The Thousand Emperors

A look of grim satisfaction spread across her face. <Just what I thought. You did know what we were all saying to each other back in Vasili’s library, didn’t you?>

Luc swallowed. <Scripting is fairly common, last thing I heard.>

<Except that was a private conversation, mediated through lattices, and using compression and encryption techniques far beyond anything a mere CogNet unit like the one you own could possibly handle. You shouldn’t have had any idea what we were discussing amongst ourselves. Just how much did you overhear?>

Luc felt his shoulders sag. ‘Pretty much all of it,’ he said out loud.

She stared at him with frightening intensity. ‘I could have you killed. Tell me, how did you do it?’

‘I don’t know. I just . . . picked up everything. It wasn’t anything I did, it just happened.’

‘I felt sure of it, from the moment you stepped inside that miserable hovel of Sevgeny’s.’

‘You already said your security networks might have been compromised in some way,’ he reminded her. ‘Maybe that’s got something to do with it?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s not it.’

Luc made an exasperated sound. ‘Look, I have no idea how I could have picked up what you were all scripting to each other. I mean, I realized I wasn’t meant to at the time, but how could I have told any of you? I was too . . .’ Too frightened.

‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But only because I’m scanning you on a number of levels right now, all of which tell me you’re not deliberately obfuscating the truth.’

‘Okay then, so how could I have picked up everything you were saying?’

She raised both eyebrows. ‘That’s a question that can’t have anything but an interesting answer. For instance, would you care to tell me exactly who put an instantiation lattice inside your skull?’

Luc gaped at her dumbly before answering. ‘No one. I don’t have any such thing.’

She smiled enigmatically. ‘Oh, but you do, Mr Gabion. Look.’

Images of the interior of a skull – his skull, he guessed – blossomed in the air around them. One showed a lump of pinkish-grey flesh encased in fine silvery lines, while another depicted a messy tangle of pulsing blue light rendered in three dimensions, overlaid with a secondary, more orderly grid of red.

‘That,’ said Zelia, ‘is what an instantiation lattice looks like, in the very early stages of settling into its owner’s cortex – your cortex, to be precise. I had my house AI remotely analyse the inside of your head as soon as I realized what you had in there. But there are differences between this and any other kind of lattice I’ve ever seen.’

‘Differences?’

‘What you’ve got in there, unless my AIs are sorely mistaken, is more advanced than anything used even by the members of the Council, including myself. It has . . . functions I can’t begin to decipher.’ She took a deep breath and shook her head, her eyes bright and feral. ‘The question, then, is how the hell did it get inside your head?’

Antonov.

Luc’s blood ran cold and he knew, in that instant, that everything he remembered from Aeschere was real, and not a hallucination. Antonov had done something to him: booby-trapped him in some way, placed a ticking bomb inside his head for reasons he hadn’t bothered to explain beyond a few cryptic statements.

He shuddered to think of what might have happened to him if he’d fallen into the hands of Victor Begum or Karlmann Sandoz following his seizure in the library or – even worse – Cripps. He might well have disappeared into some Sandoz stronghold, never to be seen again.

Not that he was necessarily any safer in de Almeida’s hands, he reminded himself. Unlike Cripps or Karlmann Sandoz, she was still an unknown quantity.

‘I swear to you, I have no idea,’ Luc replied, almost begging.

Zelia glanced towards the projections as he spoke, her lips twisting into a thin line. ‘Now you are lying, Mr Gabion: it’s all there in the flow of blood in your capillaries, and the unconscious reactions of your autonomic nervous system.’ She studied him with angry eyes. ‘If you lie to me again, I’ll know straight away. Think you can get that through your head?’

‘Yes,’ he replied carefully.

‘Good.’ Her shoulders relaxed a little. ‘Now tell me how this came about.’

‘Antonov implanted it inside me. We were on Aeschere hunting for him, when our mosquitoes turned on us, killing all of—’

‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped, interrupting him. ‘I’m already familiar with everything that took place on Aeschere.’

‘Not everything that happened is in the official report.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

Luc took a deep breath. ‘When I told Director Lethe of SecInt what really happened, he warned me he was going to leave some of the details out of the official report.’