The Thousand Emperors

of white-hot metal.

Jacob stood with care, testing his muscles and bones and finding he had suffered a few minor fractures. Under the circumstances, he could count himself lucky.

Flexing his hands, he continued on through the doorway, stepping around a corner – only to find himself face- to-face with something from his deepest nightmares. Its features flowed like mercury, jaws distending as it reached out for him with a thousand spiny fingers.

He recognized it as another defensive procedure, albeit immensely more sophisticated than any of those he had so far overcome: the monster wasn’t real, but was instead a virtual rendition of deadly software countermeasures designed to burn the lattice in his skull and render him mindless in moments.

The passageway in which Jacob had been standing disappeared, and he plummeted down an abyssal well that reminded him uncomfortably of the fate to which he had assigned Kulic. The monster was there, swimming through the air towards him.

He reached out both hands, brightly glowing katanas emerging from his fists, and slashed out at the monster’s throat. It died screaming, its corpse disintegrating into a jumble of subroutines and hopelessly scrambled cognitive algorithms.

As suddenly as it had vanished, Jacob found himself back in the passageway, hands clenching swords that were no longer there.

The emergency lights flickered, then momentarily brightened before fading altogether, leaving Jacob in pitch darkness. The artificial lenses in his eyes compensated immediately, rendering the corridor in pale and ghostly shades.

He stood straight and flexed his hands before advancing, his suit feeding him a message that it had fought off a counter-attack by the local security networks. There was no need to worry about any further countermeasures – at least, not for another few minutes.

A final door opened at his approach with a satisfying rumble. He stepped inside and found himself within a vault crammed full of Founder artefacts, either suspended within slow-time fields or flickering in and out of shadow-parallels; empty universes into which they could be permanently banished should they somehow be accidentally activated.

It took Jacob moments to locate the quantum disruptor he had been sent to retrieve: a dark, fan-shaped thing no more than a few inches in width, and somehow difficult to look at directly. The disruptor was held within its own slow-time field that, in turn, was contained within a kind of barred metal container, scarcely larger than one of Jacob’s fists.

He picked the container up and placed it in a zipped pocket of his combat suit, before jogging back down the silent and devastated boulevard, every piece of sub-molecular circuitry for kilometres around by now scrambled beyond repair.

SEVENTEEN

Bottomless grief knotted every muscle in Vasili’s body. Every night for the past several days had been long and sleepless, every thought wracked with remorse.

It was more than Luc could bear. He let go of the book Maxwell had left him with and fell back in his seat, the breath shuddering in his throat.

The library around him was silent and still. Maxwell hadn’t returned yet, and Luc was starting to get the feeling he might not be back for a while.

He took a breath, and again pushed his fingers against the pages.

Bright sunlight illuminated the spines of the books all around Vasili where he stood in his library. Winchell Antonov stood with his back to the patio doors, his small, inquisitive eyes set above a thick black beard. Only the faint rainbow shimmer of light around his outline revealed the renegade to be a data-ghost. Some flaw in the projection made him appear to be hovering just a fraction above the floor.

‘I’ve already proved to you that Ariadna was deliberately murdered,’ said Antonov. ‘That is what you wanted, isn’t it? Proof.’

For so very long, Vasili had been convinced of a cover-up over Ariadna’s death. The inquest had been filled with flawed and circumstantial evidence, while the final verdict implied she had been careless, ignoring and failing to take action on priority alerts issued by the very flier she had died in.

But the more he had learned, the more convinced he had become that the verdict was a crock of shit. There were too many unanswered questions over how the flier’s navigational systems could possibly have failed without it alerting anyone else to the danger, and that led in turn to the suspicion that its programming had been deliberately altered – in other words, sabotaged. And on top of that, an overseer responsible for the maintenance of many of Thorne’s fliers had died under equally mysterious circumstances before he could provide vital expert witness testimony. Vasili’s own private researches had uncovered yet further, damning evidence.

But who would have the motive or reason to bring about her death?

Ariadna had been a Lost Russian like himself, part of that generation growing up on what had been the Russian Federation’s Pacific coast, prior to the Chinese occupation. Much, much later, long after she had become estranged from Winchell, and on the very day the Coalition’s occupation of Newton crumbled under the sustained assault of Cheng’s guerrilla armies, they had become lovers. Until then they had been only comrades in arms, working on strategies to trigger shutdowns in enemy military networks, their relationship up to that point purely professional.

The first time they made love, by the light of burning furniture tossed from the windows of a Coalition barracks, it had been a spontaneous act brought about by their shared revolutionary fervour. He remembered the triumphant shouts of their compatriots filling the air, the sweet ecstasy of victory mixing with the pleasure of Ariadna’s aroused flesh.