‘So what did Antonov tell Vasili he could find here?’
Maxwell stood and stepped towards Luc, handing him the book. ‘A set of communication protocols which, once I had helped Sevgeny to locate them, proved to allow access to information stored on a derelict orbital station, one of dozens in orbit around Vanaheim.’
‘When I met him, Ambassador Sachs had taken up residence on a station called the Sequoia,’ said Luc. ‘Was it that one?’
Maxwell shook his head. ‘No. Vanaheim’s orbital space is littered with debris and abandoned habitats and follies. The station in question is unoccupied and, I suspect, serves as one of the Council’s many secret hiding places for its instantiation backups. When Vasili returned to visit me a few days later, having visited the station in question, he was in a dreadful state, jumping at shadows. He told me he had uncovered something monstrous – something Cheng had kept hidden from us all.’
‘Did he tell you what it was?’
‘I wanted him to,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Whatever he’d discovered clearly terrified him, and I knew he was desperate to talk about it. But he still couldn’t quite bring himself to trust me with the information. He told me he was determined to force a general meeting of the Eighty-Five, so he could present the evidence to all of them. I told him he was being naive at best, at worst suicidal.’ He shook his head. ‘The next thing I heard, he was dead.’
‘And you have no idea just what it was he found?’
‘None.’ Maxwell nodded at the book gripped, unopened, in Luc’s hands. ‘But I did manage to persuade Sevgeny to leave behind some last few memories – in case, I said, something happened to him. Once you’ve experienced what he—’
Maxwell paused mid-sentence, his eyes becoming fixed on some far-off point. Several seconds passed before he focused on Luc once more.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It seems there’s been a failure of some of my perimeter mechants,’ said Maxwell, looking noticeably paler. ‘I’ll have to leave you here for the moment while I go and find out what’s happened.’
‘Are we in danger?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Maxwell. ‘But if we are, it’s even more important you learn everything you can from that book while you have the chance.’
Luc watched as Maxwell headed back the way they’d come, the sound of his slippered feet echoing softly. Then he opened the book on his lap, and placed his fingers against a random page.
SIXTEEN
As soon as Jacob had dumped the old man’s body into the well, he boarded the flier hidden by Sillars, its hatch hissing softly open. Data displays bloomed around him as he slid into the pilot’s seat, while the upper part of the hull became transparent, giving him a fine view of the forest clearing and the ruins off to one side.
He had one more thing to do before departing. Taking a deep breath, he fetched Sillars’ pin-sized transceiver from a pocket, holding it delicately between thumb and forefinger and letting more data flow out of it and into his lattice.
All the worry and tension he’d felt building up, ever since he’d discovered how badly his predecessors had screwed up, finally melted away. He had everything he needed to complete his mission and return to the Tian Di in triumph.
Tipping his head back, he gazed up through the hull at the band of light and silver arcing from horizon to horizon like a bridge of light spanning the world. Then the ground began to slip away and the flier rose above the forest clearing, before accelerating towards the world-wheel like an arrow shot straight up into the air.
The sky soon faded from a greenish-blue to black as the flier’s AG drive pushed it out of Darwin’s gravity well at a continuously accelerating rate. The curve of the horizon became increasingly pronounced until the forest merged into a coastline streaked with clouds, their shadows patterning the land below. Spindly arms that looked impossibly fragile, but each of which was in actuality some kilometres in breadth, reached up from Darwin’s equator to support the world-wheel.
Jacob had time to review the information provided by Sillars and to make sure it matched mission expectations. Once he had recovered the Founder artefact that was his mission goal from a secure facility aboard the world-wheel, his next task would be to make his way through the recently activated Darwin–Temur gate. According to encrypted updates recently received by Sillars’ transceiver, the only people as yet allowed to pass through it were special envoys from either culture, but subtle hacks on the Temur side of the gate would cause Jacob to be identified as one such envoy making a scheduled return trip to the Tian Di. The fact that he would be departing Darwin without having ever officially arrived there was unlikely to be discovered by the Coalition authorities until it was much, much too late.
He passed the time piecing together the modular beam-weapon Sillars had left behind for his use, fitting the last component into place and studying the resultant device with an enthusiast’s eye. Next came the wave-scramblers, grenade-like things that would – if Sillars had done his homework – induce seizures in Darwin’s global datanets, as well as disrupting communications up and down the world-wheel. He supplemented these with additional subterfuge devices and weapons from the case Kulic had been so curious about.
Lastly he checked his suit’s integrated systems, making sure they were all fully functional. He’d already checked and rechecked those same systems many times since his arrival on Darwin, but he did it one more time anyway.
The world-wheel grew from a thin line of silver to a mottled band of grey and white, studded with countless brightly glowing lights. The flier soon merged into the local traffic, most of it unmanned and flying within a dozen kilometres of the wheel’s inner surface as it moved from destination to destination. Jacob caught sight of zero-gee parks and urban centres embedded in the inner rim. His sense of anticipation grew, and he practised the breathing and meditation exercises he had been taught when young.
The minutes and seconds drew out interminably until the flier finally dropped its velocity almost to zero relative to the world-wheel. He waited until the local systems had accepted Jacob’s faked authorization, then set the flier to dock automatically.
Activating his suit’s defensive systems, he disembarked into a wide, deserted boulevard within the world-wheel’s outer shell. Sillars’ research had shown this part of the world-wheel to be deserted, and it appeared to still be so.
Abandoned or not, Jacob knew there was no way to predict just how long it might take the local security networks to reroute themselves around the aggressive countermeasures his suit was already broadcasting. After that, he would have to think on his feet.
As it turned out, the security networks recovered in less than a minute. Jacob had been hoping he might have rather more time than this, but his training had taught him the value of adaptability.
Within seconds, a mechant more astonishingly complex than any he had ever encountered before, even on the killing fields of Benares, appeared from an aperture in the ceiling and came rushing towards him. He took it out with a single shot from his beam weapon, and watched it shatter into a thousand white-hot fragments.
He walked briskly onwards, his suit informing him he was close to the physical location of a junction connecting together several local data-hubs. Pausing just long enough to break open a circuit-panel set into the wall of the boulevard and insert a wave-scrambler, he then continued along the boulevard. The scrambler rapidly integrated with the dedicated networks responsible for coordinating data traffic in this part of the world-wheel, spreading chaos.
Jacob had taken no more than a couple of paces before the lights lining the boulevard began to flicker spasmodically, then faded altogether. Another few seconds passed before aged emergency circuits kicked in. Vermilion emergency lights embedded in the floor of the boulevard and integrated into the walls now illuminated the way, lending a claustrophobic quality to his surroundings.