by Gary Gibson
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.
EPILOGUE
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?’
‘I regret the deception,’ said the Ambassador, a touch disingenuously.
‘Good old Coalition super-science, eh?’ Antonov said brightly.
‘I am sorry for being unable to meet with either of you before now,’ Sachs continued. ‘But I’ve been very busy these past few weeks, negotiating with the interim government on Temur. They’re still fighting renegade Sandoz forces refusing to accept their authority, but they expect to overcome these sooner rather than later.’
‘So are you here, or there?’ asked Luc.
‘Both,’ Sachs responded.
Luc sighed. ‘None of this has been easy for me. It’s . . .’ he waved a hand.
‘Too much to take in, so soon?’ Antonov chuckled. ‘Entirely understandable. But allow me to thank you for saving my life.’
Luc shook his head. ‘I was too busy worrying over my own to worry about yours too much.’
‘Even so, you did what had to be done.’
‘I destroyed a world,’ said Luc.
‘In order to save the rest of the human race, yes,’ agreed Sachs.
‘Cheng had endless opportunities to change things for the better,’ said Antonov. ‘And few of the Council were willing to challenge his rule. They were seduced by the same things that always seduce human beings; power, and privilege. A few amongst them will be missed, but not, I think, so many.’
‘But what about the threat of the Inimicals?’ asked Luc. ‘Nobody’s been able to tell me anything about that.’
‘I have news on that front,’ said Sachs. ‘Coalition forces have successfully wrested control of the Thorne transfer gate from the Sandoz forces guarding it. We will more than likely seal it, hopefully forever.’
‘Destroy it, you mean.’
‘Better that, Mr Gabion, than risk the alternative.’
‘You still haven’t told me how you managed to build a whole new Antonov out of just that fragment I was carrying around in my head.’
‘You are not the only one the Ambassador tricked,’ Antonov explained. ‘He did the same to me on one of our last meetings, taking the opportunity to copy my mind-state to his own lattice and then transmit it all the way to the Coalition. Then they combined my old memories with newer ones, some shared with you, following my placing a lattice inside your skull.’
‘Indeed,’ said the Ambassador. ‘Our lattice technology takes advantage of certain properties of the ultimately granular structure of reality at its most base level. Further, when combined firstly with certain properties of superluminal communications, such as the ability to maintain constant contact between two points regardless of distance, and secondly with a memory substrate that can . . .’
Luc groaned, unable to take it all in.
Antonov chuckled and clapped the Ambassador hard on the shoulder. ‘Yes, all very dry and dull. Much more fun to call Sachs a wizard, and say that he has stolen our spirits away to some magical realm. But what he is trying to describe is the means by which we are able to witness Vanaheim’s destruction.’
‘All right,’ said Luc, ‘you’ve answered pretty much everything I wanted to know, except for one thing – why did you both want to meet me here, on this ship, so very far from home?’
‘Appropriate in what way?’
Antonov turned to the Ambassador, punching him lightly on the upper arm. ‘Go on, tell him, Horst.’
Sachs cleared his throat, regarding Antonov with a mixture of amusement and befuddlement. ‘There was, it turns out, some information of genuine value that Father Cheng recovered via the Thorne gate,’ he explained, stepping closer to Luc. ‘Here.’
Sachs opened one hand, to reveal something very like a firefly, glowing with inner radiance, nestled on his palm.
‘What is it?’
‘Please,’ said Sachs. ‘Take it.’
Luc opened his hand, and the firefly hopped from Sach’s open hand and into Luc’s.
Luc closed his fingers, the light of the firefly fading away at the same moment that a torrent of information spilled into his conscious mind. A second later he regarded his two companions with an expression of astonishment.
‘You discovered yet another race in the Milky Way?’ he gasped.
‘So it seems,’ Sachs agreed. ‘Naturally, we intend to be vastly more cautious in meeting with them than we were even throughout our initial encounters with the Inimicals. We have, however, even in the brief period since making contact, experienced a level of communication with them that has proven to be far more than merely satisfying.’
‘And that’s why you’re here?’
‘That’s why we’re here, Luc,’ said Sachs. ‘All three of us.’
‘But – another race? Are you sure that’s wise? I mean, after everything that happened with the Inimicals?’
‘We have learned from our past mistakes,’ Sachs explained, ‘and have learned much about this new species already. Enough to be convinced that they offer no possible threat to us. More than that, each has much to gain from the other.’
‘But . . . why bring me here?’
‘Our reward,’ said Antonov, ‘for services rendered.’
‘Few in history have had the opportunity to observe or indeed engage in a genuine first-contact scenario,’ added Sachs.