The Thousand Emperors

laboratory, not to mention an entire Sandoz weapons platform.’

‘Just before I left the Sequoia,’ Luc explained, ‘Sachs did something remotely to my lattice. He said he’d optimized it.’

‘“Optimized”?’

‘He said I wasn’t using its full potential.’ He glanced at her. ‘It’s also how I know where the stolen artefact is.’

She turned away from him, looking unsettled. ‘I just hope whatever it is you’re planning is good, because we’re going to need nothing short of a miracle if we’re going to get out of this alive.’

A sombre silence settled over them, and Luc distracted himself by keeping an eye on the flier’s screens. He didn’t want to tell her that survival wasn’t part of his plan; he’d given up any hope of surviving Antonov’s lattice some time ago.

‘I’ll tell you what, though,’ said Zelia, suddenly. ‘If, by some fucking miracle, I actually get out of this alive, I’m going to go a long, long way away and never come back.’

He glanced at her. ‘Where would you go?’

She waved a hand towards the cockpit’s ceiling. ‘Out there, somewhere. With the right instantiation equipment and a growth-tank for clone bodies, I could extend my lifespan to thousands of years, maybe even longer. I’d travel out into the galaxy and see what I could find.’

‘You mean you’d travel through the Founder Network?’

She gave him a bemused look. ‘No, I’d build a ship, one that could take me out amongst the stars as close to the speed of light as I could push it. The Founder Network is a trap.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m not saying it was intentionally built for that purpose, but I have a theory that once a species finds its way inside the Network, they either stumble across something that wipes them out, or they . . . they lose themselves inside it.’

‘How?’

‘Think about it. How big is the Network, really? Some of the earliest expeditions into it travelled as far as a hundred trillion years into the future. That’s an unimaginable length of time. Think of what might happen to a civilization with access to the Founder Network over thousands of years, and not just centuries, like the Coalition. I wouldn’t give it more than a couple of millennia at the outside before civilizations become sufficiently fragmented as they spread through the Network that they wind up forgetting where they came from. Plus, it explains the Fermi Paradox.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s a question that used to get posed before they discovered how to build transfer gates,’ she explained. ‘If you make the assumption that there must be intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe, and if you also assume it’s inclined to spread out through space as we have, then why didn’t our ancestors on Earth ever encounter them?’

‘If there are aliens, then why aren’t they here?’

‘That’s it exactly. But what we know now is that the Founder Network’s been in existence for billions of years, apparently vacuuming up every intelligent race that comes across an entrance to it. That’s why we never encountered living aliens before – because they discovered the Network first.’

‘What does that have to do with not wanting to take a shortcut through the Network?’

‘There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, Luc, with God knows how many intelligent civilizations out there who never had either the luck or the misfortune to stumble across the Network. None of us have any idea just what’s out there, because as soon as we discovered a way inside the Network’ – and here, she put a hand out in front of her chest, palm forward – ‘we more or less came to a dead stop as far as the rest of the universe was concerned.’

‘I guess it makes sense when you put it that way.’ The flier was already tilting nose-up as it dropped out of orbit, shaking as it hit the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Luc glanced at a screen and saw it would not be long before they reached Liebenau. The stars were fading from sight once more, and before long they were racing towards the rising sun, the terrain beneath them becoming increasingly mountainous the lower they dropped. Vast swathes of green and blue to the south marked the confluence of several rivers on their long journey to the coast.

In less than half an hour, they’d be at the Red Palace.

‘Is there still fighting going on?’ he asked Zelia.

‘Some,’ she replied. ‘But most of the strikes I know about came from Sandoz ships in orbit, aimed at fabricant complexes.’

‘Why them?’

‘The fabrication systems here on Vanaheim are built for large-scale industrial construction. It’s how we build our homes, but it’s not that hard, if you know how, to retool them to manufacture weapons.’

‘And that’s what your friends have been doing?’

She nodded. ‘The Sandoz are attacking fabrication plants fairly indiscriminately. Pretty much anything, really,