Gary Gibson - The Thousand Emperors

The flier thumped gently against the station’s one airlock, followed by a rumbling hiss on the other side of the hatch. The hatch unfolded a moment later, revealing a claustrophobically narrow metal passageway. Long-dormant emergency lights flickered into life, tinting the interior of the station with a soft red glow.

Luc made his way along the passageway, propelling himself along with his fingertips in the zero gravity, until he found himself inside something that looked like it had started life as a cargo flier. The interior of the flier had been stripped and converted into a makeshift storage depot; he could see a few dozen plastic crates still lashed to a bulkhead to prevent them from floating away, while an ancient-looking fabricant was mounted on a wall, printed machine-parts still stacked on a plastic pallet beside it. Three more passageways radiated outwards from this central point, giving access to the pressurized fuel tanks that constituted much of the station’s bulk.

Luc carefully picked his way over to the lashed-together crates and pulled himself into a sitting position next to one. Unzipping his jacket, he again withdrew the book Maxwell had given Vasili, slipped one arm through a cable securing one of the crates, and then shook the book open, placing it on his lap before opening it carefully and touching the revealed page.

Vasili hit the auto-mechanism for the airlock and listened to the distant hiss of air as the ancient satellite re-pressurized for the first time in years. He made his way down a narrow passageway, before emerging into a makeshift bay.

Here, he studied his surroundings with an engineer’s eyes. The station had been designed to be nothing more than a temporary structure, a pressurized orbital dock where mechants could store materials for later use. After that, the station should have been disassembled and destroyed.

But in this case, the station had remained intact. It had even been carefully maintained, though you couldn’t tell from the outside. If it had been truly abandoned, Vasili knew, it would long since have fallen out of orbit and plunged into Vanaheim’s atmosphere.

He moved deeper into the station until he came to a maintenance port, a cramped alcove tucked away at the far end of a branching passageway, where an interface panel newer and considerably more up to date than anything else aboard the station could be accessed. Pulling himself into a narrow seat, he touched a hand to a virtual panel.

Verification took just a moment, and he was in.

Luc opened his eyes and pulled himself loose from the cable. It took him just a minute or so to make his way down the same branching passageway and pull himself into the same alcove Vasili had found.

A virtual panel shimmered into existence the moment he sat down. It didn’t look like anything much out of the ordinary, little more than a standard interface for the station’s AI systems. But then, Cheng would hardly have gone out of his way to advertise the presence of his secret data-cache.

Screw it.

Luc reached out and touched the panel. In response, something slid out from the alcove next to his right hand, a metal bar that had also appeared when Vasili had been here before him.

Luc next reached out and gripped the bar. The metal was cold to the touch. His fingers tingled slightly with the contact, and he guessed the bar operated on the same principles as the lattice-enabled circuitry embedded in Maxwell’s books.

A sudden burst of data washed over him, and it didn’t take much navigating to realize the station was, indeed, one of the many secret repositories in which the Temur Council maintained copies of their backups. There were undoubtedly other such repositories scattered all across Vanaheim and in orbit.

He was only peripherally aware of the station around him, its bulkheads creaking softly, as he navigated further through a blizzard of data, centuries-worth of instantiation backups and dirty little secrets.

Wait . There was something there, tugging at his awareness. He focused on it, and . . .

All of a sudden, something enormous landed inside Luc’s skull.

It started as a feeling of pressure building inside his head, then a flurry of names and places and experiences. His body began to shake, his teeth clattering together, but he couldn’t prise his hand away from the metal bar.

Lines of fire criss-crossed his skull, forming a cage around the tender flesh of his brain. The cage grew rapidly smaller, sending him into paroxysms of pain.

Cheng booby-trapped the cache.

Luc convulsed, his head banging off one wall of the alcove, and yet his hand remained locked to the metal bar.

Some part of him dimly realized then that it wasn’t a booby-trap, but another seizure, triggered by the thunderous tide of information now flowing into his overwhelmed mind.

The pain became overwhelming, unbearable. He tried to scream, the sound dying in his throat and emerging instead as a thin rattle. The station’s bulkheads continued to creak around him like an old man laughing asthmatically.

Fire raged through his skull. His back arched and he convulsed with sufficient force that his hand was finally twisted free of the metal bar, sending him tumbling in the zero gravity like a discarded rag doll.

The pain gradually began to recede. Luc curled into a ball, pale and shivering, and waited until the worst was over. After that he dragged himself back through to the central hub, where he collapsed, too weak to move any further.

Losing all sense of time, he swam in and out of consciousness, and only barely registered a dull clang, followed by the hiss of an airlock.

A figure loomed into sight over Luc as he lay shivering by the pallet of crates. ‘Lucky I came looking for you,’ said Zelia, kneeling down so he could see her face.

A while later, Luc sat on a stool bolted to the floor of a utilitarian-looking living space in another part of the station, nursing what felt like the mother of all hangovers. A desk, sink, and a small cubby-hole for personal possessions were arranged around him with the easy disregard for conventional notions of up or down typical of every space habitat Luc had ever been in. The mechant Zelia had used to carry him from the hub waited by the entrance.

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Luc, his voice still weak. ‘First you try to kill me, then you come here and save my life.’

She shook her head. ‘I wasn’t trying to kill you, Luc. I just wanted to know what it was you were trying to find that was so important.’

‘And having that thing take a swing at my head wasn’t trying to kill me?’

She looked genuinely embarrassed. ‘I just wanted it to take that book from you.’ She glanced down at it, now tucked under one of her arms. ‘I don’t like having things kept from me, Luc. You were breaking the terms of our arrangement.’

Luc wanted to laugh, but it still hurt too much. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘it isn’t going to be much use to you. You couldn’t possibly access the data hidden inside it without Maxwell’s decryption key, and that died with him.’

Her face coloured slightly. ‘Then what the hell use was it to you ?’

He tapped the side of his head. ‘Apparently I have an unfair advantage in that regard. I don’t need a key.’

‘I know what you’ve got lodged inside your skull gives you an edge, but don’t make the mistake of underestimating me .’

‘At least promise me you’re not going to try to beat me to death a second time.’