The Thousand Emperors (12 page)

‘There are still too many variables as yet to be able to say in the short-term, Father Cheng,’ Luc replied. ‘At the very least, Aeschere constitutes a major propaganda coup for
us.’

‘And in the long-term?’

‘In the long-term, I don’t think they can really survive without his guidance.’

‘Yet Black Lotus retains considerable popular support on both Benares and Acamar. In the days following the announcement of Antonov’s demise, fresh atrocities were carried out
against Sandoz peacekeeping forces on both worlds. The reports I receive from SecInt tell me that new Black Lotus cells are popping up all across Temur at an increasing rate, some within view of
the White Palace itself. What would you say if I were to suggest that they are, in fact, stronger than they have ever been?’

‘Father Cheng, this man does not have clearance to be cognisant of the full facts concerning—’

Cheng shot an angry glare at Karlmann Sandoz, who had spoken up. ‘I want his answer, Karlmann,’ Cheng snapped, interrupting him. ‘Do you have an objection?’

Karlmann shook his head and said no more.

‘Well, Mr Gabion?’ Cheng continued. ‘I’m concerned that Antonov’s death has done nothing more than turn him into a martyr.’

Luc ran his tongue around his lips. ‘The problem lies in the underlying root causes of the dissatisfaction that Black Lotus feeds on,’ he said. ‘The unrest on Benares, the
failure of the artificial ecosystem on Acamar . . . people want someone to blame.’

Luc felt suddenly dizzy, and stepped closer to one of the bookcases in order to support himself. Everything was turning bright, while a tiny point of fire in the centre of his skull slowly
expanded outwards.

‘Surely the fact that we’ve enjoyed unprecedented peace for centuries counts for more,’ Cheng demanded.

‘I . . .’

‘Mr Gabion?’ Zelia stepped forward and grabbed his arm. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m not sure. I . . .’

The fire expanded to fill the interior of his skull. He lurched, feeling a surge of bile rush up the back of his throat.

Not now.
He reached out to the bookcase, trying to steady himself. His hand clutched at several heavy volumes, and they clattered to the floor around him as he sank to his knees.

Alicia scripted.

Zelia replied.

‘Gabion?’

He opened his eyes and saw de Almeida kneeling beside him, a look of alarm on her face.

This can’t be happening again
, he thought. Somewhere inside him, something was seriously wrong.

The next few hours passed in a blur. Luc had a vague recollection of being lifted out of the building by the two mechants set to guard Vasili’s body. After that there had
been a journey by flier, during which he drifted in and out of consciousness.

The next time he really became aware of his surroundings, he found himself looking up at the high ceiling of a circular room that had to be at least thirty metres across. The ceiling was
decorated with highly stylized depictions of astronomical symbols and of several Tian Di worlds, all wheeling around a stone pillar at the room’s centre. An iron stairway twisted around the
pillar like a braid, rising through an aperture in the ceiling to another floor above. Bright sunlight spilled through an open doorway at the far end of the room, through which he could make out
bristling reddish-green flora. Steps nearby led down, perhaps to some basement level.

Luc sat up with a groan, supporting himself with one hand, and found he had been placed on a broad, raised slab. A small wheeled trolley, loaded with trays of sharp-looking surgical instruments,
had been placed next to him.

The rest of the room was crammed with cabinets of various shapes and sizes, and pieces of mostly unidentifiable equipment and machinery, as well as an industrial-sized fabricant that took up
nearly a third of the room. A mechant hovered by the fabricant’s control panel, suggesting it was engaged in manufacturing its own replacement components.

The rush of agony that had overwhelmed him back in Vasili’s library had now faded to little more than a faint and distant throb. He swung his legs off the slab and the room reeled around
him. Catching hold of the edge of the slab, he waited until the worst of the dizziness had passed, then lowered his feet to the ground and stood gently.

He felt too light to be back on Temur. More than likely, he was still on Vanaheim. But wherever he was, the climate was much warmer than it had been on Vasili’s island.

Something went
thump
on the far side of the room.

Luc tensed, listening, then heard the same sound again after an interval of maybe twenty seconds. It sounded like someone dropping a sack of grain onto the room’s tiled floor.

He moved with caution in the direction the sound had come from, keeping one hand out in case he took another dizzy turn. He stepped past a cabinet at the other side of the room, not far from the
exit, and found himself looking at a shaven-headed man standing facing the wall, bent-over as if studying something lying on the floor. His arms hung straight down, knuckles nearly grazing the
tiles.

‘Hello?’ Luc asked uncertainly.

No answer.

The man wore a shapeless and filthy smock that reached down to his bare feet, and stood perfectly still, as if his bones had locked into place and he could no longer stand straight.

‘Hello?’ Luc asked again. ‘Can you tell me where I am?’

No answer. Somehow he hadn’t really expected one.

He watched as the bent figure took a sudden step forward, banging his head into the wall with some force.

Despite a burgeoning sense of dread, Luc stepped closer, putting one hand on the man’s shoulder and pulling him around. Instead of eyes, grey metal ovals studded with pin-like extensions
protruded from between the man’s eyelids, while much of his lower jaw had been removed entirely and replaced with some kind of machinery with a steel grille built into the front. His flesh
was mottled and twisted where it had been fused to plastic and metal.

A moan emerged from the creature’s mouth-grille, full of terrible pain and unfathomable anguish.

Luc stumbled backwards, his heart hammering with shock. The misshapen figure turned away from him once more and resumed ramming its head against the wall.

Luc fled, running through the sunlit exit, desperate to get away from the misshapen creature. But rather than finding himself outside as he had expected, he instead found himself standing at one
end of a greenhouse filled with a stunning variety of flora. The air tasted moist and peaty.

He shaded his eyes against the sunlight streaming in through the panes overhead and saw Zelia de Almeida standing further down a narrow path. A mechant hovered by her side, a straw basket
incongruously clutched in one of its many manipulators. He watched as de Almeida took a small cutting from the branch of a tree, placing it in the basket.

The tree shivered in response, its lower branches weaving in slow patterns that somehow suggested distress. De Almeida reached out again, grasping hold of a slim branch. It tried to pull away
from her, but she had too firm a hold on it. He watched as she snipped the branch off with a small pair of secateurs.

The tree shivered more violently than before, and Zelia murmured something inaudible to the mechant. In that same moment, another faceless monstrosity, identical to the one Luc had just
encountered, appeared at the far end of the path, another straw basket clutched in its hand.

Luc watched dry-mouthed as the figure shambled along a connecting path, and out of sight.

‘Ah, there you are.’

He looked back at Zelia. She was peeling off a pair of gloves, dropping them into the mechant’s basket.

‘Where am I?’ he asked.

Zelia gestured to the mechant, and it moved down the path away from him. ‘I brought you to my home,’ she replied, stepping towards him. ‘Call me paranoid, but I didn’t
want to take a chance somebody might have interfered with you.’

She placed one hand on his shoulder and guided him back through to the circular room he had just come from.

‘Back up, please,’ she said, leading him back over to the raised slab. Her manner was brisk and business-like.

Another thump echoed from across the room, but Zelia showed no sign of even being aware of it.

‘What the hell is that thing?’ Luc demanded, unable to hide his revulsion.

‘What thing?’ asked Zelia.

‘The man with no eyes.’

She glanced behind her with mild puzzlement, then back at him. ‘Ah,’ she said, nodding. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just an experiment.’

‘An experiment,’ Luc repeated. ‘What
kind
of experiment?’

‘One that needn’t concern you,’ she replied briskly. ‘You’ll be pleased to know I’ve already treated us both for radiation damage.’

He gestured back in the direction of the eyeless thing. ‘But . . .’

She flashed him an angry look. ‘We’re not here to discuss my private research,’ she snapped. ‘I want to find out what happened to you back there at Vasili’s. How
much do you remember, from when you collapsed?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘One minute everything was fine, the next . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve never experienced anything like it.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well . . . something like it happened to me back on Temur, just after they brought me back from Aeschere.’

She nodded, as if this had been the answer she had been expecting. ‘I checked your records as soon as I had the chance, but the medicians attending to you couldn’t identify a cause
for that first seizure. Is that correct?’

He nodded.

she scripted at him, her gaze unblinking,

Luc stared at her, unsure how to respond.

A look of grim satisfaction spread across her face. did
know what we were all saying to each other back in Vasili’s library, didn’t you?>

Luc swallowed.

handle. You shouldn’t have had any idea what we were discussing amongst ourselves. Just how much did you overhear?>

Luc felt his shoulders sag. ‘Pretty much all of it,’ he said out loud.

She stared at him with frightening intensity. ‘I could have you killed. Tell me, how did you do it?’

‘I don’t know. I just . . . picked up everything. It wasn’t anything I did, it just happened.’

‘I felt sure of it, from the moment you stepped inside that miserable hovel of Sevgeny’s.’

‘You already said your security networks might have been compromised in some way,’ he reminded her. ‘Maybe that’s got something to do with it?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s not it.’

Luc made an exasperated sound. ‘Look, I have
no idea
how I could have picked up what you were all scripting to each other. I mean, I realized I wasn’t meant to at the time,
but how could I have told any of you? I was too . . .’
Too frightened.

‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But only because I’m scanning you on a number of levels right now, all of which tell me you’re not deliberately obfuscating the
truth.’

‘Okay then, so how
could
I have picked up everything you were saying?’

She raised both eyebrows. ‘That’s a question that can’t have anything but an interesting answer. For instance, would you care to tell me exactly who put an instantiation
lattice inside your skull?’

Luc gaped at her dumbly before answering. ‘No one. I don’t have any such thing.’

She smiled enigmatically. ‘Oh, but you
do
, Mr Gabion. Look.’

Images of the interior of a skull –
his
skull, he guessed – blossomed in the air around them. One showed a lump of pinkish-grey flesh encased in fine silvery lines, while
another depicted a messy tangle of pulsing blue light rendered in three dimensions, overlaid with a secondary, more orderly grid of red.

‘That,’ said Zelia, ‘is what an instantiation lattice looks like, in the very early stages of settling into its owner’s cortex –
your
cortex, to be precise.
I had my house AI remotely analyse the inside of your head as soon as I realized what you had in there. But there are differences between this and any other kind of lattice I’ve ever
seen.’

‘Differences?’

‘What you’ve got in there, unless my AIs are sorely mistaken, is more advanced than anything used even by the members of the Council, including myself. It has . . . functions I
can’t begin to decipher.’ She took a deep breath and shook her head, her eyes bright and feral. ‘The question, then, is how the hell did it get inside your head?’

Antonov.

Luc’s blood ran cold and he knew, in that instant, that everything he remembered from Aeschere was real, and not a hallucination. Antonov had done something to him: booby-trapped him in
some way, placed a ticking bomb inside his head for reasons he hadn’t bothered to explain beyond a few cryptic statements.

He shuddered to think of what might have happened to him if he’d fallen into the hands of Victor Begum or Karlmann Sandoz following his seizure in the library or – even worse –
Cripps. He might well have disappeared into some Sandoz stronghold, never to be seen again.

Not that he was necessarily any safer in de Almeida’s hands, he reminded himself. Unlike Cripps or Karlmann Sandoz, she was still an unknown quantity.

‘I swear to you, I have no idea,’ Luc replied, almost begging.

Zelia glanced towards the projections as he spoke, her lips twisting into a thin line. ‘Now you
are
lying, Mr Gabion: it’s all there in the flow of blood in your capillaries,
and the unconscious reactions of your autonomic nervous system.’ She studied him with angry eyes. ‘If you lie to me again, I’ll know straight away. Think you can get that through
your head?’