The Thousand Emperors

his head. I’m saving your life, and mine as well.

How in hell do you figure that out?

When you found me, I had no access to my backups, no other way to preserve at least some of my thoughts and memories. What you see before you is all that’s left of me.

Luc listened, thunderstruck.

You did a better job than you realized, the dead man continued. I had cached backups, of course, but SecInt, thanks to its temporary truce with Sandoz, managed to locate nearly all of them – and every last one of them auto-destructed before it could be interrogated. He clasped one hand to his injured chest. But this part of me, mere shadow of my former self that it is that now resides inside you, is enough to finish the task ahead.

He leaned in close to Luc. Speak to the Ambassador, Luc. With his help, we will both be reborn, and a terrible calamity will be prevented.

What Ambassador? What—

Luc woke with a start and jerked upright, lungs heavy and aching in his chest. He was back home again.

For all he knew, the dream he had just experienced was at best an elaborate fantasy formed from his own fears and desires – at worst, a sign of incipient madness, triggered by the lattice as it grew in complexity and reach.

But he knew better. Whatever Antonov had done to him, it had been done for a reason. Some part of the dead man, some shadow-aspect, was alive and well inside his skull, drawing out the agony and drip-feeding him whatever tantalizing scraps of information it could use to make him dance to any tune but his own.

Speak to the Ambassador. Luc had no idea which Ambassador Antonov might have been referring to.

Every world of the Tian Di but Vanaheim had embassies, but they meant little in this age of instantaneous travel across the light-years. Mostly, the title ‘Ambassador’ was an honorary role given to those who’d served the Temur Council with distinction. They could have told Luc he was an Ambassador as his reward for Aeschere, and it wouldn’t have meant a damn thing.

He searched the public and secure databases for information on planetary ambassadors currently resident on Temur while he dressed and breakfasted. He vaguely recognized some of the names, but could find no immediately obvious link to Vasili or to de Almeida or anyone else – nothing that might make sense of what the dream-Antonov had said to him.

Glancing in a mirror, he frowned, then stepped closer. His CogNet earpiece had turned dark, an indicator that it had failed in some way and needed to be replaced.

He carefully removed it and looked down at it in the palm of his hand. It was tiny, the kind of thing that was easily lost, but as easily replaced at virtually no cost. The technology was entirely ubiquitous, the kind of thing you grew up around without ever really being aware of how badly you needed it until it was gone.

Except there had been no break in service during his search of several different databases, despite his CogNet earpiece’s terminal failure. Antonov’s lattice, he realized with a chill, had seamlessly taken over from it without his even noticing.

He stared down at the tiny darkened bead, a mixture of dread and excitement churning inside him.

Then he thought back to his meeting with Offenbach, when he had been unable to bypass the security settings on a number of files. Would his lattice, unwelcome as it was, now enable him to access those same files should he try again?

Luc dropped the darkened bead in the recycling, then headed out.

One of de Almeida’s mechants guided him to a tiny private cubicle in a walk-in office complex close by Chandrakant Lu Park. He didn’t have long to wait before de Almeida’s invitation arrived in the form of a tiny point of light that hovered in the air before him.

He reached out. The star-like point puffed into mist the moment his fingertips brushed it, and –

– he was on Vanaheim.

Looking down at his hands, he flexed them, stunned at how perfectly real they looked. He could feel a breeze touching his cheek, as if he were really, actually physically present. The haptics alone were on a whole order of sophistication beyond anything he’d ever experienced before while data- ghosting. It had to be because of his lattice.

It was like actually being there.

He was sitting on a long stone bench near the middle of an auditorium cut into the side of a hill. The benches formed steps that led down to the foot of the hill, and seated on them at different points around the auditorium were maybe forty or fifty men and women, the majority of whom he did not recognize. Sitting at his side was de Almeida, who glanced towards him out of the corner of her eye, giving him the tiniest nod to let him know she could see him.

The auditorium was large enough that it looked almost empty. Clearly, few amongst the Temur Council had felt inclined to come and pay their respects to their dead compatriot. Most of those present were clustered together near the base of the auditorium, but a few, including de Almeida, sat conspicuously apart from the rest. Mechants sporting a variety of liveries hummed through the air.

Before the steps stood a low, wide platform, and beyond that a sloping grassy plain. Luc could see a meandering river a few kilometres away. Tall columns were arranged haphazardly around the edges of the auditorium, a few bearing broken-limbed statues, as if the auditorium were the remnant of some long dead civilization. Close by a bend in the river stood an imposing-looking ruin, moss growing up its sides, a partly caved-in roof open to the elements.

Luc held his breath, half-convinced someone would see his electronic phantasm despite de Almeida’s reassurances.