Gary Gibson - The Thousand Emperors

Luc bristled. ‘I knew the risks going in. It was still something I had to do.’

If you aren’t there , Lethe had said, no one’s going to remember all the work you did finding Antonov.

‘And that’s why I said what I said to you before. You don’t even care when you’re being used.’

‘I was using Lethe just as much as he was using me.’

‘Did nothing I say get through to you?’ she shot back. ‘You’re filled with survivor guilt. You wanted to get killed on that damn mission, just so you could feel better about not dying along with the rest of your family.’

He stared at her, shocked at what she had said. She reached up to pat the bun at the back of her head as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with her hands, her expression flustered and her chest rising and falling from barely suppressed emotion.

‘I’m going to retire,’ he said abruptly.

Her eyes widened.

‘From active service, at least,’ he continued. ‘I’m serious. With Antonov gone, there’s no reason not to let other people deal with whatever’s left of Black Lotus.’

‘You never said anything about this before.’

‘Because I didn’t know just what was going to happen on Aeschere. I couldn’t discount the possibility I was wrong, that Antonov wouldn’t be there.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘But he was.’

‘Then . . . you’re serious? No more risking your neck?’

‘I’ll stay on in Archives, but if I do any more field-work, I’ll stick to the kind of low-risk background investigations you and me used to do. But nothing like Aeschere,’ he added, shaking his head. ‘That was more than enough for this lifetime.’

Eleanor looked almost dizzy with relief. ‘I can hardly believe you’re saying this. You were always so’ – she searched for the right word – ‘driven.’

Monomaniacal , he remembered her screaming at him once. Obsessed. He couldn’t really deny the charge.

‘All I’m saying,’ he said, reaching out for her hand, ‘is that things are going to be different from now on.’

He half expected her to pull away from him, but instead she laced her fingers through his. Luc felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest.

‘There was another reason Lethe came here,’ she said. ‘You’ve been invited to the White Palace for a ceremony.’

‘Ceremony?’

‘They want to make you a Master of Archives, Luc.’

He blinked at her in confusion and surprise. ‘Seriously?’

‘Director Lethe thought you might like to hear it coming from me. Assuming you’ll actually accept a promotion this time.’

Well, I’ll be damned, thought Luc. ‘The last time they tried to give me a promotion was different. They wanted to boot me up to the Security Division.’

‘But this time,’ she said, her mouth softening into a smile, ’you get to stay where you want to be.’

It took time for Luc to learn how to control his freshly grafted muscles, but progress was fast. Further treatments sped up the reconnection of nervous tissues, and simple tasks that at first represented an enormous struggle rapidly became smooth and natural. Even the food Luc ate tasted different. After just a couple of days his skin had lost much of its patchwork appearance, and the next time he looked in a mirror, he saw someone who appeared to have suffered nothing more than mild sunburn. He touched his new face, marvelling at the wonder of it all.

On the day his treatments came to an end, he made his way along a series of narrow paths that sliced through a small courtyard at the centre of the hospital grounds. The courtyard was filled with small patches of greenery interspersed with koi ponds, their waters glittering under a noon sun. At first a mechant trailed after him, but he shooed it away.

He sat on a concrete bench and took a small case from out of a jacket pocket, opening it and extracting a new Archives CogNet earpiece. He fitted it carefully to the lobe of one ear. During his therapy, he’d been forced to rely on a general-purpose piece rather than the secure model normally used by Archives staff.

He activated it, immediately sensing the pulse of humanity in the streets beyond the hospital’s perimeter, and soon found himself deluged with data-ghosted messages from colleagues and well-wishers in Archives, including Offenbach and Hetaera. There were so many that their animated images jostled for space around him, some appearing to hover above the nearby koi ponds. He listened to a few before dismissing them all. He’d have plenty of opportunity to go through them all later.

And besides, what he had in mind might be better done without witnesses.

Linking into Archives for the first time since his return from Aeschere, he ran a search for any files with the reference Thorne, 51 Alpha, Code Yellow – and stared numbly at the fish circling in the pond before him when the search returned an immediate hit.

It was real.

The file in question contained a report detailing an incident on Thorne more than 125 years before. Out of all the worlds of the Tian Di, Thorne was both the least hospitable and the most recently colonized, a scrap of rock with a few bare lichens to its name orbiting on the outer edge of a red dwarf star’s habitable zone. It was a far from suitable candidate for terraforming, but a penal colony had been set up there following the Schism, and later a series of biological research stations had also been established there. That community of scientists, along with those unlucky enough to be sent there to live out their sentences, huddled in shielded biomes or in deep sheltered caves.

The report detailed the accidental deaths of hundreds of prisoners following a containment breach in a biotech station, but any more specific details had been flagged as restricted. The only name he even vaguely recognized amongst those attached to the incident was that of Zelia de Almeida – a minor member of the Temur Council who had, at the time, been Thorne’s Director of Policy.

The report also mentioned that de Almeida had been removed from her post following the incident, while an investigation blamed the whole incident on criminal negligence. There was nothing to connect any of it with Winchell Antonov; nothing to explain why he had asked Luc – in a dream , of all things – to come looking for this particular file.

Or maybe he’d come across the file in the past and forgotten about it, until he had incorporated it into a trauma-induced fantasy about secret transfer gates.

He stared hard at the report, visible only to him where it hovered in the air. You have a choice , he told himself. You can either decide the dream was just that, or you can act like it meant something real.

Luc stared past the report and at the upwards-thrusting skyline of Ulugh Beg, feeling as if he were balanced on the edge of a precipice. He had requested, and been granted, further scans, but there was nothing inside his skull that shouldn’t have been there. If there ever had been, it was long gone.

He reached out, meaning to dismiss the record. Instead he opened it for editing, adding in five words: I’m calling in my favour .

He saved and dismissed it, feeling like a fool. With any luck, he’d never have to think about it ever again.

Luc found himself back home within another few days, staring around his apartment like he’d never seen it before. It might as well have been a million years since he’d last stood upon its threshold.