Gary Gibson - The Thousand Emperors

‘Look – maybe I overreacted, back there.’

This time, he did manage to laugh.

‘It’s just that when you flew off like that,’ she said, ‘headed for Vasili’s, I felt like I was losing control of the situation.’

Losing control of me, you mean . ‘You’ve managed to hang on to Vanaheim’s security networks?’ he asked.

She smiled triumphantly. ‘Of course. Otherwise I would never have been able to track you here.’

‘What about Cheng or Cripps or any of the rest of them? Will they know we’ve been here?’

‘Only if they manage to grab control of the networks from me again. Things are moving fast, Luc. Javier Maxwell’s murder was only the beginning. Now Cheng’s claiming Black Lotus have penetrated the Council itself, starting with me. People are starting to take sides.’

‘Sounds like a war’s going on down there.’

‘A war is pretty much what it is,’ she agreed. ‘But if I lose control of the networks again, we’ll also lose most of our advantage.’ She flipped the half-burned book open and flicked through its pages. ‘What exactly was in here that turned out to be so important?’

He realized, having found what he’d come looking for, there was little point in hiding things from her any more. ‘Coordinates,’ he explained, ‘for this station.’ He glanced around. ‘And Vasili’s last memories from just before he died.’

She stared at him. ‘How . . . ?’

He told her what he had learned so far from Maxwell’s books. She listened, hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

Nausea gripped him as he finished. Trying to push himself up from the stool, he saw the cabin tumble around him.

‘Easy,’ said Zelia, grabbing hold of him.

He let her guide him towards a wall-recess by the sink that contained a thin plastic mattress, which she pushed him down onto.

‘Your nervous system must have suffered one hell of a shock,’ she said, looking down at him.

‘It’s not safe here,’ he mumbled.

‘If anyone’s on the way to this station,’ she assured him, ‘I’ll know a long time before they arrive, don’t you worry. Right now this is probably safer than a lot of places on Vanaheim.’

He lay back against the mattress, pulling an elbow over his face. ‘The data-cache hidden on this station. Have you accessed it yet?’

‘Not yet, no. You?’

‘Yes, just in the last moments before the seizure hit.’

‘Where is it?’

He told her where she could find the access terminal. She disappeared, her mechant trailing after her, then came back several minutes later, her expression troubled.

‘I don’t know just what happened after you got here,’ she said, ‘but if there was ever any data there, it’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ he asked, looking up at her. ‘How is that possible?’

‘The backups were probably set to self-delete if they were accessed by anyone the systems didn’t recognize. Anything else would have been deleted right along with them.’

‘And that’s why it didn’t wipe itself when Vasili was here?’

She nodded. ‘He had all the access privileges of an Eighty-Fiver, and you didn’t, protocols or not.’

Luc nodded, and realized he was feeling better than he had just moments before. Moving cautiously, he pulled himself upright, and found that most of the dizziness and nausea had now been replaced by a deep thirst and hunger.

Zelia watched as he pulled himself out of the alcove, hunting through several drawers until he found some protein bars that were probably long, long past the point where they were still edible. He ate them anyway.

‘So tell me then,’ Zelia asked as he tore the bars apart and shovelled them into his mouth, ‘did you manage to get anything at all from the cache?’

He nodded wearily. ‘I did. Why, what’s the plan? I tell you everything I know, and then you kill me?’

To his surprise, she looked hurt. ‘You talk about me like I’m a monster. Part of a man I once loved is still alive inside you.’

He stared at her. ‘You and Antonov? But you were never . . .’

But then he realized how wrong he was. She was there, in Antonov’s memories, rising to the surface of his own thoughts as if he had always known. It felt like walking into a house he’d always lived in, and finding a room he never knew existed.

She stared at him, her eyes becoming round. ‘But you must have known,’ she said. ‘You have his memories. You must . . .’ her voice trailed off.

He remembered he had dreamt of making love to her, that night she had data-ghosted into his home. Everything about it had felt real, far more like an actual memory than a mere dream, and now the reason was obvious: it was a memory - but Antonov’s, rather than his own.

‘I think maybe I suspected,’ he said.

‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, close enough to him in the cramped quarters that he could smell her skin. ‘A very long time ago, even before he met Ariadna. But we . . . saw things differently. There were things we left unsaid, things I wanted to say to him but never could.’

‘I had no idea.’

She drew back slightly, peering at him with curiosity. ‘How much is there left of him inside you, would you say?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe just a little.’

‘But I saw the way you looked just now, when I told you we had once been lovers. You looked like you remembered something.’

‘I did,’ he admitted. ‘Just not my own memories.’

‘And he still . . . speaks to you?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘But does he hear things?’ she asked haltingly. ‘Does he understand what’s going on around you – around him?’

Luc thought about it. ‘I think he does, yeah.’

Just for a second the mask slipped, and Luc saw a part of de Almeida he never had before, vulnerable and soft and yielding. Despite his fear of her, the sight and smell of her commingled with Antonov’s own memories until they were very nearly impossible to distinguish.

Some instinct made him reach out to her. He half-expected her to react with anger, but instead she responded with unexpected hunger. Their mouths mashed together, Luc’s hands curling around the back of her neck to grip her by the hair, pulling her close enough that he could feel her heartbeat thrumming through her chest.

She stood, first pulling off her jacket, and then her thin blouse, revealing small, high breasts, before sliding into the narrow alcove containing the mattress. He followed, sliding one hand under her back, but then she locked her ankles around his waist and flipped him around in the zero gravity until she was straddling him.

He reached up to cup her breasts with his hands, eliciting a soft moan from her, while she reached down to his waist, tugging at his belt.

Soon he was struggling out of his clothes with some difficulty, unsurprising given the exceedingly cramped nature of the alcove. Zelia lifted herself up and out of the way, taking the opportunity to wriggle out of the rest of her clothes before again straddling him, her breath coming in small, nervous gasps.

Luc could feel his erection pulsing against her belly. Taking hold of her hips, he lifted her slightly, as she reached down between her legs and manoeuvred him inside her.

He started to move. Zelia gripped him hard with her knees, grinding herself against him, the fingernails of one hand digging into his chest while she kept the other pressed flat against the ceiling of the alcove. Luc held off as long as he could, holding her tight with both hands, her gasps becoming shorter and higher-pitched.