Gary Gibson - The Thousand Emperors

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.

‘Proof.’ Vasili licked his lips, unable to keep a slight tremor out of his voice. ‘This was all so much easier when everybody thought I was insane.’

‘You weren’t insane,’ Antonov replied gently. ‘For a long time I hated you for taking Ariadna from me, but then I realized it was I who had pushed her away.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘When I found out what had happened to her, I instigated my own investigation into the circumstances surrounding her death, but it took a very long time to bear fruit. For a while I foolishly believed that you yourself might be her murderer, but my jealousy for your long life with her had blinded me. For that, I ask forgiveness. By asking as many difficult questions as you did, Sevgeny, you proved to me that you are an honourable man, and for that you have my respect, however much we might disagree on other matters.’

‘They told me I had lost my senses,’ muttered Vasili. ‘That I was unable to . . . to accept there was no meaning to her death.’

‘But you never stopped being suspicious, did you?’

‘Of course not,’ Vasili snapped, slamming one hand against a bookcase, taking a certain relish in the sudden burst of pain.

He could hardly believe he had consented to this meeting. Antonov represented everything he stood against – an enemy of order and sanity, a man who had proven himself more than willing to risk bringing the same destructive forces that had once destroyed the entire Earth raining down upon the colonies.

And yet here Antonov was, in his very home, offering answers to questions he had come to believe would never be answered. Ever since that terrible day when Ariadna had died, he had focused on his work as a way to avoid the despair of grief, fulfilling his duties both to the Council and to the Tian Di to the utmost. But it still had not been enough to prevent his slow abandonment by Cheng, a man he had once considered the closest thing to a friend.

‘I’ve already given you a taste of what I know,’ said Antonov, his voice calm and steady and infuriating in equal measures. ‘Your wife was asking too many questions for the comfort of certain of your fellow Eighty-Fivers.’

Vasili’s thoughts flashed back to a few days before, when an anonymous and heavily encrypted message had been delivered by a decrepit mechant, its hull pitted and rusted, its livery indicating it had belonged to Antonov prior to his fall from grace. God only knew where on Vanaheim Antonov had secreted it all these years.

Despite considerable misgivings, Vasili had loaded the message into his sensorium, curiosity overcoming his normal caution. He soon found himself watching shaky footage from the point of view of a Sandoz missile flying low across Thorne’s rock- and boulder-strewn landscape, before homing in on a single flier as it passed over a range of crater-pocked mountains.

‘You said Sandoz forces were ordered to kill her,’ said Vasili. ‘But who gave them their orders?’

‘To find out the answer to that ,’ Antonov replied, ‘you must first go somewhere I cannot.’

‘You said she was asking too many questions. Questions about what?’

Antonov rolled his shoulders, as if one of them were slightly kinked. ‘I need to get access to the information stored in a private data-cache maintained by Cheng – one that nobody else knows exists, and that contains, or so I believe, damning proof regarding Ariadna’s death.’

Vasili stared at Antonov, his eyes burning. ‘You’re using me,’ he rasped. ‘You never gave a damn about me before now, and I’m not stupid enough to believe you’re here solely for my benefit.’

Antonov laughed. ‘Ever the pessimist, Sevgeny? Of course I’m using you. What kind of fool would I be, if it were any other way?’

‘You’re a devil,’ rasped Vasili. ‘When you go to hell, they should put you in charge. I swear you were made for the job.’

‘I seek evidence of a different kind,’ Antonov told him. ‘Proof that your beloved Father Cheng has not only discovered a second entrance to the Founder Network, but is exploiting its discoveries just as recklessly as the idiots who brought about the Abandonment.’

Vasili stared open-mouthed at Antonov’s data-ghost. ‘Impossible!’ he cried. ‘I stood by Joe’s side through almost every major policy decision the Council has made since its inception. He—’

‘Used you,’ Antonov finished, ‘to get into power, then finally discarded you once you proved to be a liability. You know he always treated Ariadna with disdain; he allowed you to become part of his inner circle, but not her – and why? Because she asked the questions you refused to face. There’s a reason, Sevgeny, that people called us the Thousand Emperors – because that’s what we became, figureheads spouting the same old monopolistic bullshit to justify their grip on power.’