The Thousand Emperors

NINETEEN

The flier juddered as it accelerated upwards, soon rising above a sea of clouds that dwindled beneath it. Luc closed his eyes and let his head sink back against his seat before letting out a rush of shaky breath.

I should have realized Zelia might turn on me.

But then again, Zelia had been right about one thing: he would never have got past Vasili’s house mechants without her help, even if the only reason she had done so was in order to betray him.

Pulling Vasili’s book out of the netting where he had secured it, he weighed it in his hands before opening it, placing his fingers against its cool, faintly metallic pages.

He sat still for several seconds, his breath gradually evening out. Navigating the memories and other information encoded within the book was far from intuitive. He had flashes once more of Vasili’s last moments before his death, including, he noted with grim satisfaction, a glimpse of Cripps’ own face as he entered Vasili’s home. But he could sense other information buried in the pages, in essence almost indistinguishable from his own half-remembered thoughts . . .

He let go of the book with a gasp, blinking and shaking his head, and then laughed. He had them: the coordinates of Father Cheng’s secret data-cache, hidden in orbit above Vanaheim.

All he had to do now was feed them into the navigational systems via his lattice, and the flier would take him there immediately.

The cache might as easily have been hidden somewhere far more inaccessible, such as the Red Palace back in Liebenau. In that case, Luc would have been forced to admit defeat. But to keep it so close to home would, he suspected, have invited a greater risk of discovery. Whereas if Vanaheim’s orbital space was as clogged with junk as Maxwell had claimed, there probably wasn’t a better place for Eighty-Fivers to hide their dirty laundry.

The same light that Zelia had used to make contact with him following his escape from Maxwell’s prison began flashing once more. Luc stared at it for a few moments, then ignored it, setting the flier on a new course.

Before long, he was on his way to high orbit.

An hour or so later, the flier’s external sensors gave Luc a view of what at first appeared to be a zero-gee junkyard. Much of what he could see had been jury-rigged from discarded fuel tanks and temporary accommodations, and looked it. But a query to the station’s datanet – unexpectedly still functioning – reassured him that although it was entirely abandoned, having apparently served for some decades as a kind of orbital storage depot, it was still pressurized. At least he wouldn’t have to suit up.

The flier thumped gently against the station’s one airlock, followed by a rumbling hiss on the other side of the hatch. The hatch unfolded a moment later, revealing a claustrophobically narrow metal passageway. Long-dormant emergency lights flickered into life, tinting the interior of the station with a soft red glow.

Luc made his way along the passageway, propelling himself along with his fingertips in the zero gravity, until he found himself inside something that looked like it had started life as a cargo flier. The interior of the flier had been stripped and converted into a makeshift storage depot; he could see a few dozen plastic crates still lashed to a bulkhead to prevent them from floating away, while an ancient-looking fabricant was mounted on a wall, printed machine-parts still stacked on a plastic pallet beside it. Three more passageways radiated outwards from this central point, giving access to the pressurized fuel tanks that constituted much of the station’s bulk.

Luc carefully picked his way over to the lashed-together crates and pulled himself into a sitting position next to one. Unzipping his jacket, he again withdrew the book Maxwell had given Vasili, slipped one arm through a cable securing one of the crates, and then shook the book open, placing it on his lap before opening it carefully and touching the revealed page.

Vasili hit the auto-mechanism for the airlock and listened to the distant hiss of air as the ancient satellite re-pressurized for the first time in years. He made his way down a narrow passageway, before emerging into a makeshift bay.

Here, he studied his surroundings with an engineer’s eyes. The station had been designed to be nothing more than a temporary structure, a pressurized orbital dock where mechants could store materials for later use. After that, the station should have been disassembled and destroyed.

But in this case, the station had remained intact. It had even been carefully maintained, though you couldn’t tell from the outside. If it had been truly abandoned, Vasili knew, it would long since have fallen out of orbit and plunged into Vanaheim’s atmosphere.

He moved deeper into the station until he came to a maintenance port, a cramped alcove tucked away at the far end of a branching passageway, where an interface panel newer and considerably more up to date than anything else aboard the station could be accessed. Pulling himself into a narrow seat, he touched a hand to a virtual panel.

Verification took just a moment, and he was in.

Luc opened his eyes and pulled himself loose from the cable. It took him just a minute or so to make his way down the same branching passageway and pull himself into the same alcove Vasili had found.

A virtual panel shimmered into existence the moment he sat down. It didn’t look like anything much out of the ordinary, little more than a standard interface for the station’s AI systems. But then, Cheng would hardly have gone out of his way to advertise the presence of his secret data-cache.

Screw it.

Luc reached out and touched the panel. In response, something slid out from the alcove next to his right hand, a metal bar that had also appeared when Vasili had been here before him.

Luc next reached out and gripped the bar. The metal was cold to the touch. His fingers tingled slightly with the contact, and he guessed the bar operated on the same principles as the lattice-enabled circuitry embedded in Maxwell’s books.

A sudden burst of data washed over him, and it didn’t take much navigating to realize the station was, indeed, one of the many secret repositories in which the Temur Council maintained copies of their backups. There were undoubtedly other such repositories scattered all across Vanaheim and in orbit.

He was only peripherally aware of the station around him, its bulkheads creaking softly, as he navigated further through a blizzard of data, centuries-worth of instantiation backups and dirty little secrets.

Wait. There was something there, tugging at his awareness. He focused on it, and . . .

All of a sudden, something enormous landed inside Luc’s skull.

It started as a feeling of pressure building inside his head, then a flurry of names and places and experiences. His body began to shake, his teeth clattering together, but he couldn’t prise his hand away from the metal bar.

Lines of fire criss-crossed his skull, forming a cage around the tender flesh of his brain. The cage grew rapidly smaller, sending him into paroxysms of pain.

Cheng booby-trapped the cache.

Luc convulsed, his head banging off one wall of the alcove, and yet his hand remained locked to the metal bar.

Some part of him dimly realized then that it wasn’t a booby-trap, but another seizure, triggered by the thunderous tide of information now flowing into his overwhelmed mind.

The pain became overwhelming, unbearable. He tried to scream, the sound dying in his throat and emerging instead as a thin rattle. The station’s bulkheads continued to creak around him like an old man laughing asthmatically.

Fire raged through his skull. His back arched and he convulsed with sufficient force that his hand was finally twisted free of the metal bar, sending him tumbling in the zero gravity like a discarded rag doll.

The pain gradually began to recede. Luc curled into a ball, pale and shivering, and waited until the worst was over. After that he dragged himself back through to the central hub, where he collapsed, too weak to move any further.

Losing all sense of time, he swam in and out of consciousness, and only barely registered a dull clang, followed by the hiss of an airlock.

A figure loomed into sight over Luc as he lay shivering by the pallet of crates. ‘Lucky I came looking for you,’ said Zelia, kneeling down so he could see her face.

A while later, Luc sat on a stool bolted to the floor of a utilitarian-looking living space in another part of the station, nursing what felt like the mother of all hangovers. A desk, sink, and a small cubby-hole for personal possessions were arranged around him with the easy disregard for conventional notions of up or down typical of every space habitat Luc had ever been in. The mechant Zelia had used to carry him from the hub waited by the entrance.

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Luc, his voice still weak. ‘First you try to kill me, then you come here and save my life.’

She shook her head. ‘I wasn’t trying to kill you, Luc. I just wanted to know what it was you were trying to find that was so important.’

‘And having that thing take a swing at my head wasn’t trying to kill me?’

She looked genuinely embarrassed. ‘I just wanted it to take that book from you.’ She glanced down at it, now tucked under one of her arms. ‘I don’t like having things kept from me, Luc. You were breaking the terms of our arrangement.’

Luc wanted to laugh, but it still hurt too much. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘it isn’t going to be much use to you. You couldn’t possibly access the data hidden inside it without Maxwell’s decryption key, and that died with him.’

Her face coloured slightly. ‘Then what the hell use was it to you?’

He tapped the side of his head. ‘Apparently I have an unfair advantage in that regard. I don’t need a key.’

‘I know what you’ve got lodged inside your skull gives you an edge, but don’t make the mistake of underestimating me.’

‘At least promise me you’re not going to try to beat me to death a second time.’

‘Look – maybe I overreacted, back there.’

This time, he did manage to laugh.

‘It’s just that when you flew off like that,’ she said, ‘headed for Vasili’s, I felt like I was losing control of the situation.’

Losing control of me, you mean. ‘You’ve managed to hang on to Vanaheim’s security networks?’ he asked.

She smiled triumphantly. ‘Of course. Otherwise I would never have been able to track you here.’

‘What about Cheng or Cripps or any of the rest of them? Will they know we’ve been here?’

‘Only if they manage to grab control of the networks from me again. Things are moving fast, Luc. Javier Maxwell’s murder was only the beginning. Now Cheng’s claiming Black Lotus have penetrated the Council itself, starting with me. People are starting to take sides.’

‘Sounds like a war’s going on down there.’

‘A war is pretty much what it is,’ she agreed. ‘But if I lose control of the networks again, we’ll also lose most of our advantage.’ She flipped the half-burned book open and flicked through its pages. ‘What exactly was in here that turned out to be so important?’

He realized, having found what he’d come looking for, there was little point in hiding things from her any more. ‘Coordinates,’ he explained, ‘for this station.’ He glanced around. ‘And Vasili’s last memories from just before he died.’

She stared at him. ‘How . . . ?’

He told her what he had learned so far from Maxwell’s books. She listened, hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

Nausea gripped him as he finished. Trying to push himself up from the stool, he saw the cabin tumble around him.

‘Easy,’ said Zelia, grabbing hold of him.

He let her guide him towards a wall-recess by the sink that contained a thin plastic mattress, which she pushed him down onto.

‘Your nervous system must have suffered one hell of a shock,’ she said, looking down at him.

‘It’s not safe here,’ he mumbled.

‘If anyone’s on the way to this station,’ she assured him, ‘I’ll know a long time before they arrive, don’t you worry. Right now this is probably safer than a lot of places on Vanaheim.’

He lay back against the mattress, pulling an elbow over his face. ‘The data-cache hidden on this station. Have you accessed it yet?’

‘Not yet, no. You?’

‘Yes, just in the last moments before the seizure hit.’

‘Where is it?’

He told her where she could find the access terminal. She disappeared, her mechant trailing after her, then came back several minutes later, her expression troubled.

‘I don’t know just what happened after you got here,’ she said, ‘but if there was ever any data there, it’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ he asked, looking up at her. ‘How is that possible?’

‘The backups were probably set to self-delete if they were accessed by anyone the systems didn’t recognize. Anything else would have been deleted right along with them.’

‘And that’s why it didn’t wipe itself when Vasili was here?’

She nodded. ‘He had all the access privileges of an Eighty-Fiver, and you didn’t, protocols or not.’

Luc nodded, and realized he was feeling better than he had just moments before. Moving cautiously, he pulled himself upright, and found that most of the dizziness and nausea had now been replaced by a deep thirst and hunger.

Zelia watched as he pulled himself out of the alcove, hunting through several drawers until he found some protein bars that were probably long, long past the point where they were still edible. He ate them anyway.

‘So tell me then,’ Zelia asked as he tore the bars apart and shovelled them into his mouth, ‘did you manage to get anything at all from the cache?’

He nodded wearily. ‘I did. Why, what’s the plan? I tell you everything I know, and then you kill me?’

To his surprise, she looked hurt. ‘You talk about me like I’m a monster. Part of a man I once loved is still alive inside you.’

He stared at her. ‘You and Antonov? But you were never . . .’

But then he realized how wrong he was. She was there, in Antonov’s memories, rising to the surface of his own thoughts as if he had always known. It felt like walking into a house he’d always lived in, and finding a room he never knew existed.

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

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

‘I think maybe I suspected,’ he said.

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

‘I had no idea.’

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

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

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

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

‘And he still . . . speaks to you?’

‘Sometimes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Wait,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t move.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What?’

‘He forgave me.’

He felt her tears dampen his chest.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Everything’s different now, Zelia.’

‘Different how?’

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

‘So you did get something from it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What else did you find?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t meet his eyes.

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

‘In what way?’

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

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

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

‘But where is this Founder Network gate?’

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

Her face grew fractionally paler. ‘Go on.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What?’

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

‘Meaning, Antonov found out about it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What? How could you—’

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

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

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

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

‘It was about Antonov.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t be.’

‘Look,’ she said, ‘maybe you should stay up here on this station until it’s all over. There’s air, and even if there’s not enough food, I can send another flier with supplies up to you. At least until all the fighting is over.’

‘No, Zelia. I’m not going to let you cut me out of the picture again.’

Her face coloured. ‘Damn it, Luc, don’t you understand? This isn’t your war any more. Whatever Cheng or Cripps have done, you still serve the Council, and that includes me. Wait here until it’s safe for you to pass through the Hall of Gates, then let me and the rest of the Council take care of this.’

‘And once I’m home, what do I do?’ he asked her, ‘wait until I die from another seizure?’

‘I told you already I’d help you—’

‘No,’ he reminded her, ‘you said you’d try and help me, but I don’t think you have any idea what you’re doing. Antonov told me Ambassador Sachs has some way to save both of us. I’m going to find the Ambassador and tell him everything I just told you, and maybe this time he will help me.’

De Almeida looked more tired than angry when she next spoke. ‘Damn you, Gabion—’

He stared at her adamantly. Her nostrils flared, and for a moment he thought she might do something, perhaps attack him or hit him or, worse, order her mechant to do it for her. But in the next moment something changed in her demeanour, as if all the fight had gone out of her. For a moment, she looked all of her many, many years.

‘Then go find Sachs, if you must,’ she said, her tone weary. ‘Do you even know where to look?’

Luc checked. ‘If things are as bad as you say they are down there, I’m going to guess he’s probably back on the Sequoia. And you?’

‘I’ll take a look at the list of Tian Di envoys who’ve travelled back through the transfer gate from Darwin. It’s possible one of them could have brought something back they weren’t supposed to.’

‘What happened to you, Zelia?’ Luc asked her. ‘You, and the rest of the Council. What went wrong?’

‘Hang around a couple more centuries,’ she said, ‘and you can answer the question yourself.’

Luc turned away from her then, making his way back through the station to the flier that had brought him there.