The Thousand Emperors (46 page)

Leaning forward, he could see that he had been stripped naked. He swallowed, pain pulsing around his broken teeth. His mouth was still full of the taste of his own blood.

For some reason, he could neither blink nor close his eyes. The urge to block out the light was maddening, but there was nothing whatsoever he could do to avoid it.

‘Yes, he does appear to be conscious,’ said the second voice.

Luc twisted his head from side to side to try and see who had just spoken.

‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ asked the voice of a third man, ‘is what you’ve done to him
entirely
necessary?’

‘I would say it was
absolutely
necessary, my dear Meinhard,’ Cheng replied. ‘Didn’t you see what this creature and his accomplice did to poor Bailey? Or are you
really suggesting someone guilty of such a crime deserves
better
?’

Meinhard Carter
, Luc realized with a shock: the man Cheng had put in charge of the Tian Di’s deep-space exploration. And the same man with whom Ambassador Sachs had attempted
last-minute negotiations over the Founder Network.

‘Of course not, Father Cheng,’ Carter replied with nervous haste.

The pain in Luc’s eyes was becoming extraordinary, maddening. An instant later he felt another burst of cool moisture on his face, reducing the pain and discomfort – but no more than
marginally.

‘Reduce that light,’ said Cheng. ‘I want our guest to be able to see himself quite clearly.’

The light dimmed a little, and someone sprayed more moisture into Luc’s eyes. It tasted cool and damp and fresh on his tongue. He swallowed a few drops, filled with a sudden, raging
thirst.

‘I think he’s thirsty,’ said another, unidentifiable voice.

‘Maybe we should give him something to drink,’ chuckled yet another. ‘Maybe I should . . . ?’

Luc heard a faint rustle, followed by a stifled giggle.

‘Very droll,’ he heard Cheng reply, with what sounded like faint humour. ‘As you please – but
not
, I beg you, in his eyes. I don’t want him to end up in so
much pain that he can’t talk.’

Something warm and sticky splashed onto Luc’s torso and ran down between his thighs. One of the shadowy figures, he realized, was pissing on him.

He jerked at his restraints and tried to scream, but all that came out of his throat was a hoarse rattle.

‘Enough of this,’ Cheng snapped irritably, and the stream of urine ceased. ‘Let him see.’

Someone turned the spotlight away from Luc’s face, instead focusing it on the ceiling so that he could see his surroundings more clearly.

The room in which they had him was long and low and entirely bare of decoration. The floor had a drain at its centre, while large and unpleasantly sharp-looking hooks hung from the ceiling. A
heavily muscled Sandoz warrior stood to one side of Luc, while Cheng, Carter and four others he did not recognize stood facing him. He guessed they were members of the Eighty-Five.

Glancing to his other side, he saw another, unfamiliar man standing immediately next to him. This man’s apparent physical age was much younger, and he wore a plain black tunic, fluted at
the waist, that reached very nearly to the ground. His face was gaunt, and devoid of emotion. Lifting a small bulb to Luc’s face, the man quickly squirted moisture into his eyes, one after
the other, before stepping back once more.

‘Turn him so he can see her,’ Cheng commanded.

The Sandoz warrior stepped around behind Luc’s chair and, with a grunt, turned it through ninety degrees, the metal legs scraping noisily against the bare concrete floor. Luc found himself
facing an identical steel chair, the body of a naked woman secured to it at the wrists and ankles.

Zelia had been so badly beaten he almost couldn’t recognize her. Her face had swollen up, severely distorting her features, her whole body a patchwork of bruises and welts. Although fresh
bandages had been placed over her chest wound, there were burn marks all across her breasts and thighs.

But that wasn’t the worst thing.

Her eyelids had been cut away, along with her nose. Luc slowly understood that the same had been done to him, that this was the reason he could neither blink nor close his eyes. A second Sandoz
warrior stood by Zelia, occasionally squirting moisture onto her exposed eyeballs, to prevent them from drying.

‘Zelia has been most helpful,’ said Cheng, stepping up beside Luc and nodding towards her, ‘if initially uncooperative. But thanks to her wise decision to work with us, we now
understand the full extent of your involvement in Winchell Antonov’s revolution, as well as the nature of the Coalition technology inside your head.’

Cheng turned to the man in the dark tunic beside Luc. ‘Jacob,’ he said with a gesture, ‘if you please.’

Jacob squirted more moisture onto Luc’s face, regarding him with pitiless eyes.

‘Jacob Moreland,’ Luc managed to rasp.

‘I understand,’ said Moreland, ‘that you came here hoping to prevent me from completing my mission. Don’t you understand that everything Father Cheng does, he does out of
love?’

It took an effort for Luc to say anything more, his tongue sliding across the ragged ruins of his teeth. ‘Ambassador Sachs told me everything,’ he said, spitting the words at Cheng
and ignoring Moreland. ‘You’d kill a whole world, rather than risk falling out of power.’

Cheng smiled sadly. ‘It’s a terrible price for so many people to pay, I agree entirely. But do you think I would do any such thing, if I really believed there could be any possible
alternative?’

‘Alternative to
what
?’ Luc rasped. ‘The Coalition are going to wipe you out. Don’t you understand that?’

‘Regardless of whatever offensive action the Coalition are planning, our Sandoz forces are well equipped to engage them.’

‘You’re insane. The Inimicals—’

‘—are a product of Ambassador Sachs’ imagination,’ Cheng snapped. ‘They do not
exist
. Jacob, please tell Mr Gabion what we’re going to be doing here
today.’

‘The plan,’ said Jacob, squirting more moisture onto Luc’s naked eyeballs, ‘is to perform a live dissection, starting with the lattice inside your skull. You’ll be
kept awake and conscious throughout, in order that your responses may be measured and assessed.’

A door slid open, and a mechant floated into the centre of the room. Razor-tipped instruments glinted from its underbelly.

‘The artefact,’ Luc rasped. ‘I know it’s close to here.’

‘Now do you see how badly we’ve let things slip over the years?’ Cheng declared, turning angry eyes on those of his advisors who were present. ‘Do you
see
how much
this man knows?’

They all glanced away, as if the walls around them were of sudden and unexpected interest.

‘Father—’ one of the men tried to say.

‘Shut up!’ Cheng shouted, his face twisted in fury. ‘You’ve failed me. You’ve
all
failed me. I should send you all to the same hell as these two. Do you
understand?’

‘The artefact is here, yes,’ Moreland told Luc with a smirk. ‘But not, I assure you, for much longer.’

Luc laughed, the sound descending into violent, hacking coughs. His eyes were becoming painfully dry once more, but Moreland made no move to squirt more moisture onto them.

He looked back over at Zelia. He tried to script to her, but got no answer. She gazed dully back at him.

‘I’m sorry, Zelia,’ Luc whispered. ‘I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid you might stop me.’

Her lips moved fractionally, and a faint mumble emerged from the bruised wreckage of her mouth.

‘What was that?’ Cheng demanded sharply.

Luc licked dry, cracked lips, and shuddered with relief when Moreland finally stepped forward and sprayed moisture onto his eyeballs.

‘When I met Ambassador Sachs that last time on the
Sequoia
,’ Luc said to Cheng, ‘he gave me the means to track the artefact Moreland brought back here. But on the way
here, I realized he’d given me much more than just that.’

‘I am not in the mood for speeches, Mr Gabion,’ said Cheng, sounding irritable. ‘Please get to the point, and all this unpleasantness will be over that much sooner.’

‘At first I wondered,
why me
? But then I realized he didn’t see it as being a decision he could make. The choice had to be made by someone from the Tian Di – someone
like me.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ demanded Cheng, his tone suspicious.

‘I realized the Ambassador had given me a way to control the artefact, not just track it down.’ Luc smiled through cracked and broken teeth. ‘Even activate it, should it happen
to be within sufficient proximity.’

Cheng gaped at him. They all did.

‘Kill him,’ Cheng barked. ‘
Now.
’

‘Too late,’ Luc whispered, and triggered the artefact.

He sat on a bench and watched an entire world die.

First, the atmosphere rippled outwards from a central point, as if an object the size of a moon had struck it. A haze spread up and out from that same central point like dark smoke, spiralling
upwards with sufficient velocity to escape the gravitational tug of the planet itself.

Seen from a distance of some tens of thousands of kilometres, it made for a startlingly beautiful sight, until he remembered that hurricanes of a ferocity unseen since the planet’s
formation were tearing the soil from its bedrock, and sending vast, towering tsunami sweeping across its continents, scouring it clean of any evidence that men had ever been there.

He kept watching, as the crust was stripped away from the hot molten core. By now, much of Vanaheim had been reduced to a smear of dust and gravel spread along the path of its orbit.

The laws of physics, briefly interrupted by the activation of the quantum disruptor, began reasserting themselves. He saw trillion-ton chunks of debris collide with each other, obscured by that
same dense haze, still spreading out into a circle around the nearby sun.

I made this happen.

No matter how many times Luc said it to himself, he couldn’t quite take it in. Perhaps he never would.

Finally, he dismissed the recording. No matter how often he watched it, it always had the same effect, like being punched in the gut at the same time as having his head submerged in a bucket of
ice-water.

He looked around the communal lounge, one wall of which displayed an entirely different view – that of a supermassive black hole orbited by blue-shifted stars, caught in slowly decaying
orbits that would eventually send them spiralling to their doom. The lounge itself was vast, filled with dozens of couches and tables, all of them currently unoccupied. He was quite alone, but not,
he knew, for very much longer.

He passed the time in silent contemplation, unsure of what he would say or do when his visitors finally arrived.

When he grew bored enough, he ran the recording a second time.

He stiffened on hearing a door open at the far end of the lounge, somewhere behind him. Footsteps echoed as they crossed the floor, growing closer. He felt a tightness in his chest, suddenly
afraid to turn around.

‘A magnificent sight, is it not?’ asked Antonov, coming to stand by him and nodding towards the footage. ‘Zelia would have had much to say about this, I think.’

Luc looked up at him. Antonov’s lips were curled in a wistful smile, only half-visible through his bushy black beard.

Horst Sachs stood just behind and to one side of Antonov, shorn of his mirror mask, and dressed in colourful robes entirely unlike those he had worn in the course of his duties as Coalition
Ambassador.

‘Zelia once told me that she wanted to journey across the galaxy,’ Luc managed to say.

‘She once told me the same thing too,’ said Antonov, nodding, regarding Luc with a merry smile. ‘And here we are, enjoying those same sights for her. A touch of irony that it
should be us two dead men, rather than her.’

The lounge they occupied was not real, of course – or not real in the way Luc had understood such things by the measure of his former existence. The starship whose lounge they occupied,
here so very close to the heart of the Milky Way, was in reality barely any larger than a dandelion seed. The lounge had only a virtual existence. And yet Luc’s subjective experience of the
vessel was of a vast and luxurious liner, measuring perhaps fifty kilometres from bow to stern.

There were thousands of other passengers, in an astonishing variety of forms. And yet, by a simple trick of focus, Luc could make them effectively disappear from his sight, giving him the
illusion of solitude. They were still there, of course – or as
there
as he, Antonov or indeed the lounge were – and every one of them shared the same ability. They could all, if
they so chose, occupy precisely the same spot without ever being aware of one another’s presence.

Winchell Antonov looked much the same as Luc remembered him from the deep tunnels beneath Aeschere. Luc understood that this was now really a kind of affectation, since both he and Antonov were
in a position to choose any form they desired. But, given their proximity to their former lives, they had each made the same, unspoken decision to maintain outward forms that closely matched those
they had been born with.

Perhaps, give or take a few thousand years of subjective lifetime, they might come to see things differently. But not yet.

‘So our friends in the Coalition put you back together again,’ said Luc.

‘That, and more,’ Antonov agreed.

‘But
how
?’ asked Luc. ‘There was only a fragment of you inside me. Nothing more.’

‘I must apologize,’ said the Ambassador from beside Antonov. ‘That brief moment of physical contact between you and I aboard the
Sequoia
was all that was necessary to
allow me to make a complete copy not only of your mind-state, stored within your lattice, but also of Antonov’s. Under the circumstances, there was no time to explain as much as I wanted
to.’

‘You essentially tricked me by getting me to take your hand,’ said Luc. ‘Is that it?’