The Thousand Emperors

SIXTEEN

As soon as Jacob had dumped the old man’s body into the well, he boarded the flier hidden by Sillars, its hatch hissing softly open. Data displays bloomed around him as he slid into the pilot’s seat, while the upper part of the hull became transparent, giving him a fine view of the forest clearing and the ruins off to one side.

He had one more thing to do before departing. Taking a deep breath, he fetched Sillars’ pin-sized transceiver from a pocket, holding it delicately between thumb and forefinger and letting more data flow out of it and into his lattice.

All the worry and tension he’d felt building up, ever since he’d discovered how badly his predecessors had screwed up, finally melted away. He had everything he needed to complete his mission and return to the Tian Di in triumph.

Tipping his head back, he gazed up through the hull at the band of light and silver arcing from horizon to horizon like a bridge of light spanning the world. Then the ground began to slip away and the flier rose above the forest clearing, before accelerating towards the world-wheel like an arrow shot straight up into the air.

The sky soon faded from a greenish-blue to black as the flier’s AG drive pushed it out of Darwin’s gravity well at a continuously accelerating rate. The curve of the horizon became increasingly pronounced until the forest merged into a coastline streaked with clouds, their shadows patterning the land below. Spindly arms that looked impossibly fragile, but each of which was in actuality some kilometres in breadth, reached up from Darwin’s equator to support the world-wheel.

Jacob had time to review the information provided by Sillars and to make sure it matched mission expectations. Once he had recovered the Founder artefact that was his mission goal from a secure facility aboard the world-wheel, his next task would be to make his way through the recently activated Darwin–Temur gate. According to encrypted updates recently received by Sillars’ transceiver, the only people as yet allowed to pass through it were special envoys from either culture, but subtle hacks on the Temur side of the gate would cause Jacob to be identified as one such envoy making a scheduled return trip to the Tian Di. The fact that he would be departing Darwin without having ever officially arrived there was unlikely to be discovered by the Coalition authorities until it was much, much too late.

He passed the time piecing together the modular beam-weapon Sillars had left behind for his use, fitting the last component into place and studying the resultant device with an enthusiast’s eye. Next came the wave-scramblers, grenade-like things that would – if Sillars had done his homework – induce seizures in Darwin’s global datanets, as well as disrupting communications up and down the world-wheel. He supplemented these with additional subterfuge devices and weapons from the case Kulic had been so curious about.

Lastly he checked his suit’s integrated systems, making sure they were all fully functional. He’d already checked and rechecked those same systems many times since his arrival on Darwin, but he did it one more time anyway.

The world-wheel grew from a thin line of silver to a mottled band of grey and white, studded with countless brightly glowing lights. The flier soon merged into the local traffic, most of it unmanned and flying within a dozen kilometres of the wheel’s inner surface as it moved from destination to destination. Jacob caught sight of zero-gee parks and urban centres embedded in the inner rim. His sense of anticipation grew, and he practised the breathing and meditation exercises he had been taught when young.

The minutes and seconds drew out interminably until the flier finally dropped its velocity almost to zero relative to the world-wheel. He waited until the local systems had accepted Jacob’s faked authorization, then set the flier to dock automatically.

Activating his suit’s defensive systems, he disembarked into a wide, deserted boulevard within the world-wheel’s outer shell. Sillars’ research had shown this part of the world-wheel to be deserted, and it appeared to still be so.

Abandoned or not, Jacob knew there was no way to predict just how long it might take the local security networks to reroute themselves around the aggressive countermeasures his suit was already broadcasting. After that, he would have to think on his feet.

As it turned out, the security networks recovered in less than a minute. Jacob had been hoping he might have rather more time than this, but his training had taught him the value of adaptability.

Within seconds, a mechant more astonishingly complex than any he had ever encountered before, even on the killing fields of Benares, appeared from an aperture in the ceiling and came rushing towards him. He took it out with a single shot from his beam weapon, and watched it shatter into a thousand white-hot fragments.

He walked briskly onwards, his suit informing him he was close to the physical location of a junction connecting together several local data-hubs. Pausing just long enough to break open a circuit-panel set into the wall of the boulevard and insert a wave-scrambler, he then continued along the boulevard. The scrambler rapidly integrated with the dedicated networks responsible for coordinating data traffic in this part of the world-wheel, spreading chaos.

Jacob had taken no more than a couple of paces before the lights lining the boulevard began to flicker spasmodically, then faded altogether. Another few seconds passed before aged emergency circuits kicked in. Vermilion emergency lights embedded in the floor of the boulevard and integrated into the walls now illuminated the way, lending a claustrophobic quality to his surroundings.

Less than thirty seconds after Jacob had placed the scrambler, emergency evacuation alerts began forming in the air up and down the boulevard, rippling softly as he passed through them. AI systems for a hundred kilometres in either direction proceeded to spontaneously reboot, only to be issued with new algorithms provided by the scrambler.

The effect could only be temporary; according to Sillars, Coalition technology was astonishingly flexible when faced with the unexpected. He had nonetheless discovered that a very few parts of the world-wheel, such as this one, had not been improved or upgraded to any significant degree in centuries.

In truth, much of Darwin’s world-wheel had become a relative backwater, the majority of the action having long since moved into the frozen depths of the outer system and the dark masses scattered throughout the Oort cloud. The wheel had been reduced to the status of a dusty attic, into which unwanted possessions could be thrown against the day when they might – just might – be needed.

It was a vulnerability waiting to be exploited. And in order to maximize that vulnerability, it was necessary to cause the greatest damage possible.

After another minute, just as Jacob approached a door that marked the end of the boulevard, gyroscopic motors designed to coordinate and balance this segment of the world-wheel proceeded to power down for the first time ever.

Jacob felt a faint but distinct tremor running through the floor of the boulevard. His lattice informed him that within the hour, oscillations normally dampened by the gyroscopic systems would destabilize this part of the world-wheel, and ultimately tear it apart if drastic countermeasures were not taken by Darwin’s authorities.

The door slid shut at Jacob’s approach, barring his way. He stopped to contemplate his next step. Things had been going almost too well up until this point.

He sensed, rather than saw, defensive mechants emerging from slots in the walls of the boulevard behind him.

He turned to face them. To call them mechants, he decided, was to do them slim justice. They constantly reshaped themselves with an organic fluidity he had never witnessed before as they bulleted towards him.

Jacob felt subjective time slowing down as his lattice took full control of his body. He swept his hands outward, causing microscopic darts tipped with infinitesimal quantities of antimatter to erupt from his gloves, fanning outwards and tearing the mechants apart in a blaze of destruction that would have blinded him if he hadn’t immediately rolled into a ball and covered his eyes. His suit became as rigid as steel, protecting him as the force of the blasts picked him up and smashed him against the wall of the boulevard.

When he looked back up, the blasts had wrecked much of the boulevard and shattered the doorway that had previously been barred to him. There was little left of the mechants beyond some fragments of white-hot metal.

Jacob stood with care, testing his muscles and bones and finding he had suffered a few minor fractures. Under the circumstances, he could count himself lucky.

Flexing his hands, he continued on through the doorway, stepping around a corner – only to find himself face-to-face with something from his deepest nightmares. Its features flowed like mercury, jaws distending as it reached out for him with a thousand spiny fingers.

He recognized it as another defensive procedure, albeit immensely more sophisticated than any of those he had so far overcome: the monster wasn’t real, but was instead a virtual rendition of deadly software countermeasures designed to burn the lattice in his skull and render him mindless in moments.

The passageway in which Jacob had been standing disappeared, and he plummeted down an abyssal well that reminded him uncomfortably of the fate to which he had assigned Kulic. The monster was there, swimming through the air towards him.

He reached out both hands, brightly glowing katanas emerging from his fists, and slashed out at the monster’s throat. It died screaming, its corpse disintegrating into a jumble of subroutines and hopelessly scrambled cognitive algorithms.

As suddenly as it had vanished, Jacob found himself back in the passageway, hands clenching swords that were no longer there.

The emergency lights flickered, then momentarily brightened before fading altogether, leaving Jacob in pitch darkness. The artificial lenses in his eyes compensated immediately, rendering the corridor in pale and ghostly shades.

He stood straight and flexed his hands before advancing, his suit feeding him a message that it had fought off a counter-attack by the local security networks. There was no need to worry about any further countermeasures – at least, not for another few minutes.

A final door opened at his approach with a satisfying rumble. He stepped inside and found himself within a vault crammed full of Founder artefacts, either suspended within slow-time fields or flickering in and out of shadow-parallels; empty universes into which they could be permanently banished should they somehow be accidentally activated.

It took Jacob moments to locate the quantum disruptor he had been sent to retrieve: a dark, fan-shaped thing no more than a few inches in width, and somehow difficult to look at directly. The disruptor was held within its own slow-time field that, in turn, was contained within a kind of barred metal container, scarcely larger than one of Jacob’s fists.

He picked the container up and placed it in a zipped pocket of his combat suit, before jogging back down the silent and devastated boulevard, every piece of sub-molecular circuitry for kilometres around by now scrambled beyond repair.