The Thousand Emperors
Contents
In brief, then, human history can be split into two parts: the period occurring before the destruction of all life on Earth in the year 2235 C.E., and
that following those terrible, final days.
At the time, a network of wormhole connections or ‘transfer gates’ linked Earth via its moon to its interstellar colonies, though few were aware that secret exploratory missions
had uncovered the existence of a second, incomparably vast wormhole network, created by aliens we now call the Founders. Certain Founder artefacts were brought back to Earth with devastating
results when one was somehow activated, leading to the sterilization of the Earth within days. If not for the deliberate destruction of the Lunar Gate Array, the same fate might also have been
visited upon the colonies. It is this period we now call the Abandonment. The Western Coalition, as it was then known, having recognized that the Earth was doomed, initiated a rapid and successful
military takeover of every colony apart from Galileo.
The decades following the Abandonment were hard, lean times, but barely half a century later starships carrying new, retro-engineered transfer gates were already being sent out to reconnect
the colonies one to another. It is in this period that the template for the modern political order was laid down.
Although the Western Coalition – by this time, simply the Coalition – had seized political and military control of the colonial governments, the general populations of those
worlds had been predominantly drawn from member nations of the former Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Coalition–Sphere relations were already deeply antagonistic prior to the Abandonment, and
became more so, inevitably flowering into a full-fledged revolt a century after the Coalition’s takeover.
The uprising proved to be bitter and protracted, but ended with several worlds finally achieving autonomy from Coalition rule. These worlds – Da Vinci (now Benares), Newton (now New
Samarkand), Franklin (now Temur), Galileo (now Novaya Zvezda), Yue Shijie, and Acamar – became known collectively as the Tian Di, and were ruled from Temur by a council of revolutionary
leaders numbering nearly a thousand. Although far from being a democracy, this Temur Council provided much-needed stability in the post-revolutionary period.
While the Tian Di and the Coalition co-existed in relative peace over the next several decades, they rapidly diverged both culturally and technologically. The Coalition first renewed and then
stepped up its exploration of the Founder Network, despite increasingly alarmed protests from the Temur Council, whose members were afraid of a repeat of the events leading to the
Abandonment.
It is undoubted that the Temur Council lacked for effective leadership in the years immediately preceding what we now call the Schism, and the power vacuum following Salomón
Lintz’s forced resignation as the Council’s Chairman offered a clear opportunity for a man as ruthlessly determined as Joseph Cheng. Cheng soon swept to power on the wave of a popular
coup, and the promise that he would sever all transfer gates linking to the Coalition to prevent any possible repeat of the Abandonment.
Cheng soon fulfilled his promise and, within days of becoming Permanent Chairman of the Temur Council, the human race was effectively split in two. Those few members of the Temur Council who
had openly opposed Cheng’s rise to power, including, most prominently, myself and Winchell Antonov, were either imprisoned, forced into exile, or executed on trumped-up charges.
It cannot be denied that the period immediately following the Schism was marked by unprecedented peace throughout the Tian Di. The quality of life for our citizens improved by such leaps and
bounds that there was, for a long time, little to no demand throughout the Tian Di for moves towards more democratic representation. The one real exception, of course, was Benares – a world
of limited resources, cruelly under-represented within the Council. It was on Benares that Winchell Antonov, having escaped his imprisonment, founded the Black Lotus organization. Antonov is also
credited with giving Cheng’s Council the less than flattering sobriquet The Thousand Emperors.
At the time of writing, the Council continues to enjoy privileges unavailable to the wider population, most notably the instantiation lattices that grant them effective immortality through
mind-state backups and cloned bodies. It is becoming harder for them to justify this exclusivity, now that the hardship of the post-Abandonment period and the violence of the Schism are little more
than history lessons to the majority of the Tian Di’s citizens. At the same time, calls for greater public participation in the running of the Tian Di are slowly beginning to grow, even on
Temur. There are even calls to reunite with the Coalition which, expectations to the contrary, appears from our limited communications with them to have flourished in the intervening two
centuries.
Such calls have long gone unanswered. Cheng has meanwhile begun to retreat more and more from public view, surrounding himself with a circle of trusted advisors known as the Eighty-Five, from
whom little is heard bar the occasional official pronouncement.
To this day, there is much concerning Cheng’s past that is dangerous to speak of publicly. The Council has worked hard to alter the facts of the past to suit its vision of our future,
making it at times extraordinarily difficult to separate truth from fiction.
I write these words with no certainty that they will ever be read. But I am an optimist, even here in my prison, and it remains my hope that I can present to you, the reader – when or
wheresoever you might be – some approximation of our true history in the following pages.
Excerpt from
A History of the Tian Di: Volume 1 – From Abandonment to Schism
by Javier Maxwell.
‘Gabion.’
Luc turned to see Marroqui stabbing a finger at him from across the hold, his face dimly visible within his helmet.
‘Close your visor, Goddamn it,’ said Marroqui, his voice flat and dull in the cramped confines of the hold. ‘Depressurization in less than thirty seconds. We’re
landing.’
Luc reached up and snapped his helmet’s visor into place, ignoring the smirking expressions of the armour-suited Sandoz warriors arrayed in crash couches around him. They were crammed in
close to each other, bathed in red light.
An alarm sounded at the same moment that the lander carrying them began to jerk with abrupt and sudden violence. Marroqui had warned him about this, explaining that the lander had been
programmed with evasive routines designed to reduce the chances of their being shot down by hidden ordnance. Even so, the breath caught in Luc’s throat, and he pictured the craft slamming
into Aeschere’s pockmarked face at a thousand kilometres an hour, scattering their shredded remains far and wide. But the shaking soon subsided, and he finally remembered to exhale, although
his hands appeared unwilling to release their death-grip on the armrests of his couch.
The lander lurched gently, and the alarm stopped as suddenly as it had begun. They were down.
A ceiling-mounted readout showed the air pressure in the lander dropping to zero. The rumbling sounds of the craft’s internal workings soon faded away, leaving Luc with nothing but the
sound of his own half-panicked breath.
Their harnesses parted all at once, sliding into hidden recesses as one wall of the hold dropped down, becoming a ramp leading onto the moon’s surface. Thick dust, kicked up by their
landing, swirled into the hold as the suited figures surrounding Luc climbed out of their couches, looking like an army of armoured bipedal insects as they moved down the ramp with practised
efficiency.
The hydraulics in Luc’s suit whined faintly as he followed, stepping onto the dusty floor of a crater about thirty kilometres across. He glanced back in time to see the lander leap upwards
before its ramp had time to fully snap back into place, quickly receding to a distant dark spot against Grendel’s cloudscape.
Luc hastened to keep up with the Sandoz warriors hustling towards the wall of the crater just a few hundred metres away. All around him he could see dozens of black hemispheres scattered across
the crater floor.
Several black spheres thudded into the dust not far from him, dropped from orbit by some unmanned Sandoz scout ship. He saw one crack in half like an egg, disgorging a metal-limbed mechant
barely larger than his fist. The machine span in a half-circle until it had acquired its target, then rushed ahead of him in a flurry of fast-moving limbs.
Being this up close and personal with a Sandoz Clan reminded Luc just how little he’d enjoyed the experience on every previous occasion he’d had the privilege. It was like bathing in
an ocean of testosterone and barely suppressed rage. He saw the way they looked at him: a mere
Archivist
, for God’s sake, some kind of jumped-up librarian from one of SecInt’s
less glamorous divisions and, worse, a civilian.
It was a common fallacy. He could have pointed out that rather than being a librarian, he was instead a fully accredited investigative agent, and that rather than being some minor part of
SecInt, Archives was in fact that organization’s primary intelligence-gathering resource. But it would just have been one more opportunity for Marroqui to bitch about having him tag
along.
He had to remind himself that the Sandoz Clans looked down on everyone, not just him. Each Clan operated more like a family than anything resembling a traditional military unit, borne as they
were out of a strange amalgam of religion, gene-tweaking and asceticism. They all spent their formative years training in the combat temples of Temur’s equatorial jungles, and took advantage
of instantiation technology otherwise reserved for members of the Temur Council. That, plus their unwavering and very nearly fanatical devotion to Father Cheng, made them close to unstoppable.
Luc’s CogNet informed him that sunrise was less than one hundred and eight seconds away. Marroqui was cutting it close.
He stared ahead towards the crater wall, and the monastery entrance set into it. His eyes automatically moved up to regard the crater’s rim, already incandescent from the approaching dawn.
Grendel rose above Aeschere’s horizon to the west, thick bands of methane and hydrogen wrapped around the gas giant’s equator, glowing with the reflected heat of the star it orbited at
a distance of just a few million kilometres. The sight of it made his skin crawl.
And fuck you too
, thought Luc, picking up the pace and racing to catch up with the rest. Grey dust like funeral ashes puffed up with every step.
It had all started with Luc’s discovery of an insurgent data-cache in a vault on Jannah, an uninhabitable world of perpetual storms in the Yue Shijie system. Finding it
had taken months of careful work, requiring the assembly of a team of specialists with experience in Black Lotus cryptanalysis. Before long a horde of Archivists had descended on the vault, and the
information contained therein had led Luc finally to Grendel and Beowulf, two Hot Jupiters in the New Samarkand system.
He remembered running through Archives and almost colliding with Offenbach, the look of confusion on the Senior Archivist’s face changing to one of delight once he realized Antonov had
finally been cornered.