The Thousand Emperors (43 page)
Almost as soon as the flier lifted up from its cradle, something slammed into the station with tremendous force. Clearly the Ambassador wasn’t wasting time following
through on his promise. The stars wheeled past the open bay doors, and the flier was sent crashing into a bulkhead.
Luc’s head snapped sideways, his teeth clicking together. Blood began to fill his mouth and he swallowed hard, grimacing at the taste. Emergency alerts flowered in the air all around
him.
Tubes dropped down from immediately overhead, reaching towards him and forming a seal over his nose and mouth at the same time that a thick, glutinous liquid began pouring out from hidden
nozzles, filling the interior of the flier in seconds.
Luc breathed in the high-oxygen mix coming through the tubes and felt suddenly calmer, so much so that he found himself wondering if there might be some form of narcotic in the air mix. The
flier meanwhile pumped visual data to him directly, via his lattice, and he saw a Sandoz mechant had entered through the open bay doors, its carapace bristling with weaponry.
The mechant launched itself immediately towards the flier. Luc flinched, hearing it land on the hull, a soft thud that reverberated through the impact gel surrounding and cushioning him. He
watched with horror as the mechant extended manipulators, using them to secure itself to the flier’s hull. It then applied a tightly focused blue flame to a spot on the hull, which brightened
to a dull orange almost immediately.
Go away
, thought Luc.
The mechant jerked suddenly, and the flame switched off. It let go of the flier, its manipulators undulating around it, as if in confusion. Drifting across the bay, it rebounded from a bulkhead,
now apparently lifeless.
Luc stared at it in stupefaction as the stars wheeled by beyond the bay doors.
The flier carefully manoeuvred its way out through the bay doors before quickly boosting far away enough from the
Sequoia
that Luc could see the station’s long hub had been
shattered in several places. Pieces of the
Sequioa
were drifting apart from each other, some spinning as they went.
What came next happened so fast that Luc only had time to think about it clearly a few minutes after the fact.
First, his flier flashed a warning that it was being targeted by multiple energy and kinetic weapon systems. Then it accelerated hard enough to break every bone in his body, if not for the
impact gel surrounding and supporting him.
He blacked out. The next time he became aware of his surroundings, the
Sequoia
was twenty kilometres distant and receding fast. The flier’s onboard AI outlined each and every one of
the thousands of pieces of spinning and flying wreckage with bright green circles and associated impact probability estimates.
Luc called up a view of the Sandoz platform, and saw a heavily shielded framework supporting multiple weapons systems. Red circles marked dart-sized missiles hurtling across the intervening
space towards him. Clearly Ambassador Sachs’ pre-emptive tactic of destroying the
Sequoia
, however drastic, hadn’t worked as well as he’d hoped.
Luc imagined the missiles detonating, and then watched as incandescent points of light suddenly bloomed amongst the stars.
I did that
, Luc realized with a thrill of shock that ran up his spine like electricity.
He glanced towards the Sandoz platform. Light bloomed at half a dozen points across its framework, as its remaining stocks of missiles also spontaneously detonated.
The resulting explosions tore the platform apart like soft candy under a blowtorch.
Luc found himself wondering just how much chaos and death one man could bring about with that much power. He felt numb, as if he were no more substantial than a ghost drifting high above
Vanaheim’s upper atmosphere.
The flier informed him it was receiving a transmission coded for the
Sequoia
. On investigation, it proved to be from Zelia.
He thought for a moment about everything Sachs had shown to him.
she sent, then added:
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.
