The Thousand Emperors

asked Luc, but by then the flier was re-entering Vanaheim’s atmosphere, rendering any further communications impossible for at least the next few minutes.

Luc gasped as rough hands yanked the breathing mask from his face. The impact gel had congealed into a thick translucent sludge around his feet shortly after the flier had landed safely by Zelia’s domed laboratory.

Harsh sunlight cut through the flier’s open hatch. He felt hands take hold of him, pulling him out from his seat restraints. He collapsed onto grass, half-blinded by the light, and heard the distant hiss of the sea.

Looking up, he discovered he was surrounded by several of Zelia’s machine-men. For one terrible moment he thought perhaps Zelia had sent them to kill him, but they kept their distance as he staggered to his feet, gel still dripping from his clothes.

One of the creatures gestured towards Zelia’s laboratory, a short walk away, a faint buzzing emerging from the grille where its mouth should have been. Luc nodded warily, then watched the creatures shuffle out of his way as he stepped forward.

Part of the building housing Zelia’s laboratory had caved in, while the twisted wreckage of a Sandoz mechant lay nearby. Burned, ragged shapes scattered around the surrounding land were recognizable as fallen soldiers in Zelia’s army of machine-men. Dark smoke rose from the mansion next door, the wind carrying an acrid smell of ashes down to the sea.

He found Zelia inside the laboratory, wearing a bloodied smock and perched on the edge of a chunk of masonry that had smashed a work table, having fallen from the ceiling, wrecking the room’s carefully-wrought astronomical mural.

She was not alone. At least a dozen other men and women stood or sat where they could amidst the scattered laboratory equipment, all turning to stare at Luc with varying degrees of suspicion as he entered from the greenhouse. A few of them looked as if they had been through their own trials: one had a heavily bandaged arm, while another appeared to have suffered serious burns to one side of her face. He ignored them all, focusing his attention on Zelia as he stepped over to her.

‘Who is he?’ one of the others shouted. ‘He’s not a member of the Council!’

‘Mr Gabion is working for me,’ said Zelia, without looking around. ‘He found the evidence that Cheng is responsible not only for Sevgeny Vasili’s assassination, but that of Ariadna Placet before him.’

‘That doesn’t mean he should be here,’ said another voice. ‘Send him away, Zelia.’

She glanced around them all with an irritated expression. ‘I brought you all here so we’d have some chance at salvaging something from this mess,’ Zelia shouted, ‘not so you could dictate terms to me. Gabion being here is my choice, not yours.’

‘Who are all these people?’ Luc asked her quietly.

She slid down from the chunk of masonry. ‘Members of the Council who’ve made the mistake of opposing Cheng in any number of ways. He’s accused us all of being Black Lotus sympathizers and ordered our arrests.’

‘But why bring them here?’ he demanded. ‘Surely you’re making it easy for Cheng to kill or capture you all at once?’

‘There is strength in numbers, Mr Gabion.’ She nodded towards the steps leading down to the basement. ‘There’s something I need you to see.’

‘What you did to Cripps was wrong, Zelia,’ said another voice from the crowd. ‘You should have waited to speak to the rest of us before electing yourself judge and jury.’

Luc gazed around until he saw who had spoken: a dignified-looking man wearing a dark suit, his steely-grey hair cut close to the scalp. A few other heads nodded or muttered their agreement.

‘I made a necessary decision,’ Zelia snapped, her voice full of wounded anger, ‘while the rest of you sat around with your thumbs up your fucking asses. Where the hell were you, Ben,’ she said to the man in the dark suit, ‘when Cripps was trying to hunt me down like a dog?’

Luc grabbed hold of Zelia’s arm. ‘How much else have you told them?’

‘Told us what?’ asked Ben.

‘That Cheng’s been sending Sandoz reconnaissance teams through a secret gate leading into the Founder Network,’ Luc replied.

‘I already told them,’ Zelia grated. ‘They know what Cheng had planned for Benares as well.’

‘But do they know that the Coalition are about to start a war with us because Cheng refused to pull his teams back out from the Network?’

That shut them up, he thought with satisfaction, as they all stared at him in stunned silence.

‘How do you know this?’ demanded Ben. ‘And why would the Coalition want to start a war?’

‘I know because I just got back from a meeting with Ambassador Sachs,’ Luc explained. ‘He told me the whole story. It seems the Coalition came under attack from an alien race they encountered inside the Founder Network not long after the Schism, and they only barely survived the encounter. Several of Cheng’s reconnaissance teams have disappeared without trace inside the part of the network they’ve been exploring, and Sachs believes the same creatures that attacked the Coalition are responsible. It’s my understanding that if those aliens found their way back here through Cheng’s secret transfer gate in the Thorne system, they could spread through this part of the Milky Way and kill everything they encounter.’

Their expressions ranged from frankly disbelieving to utterly terrified. ‘Once the Coalition realized there were Sandoz exploring the Network,’ he continued, ‘they entered into secret negotiations to try and persuade Father Cheng to stop. But the talks broke down, and unless you can find some way in the next twelve hours to persuade Cheng to stand down, or else pull his Sandoz teams back out of the Network, we’re going to come under attack from Coalition forces far in advance of anything we could possibly throw back at them.’

Somebody laughed, the sound low and derisive, and Luc turned to see it came from a dark-skinned woman, her hair cropped close to her skull, sitting with her back to a wall. ‘That’s quite some story,’ she said, ‘and you honestly believed one word of this?’

‘You heard what Cripps confessed to Zelia!’ someone else yelled. ‘What Gabion says fits in with everything else he said.’

Within moments the air was filled with a hubbub of conflicting voices.

‘Come on,’ said Zelia, stepping up beside Luc and leading him by the arm towards the stairwell. ‘I told you there’s something you need to see.’

‘Don’t let her take you down there,’ someone called after them with a mocking tone, ‘or you might never come back!’

Luc followed her down into the same stone corridor he had since revisited only in his nightmares. The passageway was as dark and dank as he remembered, the same rusting junk still piled in alcoves, the same thudding of distant machinery reverberating through walls and sending faint tremors through the floor. Zelia led him towards the steel trestle tables lined up neatly in a row where the corridor widened. As before, a few mechants and one of her machine-men stood around a single, supine form laid out on one of the tables.

Luc knew immediately it was Cripps, despite what had been done to him. In the few short hours since he’d last seen her, Zelia had found some way not only to capture Cheng’s right-hand man, but also begin the process of butchering his living body. Parts of his skull had been cut away, exposing the living brain matter beneath, while a nest of wires and sensors were now plugged into the raw flesh. Cripps’ lower jaw had been removed, the mechants hovering over him engaged in the process of securing machinery in its place.

The worst thing of all was when his eyes glanced towards Luc. Cripps was not only conscious, but also clearly aware of everything that was happening to him. He stared at Luc with maddened, pleading eyes.

Luc turned away from the sight, sick to his stomach. ‘What the hell have you done to him?’ he gasped.

Zelia regarded him with an expression of faint amusement. ‘You don’t actually feel sorry for him, do you?’ she asked. ‘He’s the one who caused all this, or carried out the orders, at the very least.’

Luc shook his head. ‘How . . . ?’

‘How did I find him?’ She let out a bark of laughter. ‘I know Cripps well enough to know just where to look, after all these years.’

‘Does he know what’s happening to him?’

‘Of course he does. There’s no point punishing someone unless they know they’re being punished, and what for,’ she remarked, her voice edging towards shrill. ‘Please don’t feel pity for him, Luc: he’s a miserable, sadistic little shit, and there’s a long queue of people who’d be very envious to know I’m the one who got to him first.’

‘Including the people upstairs?’ Luc asked. ‘How do they feel about . . . about this?’

Her nostrils flared. ‘They care about what’s important, such as Cripps’ full and frank confession to his part in Father Cheng’s crimes. This is no time for half-measures, don’t you understand that?’

Luc glanced back at Cripps just as the eyeless creature attending to him carefully snipped off one of his fingers, just above the knuckle. Cripps’ eyes grew wide with pain and shock, and a rattling sound emerged from the grille that had now been secured over the lower half of his face. The creature next to him then fitted some form of needle-tipped device over the raw stump where the finger had been.

Luc turned away and just about managed to resist the urge to throw up again.

‘Maybe you’re not as strong as I thought,’ mused Zelia, watching the surgery with keen attention.

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

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

‘And?’

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

‘And Cripps told you all this?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A what?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You make it sound hopeless. Is it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What the hell happened?’ Luc demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop, thought Luc, focusing on the approaching mechants.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Can we get away from them?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t understand.’

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

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

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

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