back through the gate to the interior of the White Palace, thinking of his home somewhere on the far side, so very close and yet so very far away. Then he turned around to regard the concourse on which he now found himself, and the greenish-blue sky visible through a curved glass ceiling several metres overhead.
There was no sign of anyone else.
The complex of which the concourse was part stood on raised ground on one slope of a river valley that was home to Liebenau, the single largest settlement on the entire planet. Luc saw a Gothic mansion at the centre of a vast, rolling estate, bordering what appeared to be an ancient Hindu temple; there were other buildings of varying and clashing architectural styles, most drawn from old Earth, although a cluster of grey-and-brown, utilitarian-looking structures were clearly inspired by post-Abandonment biome architecture. A few crystalline towers, not so different from those found on Temur and the capitals of other Tian Di colonies, rose towards the sky like upright spears.
Most of these were the homes of Cheng’s inner circle, the Eighty-Five; they all orbited a single, vast complex of ancient-looking buildings, which were in turn surrounded by a high, rectangular wall topped at each corner by pagoda-style roofs. A moat surrounded this wall. Extensive gardens helped to further separate and distinguish the Red Palace – as it was known – from the rest of the settlement. It had been modelled, he vaguely recalled, on a palace built on Earth many centuries before the Abandonment.
The mechant moved ahead of him and towards a single flier parked just beyond an exit. A door in the craft’s side swung open as they approached.
‘Now we’re here,’ he called after the mechant, ‘would you mind at least giving me some idea what the hell this is about?’
‘You are required,’ the mechant informed him, coming to a halt next to the flier, ‘to assist in the investigation of a murder.’