The Thousand Emperors

placing his fingers against its cool, faintly metallic pages.

He sat still for several seconds, his breath gradually evening out. Navigating the memories and other information encoded within the book was far from intuitive. He had flashes once more of Vasili’s last moments before his death, including, he noted with grim satisfaction, a glimpse of Cripps’ own face as he entered Vasili’s home. But he could sense other information buried in the pages, in essence almost indistinguishable from his own half-remembered thoughts . . .

He let go of the book with a gasp, blinking and shaking his head, and then laughed. He had them: the coordinates of Father Cheng’s secret data-cache, hidden in orbit above Vanaheim.

All he had to do now was feed them into the navigational systems via his lattice, and the flier would take him there immediately.

The cache might as easily have been hidden somewhere far more inaccessible, such as the Red Palace back in Liebenau. In that case, Luc would have been forced to admit defeat. But to keep it so close to home would, he suspected, have invited a greater risk of discovery. Whereas if Vanaheim’s orbital space was as clogged with junk as Maxwell had claimed, there probably wasn’t a better place for Eighty-Fivers to hide their dirty laundry.

The same light that Zelia had used to make contact with him following his escape from Maxwell’s prison began flashing once more. Luc stared at it for a few moments, then ignored it, setting the flier on a new course.

Before long, he was on his way to high orbit.

An hour or so later, the flier’s external sensors gave Luc a view of what at first appeared to be a zero-gee junkyard. Much of what he could see had been jury-rigged from discarded fuel tanks and temporary accommodations, and looked it. But a query to the station’s datanet – unexpectedly still functioning – reassured him that although it was entirely abandoned, having apparently served for some decades as a kind of orbital storage depot, it was still pressurized. At least he wouldn’t have to suit up.

The flier thumped gently against the station’s one airlock, followed by a rumbling hiss on the other side of the hatch. The hatch unfolded a moment later, revealing a claustrophobically narrow metal passageway. Long-dormant emergency lights flickered into life, tinting the interior of the station with a soft red glow.

Luc made his way along the passageway, propelling himself along with his fingertips in the zero gravity, until he found himself inside something that looked like it had started life as a cargo flier. The interior of the flier had been stripped and converted into a makeshift storage depot; he could see a few dozen plastic crates still lashed to a bulkhead to prevent them from floating away, while an ancient-looking fabricant was mounted on a wall, printed machine-parts still stacked on a plastic pallet beside it. Three more passageways radiated outwards from this central point, giving access to the pressurized fuel tanks that constituted much of the station’s bulk.

Luc carefully picked his way over to the lashed-together crates and pulled himself into a sitting position next to one. Unzipping his jacket, he again withdrew the book Maxwell had given Vasili, slipped one arm through a cable securing one of the crates, and then shook the book open, placing it on his lap before opening it carefully and touching the revealed page.

Vasili hit the auto-mechanism for the airlock and listened to the distant hiss of air as the ancient satellite re-pressurized for the first time in years. He made his way down a narrow passageway, before emerging into a makeshift bay.

Here, he studied his surroundings with an engineer’s eyes. The station had been designed to be nothing more than a temporary structure, a pressurized orbital dock where mechants could store materials for later use. After that, the station should have been disassembled and destroyed.

But in this case, the station had remained intact. It had even been carefully maintained, though you couldn’t tell from the outside. If it had been truly abandoned, Vasili knew, it would long since have fallen out of orbit and plunged into Vanaheim’s atmosphere.

He moved deeper into the station until he came to a maintenance port, a cramped alcove tucked away at the far end of a branching passageway, where an interface panel newer and considerably more up to date than anything else aboard the station could be accessed. Pulling himself into a narrow seat, he touched a hand to a virtual panel.

Verification took just a moment, and he was in.

Luc opened his eyes and pulled himself loose from the cable. It took him just a minute or so to make his way down the same branching passageway and pull himself into the same alcove Vasili had found.

A virtual panel shimmered into existence the moment he sat down. It didn’t look like anything much out of the ordinary, little more than a standard interface for the station’s AI systems. But then, Cheng would hardly have gone out of his way to advertise the presence of his secret data- cache.

Screw it.

Luc reached out and touched the panel. In response, something slid out from the alcove next to his right hand, a metal bar that had also appeared when Vasili had been here before him.

Luc next reached out and gripped the bar. The metal was cold to the touch. His fingers tingled slightly with the contact, and he guessed the bar operated on the same principles as the lattice-enabled circuitry embedded in Maxwell’s books.

A sudden burst of data washed over him, and it didn’t take much navigating to realize the station was, indeed, one of the many secret repositories in which the Temur Council maintained copies of their backups. There were undoubtedly other such repositories scattered all across Vanaheim and in orbit.

He was only peripherally aware of the station around him, its bulkheads creaking softly, as he navigated further through a blizzard of data, centuries-worth of instantiation backups and dirty little secrets.

Wait. There was something there, tugging at his awareness. He focused on it, and . . .