‘I’ll be fine,’ he said, reaching out to squeeze her arm.
She tried to force a smile, but the strain was clear on her face.
He nodded to the mechant and it led the way, gliding towards an AG platform at the far end of the bay. The platform began to accelerate upwards as soon as he stepped onto it, the mechant rising at the same rate in order to keep even with him. He glanced down once to see Eleanor looking back up at him, and tried to ignore the deep unease lurking at the back of his thoughts.
The platform kept rising, and Luc realized with a shock it was going all the way to the top, to the Hall of Gates. He made a point of not stepping too close to the edge of the platform. Its AG fields would prevent him from falling off, but he had little desire to see just how far he had risen.
‘The matter for which your presence has been requested rates a C category under the Security review of 285 P.A.,’ said the mechant, turning towards him as the platform began to decelerate. ‘You may not disclose the nature, location or any other pertinent aspect of your final destination to anyone with a less than C-category security rating, under penalty of the permanent loss of all granted privileges, and possible detention or permanent discorporation at the pleasure of a court assembled from select members of the Temur Council. The same penalties also apply to anyone with whom you share this information, and anyone amongst their immediate family, social or work groups suspected of coming into possession of this information.’
Luc nodded dumbly, thinking: a C-level security rating. There weren’t many that were higher.
‘Please acknowledge, before we reach our destination, that you understand and accept these terms,’ the mechant finished.
‘I don’t have the rank for that level of security rating,’ said Luc. ‘I’m not sure I’ve even met anyone who does.’ Outside of members of the Council, anyway.
‘You have been granted a temporary C-rating security clearance,’ the mechant replied. ‘Do you agree to the stated terms?’
Luc stared at the machine. ‘I do.’
The platform passed through a circular opening in the atrium’s ceiling before finally coming to a halt at the centre of a low-ceilinged circular hall. Luc saw more than a dozen transfer gates spaced equidistant from each other set into the walls: private transfer gates, each one leading to a major Tian Di colony and reserved for the sole use of members of the Temur Council. One other gate led to Vanaheim.
The mechant moved towards the Vanaheim gate. Luc hesitated once he realized where it was leading him.
‘I just want to be clear on this,’ he called after the machine. ‘I’ve been requested to travel to Vanaheim?’
‘Yes,’ the mechant confirmed, pausing briefly before gliding onwards and through the gate. Luc followed, feeling increasingly out of his depth.
He felt some of his weight fall away when he stepped through a pressure-field on the far side of the gate. Vanaheim’s gravity was almost a fifth less than that of Temur.
He had never been to Vanaheim before; few outside of the Temur Council ever had. The air felt dense, almost soupy, and had a curiously honeyed scent to it. He glanced back through the gate to the interior of the White Palace, thinking of his home somewhere on the far side, so very close and yet so very far away. Then he turned around to regard the concourse on which he now found himself, and the greenish-blue sky visible through a curved glass ceiling several metres overhead.
There was no sign of anyone else.
The complex of which the concourse was part stood on raised ground on one slope of a river valley that was home to Liebenau, the single largest settlement on the entire planet. Luc saw a Gothic mansion at the centre of a vast, rolling estate, bordering what appeared to be an ancient Hindu temple; there were other buildings of varying and clashing architectural styles, most drawn from old Earth, although a cluster of grey-and-brown, utilitarian-looking structures were clearly inspired by post-Abandonment biome architecture. A few crystalline towers, not so different from those found on Temur and the capitals of other Tian Di colonies, rose towards the sky like upright spears.
Most of these were the homes of Cheng’s inner circle, the Eighty-Five; they all orbited a single, vast complex of ancient-looking buildings, which were in turn surrounded by a high, rectangular wall topped at each corner by pagoda-style roofs. A moat surrounded this wall. Extensive gardens helped to further separate and distinguish the Red Palace – as it was known – from the rest of the settlement. It had been modelled, he vaguely recalled, on a palace built on Earth many centuries before the Abandonment.
The mechant moved ahead of him and towards a single flier parked just beyond an exit. A door in the craft’s side swung open as they approached.
‘Now we’re here,’ he called after the mechant, ‘would you mind at least giving me some idea what the hell this is about?’
‘You are required,’ the mechant informed him, coming to a halt next to the flier, ‘to assist in the investigation of a murder.’
THREE
His name was Jacob Moreland, and he was a spy.
His mission had begun seventy-four years before, when he had been placed into a one-man craft launched from a Sandoz platform in orbit around Novaya Zvezda. Along with an armada of identical craft, each carrying a lone passenger, the ship carrying Jacob had accelerated rapidly out of the system, reaching eighty per cent of light-speed within half a year. The star around which Novaya Zvezda itself orbited soon became just one more exquisitely jewel-like point of light amongst countless others.
Jacob slept unawares, his body buffered by impact-gels and cooled by onboard cryogenics.
For a very long time, Jacob Moreland was, by any objective measure, dead. The instantiation lattice within his skull had encoded much of the fleeting data that made up his conscious mind, while more specialized structures did their best to repair the unavoidable damage done to his delicate human tissues by prolonged deep-space flight.
Attrition soon took its toll, as some of the craft accompanying Jacob on his long journey were destroyed by micrometeorite impacts. It had proven necessary to provide each ship with relatively low-grade shielding, since this increased their chances of evading detection by the Coalition’s deep-space monitors. That a certain number of craft were likely to be lost had been taken into account during the mission’s planning stages. It was an unfortunate, but ultimately necessary, sacrifice.
A few other of the ships suffered fatal systems failures, victims of high-energy particle impacts that interfered with their delicate circuitry. The rest continued on their long flight across the light-years, their onboard computers communicating with each other via encrypted channels, aware within their limited intelligence that, as time progressed, their numbers were steadily dwindling, although not yet below mission-critical levels.
At the apex of their journey, the armada was moving at just a shade over 97 per cent of light-speed. Time-dilation slowed the pace at which the attritions of age and radiation damage wore away at their passengers. The onboard medical systems did their best but, inevitably, there were further casualties: those ships bearing the irretrievably dead automatically shut themselves down and fell behind the rest, to drift between the stars forever.
The years passed, and the ships flew on. They did not begin to decelerate until the last decade of their voyage, finally braking into the 36 Ophiuchi system, deep within Coalition territory.
Automated defences patrolling the outer worlds of 36 Ophiuchi detected a number of the approaching ships, analysing their trajectories and responding by moving hunter-killer mechants into intercept patterns. The craft came under fire from kinetic weapons that sent chunks of asteroid slag curving in towards them along gravity-assist paths.