The Thousand Emperors

by Gary Gibson

  For the first time since he had stumbled out of his ship and watched it dissolve to nothing, Jacob allowed himself a faint sliver of hope. There was still a chance – small, but real – that he could find the weapon Father Cheng required him to locate, and carry it back to Temur.

  Just days from now, and he, Jacob Moreland, would earn his place as one of the greatest heroes of the Tian Di. Millions might die as a result of his actions, but – as all truly good men knew – history was a tapestry necessarily woven from the bodies of the innocent.

  EIGHT

  At first, Luc thought Cripps had returned when he awoke to find a figure once again lurking in the darkness of his bedroom. But when it stepped closer, he saw instead that it was de Almeida’s data-ghost.

  He had been dreaming that he was making love to her. He remembered clearly the way her lithe frame had moved above his in a room whose contours were unfamiliar to him. He recalled with astounding clarity the warm scent of her skin and the taste of her lips and tongue, and the urgent thrust of her hips against his own. It had felt so entirely real that upon seeing her data-ghost standing before him, he felt momentarily disoriented, not quite sure if he was awake or not.

  ‘Mr Gabion,’ she said, her voice low. ‘We need to talk.’

  He sat upright amidst the tangled sheets of his bed, irritated and embarrassed, as if she had somehow been privy to his thoughts.

  He waved a hand and the window de-opaqued, letting in the pre-dawn light. At least he was alone this time; Eleanor had spent most of the previous evening neck-deep in preparations for a pre-tribunal hearing concerning Aeschere.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, making no attempt to hide his irritation.

  ‘It’s Sevgeny Vasili’s murderer,’ she said. ‘They’ve found him.’

  His fatigue drained away. ‘Where?’

  ‘Downtown, here in the capital,’ she said. ‘Dead, unfortunately. Alive would have been better. Do you know Kirov Avenue?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Kirov Avenue was in one of the oldest districts of the city, an area heavily populated by Benareans like himself.

  ‘Meet me there,’ she said, flashing an address to him before vanishing.

  Kirov Avenue was lined by tall apartment buildings that hailed from the days of vat-based architecture, when construction materials had been formed from slabs of fullerene grown in tanks of engineered microbes. There had been a scandal when the buildings had started sagging just a few decades after their construction, causing their once-gleaming facades to slowly melt. The internal skeleton of one fluted tower was clearly visible where the outer cladding had crumbled away. After that, Benareans dislocated by the repercussions of the uprising there had moved in, while everyone else had moved out.

  Luc had been one of those Benareans – one of thousands of refugees who had scattered across the Tian Di in the wake of the Battle of Sunderland. It had not, at first, been an easy existence. Orphaned in the wake of the rebellion, he had been given over to the charge of a Benarean family. His adoption had not gone well, and he had only rarely returned to this part of the city since.

  He arrived there just over an hour after de Almeida summoned him, stepping out of an Archives flier to find himself confronted by half a dozen armoured Sandoz cars arrayed outside a building whose walls curved gently as they rose towards a peak sufficiently lofty that he couldn’t quite make it out.

  Several data-ghosts conferred with each other beside one of the Sandoz vehicles, while a few steps away, SecInt mechants kept a small crowd of a dozen or so civilian onlookers at a distance from the building.

  Luc decided to keep his own distance until Zelia made her appearance. The data-ghosts, all of which had their backs to him, alternated between studying something on the ground immediately before them and craning their heads back to peer at the upper floors of the adjacent building.

  Luc couldn’t see just what it was they were all staring at on the ground, but he could make an educated guess. Someone had exited the building the hard way, and at a terminal velocity. As he continued to watch, one of the data-ghosts turned away with a grimace, covering his mouth as if he was about to be sick. This convinced Luc he’d guessed correctly.

  Just when he had started to wonder if de Almeida was going to turn up at all, the data-ghost of a small, wiry-looking woman with blond hair and severe eyes stepped away from a mechant she had been addressing and approached him.

  ‘It’s me,’ the woman muttered, leaning in close. ‘Zelia.’

  Luc shook his head. ‘Why the disguise?’

  ‘It would cause something of a fuss, don’t you think, if people were to know there were this many members of the Council standing around Kirov Avenue in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Where?’ Luc asked, glancing around. He saw one or two data-ghosts, but none he recognized. . .

  ‘Oh,’ he said, feeling stupid. He wondered if Father Cheng himself might be amongst them.

  ‘I want you to take a look at the body.’

  ‘If you’ve found your killer,’ said Luc, ‘why do you need me here?’

  ‘Because I think you might know him,’ she said, before turning her back on him and suddenly fading from sight.

  Luc stepped towards the cluster of vehicles, muttering a curse under his breath.

  His name was Reto Falla. He had fallen nearly three quarters of a kilometre from the window of his apartment, landing in a sculpted garden area at the base of the tower, which had long since gone to seed. His legs were grotesquely folded back behind his body, while his torso had ruptured upon impact. The back of his skull had also shattered where it had struck a decorative rock. He had died, Luc noted, with a look of surprise on what was left of his face.

  He stepped away as mechants proceeded to hide the body from view inside a temporary, dome-spaced structure. De Almeida’s data-ghost-in-disguise beckoned to him to follow her away from the cluster of people, again coming to a halt a short distance away.

  ‘So?’ asked de Almeida, ‘was I right? You knew him?’

  Luc sighed. ‘Yes. We both come from the same small settlement on Benares.’

  ‘A settlement that was entirely wiped out during the Battle of Sunderland, I understand.’

  ‘Yes,’ Luc admitted, a sudden tension taking hold of him. ‘Falla and me and some other kids were on a school trip to a low orbit factory at the time of the attack. All of us became orphans in the exact same moment.’

  Luc studied the face of de Almeida’s data-ghost, to see if he had evinced so much as a trace of pity. None was apparent.

  ‘But you were already aware, I gather, that he had since become involved with Black Lotus?’

  ‘Sure. He was picked up during a raid some years back, when Black Lotus were just gaining a real foothold here on Temur. That’s when I saw him, for the first time since we were kids.’

  ‘When, exactly?’

  Luc was sure she already knew the details, but answered anyway. ‘They put me in charge of his interrogation, in case knowing me might make him more inclined to be talkative.’

  ‘And did it?’

  Luc laughed, glancing back over to where Falla’s crumpled form was now hidden inside a brightly coloured dome, shadowy figures moving inside. ‘He hardly even remembered me. When I told him we’d grown up in the same place, he just looked at me like I was lying. It had been a long time, after all.’

  ‘Just how deeply involved was he with Black Lotus?’

  ‘He was far from being a high-level operative, if that’s what you mean.’ He felt a sense of inexplicable sadness that he recognized as just one legacy of the trauma of those years. ‘He wasn’t much of anything; more of a fantasist, with no real connections. He had some psychological issues, along with a whole roster of dependencies, chemical, neural and otherwise.’

  ‘Curable enough, I would have thought.’

  He turned to look at her. ‘Some things run too deep, Miss de Almeida. You can’t just root them out without fundamentally changing someone’s personality
.’

  ‘But is he the kind of person Black Lotus would want to recruit?’

  ‘He was certainly disaffected enough, but he never amounted to much. At best, he knew people who knew people, if you follow.’

  ‘So what did you do with him?’

  ‘Nothing. We made him into a paid informant, but we never got anything useful out of him.’ He made sure to fix his eyes on de Almeida’s. ‘And in answer to your next question, there’s absolutely no way he’d have been able to pull off anything so sophisticated as a high-level assassination. Not even with a lot of help.’

  She regarded Luc with a look of amusement. ‘It’s interesting the way your lives worked out. Him on one side of the fence, you on the other.’

  He frowned. ‘Reto fell for Black Lotus’s bullshit. I didn’t.’

  ‘What kind of bullshit?’

  ‘Is there a reason for this line of questioning?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I want to know the answer.’

  ‘Black Lotus claimed they weren’t responsible for the assault on Sunderland that killed a huge number of Benareans, but it’s demonstrably not true. As far as Black Lotus were concerned, the Benareans who died as a direct result of their actions were nothing more than collateral damage.’

  ‘That didn’t stop a lot of other Benareans joining their ranks afterwards,’ said Zelia.

  ‘Then I guess you’d have to ask them for their reasoning,’ he replied levelly.

  De Almeida again regarded him with a look of amusement that was already becoming as familiar as it was deeply irritating. The real problem with data-ghosts, Eleanor had once said, is that you can’t punch them in the face.

  A second data-ghost appeared next to de Almeida’s, and spoke to her without acknowledging Luc’s presence before vanishing once more.

  ‘Two hundred and thirty-first floor,’ said Zelia, turning back to face him. ‘That’s Falla’s apartment. The elevator’s out of action past the two-hundredth floor, I’m afraid. You’ll have to walk the rest of the way.’

  ‘Or,’ he said, ‘I could just ghost there.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Father Cheng might want you to take a look at physical evidence, and you can’t do that if you’re only present as a projection. If you start now, I’ll see you there in half an hour.’

  By the time Luc had ascended in a working car to the two-hundredth floor and climbed up the last thirty-one flights, his skin was slick with sweat and he was breathing hard. It took him longer than half an hour since he also had to negotiate his way past a series of security mechants placed in the stairwells. A final mechant, decorated in the distinctive livery of the Temur Council, led him into a small, derelict-looking apartment.

  De Almeida was there in the flesh, although Father Cheng and Bailey Cripps themselves were only present as data-ghosts. Cheng turned to regard him as he entered, and for a moment Luc caught his look of cold contempt, quickly replaced by one of jovial avuncularity.

  ‘Mr Gabion,’ said Cheng, his voice booming in the confines of the tiny living-room. ‘It appears we’ve found our killer and saved you a great deal of bother.’

  ‘Take a look at this,’ said de Almeida, gesturing to the mechant that had led him inside.

  The mechant projected an image of a crude-looking device, blown up until it was nearly a metre across. Luc recognized it as a home-brew CogNet earpiece, a customized unit typically used for circumventing low-grade security networks – part of a thief’s arsenal, in other words. Black Lotus often made use of operatives skilled at constructing such devices.

  Luc glanced between de Almeida and Cheng. ‘All this tells us is that Falla probably made his living as a thief,’ he said.

  he heard Cheng script.

  she replied, her expression defiant.

 

  Luc kept his gaze fixed on the projected image, terrified that Cheng and Cripps might realize he could hear their every word.

  ‘Mr Gabion,’ said de Almeida, nodding at the projection, ‘Father Cheng believes Falla must have used this device to pass through the Hall of Gates.’

  ‘Case closed, really,’ said Cripps. ‘That thing’s crammed with decrypted security data for getting past the White Palace’s defences. There’s even data proving he was present on Vanaheim at the time of Vasili’s murder.’

  Luc glanced at de Almeida. Her jaw was clenched, like she was on the verge of going ballistic.

  ‘If you have the actual device here, can I take a closer look?’ asked Luc, gesturing to the projection.

  Cripps started to say something. ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Of course,’ de Almeida snapped before he could finish. ‘Here.’ She reached out a hand to the mechant providing the projection, and it dropped the original device into her open palm. It was, as Luc had expected, quite tiny, smaller even than a fingernail.

  She passed it to Luc, who studied it closely, ignoring the glare on Cripps’ face. When he tried to access it through his own CogNet link, he found to his surprise that it was quite easy. The crude device’s temporal archives proved to be not only accessible, but also dated back months. It didn’t take him more than a minute to locate data inside the tiny machine that apparently proved the device and its owner had indeed passed through the Hall of Gates.

  He shot a furtive glance at de Almeida, and saw her looking back, her jaw clenched beneath angry eyes.

  she sent.

  It took Luc a moment to understand she was addressing him directly. He continued to study the device in his palm without replying.

  de Almeida continued, guessing why he was suddenly reluctant to respond. She was looking in the other direction from him now, towards the shattered window.

  Luc sent back, turning the device over in his hands.

  The casing had been crudely soldered, as if it had been built in a hurry. In that respect it was entirely unlike similar devices he had encountered in the past, which had been more sophisticated in appearance, often indistinguishable from commercial CogNet units.

  ‘Do we know for a fact that Falla killed himself ?’

  Luc glanced up. De Almeida had directed her question at Cripps.

  Cripps scripted back to her.

  de Almeida sent back.

 

  ‘If you will, Bailey,’ Cheng commented.

  Cripps looked like he’d eaten something sour. ‘Clearly Falla killed himself,’ he said out loud. ‘He must have had a tip-off that SecInt were on their way here.’

  Luc stepped across to the shattered window at the room’s far end and looked out. The ground was an unpleasantly long way down.

  ‘But a tip-off from who?’ asked Luc, stepping back from the window.

  ‘Black Lotus, of course,’ Cripps barked. ‘He decided to end his life rather than face punishment for his actions.’

  ‘Or possibly, someone connected to Black Lotus made that decision for him,’ suggested Cheng. ‘It would certainly make it harder to track down whomever was responsible for giving him his orders.’

  ‘It’s looking very open and shut to me,’ Cripps declared. ‘His connections with Black Lotus are extensively documented.’

  ‘Finding that device doesn’t prove he killed Vasili, let alone somehow found his way through the Hall of Gates!’ de Almeida protested.

  ‘No,’ said Cheng, ‘but that machine’s own internal records strongly
suggest he did.’

  ‘Those records,’ she said through clenched teeth, ‘could have been faked.’

  ‘Oh no, Zelia,’ said Cripps, one corner of his mouth curling up. ‘On the contrary, I already checked the White Palace’s own security records. I found anomalies in them, corresponding to the times and dates inside Falla’s crude little toy.’

  ‘But why on Earth would Black Lotus want him to kill Vasili?’ she demanded.

  Cripps regarded her with a pained expression, as if confronted by an imbecile. ‘Surely, Zelia, that should be clear. This was a tit-for-tat move, a strike against the Council in return for Winchell Antonov’s death. As far as I’m concerned, you can stop playing detective now. We’ll arrange an immediate inquest and have a decision based on the evidence within the next few days. After that, we can concern ourselves with other questions – such as who might have helped Falla carry out his crime.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said de Almeida. ‘Are you telling me that you think Vasili was killed as revenge for our stopping Antonov? He hasn’t been at the heart of Council politics for more than a century. What would be the point? You, on the other hand,’ she said, practically spitting the words at Cripps, ‘would make a far more worthwhile target, especially since you spend so much of your time away from Vanaheim. Why, if Falla found it so easy to pass through the Hall of Gates, would he fly halfway around Vanaheim just to kill a minor and half-forgotten member of the Eighty-Five, when he could have stuck around Liebenau and killed someone a lot more important?’

  Cripps shrugged. ‘You heard Joe: there’ll be an enquiry to figure out the hows and the whys. Right now the most appalling thing about all this is that it’s all so easily preventable.’ His voice began to rise. ‘That means someone hasn’t been doing their job, Zelia. If they had, Sevgeny might still be alive today.’

  ‘If it were to become publicly known that the architect of the Reunification was murdered in his own home,’ said Cheng, ‘it would be a major propaganda coup for Black Lotus and their supporters, and there are still plenty of those left. I’ve already made it clear that this is unacceptable. Instead of questioning Bailey’s hard work, Zelia, perhaps you should try and find out how it is your vaunted security systems failed to prevent a lone agent, acting with the minimum of support, from entering our sanctuary and killing one of our own like a dog. If it hadn’t been for Bailey’s swift and decisive action here, Falla might have lived to do much worse things than what he so very clearly did to poor Sevgeny.’