The Thousand Emperors (38 page)

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.