The Thousand Emperors

around her in the air.

‘Councillor,’ he said, stepping towards her.

‘Sachs is still out of sight,’ she said, without taking her eyes from the displays. ‘I don’t know how he’s done it. He was on his way back from meeting with Meinhard Carter, and his flier just . . . vanished.’

‘You mean it crashed?’ asked Luc. ‘Are we talking about sabotage of some kind?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she muttered. ‘If he’d got into any kind of trouble, his flier should have sent out a distress signal. No, it’s more like he’s become invisible.’

So what’s really got you worried is that someone else can pull off the same tricks as you. Luc stepped up beside her and saw the projections depicted a variety of locations all across Vanaheim.

‘So where exactly was the Ambassador before he disappeared?’

She let out a sigh. ‘That’s a harder question to answer than it should be.’

De Almeida whispered something under her breath, and the projections merged into a single representation of Vanaheim as a spinning globe, more than a metre across. Brightly glowing hoops of navigational data materialized around the globe’s circumference.

‘Wherever it was,’ she said, pointing to one particular location, ‘it was somewhere around here, within a thousand-kilometre radius.’

Luc saw a circle appear over one continent and begin to strobe gently, while a dashed line representing the trajectory of Sachs’ flier appeared layered over it.

‘He was somewhere in this rough area when his locational data went haywire, making it look like he was in a thousand places at once.’ She glanced at him for the first time since his arrival. ‘Like informational chaff,’ she explained. ‘That way, it’s nearly impossible to figure out whether the craft you’re tracking is the true one, since all the rest are just mirages.’

Luc nodded towards the slowly spinning globe. ‘Do we know where he was headed to when he disappeared?’

‘To another meeting, this time with Hobart Tidman and Hernando Kowallek.’ She frowned. ‘Which is strange.’

‘Strange, how?’

‘The two of them have been inactive in Council affairs for a long time. They used to work in artefact recovery.’

‘Artefact recovery?’

‘They both researched alien technology recovered from the Founder Network back even before the Abandonment,’ she explained, her frown deepening. ‘They later acted as advisors to Coalition governments before they were cut off by the Schism.’

‘And the Ambassador had just come from a meeting with Carter, who heads up an advisory committee on deep space research,’ said Luc, feeling a prickle of unease.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said de Almeida. ‘Believe me, there are no Founder artefacts anywhere in the Tian Di. I’d know if there were.’

He looked at her carefully. ‘You’re absolutely sure of that?’

Her expression became uncertain. ‘Let’s just stick to the facts we have and not get distracted by speculation. Only one way inside the Founder Network has ever been discovered, and that’s still deep inside Coalition territory. As far as Ambassador Sachs is concerned, we need to figure out just how he managed to fool my systems so completely.’

‘There was something you said back at Vasili’s funeral service, about rumours of secret negotiations with the Coalition. Maybe we need to start speculating: what if the rumours are true? And what if Carter, Tidman, Kowallek and the Ambassador are all involved in some capacity? And . . . what about Cheng?’

She looked at him. ‘What about Cheng?’

‘I just heard a rumour he’s been asked to relinquish control over the Council.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

She didn’t seem angry, just curious. ‘Through a contact in SecInt,’ he told her. ‘Is it true?’

She shook her head as if in sorrow. ‘There’s some truth to it, yes.’

Luc felt suddenly light-headed. ‘Borges was right, wasn’t he? Something really is going on – something bigger than one Councillor winding up dead.’

De Almeida sighed, all of her usual swagger gone. ‘I really don’t know, Mr Gabion. If I did, I probably wouldn’t need you here. I already told you I’m not always privy to everything that goes on in the Council, particularly where its higher echelons are concerned. Sometimes I have little more than rumours to rely on myself.’

‘What I’m beginning to wonder,’ Luc continued, ‘is whether there’s something more to Reunification than is being publicly admitted. What if it’s not just about reuniting the human race – what if there’s some other reason the Coalition are here?’

Just a few days before, the idea of speaking to a member of the Temur Council in this way would have been unimaginable to him. So much had changed in such a very short time. Even so, Luc held his breath as he waited for her to reply.