The Thousand Emperors

by Gary Gibson

  Reaching the platform, he slammed its control panel with one hand, then collapsed onto all fours, hooking his fingers through the metal grille as he was carried back up. It clanged to a stop a minute later, and Luc ran as best he could, until he was back at the control room where Marroqui and his Clan-members had died.

  At the same moment he reached the threshold of the control room, the ground beneath his feet began to tremble, at first gently but then with greater violence. A deep bass murmur rolled up from the depths of the complex.

  He was out of time.

  Most of the cryogenic pods that hadn’t been buried beneath falling debris had clearly suffered massive damage from the explosion that had devastated the control room. Only one appeared to have escaped unscathed – unlike the rest, its control panel still glowed softly in the dust-filled darkness.

  Luc headed straight for it, the rumbling all the while growing louder and closer. He tore the lid open and climbed inside, listening to the exhausted rattle of his own breath as he lay back.

  The lid clicked back into place above him. An internal light came on, low and red. Icons and menus appeared around him, filling the coffin-like space.

  He selected an option marked Critical Emergency, bypassing everything else. A soft hiss began from somewhere just above his head, and he became drowsy within moments.

  The roaring grew in volume. Hammer blows began to rain down on the pod at the same moment that a deep chill spread through his bones.

  He tried to take a breath, and then another. On the third try, the breath froze in his lungs, and for the third time that day he sank into bottomless darkness.

  TWO

  Luc dreamed.

  He was six years old again, running through a field beneath a curving transparent dome, the sun dropping towards the peak of Razorback Mountain and dazzling his eyes. His hands brushed against stalks of wheat as he ran, ignoring the field-mechant that kept pace with him, warning of the consequences of trespassing.

  Something huge flitted through the sky above the biome’s ceiling, moving so fast he barely had time to register its passage. He stopped to stare, seeing the dark silhouettes of Council stinger-drones following in close pursuit. A copse of seaweed bushes beyond the biome’s transparent wall stirred beneath a sudden breeze, sending startled lizard-wings spinning upwards from their perches to scatter across the sky.

  Light flared on the horizon, a second sun rising to meet the first. He saw the peak of Razorback Mountain melting as the firestorm engulfed it.

  The ground beneath Luc’s feet shook, and he turned to run back the other way, back to the safety of home.

  Luc became aware of bright smears of light that made his eyes hurt. Round, pink blobs that might have been faces hovered indistinctly before him. He took a breath, and realized his lungs were filled with some form of liquid, thick and viscous. Panic seized him until he realized he wasn’t drowning. Someone had put him into a recovery tank.

  I’m still alive, he realized. The dream was still fresh in his mind. It was an old one, but it had never happened in reality. If he’d really been home on Benares during the Battle of Sunderland, he’d have died along with millions of others.

  He could make out just enough of his reflection in the tank’s transparent wall to see that something was terribly wrong.

 

  One of the pink blobs came closer, resolving into a sallow-faced man with a close-shaved skull, wearing the uniform of a Temur medician.

 

  Luc twisted his head back, seeing bright lights shimmering overhead.

  the medician scripted in reply, then turned to someone behind him.

 

  Any further protests died on Luc’s lips.

  There were several more such brief episodes of lucidity, each one slightly longer than the last, including one in which Luc found himself being questioned by a medician who never bothered to give his name. He showed Luc CogNet-mediated video of his extraction from the twisted wreckage of the cryogenic unit that had saved his life, but only just.

  He couldn’t recognize the raw, burned slab of meat in the video, couldn’t connect it to himself. The medician allowed him to see himself through the eyes of lenses dotted around the recovery room. He was submerged in a fluorocarbon-rich gel, his body half-hidden amongst a tangle of sensor leads, his flesh burned and flayed. Shoals of tiny black things like tadpoles swarmed around his legs and lower back with apparent purpose, while his face had been reduced to little more than sheets of exposed muscle laid over the skull beneath.

  The medician asked questions that Luc tried to answer, sticking to script-speak since Luc’s newly-grown throat and larynx hadn’t quite finished healing. He learned the cryo-unit had put most of its energy into protecting his head and brain once the temperature of the plasma began to push it beyond its operational parameters. As a result, many of Luc’s organs and muscles had been replaced using fast-track tissue work. Even so, the work was going fast, and it might only be another day or two before they were able to lift him out of the tank.

  The medician departed, and Luc soon drifted back into a drug-induced sleep. A new dream came to him, disturbing because it felt more like a memory than anything else. He found himself staring into a convex mirror surrounded by folds of dark cloth, but instead of his own face, he saw that of Winchell Antonov reflected there. Antonov’s lips moved in silence, his expression full of bitter anger.

  The rapidity with which they healed him was astonishing. Each time the medicians brought him back to consciousness, Luc found the pain was a little less than it had been, until finally it was reduced to not much more than a dull ache.

  The Chief Medician had Luc decanted from his tank and moved to a room with an actual bed. His new skin felt ridiculously soft and delicate, as insubstantial as rice-paper origami that might come undone in the slightest breeze. The sensation of soft linens against his body was a wonder in itself.

  It wasn’t long before he got his first visitors. Eleanor Jaq walked into the room, her lithe form wrapped in a SecInt uniform, long brown hair tucked into a small bun at the back of her head. The last time he’d seen her, she’d told him they were finished, and so her arrival was more than a little unexpected.

  She wasn’t alone. Her companion was Isaak Lethe, SecInt’s Director of Operations, his brow marked by worry-lines. He took a seat to one side of Luc’s bed, the corners of his mouth jerking up in a half-smile as if this were the same as any other debriefing. Eleanor remained standing, her expression carefully neutral.

  ‘Mr Gabion,’ said Lethe. ‘You’re looking a lot better than you did when they first brought you in here.’

  ‘I’ve had better days,’ Luc croaked, his voice scraping like rusted razors. He tried to catch Eleanor’s eye, but she glanced away. ‘Just how long have I been here?’

  ‘You got back to Temur just a couple of days ago,’ Lethe replied. ‘Medician Merlino told me how much work they had to do on you.’

  ‘Apparently,’ said Luc, ‘they had to replace pretty much everything.’

  ‘They also rolled your age back about a half-decade or so. My understanding is that made things easier for them.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ said Eleanor, eyes finally settling on him. Her nostrils flared slightly, a sure sign she was still angry at him, despite everything he’d been through. ‘Really lucky.’

  ‘I know you’re only just out of the tank, but I need to talk to you about what happened on Aeschere,’ said Lethe, his expression becoming apologetic. ‘I know you probably don’t feel ready for it.’

  Luc shook his head. ‘It’s fine. What do you need to know?’

  ‘Sandoz Command are facing questions over how they managed to lose an entire Clan on what should have been a straightforward operation. And it’s not like we can ask Marroqui or any of the rest of them what happened.’


  ‘Why not? They’ll be re-instantiated, won’t they?’

  ‘Yes, and Karlmann Sandoz has already given the order to prep their clone bodies. Unfortunately, since the explosion that destroyed the complex left no trace of them . . .’ Lethe regarded him from beneath shaggy eyebrows.

  Meaning, Luc guessed, that their instantiation lattices had also been destroyed. ‘So they won’t be able to reboot them from the point when they were actually killed,’ Luc finished for him. ‘I get it.’

  ‘Which makes you our only material witness to what happened down there,’ Lethe continued. ‘The version of Master Marroqui they’re about to shovel into a new body hasn’t even heard of you. That means at some point you’re going to find yourself standing in front of an investigative committee, possibly several of them. And they’re all going to ask difficult questions.’

  ‘And that’s why you’re here?’

  Lethe smiled stiffly. ‘Actually, it concerns Antonov. You told a Sandoz investigator he was still alive when you reached the lowest level of the complex.’

  Luc shook his head. ‘I don’t recall speaking to anyone from the Sandoz.’

  ‘They sent one of their own here to interrogate you without getting our clearance first,’ Lethe explained. ‘You were still only half-conscious at the time. One of the medicians told me it’s unlikely you’d recall any of it. I filed a protest and managed to get the details of what you told the investigator. So Antonov – was he still alive?’

  Luc nodded. ‘He was, yes.’

  ‘You also told him Antonov compromised Marroqui’s mosquitoes.’

  ‘Also correct.’

  ‘Mostly correct. It turns out those mosquitoes were still transmitting some data back to the orbital platform parked around Grendel.’

  Luc sat up with extreme care. ‘So you managed to recover at least some data?’

  Lethe nodded. ‘Enough to prove your version of events. Up to a point.’

  Up to a point. ‘Go on,’ said Luc, sensing Lethe was leading up to something.

  ‘Your CogNet link stopped recording just before you reached the lowest level of the complex, and didn’t start again until you contacted Master Siedzik. That means we have no idea what happened during the period it wasn’t functioning.’

  ‘You think Antonov compromised it in some way?’

  Lethe ignored the question. ‘Apparently you told this investigator that after your encounter with Antonov, you headed straight for the cryo units, but not before sending a warning to Siedzik. Why?’

  ‘Antonov told me he was going to destroy the complex. He even told me the cryogenic pods were my best bet at staying alive.’

  ‘Let me just be clear on this. Antonov told you he was going to trigger a detonation?’ asked Lethe.

  Luc shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a bomb or anything like that. Antonov had a transfer gate set up down there on the lowest level, connected to a ship orbiting close to 55 Cancri’s photosphere. He set the ship to dive into the sun before knocking me out. When I woke up he was dead, and I checked the readings in one of the navigation booths for just long enough to see he hadn’t been lying.’

  They both stared at him like he’d started barking profanities.

  ‘Didn’t I tell the investigator . . . ?’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ said Lethe, looking outraged. ‘A transfer gate? How the hell could Antonov get his hands on technology like that?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Luc, ‘but I swear to you it’s the truth. He was badly wounded, dying.’

  Luc stopped, his head throbbing with sudden, unexpected pain. It wasn’t hard to guess Lethe didn’t believe a word.

  ‘How badly wounded?’ asked the Director.

  Luc swallowed with some difficulty. Sharp spikes of pain radiated from inside his skull, getting worse with every passing second. ‘He had a deep chest wound. At first I thought he was too weak to be any danger. But he fooled me. He managed to dose me, then drag me through to the ship’s bridge.’

  ‘Why in Heaven didn’t Antonov just kill you?’ asked Lethe. He had a look on his face like a man trying to figure out a particularly intractable puzzle, one he was sure contained some central flaw that, once identified, would cause all the rest to fall apart.

  ‘I don’t know. By the time I came to, he was dead and the ship was locked into its course. All I could do was get the hell out. I made my way back through the gate and up to the higher levels.’

  ‘And the rest of Antonov’s people?’ asked Eleanor. ‘The Black Lotus insurgents?’

  Antonov put something inside my head, Luc wanted to say, but as soon as the thought crossed his mind, sweat burst out all over his newly-minted skin, the pain in his skull doubling.

  It felt almost like something was trying to stop him talking about it. He gripped the bed sheets, twisting the soft cotton around his fingers.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Eleanor, stepping around the side of his bed and placing one hand on his upper arm. The sensation of her fingers against his skin was almost unbearably sensual. She glanced back at Lethe. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t . . .’

  ‘No,’ Luc gasped. ‘It’ll pass.’

  He saw Eleanor and Lethe exchange a look.

  ‘Look,’ said Lethe, ‘if we go to an investigative committee and try and tell them Antonov had transfer gate technology without any proof, there’s going to be hell to pay. There are already questions about how badly you might have been affected by the trauma of what happened to you.’

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ Luc said hollowly.

  Lethe sighed. ‘It’s not a question of whether I believe you or not.’

  ‘Just other people.’

  ‘Even if there really was a transfer gate down there, Aeschere’s got a low enough average density that the explosion, or whatever the hell it was, brought the roof down on half the complex. It’d take months, maybe years to dig down far enough before we could even begin to verify your story. Come to think of it, it was probably sheer damn luck you didn’t wind up buried under half a million tons of rock along with everything else.’

  ‘So you think Antonov was never there, that I hallucinated the whole damn thing. Is that it?’

  ‘No, he was definitely there,’ Lethe replied. ‘We managed to get visual corroboration of that much, at least, from Black Lotus’s own security networks just prior to the raid. It looks like he died there as well. Whether I believe there was a transfer gate or not doesn’t really matter, not without hard evidence. With no CogNet data and no proof to the contrary, any committee you wind up in front of is going to dismiss every word that comes out of your mouth.’

  Luc opened his mouth to protest, but then realized that if their roles had been reversed, he’d have said exactly the same damn thing. He’d have assumed the story about the transfer gate was a delusion, triggered by the dreadful trauma of having half his body burned away.

  But it had been real. He could feel it, deep in his bones. The proof was in his skull, put there by Antonov. All he had to do was tell them, but even the thought of doing so filled his head with a furious ache.

  ‘I was pretty torn up, right?’ Luc managed to blurt. ‘When they pulled me out of that cryo unit, they must have scanned me pretty thoroughly, inside and out.’

  Lethe frowned, then gestured at something behind him. A mechant drifted forward until it hovered just centimetres above the bed, its sensors directed at Luc.

  The ache grew worse. It took all Luc’s strength just to force the next words out.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he gasped. ‘In my head. Antonov put—’

  The pain escalated beyond all endurance. His body snapped rigid as something tore at the inside of his head. He was vaguely aware through the haze of agony that two human orderlies had come rushing into the room.

  The mechant reached out and did something to his arm where it lay on top of the sheets. Everything began to recede, as if he were seeing the hospital room and its occupants from down the far end of a long, dark tunnel. The pain wasn�
�t any less, but he found he no longer cared about it.

  He experienced a kind of fugue, and the next thing he knew lights were slipping by overhead as he was taken somewhere else. Then there were more mechants, and other, unfamiliar faces, and finally another room where he was given into the care of a machine that pressed in close all around him.

  Whatever they’d pumped into his veins, it felt good.

  He came to, and saw Eleanor standing by a window, staring out across the rooftops of Ulugh Beg. Night had fallen. There was no sign of Lethe.

  ‘What . . .’

  She turned and blinked red-rimmed eyes at him, almost as if she’d forgotten he was there.

  ‘. . . the fuck?’ he finished, his voice a harsh croak.

  She came over to him. ‘You had some kind of seizure. They’re still not sure what happened.’

  He managed to push himself upright in the bed, and saw he was back in the same room as before. ‘Well, that’s less than reassuring.’

  ‘They ran a bunch of scans on you to see what triggered it, but they didn’t find anything.’

  Luc stared at her in disbelief. ‘What kind of scans?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You’d have to ask one of the mechants.’ She nodded towards one that hovered inconspicuously by the door.

  Luc did. ‘Deep tissue and tomographic scans were carried out,’ it replied, drifting closer. ‘No lesions or other possible causes of a cerebral seizure were found.’

  ‘What about Merlino, the medician?’ Luc asked, turning back to Eleanor. ‘What exactly did he say?’

  ‘He said they can’t be sure of anything until they carry out further tests. He didn’t exactly say it, but from what I can tell they don’t have the faintest idea just what happened to you.’

  ‘But the scans must have found something,’ Luc demanded, turning his attention back to the mechant.