Her face grew fractionally paler. ‘Go on.’
‘After you were replaced by Ariadna Placet, she figured out there was a cover-up, and was murdered on Cheng’s direct orders to stop her telling anyone else.’
Zelia stared at him, clearly outraged. Luc finished dressing, then heard a thump as she picked up one of her boots and threw it towards a wall. It bounced back, somersaulting through the air before rebounding from the ceiling.
Luc reached out and managed to catch it, handing it back to her.
‘I hope you weren’t throwing that at me,’ he said, ‘because if you were, you’re a lousy shot.’
‘All right,’ she said at last, her voice flat, ‘I believe you. I don’t want to, but I do. Except there’s one thing that doesn’t make much sense to me – if Cheng really had access to the Founder Network for all this time, why bother sending agents to the Coalition to recover Founder artefacts, if he can just go and get them at the source? And after going all that way, how’s he going to bring them back to . . .’
She halted and looked at him, then closed her eyes. ‘The new transfer gate.’
‘That’s just about the only reason he agreed to let the Coalition bring the transfer gate here,’ Luc confirmed. ‘As for why he’s sending agents to Darwin, the part of the Network he’s been able to access was cleared out long ago by some other long-gone race. He hasn’t been able to find anything he could use as a weapon.’
‘Dear God,’ said Zelia. ‘Cheng’s data-cache told you all this?’
‘Yes,’ he said triumphantly. ‘But Cheng didn’t place it here – Cripps did.’
‘What?’
‘Maxwell told me before he died that some of the Eighty-Five sometimes hid sensitive or incriminating information in his library, against the day that Cheng might turn against them. Cripps is Cheng’s right-hand man, but I think he knew the day might come when he knew too much for Cheng to want to keep him alive. He placed the data-cache here, without Cheng’s knowledge, against the day he could use it for a bargaining chip. But he wasn’t quite clever enough.’
‘Meaning, Antonov found out about it?’
Luc nodded. ‘The cache might have self-deleted once I’d accessed it, but the evidence is still around, even if it is locked up inside my head. When Cheng first sent those agents to Darwin, it was only intended to be a backup plan in case his reconnaissance teams failed to find an appropriate weapon inside the Founder Network.’
‘But he never did find anything, so now the backup plan is the main plan.’
‘Which works out better for Cheng, since this way he can lay the blame for Benares on the Coalition as well as Black Lotus.’
‘We need to talk to Ambassador Sachs,’ she said, suddenly decisive, ‘and tell him everything you just told me. Maybe his own people can find some way to stop this from their side of the gate.’
Luc recalled childhood nightmares, of witnessing Benares consumed by flames. He had decided not to tell her what else he had discovered; that everything Antonov and, later, Maxwell had told him was true – Cheng really had ordered the Benares raid that changed his life, in order to discredit Black Lotus.
And now, with Antonov out of the way, there was nothing to stop Cheng from delivering the final coup de grâce to a world that had offered nothing but resistance since the beginning of his rule.
‘The only problem,’ he said, ‘is that we don’t know whether one of Cheng’s agents hasn’t already brought an artefact back from Darwin.’
Zelia nodded, as if to herself. ‘Perhaps I should go and find Cripps and ask him that question myself.’
‘What? How could you—’
‘Just leave it to me,’ she snapped, a wild look in her eyes. ‘That man’s had a reckoning coming to him for a long, long time, and I want to be the one who finally gets to deliver it to him.’
She got up and started to pull on her own clothes.
‘Listen,’ said Luc, suddenly feeling awkward. ‘I . . .’
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she replied without meeting his eyes. ‘It was just something that happened. Besides . . . it wasn’t really about you.’
‘It was about Antonov.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t be.’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘maybe you should stay up here on this station until it’s all over. There’s air, and even if there’s not enough food, I can send another flier with supplies up to you. At least until all the fighting is over.’
‘No, Zelia. I’m not going to let you cut me out of the picture again.’
Her face coloured. ‘Damn it, Luc, don’t you understand? This isn’t your war any more. Whatever Cheng or Cripps have done, you still serve the Council, and that includes me. Wait here until it’s safe for you to pass through the Hall of Gates, then let me and the rest of the Council take care of this.’
‘And once I’m home, what do I do?’ he asked her, ‘wait until I die from another seizure?’
‘I told you already I’d help you—’
‘No,’ he reminded her, ‘you said you’d try and help me, but I don’t think you have any idea what you’re doing. Antonov told me Ambassador Sachs has some way to save both of us. I’m going to find the Ambassador and tell him everything I just told you, and maybe this time he will help me.’
De Almeida looked more tired than angry when she next spoke. ‘Damn you, Gabion—’
He stared at her adamantly. Her nostrils flared, and for a moment he thought she might do something, perhaps attack him or hit him or, worse, order her mechant to do it for her. But in the next moment something changed in her demeanour, as if all the fight had gone out of her. For a moment, she looked all of her many, many years.
‘Then go find Sachs, if you must,’ she said, her tone weary. ‘Do you even know where to look?’
Luc checked. ‘If things are as bad as you say they are down there, I’m going to guess he’s probably back on the Sequoia. And you?’
‘I’ll take a look at the list of Tian Di envoys who’ve travelled back through the transfer gate from Darwin. It’s possible one of them could have brought something back they weren’t supposed to.’
‘What happened to you, Zelia?’ Luc asked her. ‘You, and the rest of the Council. What went wrong?’
‘Hang around a couple more centuries,’ she said, ‘and you can answer the question yourself.’
Luc turned away from her then, making his way back through the station to the flier that had brought him there.
TWENTY
Any nagging doubts Luc had about the Coalition Ambassador’s location slipped away once he arrived in the vicinity of the Sequoia, and found it under attack from Sandoz forces.
An image of the Sequoia floated before him in the cockpit of his flier, rendered in real-time. One of its several domed arboretums dotted around its exterior had been torn open and exposed to vacuum, and as a result a glittering halo of debris and frozen atmosphere now surrounded the station, while here and there attack-pods of Sandoz design had locked onto the hull like so many fat metal leeches.
Something shot out of the darkness as Luc watched, striking the station’s primary hub and sending more glittering fragments spinning outwards. A dark shape silhouetted against the planet below proved, upon magnification, to be a Sandoz orbital platform, emitting a steady stream of heavily armed mechants making their way across the intervening gap.
Luc watched all of this with a terrible sinking feeling, debating whether it might be wiser to turn back. But if he could see the Sandoz forces attacking the Sequoia, then they undoubtedly could see his flier decelerating towards the station on an approach vector. Even if he chose to turn back, by the time he managed to accelerate away they would already be on his tail, and the chase would be as good as over.