Gary Gibson - The Thousand Emperors

‘Quite sure,’ Luc said stiffly.

Marroqui half-turned to look at his fellow Clan-members with a raised eyebrow and an expression of frank disbelief. Luc heard someone snicker.

‘Well, what the mosquitoes can tell us is that we hit this complex a lot harder and faster than either Antonov or any of his Black Lotus fighters were clearly expecting,’ said Marroqui, turning back to face Luc fully. ‘Chances are we stepped over his corpse on the way in here. If you really want to be of help, you should stay behind and see if one of these bodies is his. The rest of us meanwhile can scout out the lower levels, and maybe figure out where those missing mosquitoes went to.’

Luc felt his face colour. You can stay behind and clear up the litter while we do the real work , was what Marroqui really meant.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out he was desperately unwelcome. His temporary promotion to expedition leader had, he gathered, gone down very badly with Sandoz Command. But without his presence here, SecInt’s role in tracking Antonov down would be reduced to not much more than a footnote.

And that would never do.

‘Isn’t assuming Antonov’s already dead something of a dangerous assumption?’ asked Luc.

‘Haven’t you seen how badly the ‘skeets tore this place up?’ Marroqui protested. ‘Look – even if he somehow survived the initial assault, he’s powerless. All his men are dead, and we’ve shattered his defences. Whether he’s alive or not, you need to stay back here, and let us take care of things from here on in.’

Luc fought to keep his voice steady. ‘You weren’t at Puerto Isabel. I was there, with another Sandoz Clan. We had Antonov cornered, along with several Black Lotus agents. I made the mistake of listening to someone just like you telling me to step back and let them take care of things.’

Marroqui stared back at him with dagger eyes. ‘And your point is?’

‘That he got away ,’ said Luc, enunciating the words as if speaking to a recalcitrant child. ‘I’m not going to make that mistake a second time.’

‘If I’d been in charge of that raid, there wouldn’t have been any screw-ups.’

‘That’s funny, because I’m getting a powerful sense of déjà vu every time you open your mouth,’ Luc spat back.

‘You’re not seriously suggesting Antonov could escape ?’

‘Master Marroqui, I’ve spent half my damn life trying to find Winchell Antonov, and there’s no way he’d wind up here without some kind of an exit strategy in place. Right now, my guess is that your missing mosquitoes have something to do with it.’

Marroqui’s expression became incredulous. Exit strategy? Luc could almost hear him thinking. Exit to where? Snoop hunters hid in Aeschere’s shadow cone, ready to challenge anything emerging from the moon’s surface, while a fat-bellied intercept platform orbited above Grendel’s dark side, its deep-range scanners sweeping the whole of 55 Cancri’s inner system. And that wasn’t even counting the autonomous units scattered throughout the rest of Grendel’s moons.

And yet the fact remained that Antonov had managed to evade capture or assassination for nearly two centuries. Luc wanted desperately to be the one who finally caught the Tian Di’s greatest fugitive, but the defeats and setbacks he had suffered over the years had taught him the value of caution.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Marroqui said quietly. ‘Of course we can’t hear from all of the ‘skeets; solar storm’s fucking our comms up.’

Which was entirely possible, and yet Luc couldn’t avoid a nagging doubt that lingered in the pit of his stomach. It might have been safer for all concerned to pull back to the intercept platform and wait the storm out, but Luc felt sure that Antonov, if he was still alive, was waiting for just such an opportunity to slip past them. They had to make their move sometime in the next twenty hours, then escape before the storm reached its peak and lashed Grendel and its moons with fiery whips billions of kilometres in length.

It was Luc’s call, of course, as expeditionary leader. If he was wrong, he’d pay for it with his career.

‘It’s going to be most of a day before the storm reaches its peak,’ said Luc. ‘If we’ve hit him as hard as you say, then we still have time to figure out why we’re having comms problems before we go any further.’

Marroqui stepped up close enough to Luc that their noses were almost touching. ‘You’re just a bureaucrat,’ he said, his voice soft. ‘No, less than that: a glorified clerk. I have the safety and the honour of my Clan to consider. I say we go ahead and clear this damn place out now .’

‘If you go against my orders,’ Luc replied, ‘you’re going to find yourself in a shitstorm of trouble.’

‘Like I give a damn,’ Marroqui snapped, turning back to his soldiers and ordering them to split into separate teams, each to make its way down a different shaft before meeting up again at the reactor room.

Most of the soldiers voiced their affirmatives and made their way back out of the prayer hall, while a few stayed behind. Luc’s hands tightened into fists by his sides, the frustration pooling inside him like a hot lava tide.

‘How many of our ‘skeets are primed with explosives?’ Marroqui asked his second-in-command, a pale-skinned woman with a scar on one side of her nose.

‘We’ve used up two, but we still have three left,’ the woman replied.

‘Fine. Once we’ve established line-of-sight with those missing ‘skeets, let’s send those three all the way down to the bottom and have them focus on taking out any automated defences or hunter-killers Antonov might have left waiting for us.’

Marroqui glanced back at Luc. ‘You’ll wait here, Mr Gabion. Someone has to monitor the uplink with the lander.’

‘Your mosquitoes can monitor things just fine without my help. I’m coming with you and your men.’

Marroqui regarded him with distaste. ‘You’re from Benares, right?’

Luc stared back at him. In that moment, he finally understood the reason for Marroqui’s unrelenting hostility. It had nothing to do with the rivalry between the Sandoz and SecInt; it was because he came from Benares.

‘I don’t know what they taught you in those combat temples they trained you in, Master Marroqui, but coming from Benares doesn’t make me a traitor.’

‘I never said—’

‘So you can either take me down there with you,’ Luc continued regardless, ‘or take the risk of having to explain to our superiors why you let Antonov escape a second time, right on the eve of Reunification. Your choice.’

A muscle in one of Marroqui’s cheeks twitched. For a moment Luc thought the Clan-leader might strike him, but instead the other man nodded curtly, his face impassive.

‘You follow every order I give you while we’re down there, instantly, and without question, until the moment the lander comes back to pick us up. Is that clear?’

Luc nodded. ‘As crystal.’

‘Shit. We’ve lost another mosquito,’ said Marroqui’s second in command, waiting by the entrance. ‘No, hang on . . . that’s another three out of contact, all in just the last minute.’

‘What about the rest of the ‘skeets?’ asked Marroqui.

‘They all check out,’ she replied.

‘We’d better get moving,’ said Marroqui, abruptly businesslike. ‘Anything out of the ordinary’ – and with this, he glanced reflexively towards Luc – ‘report it immediately .’

The entire complex turned out to still be pressurized. By the time they reached one of the shafts, mandalas and statues had given way to rough undecorated surfaces barely visible in the near-lightless gloom. Luc’s IR filters showed an open elevator platform dead ahead, ringed by a steel rail. According to the map, the shaft went straight down for almost a kilometre. A faint breeze drifted up from below.