by Gary Gibson
Luc nodded dumbly, thinking: a C-level security rating. There weren’t many that were higher.
‘Please acknowledge, before we reach our destination, that you understand and accept these terms,’ the mechant finished.
‘I don’t have the rank for that level of security rating,’ said Luc. ‘I’m not sure I’ve even met anyone who does.’ Outside of members of the Council, anyway.
‘You have been granted a temporary C-rating security clearance,’ the mechant replied. ‘Do you agree to the stated terms?’
Luc stared at the machine. ‘I do.’
The platform passed through a circular opening in the atrium’s ceiling before finally coming to a halt at the centre of a low-ceilinged circular hall. Luc saw more than a dozen transfer gates spaced equidistant from each other set into the walls: private transfer gates, each one leading to a major Tian Di colony and reserved for the sole use of members of the Temur Council. One other gate led to Vanaheim.
The mechant moved towards the Vanaheim gate. Luc hesitated once he realized where it was leading him.
‘I just want to be clear on this,’ he called after the machine. ‘I’ve been requested to travel to Vanaheim?’
‘Yes,’ the mechant confirmed, pausing briefly before gliding onwards and through the gate. Luc followed, feeling increasingly out of his depth.
He felt some of his weight fall away when he stepped through a pressure-field on the far side of the gate. Vanaheim’s gravity was almost a fifth less than that of Temur.
He had never been to Vanaheim before; few outside of the Temur Council ever had. The air felt dense, almost soupy, and had a curiously honeyed scent to it. He glanced back through the gate to the interior of the White Palace, thinking of his home somewhere on the far side, so very close and yet so very far away. Then he turned around to regard the concourse on which he now found himself, and the greenish-blue sky visible through a curved glass ceiling several metres overhead.
There was no sign of anyone else.
The complex of which the concourse was part stood on raised ground on one slope of a river valley that was home to Liebenau, the single largest settlement on the entire planet. Luc saw a Gothic mansion at the centre of a vast, rolling estate, bordering what appeared to be an ancient Hindu temple; there were other buildings of varying and clashing architectural styles, most drawn from old Earth, although a cluster of grey-and-brown, utilitarian-looking structures were clearly inspired by post-Abandonment biome architecture. A few crystalline towers, not so different from those found on Temur and the capitals of other Tian Di colonies, rose towards the sky like upright spears.
Most of these were the homes of Cheng’s inner circle, the Eighty-Five; they all orbited a single, vast complex of ancient-looking buildings, which were in turn surrounded by a high, rectangular wall topped at each corner by pagoda-style roofs. A moat surrounded this wall. Extensive gardens helped to further separate and distinguish the Red Palace – as it was known – from the rest of the settlement. It had been modelled, he vaguely recalled, on a palace built on Earth many centuries before the Abandonment.
The mechant moved ahead of him and towards a single flier parked just beyond an exit. A door in the craft’s side swung open as they approached.
‘Now we’re here,’ he called after the mechant, ‘would you mind at least giving me some idea what the hell this is about?’
‘You are required,’ the mechant informed him, coming to a halt next to the flier, ‘to assist in the investigation of a murder.’
THREE
His name was Jacob Moreland, and he was a spy.
His mission had begun seventy-four years before, when he had been placed into a one-man craft launched from a Sandoz platform in orbit around Novaya Zvezda. Along with an armada of identical craft, each carrying a lone passenger, the ship carrying Jacob had accelerated rapidly out of the system, reaching eighty per cent of light-speed within half a year. The star around which Novaya Zvezda itself orbited soon became just one more exquisitely jewel-like point of light amongst countless others.
Jacob slept unawares, his body buffered by impact-gels and cooled by onboard cryogenics.
For a very long time, Jacob Moreland was, by any objective measure, dead. The instantiation lattice within his skull had encoded much of the fleeting data that made up his conscious mind, while more specialized structures did their best to repair the unavoidable damage done to his delicate human tissues by prolonged deep-space flight.
Attrition soon took its toll, as some of the craft accompanying Jacob on his long journey were destroyed by micrometeorite impacts. It had proven necessary to provide each ship with relatively low-grade shielding, since this increased their chances of evading detection by the Coalition’s deep-space monitors. That a certain number of craft were likely to be lost had been taken into account during the mission’s planning stages. It was an unfortunate, but ultimately necessary, sacrifice.
A few other of the ships suffered fatal systems failures, victims of high-energy particle impacts that interfered with their delicate circuitry. The rest continued on their long flight across the light-years, their onboard computers communicating with each other via encrypted channels, aware within their limited intelligence that, as time progressed, their numbers were steadily dwindling, although not yet below mission-critical levels.
At the apex of their journey, the armada was moving at just a shade over 97 per cent of light-speed. Time-dilation slowed the pace at which the attritions of age and radiation damage wore away at their passengers. The onboard medical systems did their best but, inevitably, there were further casualties: those ships bearing the irretrievably dead automatically shut themselves down and fell behind the rest, to drift between the stars forever.
The years passed, and the ships flew on. They did not begin to decelerate until the last decade of their voyage, finally braking into the 36 Ophiuchi system, deep within Coalition territory.
Automated defences patrolling the outer worlds of 36 Ophiuchi detected a number of the approaching ships, analysing their trajectories and responding by moving hunter-killer mechants into intercept patterns. The craft came under fire from kinetic weapons that sent chunks of asteroid slag curving in towards them along gravity-assist paths.
Attrition once more took its toll as the majority of incoming craft were destroyed, and the survival rate of the spy-ships finally teetered towards mission-critical levels. The computers on board the ships risked data-bursts between each other, readjusting their shared flight plans according to decades-old algorithms: if only a few of them managed to reach their destinations, the project set in motion so very long ago might yet have a chance of succeeding.
The survivors lost themselves amidst the rubble of a dead world, long ago drawn into a belt of debris a billion kilometres beyond 36 Ophiuchi’s habitable zone. Only half a dozen of the spy-ships now remained.
Each took it in turn to accelerate towards the inner system, matching courses with cometary bodies and asteroids in order to disguise themselves, drifting sometimes for months before finally manoeuvring into new trajectories that would carry them all the way to Darwin, the system’s sole inhabited world.
It wasn’t long before Jacob’s turn came.
For the first time in several decades, he began to dream, his core body temperature slowly rising as complex cryoprotectant solutions were leached from his bloodstream. His heart began to beat, falteringly at first and then with added strength. Nutrients entered his body via a complex of hollow fibres inserted into his spine, while invisibly tiny microchines worked hard at repairing the inevitable cellular and neural damage sustained during the voyage. Some minimal damage had also been sustained by his instantiation lattice.
Jacob Moreland would live, but some of his memories were gone forever. This much, too, had been anticipated.
Networked autonomous security devices parked in Trojan orbits, balanced between the blue-green world they guarded and the star it orbited, detected the majori
ty of the surviving spy-ships and swiftly destroyed them. Only Jacob’s ship escaped, by wrapping itself within a hastily improvised informational cocoon that made it appear to be little more than an unmanned reconnaissance vehicle on a registered mission. It had been lucky, matching the trajectory of a cluster of supply drones, returning from the A-M refineries orbiting just inside 36 Ophiuchi’s solar corona.
Jacob Moreland drew breath and gasped, his lungs still filled to capacity with breathable nutrient gels that tasted vaguely of mint and antiseptic. A moment later, he remembered his name.
He became more fully conscious during the final stages of atmospheric re-entry. Fresh data flowered in his mind, generated by the instantiation lattices riddling his cerebral cortex and nearly indistinguishable from his own, entirely natural thoughts.
Plasma cannons, designed to destroy random garbage falling from the orbital wheel that encircled Darwin, burned his craft as it dropped towards the upper layers of that world’s atmosphere. It responded by releasing a burst of chaff that fooled the cannons into thinking their target had been destroyed. The ship then dipped lower into the atmosphere, burning off its ablative surface before dropping towards the cloud level.
Jacob’s pulse began to quicken as he remembered not only who, but what, he was. Upon his request, sensors embedded in the craft’s skin relayed to him images of the night-time landscape towards which he was falling. He saw deep valleys, ancient mountains rising above shallow seas, and glistening salt-flats that stretched across continents. He saw cities like brilliant kaleidoscopes of light, dense conurbations that reached silver fingers far above the planet’s atmosphere, linking into the world-wheel dotted with countless antimatter forges and industrial complexes.
This, then, was Darwin, a world that had become the economic and cultural heart of the Coalition following the Abandonment.
His craft bucked as it passed through the turbulent layers of air at the edge of a high-pressure zone, then dropped towards a ragged and apparently unpopulated coastline, minuscule thrusters slowing the ship’s rate of descent in the last moments of its flight. Seconds before the ship finally touched down, Jacob caught sight of green and violet-leaved flora growing amidst spongy-looking trees that bowed under the weight of their broad, finger-like branches.
He staggered out of the blackened shell of his craft in time to see the first fingers of dawn colouring the night sky. He coughed and retched, his lungs and throat still carrying traces of suspension fluids from his long voyage. Cold air whipped against his naked skin. Feeling weak and helpless, he sagged to his knees, pushing both hands deep into gritty soil as a deep and ravenous hunger gripped him.
His instantiation lattice fed data to his conscious mind as he kneeled. He learned that he was the only survivor out of the nearly forty men and women who had been launched from the Tian Di so many years before. Despite the deprivations of his voyage, he found that he could still remember most of their faces and names, having come to know nearly all of them over the course of the year they had spent training for this mission. They had all known how high the risks were. Even so, he was appalled to find he was the only one left.
And if he failed, the mission failed with him.
Staggering back over to the craft, he quickly retrieved a one-piece combat suit, pulling it on before he could freeze to death in the chilly air. He next retrieved a case, then stepped quickly away from the craft as his lattice flashed him an alert.
From a safe distance, he watched as the ship that had carried him so far immolated itself, its hull collapsing into sections that burned with a pungent smell. Flames flickered inside the craft’s interior, reaching up past bone-like spurs that would crumble away to nothing within just a few days. In time, the only evidence that there had ever been a craft here capable of travelling between the stars would be unusually high trace amounts of rare minerals in the soil, along with a marginally higher than normal level of background radioactivity. But one would have to look very, very carefully indeed.
Jacob stood watching for over an hour as the ship continued crumbling into gently steaming ashes that filled the night air with a scent like burning grass. Something about it filled him with a curious sense of loss, which was strange, given that he had been placed in suspension prior to being loaded aboard the craft. Nevertheless, on some deep level, a part of him recognized that this had been his home for long decades, and so it felt strange to finally leave it behind.
From this point on, there was only one way left for him to return home to the Tian Di – and doing so would constitute a major part of his mission.
When he felt ready, Jacob reached into a pocket of his combat suit, retrieving a device small enough to nestle almost invisibly in the palm of his hand: a pin-sized transceiver. He activated it, and even though there was no reason to think it might malfunction, he nonetheless felt a palpable sense of relief when it proved fully operational.
His journey across the light-years had all been just a prelude to this, the moment when his mission truly began. His first step would be to make contact with Tian Di agents who had been in place on Darwin since before he had even set out. Once their own transceivers notified them of his arrival, they would find him and aid him in fulfilling his mission.
It might have taken him decades to reach this world, but the return journey would take, quite literally, no time at all.
FOUR
The flier carrying Luc and the mechant that had fetched him from Temur dropped below cloud-level a few hours after it had set out, and he got his first glimpse of a small island situated no more than a couple of kilometres from a coastline of high cliffs dense with reddish-green forest. The island didn’t appear to be much more than a stub of grassy rock sticking out of the ocean. Tall waves crashed against its shore, and as the flier dropped down he saw a number of brick and stone buildings clustered close together on its grassy slopes, a few of them topped by gold and silver onion domes that glittered beneath Vanaheim’s sun. The flier canted to one side, shuddering slightly as its broad dark wings cut through a strong wind that tore foam from the peaks of the waves.
‘Now do you mind telling me where the hell we are?’ Luc demanded, staring down through the transparent hull.
The mechant had disappeared into a slot in one wall of the cabin as soon as they had boarded. ‘We are approaching the residence of Sevgeny Vasili,’ it explained from within its nook. ‘We will disembark in the next few minutes.’
Sevgeny Vasili. Until now, the mechant had refused to tell him anything beyond that single, cryptic reference to a murder enquiry. It hadn’t even been willing to tell him who was supposed to be dead.
He reviewed what little he knew of Sevgeny Vasili. Like Cripps and Garda both, Vasili was a long-standing member of the Eighty-Five, and had been since the very earliest days of the Temur Council. He was also aware that Vasili had been central to the negotiation process with the Coalition that had led directly to the Reunification.
The flier dropped to a silent landing in a walled courtyard on that part of the island facing towards the mainland. Luc saw as he disembarked that several other craft were already parked there. The air tasted cold and clear, and he shivered. His Archives uniform was far from adequate in such chill air.
Whatever was going on, he had the distinct feeling he was the last to arrive.
The mechant emerged once more and led him through a brick arch that exited the courtyard, and then along a shrub-lined path that terminated before a broad, wooden door that swung inwards at their approach. Luc found himself inside a high-ceilinged hall that might easily have passed for a throne-room in some ancient Earthly kingdom. Carved wooden columns reached up to a beamed roof, while a fireplace at the far end looked just about big enough to fit a whole flier within it. The flagstones beneath his feet seemed to have been worn smooth with age, while the air within the hall smelled of damp and mould. The only light came through narrow windows set close to the ceiling.
Much of this Luc noticed only peripheral
ly, his attention being otherwise taken up entirely by the half-dozen men and women clustered together in the best lit part of the hall beneath a leaded window. Not only did he see Bailey Cripps amongst their number, but also Joseph Cheng – the Benevolent Archon himself, Permanent Chairman of the Temur Council, and certainly the most powerful man in all of the Tian Di.
He paused at the gathering before him, almost frozen to the spot.
‘Is that him?’ spat a man next to Cripps.
Luc stared at the man who had spoken before suddenly realizing who he was: Victor Begum, one of the two founders of the Sandoz Clans along with old Karlmann Sandoz. He was as muscled and intimidating as Marroqui or any other Clan-leader Luc had ever encountered.
‘Easy, Victor,’ said one of the two women amongst the group, thick dark hair spilling like a wave across her shoulders. ‘You are Luc Gabion?’ she asked, glancing towards him.
‘I . . . yes,’ Luc managed to say. ‘Yes, I am. I’m not sure why I’ve been brought here.’
He heard the door swing shut behind him, the sound echoing through the hall with all the finality of an executioner’s axe. For some reason, his feet had become unwilling to carry him any further into the room.
‘Did the mechant that brought you here tell you nothing?’ asked the same woman.
‘No, except that there had been a – a murder,’ he replied, his voice pinching off slightly.
A small, balding man with round cheeks made a barking sound, his face contorted in anger. He took a step towards the dark-haired woman, who turned to face him, raising one hand as if to ward him off.