The Thousand Emperors (3 page)

They disembarked into a corridor leading deep inside Aeschere’s bowels. Something whirred past Luc, and he jerked around in time to see a mosquito come to a nimble landing on the floor a
metre or so from him.

As he watched, translucent plastic wings retracted into the machine’s carapace. It turned this way and that, its movements jerky and curiously comical.

‘It’s one of ours,’ he heard Triskia say. ‘Why’s it—?’

Triskia never got to finish her sentence. Luc watched with horrified anguish as she staggered, blood and bone misting the air as the back of her helmet exploded outwards.

Luc kicked out at the mosquito with one booted foot, sending it crashing into a wall. Marroqui screamed an order, and the air filled with noise and fury as his remaining men opened fire on the
machine. By the time it was over, the mosquito lay still, its mirrored carapace blackened and ruined.

Marroqui knelt down beside the dead woman’s prone form, swearing under his breath. He passed a finger over her forehead and muttered something that sounded like a prayer. One of the
Sandoz’s endless rituals, Luc guessed.

‘Shig,’ said Marroqui, looking back up at one of his men, ‘what the hell just happened?
Was
that one of our ‘skeets?’

‘It was,’ Shig replied, his face pale with shock. ‘I don’t understand why it . . .’

His voice trailed off.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Marroqui, standing back up and looking around. His previous swaggering bravado had all but deserted him now. ‘There’s no way Antonov
could have compromised our comms encryption . . . is there?’

‘It might explain why you lost contact with some of your mosquitoes,’ said Luc, his voice cracking slightly.

Marroqui’s hands twitched spasmodically at his sides. ‘Impossible.’

Luc nodded down at Triskia’s still form. ‘Ask her if she agrees.’

‘Ramp up your personal countermeasures,’ said Marroqui, his voice edged with steel. ‘Fire on
anything
that comes within range.’

‘I think,’ said Luc, ‘this might be a good time to reconsider falling back. We can work out a new strategy—’

Marroqui turned to regard Luc, his nostrils flaring. ‘No, Mr Gabion. We’re Sandoz. Turning back at this point isn’t an option.’

‘Even if it means refusing my orders again?’

‘Even then,’ Marroqui muttered, hoisting his weapon and motioning to his Clan-members to move on.

Luc recalled what little he knew of the Sandoz credo, especially their refusal to surrender. It was going to be the death of them all.

Within the space of a few moments, the shadows and long, bleak reaches of the tunnels beneath Aeschere’s surface had become infinitely more menacing. They passed shadowed
cells, the walls around them marked with ancient graffiti. Despite the occasional distant buzz of plastic wings, the mosquitoes kept their distance.

Communications with the rest of the Clan, scattered throughout the complex, became increasingly sporadic. At one point they all heard a momentary burst of static from their comms, interspersed
with screaming and what sounded like heavy weapons fire. After that, silence.

Marroqui still refused to turn back. They moved rapidly, reaching the fusion plant just a few minutes later. Once there, Luc almost stumbled over the corpse of another of Marroqui’s men.
The rest lay scattered around, their bodies and the walls surrounding them blackened from plasma fire.

‘I still can’t raise anyone else,’ said a man with freckled skin, looking pale and terrified. Alert symbols drifted on the periphery of Luc’s vision as he spoke.

‘Is there
any
way we can reboot communications?’ asked Marroqui. ‘Or maybe reroute them?’ His voice had become flat and emotionless, and Luc suspected this was the
first time the Clan-leader had ever tasted defeat.

The other man laughed shrilly. ‘Sure – standard operative procedure in a scenario like this is to route all our comms through the mosquitoes, but I don’t think that’s
such a good idea.’

‘One of us could still head back up top,’ suggested one of the others. ‘That way we could try and contact the lander by line-of-sight and ask for help.’

Marroqui shook his head wearily. ‘It’s a good idea, except that you’d have to wait for nightfall, and that isn’t due for a few more hours.’ He glanced at Luc.
‘On the other hand, Mr Gabion, you really might be better off out of this. I could have one of my people escort you back up there and you can wait it out in that prayer room. I can’t
make any guarantees it’s going to be any safer up there, but it might.’

Luc shook his head. ‘I have to be there when you find Antonov.’

The Clan-leader’s face reddened. ‘The situation’s changed, can’t you see that? We’re professionals, we know how to deal with this kind of situation. If you get
killed down here, you’re dead forever.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Luc replied, holding the other man’s gaze until Marroqui finally looked away, shaking his head.

‘The control room for the entire complex is right below us on the next level down,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘Before they dropped out of contact, the ‘skeets reported
Antonov was using it as a command hub.’

‘If someone’s controlling our mosquitoes, that must mean there’s someone still alive down there,’ said another.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Marroqui. ‘We can’t rule out the possibility they’re just running on automatic.’

‘Or maybe your mosquitoes were compromised from the moment we walked in here,’ Luc suggested.

They all stared at each other.

‘Fuck it,’ said Marroqui, breaking the silence and stepping over one of the blackened corpses on his way back into the corridor. ‘There’s only one way to find
out.’

They made for another elevator platform, checked it for possible sabotage, and then climbed on board, riding it down in silence before disembarking on the next level down. Luc
glanced over at one of Marroqui’s squadron, hearing him mutter something repeatedly under his breath that sounded a lot like a prayer.

Marroqui had Luc keep to the rear as they advanced down a high-ceilinged passageway lined with tables and benches. They saw the bodies of more Black Lotus fighters, slumped across tables or
curled up on the ground as if they were sleeping. The first wave of mosquitoes had killed them all.

They crowded through a narrow doorway and into the control room. An isometric plan of the entire complex hovered above a dais at the room’s centre. All it took was a quick glance to see
that it matched the updated version they had received from the mosquitoes.

The bodies of more of Marroqui’s men were scattered around the dais, their faces contorted in death. Luc tasted the acid rush of bile as it surged up the back of his throat.

He glanced down, seeing through the steel grid flooring on which they stood that another room lay immediately below this one. Just visible were cryogenic pods of a design he recognized, lined
against a wall: emergency medical units, designed for deep-space retrieval; almost tiny spaceships in their own right. Their status lights were dark, indicating they were empty. Clearly,
Antonov’s men had been slaughtered with such rapid efficiency, they had not even had time to place any of their injured inside the units.

They all heard the faint echo of something scuttling along the corridor beyond the control room entrance. Luc watched as Shig ducked outside for a look.

‘Here they come!’ Shig yelled, pulling the lower half of his body back around the door frame, then leaning out into the corridor and opening fire. A moment later he made a grunting
noise, his feet giving way beneath him as he flopped backwards in the low gravity, red mist staining the air behind him.

Luc twisted around in mindless desperation, searching for another exit. He glanced back down through the thick metal grille and saw a ladder reaching down to the floor of the room below.
Dropping to all fours, he peered through the grille. The top of the ladder terminated somewhere on the far side of the control room, hidden behind tall banks of equipment.

He ran past the dais and around the side of a tall steel cabinet in the same moment that Marroqui and his surviving Clan-members opened fire on something behind him. Set into the floor above the
ladder was a flat metal hatch, but before he could reach down to pry it open, something picked him up and slammed him against the nearest wall.

He hit the floor a moment later, ears ringing, and felt it lurch beneath him like the deck of a ship caught in a storm. He had just enough time to work out there had been an explosion before the
steel panels comprising the floor came apart from one another, sending him tumbling down into the room below, along with the contents of the control room. He just barely managed to scrabble out of
the way of the steel cabinet before it landed on him. Someone’s torso, still encased in plastic and metal armour, rolled and bounced as it hit the ground, coming to a halt just centimetres
from his nose.

When he looked back up at the ceiling of the ruined control room, he saw several mosquitoes gazing back down at him with insect-like eyes.

Managing to pull himself upright, he stumbled towards dim light spilling through a nearby doorway, squeezed past the dais from the upper floor, which had landed on its side, then ran blindly
down a passageway until he stumbled across another elevator platform. He slammed the control panel with his fist and gripped the railing like a man adrift in a storm as it carried him down to the
lowest level.

The platform came to a jerky halt at the bottom of the shaft, two rough-walled tunnels angling away from it in different directions. Luc headed down one at random, but
didn’t get far before more mosquitoes emerged from the gloom, tick-tacking through the still silence towards him. He retreated back the way he’d come and headed down the other tunnel
instead, with the uncanny sense that he was being herded in one particular direction – proof, if any were still needed, that Antonov must still be alive.

‘I’m here, Antonov!’ he shouted, and heard the hysteria creeping into his voice. Grabbing a metal bar from a pile of junk, he wielded it like a weapon, then laughed at the
ridiculousness of it. He couldn’t possibly defend himself from mosquitoes while armed with nothing more than a chunk of scrap metal, but there was something comforting about the feel of it
gripped in his armoured fist nonetheless.

More mosquitoes emerged from the gloom up ahead, but they scuttled backwards at his approach, clearing the way.

‘Are you there?’ Luc shouted again. ‘Show yourself, Goddamn it! Show your fucking face!’

Turning a corner, he found himself at the entrance to a cavern dug out of the rock, a deactivated digging machine at the far end sitting next to a mound of excavated rubble. He swallowed in the
dry air, then set his eyes on something that took his breath away.

A transfer gate, embedded into one wall of the cavern.

At first Luc couldn’t quite convince himself it was real. A thick metal torus surrounded the mouth of what might otherwise have been nothing more than the entrance to a passageway, leading
him to wonder if it had only been tricked up to
look
like the mouth of a transfer gate. Any other conclusion meant accepting the notion that Black Lotus now had access to the kind of
technology that permitted the construction of stable, linked wormhole pairs – the same technology that enabled passage between the worlds of the Tian Di.

He stepped up to the gate and saw it consisted of a short cylindrical passageway, no more than a couple of metres in length, a metal walkway suspended over its floor. He gazed into the interior
of a room on the far side. The floor of the room was at an angle with respect to the cavern in which he stood, indicating that the gate and its opposite end had not been correctly aligned. Dense
metal plating hid the wormhole’s horizon, the tori ringing each mouth of the gate shielding a core of highly exotic matter without which the wormhole could not exist. And if all that
wasn’t evidence enough, he could feel the hairs on his arms and scalp standing up, an epiphenomenon caused by inadequate shielding on the containment fields.

It was real, all right. That room might be located in another part of the complex, or might be light-years away, in some entirely different star system. There was, after all, no limit to how
widely separated the two mouths of a wormhole could be.

Luc stepped onto the walkway and felt even Aeschere’s minimal gravity drop away once he was halfway across, meaning the far end of the gate was almost certainly on board a spacecraft of
some kind. He stepped off the walkway at the far end, drifting through the air until he came to a stop against the wall opposite.

This, then, was Antonov’s exit strategy. Luc couldn’t help but feel a little awed at the scale of the man’s planning.

He heard laboured breathing from behind, and turned to find Winchell Antonov propped against a bulkhead to one side of the gate entrance, one of his hands pressed over a dreadful chest-wound,
his skin pale and waxy. His breath came in long, drawn-out gasps, and his thick, dark beard glistened with sweat.

‘I’m impressed,’ he grunted, fixing his gaze on Luc. ‘Really, I am.’

Winchell Antonov: once the Governor of Benares, later the leader of Black Lotus, the single greatest threat the Temur Council had ever faced. In that moment he looked small, despite his nearly
six and a half foot frame.

‘It’s over, Antonov,’ Luc heard himself say, his voice ragged. ‘It’s time to give up.’

Antonov chuckled, then drew his breath in sharply, squeezing his eyes shut and clutching at his wound.

Something click-clacked from nearby. Luc turned to see that several mosquitoes had hopped onto the walkway bridging the wormhole, their tiny needle-like weapons aimed towards him.

‘I fear,’ grunted Antonov, ‘that we find ourselves at a mutual impasse.’

‘There’s nothing left to fight for,’ said Luc. ‘Even if you kill me, the Sandoz are going to tear this place apart until they find you.’

Antonov squinted up at him, one corner of his mouth twitching upwards in a grin. ‘Aren’t you the least bit curious why you’re still alive?’