The Thousand Emperors

All of a sudden, something enormous landed inside Luc’s skull.

It started as a feeling of pressure building inside his head, then a flurry of names and places and experiences. His body began to shake, his teeth clattering together, but he couldn’t prise his hand away from the metal bar.

Lines of fire criss-crossed his skull, forming a cage around the tender flesh of his brain. The cage grew rapidly smaller, sending him into paroxysms of pain.

Cheng booby-trapped the cache.

Luc convulsed, his head banging off one wall of the alcove, and yet his hand remained locked to the metal bar.

Some part of him dimly realized then that it wasn’t a booby-trap, but another seizure, triggered by the thunderous tide of information now flowing into his overwhelmed mind.

The pain became overwhelming, unbearable. He tried to scream, the sound dying in his throat and emerging instead as a thin rattle. The station’s bulkheads continued to creak around him like an old man laughing asthmatically.

Fire raged through his skull. His back arched and he convulsed with sufficient force that his hand was finally twisted free of the metal bar, sending him tumbling in the zero gravity like a discarded rag doll.

The pain gradually began to recede. Luc curled into a ball, pale and shivering, and waited until the worst was over. After that he dragged himself back through to the central hub, where he collapsed, too weak to move any further.

Losing all sense of time, he swam in and out of consciousness, and only barely registered a dull clang, followed by the hiss of an airlock.

A figure loomed into sight over Luc as he lay shivering by the pallet of crates. ‘Lucky I came looking for you,’ said Zelia, kneeling down so he could see her face.

A while later, Luc sat on a stool bolted to the floor of a utilitarian-looking living space in another part of the station, nursing what felt like the mother of all hangovers. A desk, sink, and a small cubby-hole for personal possessions were arranged around him with the easy disregard for conventional notions of up or down typical of every space habitat Luc had ever been in. The mechant Zelia had used to carry him from the hub waited by the entrance.

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Luc, his voice still weak. ‘First you try to kill me, then you come here and save my life.’

She shook her head. ‘I wasn’t trying to kill you, Luc. I just wanted to know what it was you were trying to find that was so important.’

‘And having that thing take a swing at my head wasn’t trying to kill me?’

She looked genuinely embarrassed. ‘I just wanted it to take that book from you.’ She glanced down at it, now tucked under one of her arms. ‘I don’t like having things kept from me, Luc. You were breaking the terms of our arrangement.’

Luc wanted to laugh, but it still hurt too much. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘it isn’t going to be much use to you. You couldn’t possibly access the data hidden inside it without Maxwell’s decryption key, and that died with him.’

Her face coloured slightly. ‘Then what the hell use was it to you?’

He tapped the side of his head. ‘Apparently I have an unfair advantage in that regard. I don’t need a key.’

‘I know what you’ve got lodged inside your skull gives you an edge, but don’t make the mistake of underestimating me.’

‘At least promise me you’re not going to try to beat me to death a second time.’

‘Look – maybe I overreacted, back there.’

This time, he did manage to laugh.

‘It’s just that when you flew off like that,’ she said, ‘headed for Vasili’s, I felt like I was losing control of the situation.’

Losing control of me, you mean. ‘You’ve managed to hang on to Vanaheim’s security networks?’ he asked.

She smiled triumphantly. ‘Of course. Otherwise I would never have been able to track you here.’

‘What about Cheng or Cripps or any of the rest of them? Will they know we’ve been here?’

‘Only if they manage to grab control of the networks from me again. Things are moving fast, Luc. Javier Maxwell’s murder was only the beginning. Now Cheng’s claiming Black Lotus have penetrated the Council itself, starting with me. People are starting to take sides.’

‘Sounds like a war’s going on down there.’

‘A war is pretty much what it is,’ she agreed. ‘But if I lose control of the networks again, we’ll also lose most of our advantage.’ She flipped the half-burned book open and flicked through its pages. ‘What exactly was in here that turned out to be so important?’

He realized, having found what he’d come looking for, there was little point in hiding things from her any more. ‘Coordinates,’ he explained, ‘for this station.’ He glanced around. ‘And Vasili’s last memories from just before he died.’

She stared at him. ‘How . . . ?’

He told her what he had learned so far from Maxwell’s books. She listened, hand over her mouth, eyes wide.