by Gary Gibson
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.
She stared at him, her eyes becoming round. ‘But you must have known,’ she said. ‘You have his memories. You must . . .’ her voice trailed off.
He remembered he had dreamt of making love to her, that night she had data-ghosted into his home. Everything about it had felt real, far more like an actual memory than a mere dream, and now the reason was obvious: it was a memory - but Antonov’s, rather than his own.
‘I think maybe I suspected,’ he said.
‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, close enough to him in the cramped quarters that he could smell her skin. ‘A very long time ago, even before he met Ariadna. But we . . . saw things differently. There were things we left unsaid, things I wanted to say to him but never could.’
‘I had no idea.’
She drew back slightly, peering at him with curiosity. ‘How much is there left of him inside you, would you say?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe just a little.’
‘But I saw the way you looked just now, when I told you we had once been lovers. You looked like you remembered something.’
‘I did,’ he admitted. ‘Just not my own memories.’
‘And he still . . . speaks to you?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘But does he hear things?’ she asked haltingly. ‘Does he understand what’s going on around you – around him?’
Luc thought about it. ‘I think he does, yeah.’
Just for a second the mask slipped, and Luc saw a part of de Almeida he never had before, vulnerable and soft and yielding. Despite his fear of her, the sight and smell of her commingled with Antonov’s own memories until they were very nearly impossible to distinguish.
Some instinct made him reach out to her. He half-expected her to react with anger, but instead she responded with unexpected hunger. Their mouths mashed together, Luc’s hands curling around the back of her neck to grip her by the hair, pulling her close enough that he could feel her heartbeat thrumming through her chest.
She stood, first pulling off her jacket, and then her thin blouse, revealing small, high breasts, before sliding into the narrow alcove containing the mattress. He followed, sliding one hand under her back, but then she locked her ankles around his waist and flipped him around in the zero gravity until she was straddling him.
He reached up to cup her breasts with his hands, eliciting a soft moan from her, while she reached down to his waist, tugging at his belt.
Soon he was struggling out of his clothes with some difficulty, unsurprising given the exceedingly cramped nature of the alcove. Zelia lifted herself up and out of the way, taking the opportunity to wriggle out of the rest of her clothes before again straddling him, her breath coming in small, nervous gasps.
Luc could feel his erection pulsing against her belly. Taking hold of her hips, he lifted her slightly, as she reached down between her legs and manoeuvred him inside her.
He started to move. Zelia gripped him hard with her knees, grinding herself against him, the fingernails of one hand digging into his chest while she kept the other pressed flat against the ceiling of the alcove. Luc held off as long as he could, holding her tight with both hands, her gasps becoming shorter and higher-pitched.
Somewhere in the back of his thoughts, he could hear Antonov laughing.
‘Now,’ she gasped, her voice ragged. ‘Please.’
He looked up at her naked form with fascination. Her skin glistened with perspiration, while her long dark hair had come undone from the loose knot she’d had it in behind her head. It floated around her face like something alive. Her back arched in tangent with his own, increasingly urgent movements until, finally, he came.
‘Wait,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t move.’
Holding still, he watched as she rocked her hips back and forth with a gentle, barely detectable motion. Then her mouth opened wide and she let out a tiny, bird-like cry before pulling herself down and forward, letting her head rest against his chest. He felt himself slide back out of her.
They lay there together for what felt like a long time. Almost without realizing, Luc pictured Eleanor as she had been in Maxwell’s prison, side by side with Bailey Cripps, but found he felt nothing whatsoever.
‘The question,’ he finally managed to say after an indeterminate amount of time had passed, ‘is whether you were fucking me, or him.’
He felt her fingernails stroke against one shoulder as she brought her head back up to regard him. ‘Both, I think,’ she said with a faint smile.
‘You said that there were things you’d wanted to say to him, but never did.’
She was silent for a minute before answering. ‘I wanted to tell him that I’m sorry.’
He twisted his head up slightly to look down at her. ‘Sorry for what?’
‘Betraying him,’ she said quietly, then dropped her head back down against his chest.
Luc frowned. ‘Zelia . . . what exactly happened between you two?’
He felt her move into a slightly different position. ‘Does it matter? We saw things differently, and I was stupid and foolish and inexperienced enough to let that matter to me more than it should have. And you know what the worst thing was?’
‘What?’
‘He forgave me.’
He felt her tears dampen his chest.
‘But you still wanted to tell him you were sorry.’
‘Once I realized what he’d done to you, I knew there’d never be another chance.’
For the next few minutes, Luc was content to remain where he was.
‘When I was in Maxwell’s prison,’ he said at last, ‘he showed me things that made me re-evaluate what I thought I knew about Antonov. But what I saw when I opened the data-cache here on this station made me realize my whole life isn’t worth a damn unless I do everything I can to finish what Antonov started.’
She sat up and regarded him with eyes wide. ‘Did you even hear what you just said?’
‘Everything’s different now, Zelia.’
‘Different how?’
’Because of what I learned from that data-cache.’
‘So you did get something from it.’
‘Father Cheng,’ said Luc, ‘is planning to destroy Benares.’
She blinked as if she hadn’t quite heard him right. ‘What?’
‘I saw it all, through his own eyes.’ He let out a small, soft laugh at the thought of just how much of his life had been wasted chasing the wrong people. ‘Do you know Cheng sent agents all the way to Coalition space, on ships that took decades to get there? He wanted them to find some artefact the Coalition had recovered from the Founder Network, so he could use it to wipe out every living thing on Benares.’
Zelia stared at him. ‘But . . . why Benares? What possible benefit is there to doing any such thing?’
‘Apart from it being a hotbed of anti-Council sentiment? Once he’s dealt with Benares, he’s going to blame Black Lotus for its destruction. He’ll say the Coalition supplied them with advanced weapons technology, but they screwed up, destroying Benares by accident instead of Temur.’
Her expression now shifted from indignant disbelief to outright horror. ‘Please tell me you’re lyin
g,’ she said.
‘After that,’ said Luc, ‘he’ll close down the Darwin gate forever, declare martial law throughout the Tian Di, and use the Sandoz to assume total power prior to dissolving the Council. And then there won’t be a Thousand Emperors of the Tian Di – just one.’
Zelia stared past him as she worked through the implications. ‘He’s trying to turn the clock back, to the days of the Schism.’
‘That’s not even all of it,’ Luc continued. ‘Cheng’s been playing a very, very long-term strategy ever since the idea of Reunification was first mooted. Once he realized he had no choice but to go along with it, he started laying the groundwork for a plan that wouldn’t just wipe out Benares, but would have the whole of the Tian Di begging him to stay in power.’
‘What else did you find?’
‘More than you ever wanted to know.’ No wonder Vasili had been so frightened. ‘Back at that funeral service, Ruy Borges came up to you, and mentioned a rumour about Cheng being in negotiations with the Coalition. Remember?’
Zelia nodded. ‘Well, they weren’t just rumours,’ he continued. ‘Before Cripps murdered him, Javier Maxwell told me the reason the Coalition Ambassador had been to see him was to prevent a war with the Coalition – and it has to do with a second entrance to the Founder Network, discovered decades ago, here in the Tian Di.’
‘No.’ Zelia shook her head. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Ever since, Cheng’s been sending teams of Sandoz in through that entrance, to carry out secret explorations of the Network.’ He shrugged. ‘We always knew there were gates leading inside the Network scattered all over time and space. It’s hardly surprising that Cheng, or exploration teams working on his behalf, stumbled across another in one of our own systems.’
‘I would have . . .’ her words drifted off.
‘You’d have known about it?’ he guessed. ‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’
She didn’t meet his eyes.
‘Cheng even kept it secret from most of the Eighty-Five,’ Luc continued, ‘restricting the knowledge to a very few members of his inner circle. Vasili was as in the dark about all of this as you or anyone else, at least until Antonov persuaded him to come here and open that data-cache. And that’s where Ariadna Placet comes into it.’