Gary Gibson - The Thousand Emperors

A ceiling-mounted readout showed the air pressure in the lander dropping to zero. The rumbling sounds of the craft’s internal workings soon faded away, leaving Luc with nothing but the sound of his own half-panicked breath.

Their harnesses parted all at once, sliding into hidden recesses as one wall of the hold dropped down, becoming a ramp leading onto the moon’s surface. Thick dust, kicked up by their landing, swirled into the hold as the suited figures surrounding Luc climbed out of their couches, looking like an army of armoured bipedal insects as they moved down the ramp with practised efficiency.

The hydraulics in Luc’s suit whined faintly as he followed, stepping onto the dusty floor of a crater about thirty kilometres across. He glanced back in time to see the lander leap upwards before its ramp had time to fully snap back into place, quickly receding to a distant dark spot against Grendel’s cloudscape.

Luc hastened to keep up with the Sandoz warriors hustling towards the wall of the crater just a few hundred metres away. All around him he could see dozens of black hemispheres scattered across the crater floor.

Several black spheres thudded into the dust not far from him, dropped from orbit by some unmanned Sandoz scout ship. He saw one crack in half like an egg, disgorging a metal-limbed mechant barely larger than his fist. The machine span in a half-circle until it had acquired its target, then rushed ahead of him in a flurry of fast-moving limbs.

Being this up close and personal with a Sandoz Clan reminded Luc just how little he’d enjoyed the experience on every previous occasion he’d had the privilege. It was like bathing in an ocean of testosterone and barely suppressed rage. He saw the way they looked at him: a mere Archivist , for God’s sake, some kind of jumped-up librarian from one of SecInt’s less glamorous divisions and, worse, a civilian.

It was a common fallacy. He could have pointed out that rather than being a librarian, he was instead a fully accredited investigative agent, and that rather than being some minor part of SecInt, Archives was in fact that organization’s primary intelligence-gathering resource. But it would just have been one more opportunity for Marroqui to bitch about having him tag along.

He had to remind himself that the Sandoz Clans looked down on everyone, not just him. Each Clan operated more like a family than anything resembling a traditional military unit, borne as they were out of a strange amalgam of religion, gene-tweaking and asceticism. They all spent their formative years training in the combat temples of Temur’s equatorial jungles, and took advantage of instantiation technology otherwise reserved for members of the Temur Council. That, plus their unwavering and very nearly fanatical devotion to Father Cheng, made them close to unstoppable.

Luc’s CogNet informed him that sunrise was less than one hundred and eight seconds away. Marroqui was cutting it close.

He stared ahead towards the crater wall, and the monastery entrance set into it. His eyes automatically moved up to regard the crater’s rim, already incandescent from the approaching dawn. Grendel rose above Aeschere’s horizon to the west, thick bands of methane and hydrogen wrapped around the gas giant’s equator, glowing with the reflected heat of the star it orbited at a distance of just a few million kilometres. The sight of it made his skin crawl.

Marroqui scripted at him,

And fuck you too , thought Luc, picking up the pace and racing to catch up with the rest. Grey dust like funeral ashes puffed up with every step.

It had all started with Luc’s discovery of an insurgent data-cache in a vault on Jannah, an uninhabitable world of perpetual storms in the Yue Shijie system. Finding it had taken months of careful work, requiring the assembly of a team of specialists with experience in Black Lotus cryptanalysis. Before long a horde of Archivists had descended on the vault, and the information contained therein had led Luc finally to Grendel and Beowulf, two Hot Jupiters in the New Samarkand system.

He remembered running through Archives and almost colliding with Offenbach, the look of confusion on the Senior Archivist’s face changing to one of delight once he realized Antonov had finally been cornered.

Within days, Father Cheng had ordered Sandoz forces to Grendel and Beowulf. They found Black Lotus weapons fabricants seeded throughout Grendel’s sixteen moons, and machine had fought machine in a terrible war of attrition lasting months. Black Lotus’s own fabricants had been unable, however, to produce defensive mechants in sufficient numbers to stand against a nearly endless stream of Sandoz hunter-seekers.

Luc was close enough now to the monastery entrance to see that its airlock had been blasted open, debris from the explosion fanning out across the crater floor. A long time ago, the complex on the far side of that airlock had been nothing more than a research installation. Much later, during the turmoil of revolution, it had been a prison, and finally a Lamasery in the peace that followed. The monks had called it Wutái Shan . Following that, it had been abandoned – or so it had been believed, until very recently.

Marroqui sent over the CogNet. Luc thought he sounded preternaturally calm, given they were seconds away from being burned alive.

someone else replied.

Marroqui replied.

Luc’s suit carried him through the blasted airlock with long, loping strides, then down a shadow-filled corridor. A few seconds later incandescent light flared behind him as 55 Cancri finally rose over the crater’s lip.

Luc’s CogNet displayed the passageway in bright false colours, making the mandalas carved into the walls on either side appear lurid and disturbing. As he made his way further along, he saw that the mandalas alternated with blank-eyed statues set into recesses. Behind him, the corridor grew sufficiently bright that his suit’s filters were nearly overwhelmed. The outside temperature had just jumped by several hundred degrees.

Dead bodies loomed out of the dark, frozen in their final death-spasms, mouths open to the vacuum. Luc saw they had died just short of a pressure-field stretching across the passageway. Its soap-bubble surface trembled as he passed through it and into pressurized atmosphere.

He found Marroqui and the rest inside a derelict prayer hall. A golden-skinned Buddha sat cross-legged on a plinth at one end, holographic clouds drifting around its feet. A lotus blossom shimmered and unfolded in the statue’s outstretched hand. Dusty prayer wheels still stood in their holders, listless tapestries hanging on the walls. The air appeared to be a standard breathable mix, with no detectable toxins or phages.

Marroqui was the first to retract his visor, soon followed by the rest. Luc breathed in freezing-cold air underlaid by a hint of sulphur. It wasn’t hard to imagine the hall as it had been, filled with droning chants and the scent of sandalwood. Marroqui addressed his Clan-members in a Slavic dialect far removed from Luc’s native Northam, his CogNet earpiece seamlessly auto-translating everything.

Luc meanwhile called up a three-dimensional map of the entire complex and saw it was composed of nine levels, each portrayed as a flat grey rectangle connected to the rest by cylindrical shafts of varying length. A pair of shafts located at opposite ends of this top level linked it to the next two down, while a second and third pair of shafts laced the middle and bottom three levels together respectively.

Luc dismissed the map once Marroqui had finished speaking to his troops. ‘Can the mosquitoes tell us if Antonov is still alive?’ he asked the Clan-leader.

Marroqui turned to regard him with undisguised irritation. ‘They haven’t given us visual confirmation one way or the other, if that’s what you mean. Are you sure he’s even here?’