The Thousand Emperors

TWENTY-TWO

The landscape below them curved in on itself as the flier carrying Luc and Zelia boosted upwards and into low orbit, the sky darkening and becoming filled with stars. They saw brief flashes of light, like lightning, from somewhere over the horizon.

‘I’m guessing the fighting turned nuclear,’ Zelia said quietly from beside him when he turned to look at her. She studied the console. ‘No direct hits on any major targets yet, but only because there are still enough functioning countermeasures to take out the missiles before they reach their targets.’

‘How many dead?’

‘Hard to say,’ said Zelia, pressed up close beside him in the tiny cramped cockpit. ‘A hundred, maybe more. The majority of the dead were on our side, I’m afraid to say.’

A hundred, maybe more. More deaths within a few hours than had occurred amongst the Temur Council in centuries.

‘You’re planning something, aren’t you?’ she asked quietly.

He regarded her. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Centuries of observational politics,’ she replied. ‘That, and the fact of what you did to that mechant in my laboratory, not to mention an entire Sandoz weapons platform.’

‘Just before I left the Sequoia,’ Luc explained, ‘Sachs did something remotely to my lattice. He said he’d optimized it.’

‘“Optimized”?’

‘He said I wasn’t using its full potential.’ He glanced at her. ‘It’s also how I know where the stolen artefact is.’

She turned away from him, looking unsettled. ‘I just hope whatever it is you’re planning is good, because we’re going to need nothing short of a miracle if we’re going to get out of this alive.’

A sombre silence settled over them, and Luc distracted himself by keeping an eye on the flier’s screens. He didn’t want to tell her that survival wasn’t part of his plan; he’d given up any hope of surviving Antonov’s lattice some time ago.

‘I’ll tell you what, though,’ said Zelia, suddenly. ‘If, by some fucking miracle, I actually get out of this alive, I’m going to go a long, long way away and never come back.’

He glanced at her. ‘Where would you go?’

She waved a hand towards the cockpit’s ceiling. ‘Out there, somewhere. With the right instantiation equipment and a growth-tank for clone bodies, I could extend my lifespan to thousands of years, maybe even longer. I’d travel out into the galaxy and see what I could find.’

‘You mean you’d travel through the Founder Network?’

She gave him a bemused look. ‘No, I’d build a ship, one that could take me out amongst the stars as close to the speed of light as I could push it. The Founder Network is a trap.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m not saying it was intentionally built for that purpose, but I have a theory that once a species finds its way inside the Network, they either stumble across something that wipes them out, or they . . . they lose themselves inside it.’

‘How?’

‘Think about it. How big is the Network, really? Some of the earliest expeditions into it travelled as far as a hundred trillion years into the future. That’s an unimaginable length of time. Think of what might happen to a civilization with access to the Founder Network over thousands of years, and not just centuries, like the Coalition. I wouldn’t give it more than a couple of millennia at the outside before civilizations become sufficiently fragmented as they spread through the Network that they wind up forgetting where they came from. Plus, it explains the Fermi Paradox.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s a question that used to get posed before they discovered how to build transfer gates,’ she explained. ‘If you make the assumption that there must be intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe, and if you also assume it’s inclined to spread out through space as we have, then why didn’t our ancestors on Earth ever encounter them?’

‘If there are aliens, then why aren’t they here?’

‘That’s it exactly. But what we know now is that the Founder Network’s been in existence for billions of years, apparently vacuuming up every intelligent race that comes across an entrance to it. That’s why we never encountered living aliens before – because they discovered the Network first.’

‘What does that have to do with not wanting to take a shortcut through the Network?’

‘There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, Luc, with God knows how many intelligent civilizations out there who never had either the luck or the misfortune to stumble across the Network. None of us have any idea just what’s out there, because as soon as we discovered a way inside the Network’ – and here, she put a hand out in front of her chest, palm forward – ‘we more or less came to a dead stop as far as the rest of the universe was concerned.’

‘I guess it makes sense when you put it that way.’ The flier was already tilting nose-up as it dropped out of orbit, shaking as it hit the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Luc glanced at a screen and saw it would not be long before they reached Liebenau. The stars were fading from sight once more, and before long they were racing towards the rising sun, the terrain beneath them becoming increasingly mountainous the lower they dropped. Vast swathes of green and blue to the south marked the confluence of several rivers on their long journey to the coast.

In less than half an hour, they’d be at the Red Palace.

‘Is there still fighting going on?’ he asked Zelia.

‘Some,’ she replied. ‘But most of the strikes I know about came from Sandoz ships in orbit, aimed at fabricant complexes.’

‘Why them?’

‘The fabrication systems here on Vanaheim are built for large-scale industrial construction. It’s how we build our homes, but it’s not that hard, if you know how, to retool them to manufacture weapons.’

‘And that’s what your friends have been doing?’

She nodded. ‘The Sandoz are attacking fabrication plants fairly indiscriminately. Pretty much anything, really, that could be used to resist them.’

Another bright flare of light erupted from just over the horizon and the flier began to drop, losing altitude fast. The light grew in intensity, the flier responding by darkening the transparent sections of the hull until they were entirely opaque.

Screens and virtual panels flashed red all around them. One screen showed a swathe of green jungle rushing up towards them at a furious rate, and Luc swore under his breath when the flier suddenly levelled out, flying low over the treetops. The flier’s AI announced critical damage to its hull.

‘That was bad,’ said Zelia, her voice high and tight. ‘We got broadsided by an A-M missile. It was six kilometres from us when it detonated. Any closer, and neither of us would be here.’

Luc checked the view to their rear and saw a column of smoke rising up into a mushroom high above the landscape. He pulled his eyes away from the screen, heart palpitating.

The jungle gave way to level grasslands, and the flier dropped lower until it was barely skimming above the ground, rushing over shimmering oxbow lakes and gaining height only when it encountered patches of forest.

Luc saw they were headed for a series of rounded hills to the north, stretching across the horizon. The upper parts of several pale and shimmering towers could be seen rising from beyond the hills: Liebenau.

Zelia half-mumbled a series of commands, the fingers of her right hand twitching as she focused on a screen immediately to one side of her. The hull began to de-opaque, making it easier to see their surroundings.

The flier banked hard, following the course of a river. Incandescent beams of light split the sky a moment before a ball of light, as bright as the midday sun, bloomed far overhead. The flier’s skin opaqued immediately in response.

‘That was a strike in near-orbit,’ Zelia announced tersely. ‘Doesn’t matter. We’re here.’

The flier rose again, barely skimming over the crest of a hill before suddenly dipping down again as it entered a valley on the far side. Luc saw Liebenau, via the flier’s external sensors, stretched out before them in all its glistening diversity. A forest fire raged in woodlands lying east of the settlement, sending up a colossal column of smoke that curled in on itself as it rose.

The majority of the settlement appeared to have escaped the fighting unscathed, although a few buildings on the outskirts of the settlement appeared to be burning. A long section of the wall surrounding the Red Palace looked like it had been partly demolished, judging by what he could see, and the thick haze of dust in the air around it.

A haze of fast-moving dots swarmed around the rooftops within the Palace’s walls, like bees around a hive. Mechants, apparently still locked in battle. Clearly the fight wasn’t quite over yet.

The external feeds cut off, blocking their view of the settlement for several seconds before they returned. Luc felt his gorge rise as the flier span, like a ballerina performing a pirouette.

‘That was a direct hit,’ shouted Zelia. ‘I’m putting us down before we get shot down. So whatever it is you’ve got in mind, now would be a really fucking good time to tell me!’

‘First, we need to find the artefact,’ Luc replied, pulling up an aerial map of the Red Palace and displaying it where Zelia could also see it. ‘There,’ he said, pointing to an L-shaped building not far from a gate set into the west-facing outer wall.

She glanced at him. ‘You’re sure that’s where it is?’

‘I could find my way to it blindfolded, believe me. It’s right there. Is there any way someone can target that building, and take it out from a distance?’

‘If I can figure out just who’s leading the assault on Liebenau,’ she replied, ‘maybe I can get them to—’

A sledgehammer came crashing into Luc’s skull.

He blinked, seeing a sky stained with smoke trails. Somehow, he was outside.

He realized Zelia was hauling on his arm, swearing and shouting at him. Smelling something burning, he took a breath, and choked on something clogging his throat.

Pulling free of her grasp, he rolled onto all fours as he hacked and coughed. His lungs felt like they were filled with burning embers.

‘Come on,’ Zelia screamed at him, reaching down and grabbing hold of his shoulder.

Luc stared up at her through watery eyes, seeing smudges of dirt streaking her face.

He looked around. She had dragged him into the shelter of a seating area overhung by tall, mossy ferns that partially hid them from sight. The nearest wall of the Palace was only about fifty metres away. Stone bridges arched over a wide moat surrounding the palace, leading towards tall archways piercing stone walls that had to be close on nine metres tall.

Looking back the other way, he saw the remains of their flier not too distant. The craft had ploughed a hole into the carefully maintained lawns surrounding the palace. It was clearly a write-off, a smoking ruin hard up against the trunk of an enormously ancient-looking gnarled tree, its branches dotted with autumn leaves.

‘I tried to get hold of Ben,’ said Zelia, her voice ragged, ‘but I think he might be dead. He was the one coordinating the strike on the Red Palace. No one else is responding either.’ She shook her head and laughed weakly. ‘We’re so fucking screwed, it’s actually funny.’

Luc coughed again, the world swaying gently around him. He let Zelia lower him onto a seat, and squeezed his eyes shut until the worst of the dizziness had passed.

‘The artefact,’ he said, when he looked back up at her. ‘We’re close to it, Zelia. Very close.’

She sank to her knees on the grass before him. ‘Luc, listen to me,’ she said, looking more scared in that moment than he recalled ever seeing her before. ‘I really think we might be the only ones left alive. Maybe we should try and get away from here, make a run for it while we still can—’

‘No.’ Luc shook his head irritably and forced himself to think. ‘Not after everything I’ve been through.’

It was like the nightmare he’d suffered for so many years had finally come true, except he wasn’t a child any more. Instead of Razorback Mountain looming in the distance, he saw the broad wall of Cheng’s Red Palace – and instead of a ball of incandescent light and heat evaporating everyone and everything he had ever known and loved, he saw only smoke rising from a burning forest, and the flashing silver of mechants engaged in high-speed battles.

‘Listen to me, Zelia,’ he said, leaning forward and taking hold of her by the shoulders. ‘What Cheng did to Benares made me into an orphan. I lost everything. Everything. I dedicated my life to hunting Antonov, except now I discover it should have been Cheng. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand by and let him deliver the final coup de grâce to Benares.’ He shook his head violently. ‘Not if I have any chance of doing something about it.’

Zelia stared at him like he was crazy. ‘He has an army of mechants, Luc, and God knows how many Sandoz either already here or on their way through the Hall of Gates. We’ve lost, can’t you see that? But if we can find another flier, we can—’

He got up and walked away from her without another word, heading for the nearest of the stone bridges passing over the moat around the Red Palace. He passed cultivated lawns and artfully arranged groves and, although there were several more flashes of light and the sound of distant detonations, he had a sense the battle was winding down. More than likely, Cheng was consolidating his victory.

Even so, the artefact was like a magnet, drawing Luc towards it. He felt like he could almost reach out and grasp it.

Hearing feet running down the gravel path behind him, he turned to see Zelia catch up with him.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked her.

She shrugged, dirty and exhausted. ‘Fuck it,’ she said, ‘even if I get killed, I have a backup. Right?’

Luc knew Cheng would never allow her re-instantiation after everything that had happened, but also knew better than to say. He nodded and continued across the bridge without another word, surprised to find he was glad she had chosen to stay by his side.

They passed over the bridge and came to a tall arched gate giving access to the interior of the Red Palace. He saw that the wall tapered slightly as it rose towards grey stone battlements.

Thin trails of smoke rose from different points within the palace walls. Before them lay a cobbled street, and brick buildings with a carefully crafted appearance of great age.

He heard Zelia come up behind his shoulder. ‘If we can’t find a way to get hold of the artefact,’ he said, ‘our next option is to find some way to destroy it.’

‘Can we do that?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know until we try. Have you been here before?’

‘I know my way around the palace grounds a little,’ she said. ‘You think the artefact’s somewhere around here?’

‘It’s just up ahead,’ he told her, moving forward at a slow jog. He hadn’t seen anyone – neither men, nor machines. ‘Do we know what’s happening in the rest of the Tian Di?’

‘Last I heard, things aren’t much better on Temur.’ She followed him down the cobbled street. ‘There were reports of fighting inside the White Palace with the Sandoz guarding the Hall of Gates.’

The buildings within the palace walls were closely packed together. He glanced up, seeing mechants flying high above the cobbled street.

They made for the shadows cast by the overhanging roof of a pagoda-like building to their right, pressing themselves up against the wall. The mechants appeared not to have spotted them, and soon disappeared from sight.

They kept moving along the side of the building until they came to the next corner. Luc saw the building they were headed for and sensed the artefact’s presence on the other side of a door, straight ahead.

‘It’s in there somewhere,’ he said, pointing.

Something struck the cobblestones immediately before them and rolled closer.

It felt as if a giant hand had reached down, picking Luc up and throwing him several feet into the air. He landed hard next to the entrance to an alleyway, his entire body wracked with pain. For a few moments, the world was suffused with an eerie silence. Something in his shoulder and arm didn’t feel quite right.

His hearing came back only slowly, but all he could hear at first was his own ragged breathing. He saw Zelia struggling to push herself upright against a nearby wall, one of her legs twisted at an odd angle. She had her hand to her chest, the fingers stained red.

A shadow passed overhead. Luc looked up to see another Sandoz heavy-lifter dropping to a landing a few streets away. As it descended, a shape swooped down from the heavy-lifter – a mechant, making straight for him.

‘Stop,’ he muttered.

Drifting suddenly to one side, the mechant crashed into a tiled roof, finally tumbling to the cobbles below like an oversized discarded toy.

More mechants appeared overhead. He sent them all scattering across the sky like storm-tossed leaves, but already he felt tired, enormously so, and struggled to stay awake.

Luc looked back over at Zelia, who stared back at him with a blank expression. The red stain on her chest had grown larger. He managed to crawl over to her, despite one of his arms being useless.

‘Zelia,’ he said, collapsing against the wall beside her. ‘How bad?’

Her face was paler than he’d ever seen it, lips thin and translucent.

‘It’s not deep, I don’t think,’ she said. ‘But I’m losing too much blood.’

‘Can you get up?’

‘No, Luc. Leave me be.’

‘If you stay here, you’ll die!’

She laughed weakly. ‘I can’t die, you fucking idiot. I have backups, remember?’

‘Cheng would never let you come back.’

She stared at him with loathing. ‘Fuck you,’ she said. ‘You think I don’t know that?’

Nevertheless, she managed to struggle back onto her feet, and he draped his good arm around her, grabbing under one shoulder, holding her upright.

‘We’re nearly there,’ he said, glancing up and seeing more mechants descending towards them. The taste of gritty ash was on his tongue, carried on the wind.

With a burst of effort, he dragged her towards the doorway. The artefact was just on the other side.

Voices, calling from somewhere nearby. He glanced to one side, but couldn’t see where they were coming from.

The ground again came rushing towards him, hard enough this time to break several of his teeth. He could feel their ragged edges with the tip of his tongue. Another grenade, he guessed.

Rolling over, he saw Zelia lying motionless nearby, and that the door had opened from the inside, a darkened vestibule lying beyond.

The voices he’d heard came closer. A shadow fell across his face; a mechant, hovering less than a metre above him.

More shadows gathered around him, some people-shaped. Hands reached down and took a grip on him, lifting him up with the minimum of care.

But it wasn’t over. Not yet.