The Thousand Emperors

The flier informed him it was receiving a transmission coded for the Sequoia. On investigation, it proved to be from Zelia.

<Zelia.>

<You’re alive? I saw the attack on the station. Didn’t you go there?>

<I did. Ambassador Sachs destroyed the station himself.>

<You mean he’s dead?>

He thought for a moment about everything Sachs had shown to him. <Not in the way you mean, no.>

<I want you to rendezvous with the rest of us at my home,> she sent, then added: <I found Cripps, Luc – and now I know just who it was Cheng sent to Darwin.>

<What do you mean, ‘the rest of us’?> asked Luc, but by then the flier was re-entering Vanaheim’s atmosphere, rendering any further communications impossible for at least the next few minutes.

Luc gasped as rough hands yanked the breathing mask from his face. The impact gel had congealed into a thick translucent sludge around his feet shortly after the flier had landed safely by Zelia’s domed laboratory.

Harsh sunlight cut through the flier’s open hatch. He felt hands take hold of him, pulling him out from his seat restraints. He collapsed onto grass, half-blinded by the light, and heard the distant hiss of the sea.

Looking up, he discovered he was surrounded by several of Zelia’s machine-men. For one terrible moment he thought perhaps Zelia had sent them to kill him, but they kept their distance as he staggered to his feet, gel still dripping from his clothes.

One of the creatures gestured towards Zelia’s laboratory, a short walk away, a faint buzzing emerging from the grille where its mouth should have been. Luc nodded warily, then watched the creatures shuffle out of his way as he stepped forward.

Part of the building housing Zelia’s laboratory had caved in, while the twisted wreckage of a Sandoz mechant lay nearby. Burned, ragged shapes scattered around the surrounding land were recognizable as fallen soldiers in Zelia’s army of machine-men. Dark smoke rose from the mansion next door, the wind carrying an acrid smell of ashes down to the sea.

He found Zelia inside the laboratory, wearing a bloodied smock and perched on the edge of a chunk of masonry that had smashed a work table, having fallen from the ceiling, wrecking the room’s carefully-wrought astronomical mural.

She was not alone. At least a dozen other men and women stood or sat where they could amidst the scattered laboratory equipment, all turning to stare at Luc with varying degrees of suspicion as he entered from the greenhouse. A few of them looked as if they had been through their own trials: one had a heavily bandaged arm, while another appeared to have suffered serious burns to one side of her face. He ignored them all, focusing his attention on Zelia as he stepped over to her.

‘Who is he?’ one of the others shouted. ‘He’s not a member of the Council!’

‘Mr Gabion is working for me,’ said Zelia, without looking around. ‘He found the evidence that Cheng is responsible not only for Sevgeny Vasili’s assassination, but that of Ariadna Placet before him.’

‘That doesn’t mean he should be here,’ said another voice. ‘Send him away, Zelia.’

She glanced around them all with an irritated expression. ‘I brought you all here so we’d have some chance at salvaging something from this mess,’ Zelia shouted, ‘not so you could dictate terms to me. Gabion being here is my choice, not yours.’

‘Who are all these people?’ Luc asked her quietly.

She slid down from the chunk of masonry. ‘Members of the Council who’ve made the mistake of opposing Cheng in any number of ways. He’s accused us all of being Black Lotus sympathizers and ordered our arrests.’

‘But why bring them here?’ he demanded. ‘Surely you’re making it easy for Cheng to kill or capture you all at once?’

‘There is strength in numbers, Mr Gabion.’ She nodded towards the steps leading down to the basement. ‘There’s something I need you to see.’

‘What you did to Cripps was wrong, Zelia,’ said another voice from the crowd. ‘You should have waited to speak to the rest of us before electing yourself judge and jury.’

Luc gazed around until he saw who had spoken: a dignified-looking man wearing a dark suit, his steely-grey hair cut close to the scalp. A few other heads nodded or muttered their agreement.

‘I made a necessary decision,’ Zelia snapped, her voice full of wounded anger, ‘while the rest of you sat around with your thumbs up your fucking asses. Where the hell were you, Ben,’ she said to the man in the dark suit, ‘when Cripps was trying to hunt me down like a dog?’

Luc grabbed hold of Zelia’s arm. ‘How much else have you told them?’

‘Told us what?’ asked Ben.

‘That Cheng’s been sending Sandoz reconnaissance teams through a secret gate leading into the Founder Network,’ Luc replied.

‘I already told them,’ Zelia grated. ‘They know what Cheng had planned for Benares as well.’

‘But do they know that the Coalition are about to start a war with us because Cheng refused to pull his teams back out from the Network?’

That shut them up, he thought with satisfaction, as they all stared at him in stunned silence.