‘I just want to be clear on this,’ he called after the machine. ‘I’ve been requested to travel to Vanaheim?’
‘Yes,’ the mechant confirmed, pausing briefly before gliding onwards and through the gate. Luc followed, feeling increasingly out of his depth.
He felt some of his weight fall away when he stepped through a pressure-field on the far side of the gate. Vanaheim’s gravity was almost a fifth less than that of Temur.
He had never been to Vanaheim before; few outside of the Temur Council ever had. The air felt dense, almost soupy, and had a curiously honeyed scent to it. He glanced back through the gate to the interior of the White Palace, thinking of his home somewhere on the far side, so very close and yet so very far away. Then he turned around to regard the concourse on which he now found himself, and the greenish-blue sky visible through a curved glass ceiling several metres overhead.
There was no sign of anyone else.
The complex of which the concourse was part stood on raised ground on one slope of a river valley that was home to Liebenau, the single largest settlement on the entire planet. Luc saw a Gothic mansion at the centre of a vast, rolling estate, bordering what appeared to be an ancient Hindu temple; there were other buildings of varying and clashing architectural styles, most drawn from old Earth, although a cluster of grey-and-brown, utilitarian-looking structures were clearly inspired by post- Abandonment biome architecture. A few crystalline towers, not so different from those found on Temur and the capitals of other Tian Di colonies, rose towards the sky like upright spears.
Most of these were the homes of Cheng’s inner circle, the Eighty-Five; they all orbited a single, vast complex of ancient-looking buildings, which were in turn surrounded by a high, rectangular wall topped at each corner by pagoda-style roofs. A moat surrounded this wall. Extensive gardens helped to further separate and distinguish the Red Palace – as it was known – from the rest of the settlement. It had been modelled, he vaguely recalled, on a palace built on Earth many centuries before the Abandonment.
The mechant moved ahead of him and towards a single flier parked just beyond an exit. A door in the craft’s side swung open as they approached.
‘Now we’re here,’ he called after the mechant, ‘would you mind at least giving me some idea what the hell this is about?’
‘You are required,’ the mechant informed him, coming to a halt next to the flier, ‘to assist in the investigation of a murder.’
THREE
His name was Jacob Moreland, and he was a spy.
His mission had begun seventy-four years before, when he had been placed into a one-man craft launched from a Sandoz platform in orbit around Novaya Zvezda. Along with an armada of identical craft, each carrying a lone passenger, the ship carrying Jacob had accelerated rapidly out of the system, reaching eighty per cent of light-speed within half a year. The star around which Novaya Zvezda itself orbited soon became just one more exquisitely jewel-like point of light amongst countless others.
Jacob slept unawares, his body buffered by impact-gels and cooled by onboard cryogenics.
For a very long time, Jacob Moreland was, by any objective measure, dead. The instantiation lattice within his skull had encoded much of the fleeting data that made up his conscious mind, while more specialized structures did their best to repair the unavoidable damage done to his delicate human tissues by prolonged deep-space flight.
Attrition soon took its toll, as some of the craft accompanying Jacob on his long journey were destroyed by micrometeorite impacts. It had proven necessary to provide each ship with relatively low-grade shielding, since this increased their chances of evading detection by the Coalition’s deep-space monitors. That a certain number of craft were likely to be lost had been taken into account during the mission’s planning stages. It was an unfortunate, but ultimately necessary, sacrifice.
A few other of the ships suffered fatal systems failures, victims of high-energy particle impacts that interfered with their delicate circuitry. The rest continued on their long flight across the light-years, their onboard computers communicating with each other via encrypted channels, aware within their limited intelligence that, as time progressed, their numbers were steadily dwindling, although not yet below mission-critical levels.
At the apex of their journey, the armada was moving at just a shade over 97 per cent of light-speed. Time- dilation slowed the pace at which the attritions of age and radiation damage wore away at their passengers. The onboard medical systems did their best but, inevitably, there were further casualties: those ships bearing the irretrievably dead automatically shut themselves down and fell behind the rest, to drift between the stars forever.
The years passed, and the ships flew on. They did not begin to decelerate until the last decade of their voyage, finally braking into the 36 Ophiuchi system, deep within Coalition territory.
Automated defences patrolling the outer worlds of 36 Ophiuchi detected a number of the approaching ships, analysing their trajectories and responding by moving hunter-killer mechants into intercept patterns. The craft came under fire from kinetic weapons that sent chunks of asteroid slag curving in towards them along gravity-assist paths.
Attrition once more took its toll as the majority of incoming craft were destroyed, and the survival rate of the spy-ships finally teetered towards mission-critical levels. The computers on board the ships risked data-bursts between each other, readjusting their shared flight plans according to decades-old algorithms: if only a few of them managed to reach their destinations, the project set in motion so very long ago might yet have a chance of succeeding.
The survivors lost themselves amidst the rubble of a dead world, long ago drawn into a belt of debris a billion kilometres beyond 36 Ophiuchi’s habitable zone. Only half a dozen of the spy-ships now remained.
Each took it in turn to accelerate towards the inner system, matching courses with cometary bodies and
