The Thousand Emperors (7 page)

It was real.

The file in question contained a report detailing an incident on Thorne more than 125 years before. Out of all the worlds of the Tian Di, Thorne was both the least hospitable and the most
recently colonized, a scrap of rock with a few bare lichens to its name orbiting on the outer edge of a red dwarf star’s habitable zone. It was a far from suitable candidate for terraforming,
but a penal colony had been set up there following the Schism, and later a series of biological research stations had also been established there. That community of scientists, along with those
unlucky enough to be sent there to live out their sentences, huddled in shielded biomes or in deep sheltered caves.

The report detailed the accidental deaths of hundreds of prisoners following a containment breach in a biotech station, but any more specific details had been flagged as restricted. The only
name he even vaguely recognized amongst those attached to the incident was that of Zelia de Almeida – a minor member of the Temur Council who had, at the time, been Thorne’s Director of
Policy.

The report also mentioned that de Almeida had been removed from her post following the incident, while an investigation blamed the whole incident on criminal negligence. There was nothing to
connect any of it with Winchell Antonov; nothing to explain why he had asked Luc – in a
dream
, of all things – to come looking for this particular file.

Or maybe he’d come across the file in the past and forgotten about it, until he had incorporated it into a trauma-induced fantasy about secret transfer gates.

He stared hard at the report, visible only to him where it hovered in the air.
You have a choice
, he told himself.
You can either decide the dream was just that, or you can act like it
meant something real.

Luc stared past the report and at the upwards-thrusting skyline of Ulugh Beg, feeling as if he were balanced on the edge of a precipice. He had requested, and been granted, further scans, but
there was nothing inside his skull that shouldn’t have been there. If there ever had been, it was long gone.

He reached out, meaning to dismiss the record. Instead he opened it for editing, adding in five words:
I’m calling in my favour
.

He saved and dismissed it, feeling like a fool. With any luck, he’d never have to think about it ever again.

Luc found himself back home within another few days, staring around his apartment like he’d never seen it before. It might as well have been a million years since
he’d last stood upon its threshold.

He ordered the blinds to open. They parted to reveal the city spread out before him, the fat spindle of the White Palace dominating the evening skies where it floated above Chandrakant Lu Park.
The Palace itself was constructed from a series of stacked tiers, with a number of biomes arranged around its upper surface, each filled with the native flora and fauna of any one of a dozen
worlds. The whole thing hovered above the park on enormous AG pods. Few people outside of the Temur Council were granted the opportunity to visit the White Palace, and fewer still got to pass
through the private transfer gates in its upper levels that led to Vanaheim, an entire world reserved for the sole use of the Council.

Further out from Chandrakant Lu, bridges like spun diamond straddled Pioneer Gorge and the small, cramped buildings from the original, pre-terraforming settlement that had once been located
there. People came from all corners of the Tian Di just to see a view like this.

Even though Reunification was still a few weeks away, holographic images of dragons and other mythical beasts were already being projected into the void of air surrounding the White Palace,
along with images of the orbiting Coalition contact-ship that carried aboard it a transfer gate linking back to the Coalition world of Darwin. The park beneath was already a hive of activity as
final preparations for the gate’s ceremonial opening were carried out.

The world had changed while he’d been looking the other way. Antonov was dead, and two centuries of enforced isolationism were coming to an end with the official sanctioning of this
single, tentative but nonetheless permanent wormhole link with the Coalition.

Of all the times he wanted Eleanor with him, this was it. But this close to Reunification, everyone in SecInt was working overtime, including her. So Luc had his apartment form a chair facing
towards the Palace, and collapsed into it, staring out into the early evening sky and wondering if the rest of his life was going to feel as much of an anti-climax as he was beginning to suspect it
might.

Stop being so morose
, he chided himself, and asked the house mechant to bring him a glass of warm kavamilch, sipping at it until he drifted off into an exhausted sleep.

He came awake sometime in the early morning, and realized he wasn’t alone.

‘You look surprisingly well for a man who’s been burned alive,’ said a voice from behind him.

The house had dimmed the lights some time after he had fallen asleep. He brought them back up, twisting round in his seat to see a man with short-cropped hair standing facing him in the middle
of the room, his face maddeningly familiar.

Luc stared at him. ‘Who . . .’

‘I’m disappointed,’ said the man. ‘You don’t recognize me. Bailey Cripps.’

‘Bailey . . .’

‘I’m here on behalf of the Eighty-Five, Mr Gabion.’

The Eighty-Five.
Father Cheng’s inner circle within the Temur Council, all of whom had been by his side since the days of the Schism.

Luc squinted. He could just about see the hair-thin line of rainbow interference surrounding Cripps like a halo that indicated he was talking to a data-ghost – nothing more than a
projection, but an unauthorized intrusion for all that. Anger began to overwhelm his initial feelings of shock.

Luc stood, flustered, and turned to face him. ‘Of course I recognize you. You chair the Council’s Defence Subcommittee. But I have a right to privacy, even from—’

‘Sit back down,’ Cripps ordered him. ‘I’m here to ask you some questions, Mr Gabion.
Necessary
questions.’

Luc held his ground and remained upright. ‘If you wanted to talk to me, you could have just arranged an interview through SecInt.’

‘That isn’t possible,’ Cripps replied. ‘This meeting has to be strictly off the record.’

‘Why?’

Cripps’ eyes narrowed. ‘I think you’re forgetting your place, Archivist. I came here to ask
you
questions, not the other way around.’

‘How do I know you really are who you say you are? I could be speaking to anyone behind that data-ghost.’

Cripps nodded as if satisfied. ‘An excellent point. Feel free to check.’

Luc asked his house to trace the source of the projection, and soon learned that it originated from somewhere deep inside the White Palace itself. Further, the signal had been processed via a
channel used exclusively by high-ranking members of the Council’s vast bureaucracy.

The chair reformed around Luc as he sat back down, facing Cripps. ‘Okay. You check out. So what exactly is it that’s so damned important you’d come into my house
uninvited?’

‘I want you to tell me,’ said Cripps, ‘whether you think the Thousand Emperors should be in power.’

Luc felt his face grow red. ‘You mean the Temur Council, don’t you?’

Cripps raised an eyebrow. ‘Does the name bother you?’

‘It’s a highly pejorative term, used in Black Lotus propaganda.’

‘You still haven’t answered the question,’ Cripps replied, his eyes hard. ‘There are people, and not just Black Lotus supporters, who claim the Council has been running
affairs throughout the Tian Di for much too long. Is that a view you agree with?’

Luc felt his stomach curl into a tight knot. ‘Have there been questions over my loyalty, Mr Cripps?’

‘You come from Benares, I understand.’ The way he said it, it sounded more like an accusation than a polite enquiry.

‘I think,’ Luc replied, struggling for calm, ‘that what I did on Aeschere proves where my loyalties lie.’

Cripps gave him a humourless smile. ‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ he said. ‘That whole mess left more than a dozen Sandoz dead, their supposedly secure network
compromised. Then there’s you, the sole survivor, with your miraculous escape and no clear explanation for just what happened to you while you were down in that complex. Given your
background, it’s inevitable that people are going to start wondering if perhaps you were in league with Antonov in some way.’

‘If you want to ask me any more questions,’ Luc replied, his fingers gripping his knees, ‘you can do it in the presence of Director Lethe of Security and
Intelligence.’

‘Let’s leave SecInt out of it and think of this as just being between friends. Haven’t you ever thought maybe the Council’s been in power too long? It’s been more
than two centuries, now. Don’t you feel it’s time for some new kind of government to be put in their place?’

‘What I
think
, Mr Cripps, is that you’re testing me for some reason I don’t understand. I lost my family to Black Lotus when I was very young, so you’re out of
your mind if you think I’m an agent for them. Go read my SecInt file. The word “exemplary” gets used a lot.’

‘That file also tells me the majority of people in the part of Benares you came from had sympathies for Black Lotus. When you came to Temur as a refugee, you lived in a part of Ulugh Beg
with a strong Black Lotus presence.’

‘Black Lotus murdered a couple of million Benareans in a sustained assault that devastated half a continent. Believe me, Mr Cripps, I’ve got more reason than most to hate Winchell
Antonov. Besides, everyone in SecInt gets psych-profiled to find out where their loyalties lie. So why are you
really
here?’

There was a reptilian quality to Cripps’ gaze, something in the way the skin wrinkled around the corners of his eyes that made Luc think of a predator half-submerged in some watering-hole
beneath a baking sun.

‘Two reasons,’ Cripps responded. ‘For one, a couple of years ago you were given the chance at a promotion to SecInt’s security division, but you didn’t take it.
Why?’

‘Because it would have taken me out of the Archives division, and away from my intelligence work,’ Luc replied immediately. ‘The job was mostly bureaucratic. If I’d
accepted it, I might never have tracked Antonov down. I told Director Lethe that at the time, and he had no problem with my reasoning.’

‘Except that promotion would also have given you the authority to influence Archives’ lines of investigation,’ Cripps countered. ‘That could have made a lot of difference
– maybe enough so that we wouldn’t be forced to re-instantiate an entire Sandoz Clan.’

‘You said there was a second point?’ Luc snapped, barely able to contain himself any longer.

‘I don’t think you have any more love for the Temur Council and Father Cheng than Winchell Antonov ever did,’ Cripps replied, a glint in his eyes. He nodded past Luc, towards
the White Palace hovering in the air beyond the window. ‘Who’s to say you aren’t a sleeper agent, placed deep inside Archives, and who’s to say Antonov’s death
wasn’t faked in some way? No body was recovered, and all we have is your unlikely testimony, delivered to a Sandoz investigator, which can’t possibly be corroborated since no CogNet
records of your encounter with Antonov exists!’

‘With all due respect, sir,’ Luc spat back, ‘you don’t know shit.’

Cripps’ shoulders jerked briefly in a laugh. ‘Things are going to be very different from now on, Mr Gabion. I’m going to be keeping a
very
close eye on you. Remember
that, when you start your investigation.’

Luc stared at him, baffled. ‘My
what
?’

‘We’ll meet again shortly. Just remember, in the coming days, that you are as much a suspect as anyone else.’

‘Suspect in
what
?’ Luc shook his head in befuddlement. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking ab—’

Cripps’ data-ghost vanished while he was still mid-sentence, leaving him staring at an empty room.

An investigation
, Cripps had said. What kind of investigation?

He pushed both hands across his head, wondering if he hadn’t just imagined the whole thing. After everything he’d been through, he couldn’t even be sure how much he could trust
his own senses. Maybe he was losing his mind. Maybe it was really that simple.

‘House,’ he asked, ‘was anyone else just here?’

‘Senator Bailey Cripps, by remote data-presence,’ the house replied.

He closed his eyes in silent relief and sank back into the chair, but soon found himself staring back out at the Palace, feeling nothing but a premonitory chill.

The next morning a mechant guided Luc from the metro station at the edge of the park and along a pathway that skirted the bronzed statue of Chandrakant Lu. The White
Palace’s architect had been depicted with one hand reaching upwards, as if to catch the vast edifice floating half a kilometre above the city. He saw innumerable fliers arriving to decant yet
more people to join the hundreds already milling about, a considerable number of whom wore the formal work clothes of Council bureaucrats, while the rest sported the uniforms of either SecInt or
Sandoz.

Mechants, most of them conspicuously armed and bearing Sandoz markings, darted through the air, almost outnumbering the crowds. Their carapaces glittered under the bright arc lights that
substituted for sunlight beneath the Palace’s vast bulk.

The mechant guided him towards an open plaza near the park’s centre. He felt a rush of pleasure when he sighted Eleanor standing amidst a gaggle of several other SecInt agents. The agents
were gathered around an olive-skinned man wearing a long formal jacket; Luc immediately recognized him as Mehmood Garda, Director of Policy for Benares, and himself a member of the Eighty-Five.

The crowds moved and shifted, and a moment later Luc also caught sight of Vincent Hetaera, his immediate superior in Archives, engaged in what looked like an in-depth discussion with several of
his junior research staff.