Gary Gibson - The Thousand Emperors

At the same moment he reached the threshold of the control room, the ground beneath his feet began to tremble, at first gently but then with greater violence. A deep bass murmur rolled up from the depths of the complex.

He was out of time.

Most of the cryogenic pods that hadn’t been buried beneath falling debris had clearly suffered massive damage from the explosion that had devastated the control room. Only one appeared to have escaped unscathed – unlike the rest, its control panel still glowed softly in the dust-filled darkness.

Luc headed straight for it, the rumbling all the while growing louder and closer. He tore the lid open and climbed inside, listening to the exhausted rattle of his own breath as he lay back.

The lid clicked back into place above him. An internal light came on, low and red. Icons and menus appeared around him, filling the coffin-like space.

He selected an option marked Critical Emergency, bypassing everything else. A soft hiss began from somewhere just above his head, and he became drowsy within moments.

The roaring grew in volume. Hammer blows began to rain down on the pod at the same moment that a deep chill spread through his bones.

He tried to take a breath, and then another. On the third try, the breath froze in his lungs, and for the third time that day he sank into bottomless darkness.

TWO

Luc dreamed.

He was six years old again, running through a field beneath a curving transparent dome, the sun dropping towards the peak of Razorback Mountain and dazzling his eyes. His hands brushed against stalks of wheat as he ran, ignoring the field-mechant that kept pace with him, warning of the consequences of trespassing.

Something huge flitted through the sky above the biome’s ceiling, moving so fast he barely had time to register its passage. He stopped to stare, seeing the dark silhouettes of Council stinger-drones following in close pursuit. A copse of seaweed bushes beyond the biome’s transparent wall stirred beneath a sudden breeze, sending startled lizard-wings spinning upwards from their perches to scatter across the sky.

Light flared on the horizon, a second sun rising to meet the first. He saw the peak of Razorback Mountain melting as the firestorm engulfed it.

The ground beneath Luc’s feet shook, and he turned to run back the other way, back to the safety of home.

Luc became aware of bright smears of light that made his eyes hurt. Round, pink blobs that might have been faces hovered indistinctly before him. He took a breath, and realized his lungs were filled with some form of liquid, thick and viscous. Panic seized him until he realized he wasn’t drowning. Someone had put him into a recovery tank.

I’m still alive , he realized. The dream was still fresh in his mind. It was an old one, but it had never happened in reality. If he’d really been home on Benares during the Battle of Sunderland, he’d have died along with millions of others.

He could make out just enough of his reflection in the tank’s transparent wall to see that something was terribly wrong.

One of the pink blobs came closer, resolving into a sallow-faced man with a close-shaved skull, wearing the uniform of a Temur medician.

Luc twisted his head back, seeing bright lights shimmering overhead.

the medician scripted in reply, then turned to someone behind him.

Any further protests died on Luc’s lips.

There were several more such brief episodes of lucidity, each one slightly longer than the last, including one in which Luc found himself being questioned by a medician who never bothered to give his name. He showed Luc CogNet-mediated video of his extraction from the twisted wreckage of the cryogenic unit that had saved his life, but only just.

He couldn’t recognize the raw, burned slab of meat in the video, couldn’t connect it to himself. The medician allowed him to see himself through the eyes of lenses dotted around the recovery room. He was submerged in a fluorocarbon-rich gel, his body half-hidden amongst a tangle of sensor leads, his flesh burned and flayed. Shoals of tiny black things like tadpoles swarmed around his legs and lower back with apparent purpose, while his face had been reduced to little more than sheets of exposed muscle laid over the skull beneath.

The medician asked questions that Luc tried to answer, sticking to script-speak since Luc’s newly-grown throat and larynx hadn’t quite finished healing. He learned the cryo-unit had put most of its energy into protecting his head and brain once the temperature of the plasma began to push it beyond its operational parameters. As a result, many of Luc’s organs and muscles had been replaced using fast-track tissue work. Even so, the work was going fast, and it might only be another day or two before they were able to lift him out of the tank.

The medician departed, and Luc soon drifted back into a drug-induced sleep. A new dream came to him, disturbing because it felt more like a memory than anything else. He found himself staring into a convex mirror surrounded by folds of dark cloth, but instead of his own face, he saw that of Winchell Antonov reflected there. Antonov’s lips moved in silence, his expression full of bitter anger.

The rapidity with which they healed him was astonishing. Each time the medicians brought him back to consciousness, Luc found the pain was a little less than it had been, until finally it was reduced to not much more than a dull ache.

The Chief Medician had Luc decanted from his tank and moved to a room with an actual bed. His new skin felt ridiculously soft and delicate, as insubstantial as rice-paper origami that might come undone in the slightest breeze. The sensation of soft linens against his body was a wonder in itself.

It wasn’t long before he got his first visitors. Eleanor Jaq walked into the room, her lithe form wrapped in a SecInt uniform, long brown hair tucked into a small bun at the back of her head. The last time he’d seen her, she’d told him they were finished, and so her arrival was more than a little unexpected.

She wasn’t alone. Her companion was Isaak Lethe, SecInt’s Director of Operations, his brow marked by worry-lines. He took a seat to one side of Luc’s bed, the corners of his mouth jerking up in a half-smile as if this were the same as any other debriefing. Eleanor remained standing, her expression carefully neutral.

‘Mr Gabion,’ said Lethe. ‘You’re looking a lot better than you did when they first brought you in here.’

‘I’ve had better days,’ Luc croaked, his voice scraping like rusted razors. He tried to catch Eleanor’s eye, but she glanced away. ‘Just how long have I been here?’

‘You got back to Temur just a couple of days ago,’ Lethe replied. ‘Medician Merlino told me how much work they had to do on you.’

‘Apparently,’ said Luc, ‘they had to replace pretty much everything.’

‘They also rolled your age back about a half-decade or so. My understanding is that made things easier for them.’

‘You were lucky,’ said Eleanor, eyes finally settling on him. Her nostrils flared slightly, a sure sign she was still angry at him, despite everything he’d been through. ‘ Really lucky.’

‘I know you’re only just out of the tank, but I need to talk to you about what happened on Aeschere,’ said Lethe, his expression becoming apologetic. ‘I know you probably don’t feel ready for it.’

Luc shook his head. ‘It’s fine. What do you need to know?’

‘Sandoz Command are facing questions over how they managed to lose an entire Clan on what should have been a straightforward operation. And it’s not like we can ask Marroqui or any of the rest of them what happened.’