TWENTY-ONE
Almost as soon as the flier lifted up from its cradle, something slammed into the station with tremendous force. Clearly the Ambassador wasn’t wasting time following through on his promise. The stars wheeled past the open bay doors, and the flier was sent crashing into a bulkhead.
Luc’s head snapped sideways, his teeth clicking together. Blood began to fill his mouth and he swallowed hard, grimacing at the taste. Emergency alerts flowered in the air all around him.
Tubes dropped down from immediately overhead, reaching towards him and forming a seal over his nose and mouth at the same time that a thick, glutinous liquid began pouring out from hidden nozzles, filling the interior of the flier in seconds.
Luc breathed in the high-oxygen mix coming through the tubes and felt suddenly calmer, so much so that he found himself wondering if there might be some form of narcotic in the air mix. The flier meanwhile pumped visual data to him directly, via his lattice, and he saw a Sandoz mechant had entered through the open bay doors, its carapace bristling with weaponry.
The mechant launched itself immediately towards the flier. Luc flinched, hearing it land on the hull, a soft thud that reverberated through the impact gel surrounding and cushioning him. He watched with horror as the mechant extended manipulators, using them to secure itself to the flier’s hull. It then applied a tightly focused blue flame to a spot on the hull, which brightened to a dull orange almost immediately.
Go away, thought Luc.
The mechant jerked suddenly, and the flame switched off. It let go of the flier, its manipulators undulating around it, as if in confusion. Drifting across the bay, it rebounded from a bulkhead, now apparently lifeless.
Luc stared at it in stupefaction as the stars wheeled by beyond the bay doors.
The flier carefully manoeuvred its way out through the bay doors before quickly boosting far away enough from the Sequoia that Luc could see the station’s long hub had been shattered in several places. Pieces of the Sequioa were drifting apart from each other, some spinning as they went.
What came next happened so fast that Luc only had time to think about it clearly a few minutes after the fact.
First, his flier flashed a warning that it was being targeted by multiple energy and kinetic weapon systems. Then it accelerated hard enough to break every bone in his body, if not for the impact gel surrounding and supporting him.
He blacked out. The next time he became aware of his surroundings, the Sequoia was twenty kilometres distant and receding fast. The flier’s onboard AI outlined each and every one of the thousands of pieces of spinning and flying wreckage with bright green circles and associated impact probability estimates.
Luc called up a view of the Sandoz platform, and saw a heavily shielded framework supporting multiple weapons systems. Red circles marked dart-sized missiles hurtling across the intervening space towards him. Clearly Ambassador Sachs’ pre-emptive tactic of destroying the Sequoia, however drastic, hadn’t worked as well as he’d hoped.
Luc imagined the missiles detonating, and then watched as incandescent points of light suddenly bloomed amongst the stars.
I did that, Luc realized with a thrill of shock that ran up his spine like electricity.
He glanced towards the Sandoz platform. Light bloomed at half a dozen points across its framework, as its remaining stocks of missiles also spontaneously detonated.
The resulting explosions tore the platform apart like soft candy under a blowtorch.
Luc found himself wondering just how much chaos and death one man could bring about with that much power. He felt numb, as if he were no more substantial than a ghost drifting high above Vanaheim’s upper atmosphere.
The flier informed him it was receiving a transmission coded for the Sequoia. On investigation, it proved to be from Zelia.
<Zelia.>
<You’re alive? I saw the attack on the station. Didn’t you go there?>
<I did. Ambassador Sachs destroyed the station himself.>
<You mean he’s dead?>
He thought for a moment about everything Sachs had shown to him. <Not in the way you mean, no.>
<I want you to rendezvous with the rest of us at my home,> she sent, then added: <I found Cripps, Luc – and now I know just who it was Cheng sent to Darwin.>
<What do you mean, ‘the rest of us’?> asked Luc, but by then the flier was re-entering Vanaheim’s atmosphere, rendering any further communications impossible for at least the next few minutes.
Luc gasped as rough hands yanked the breathing mask from his face. The impact gel had congealed into a thick translucent sludge around his feet shortly after the flier had landed safely by Zelia’s domed laboratory.
Harsh sunlight cut through the flier’s open hatch. He felt hands take hold of him, pulling him out from his seat restraints. He collapsed onto grass, half-blinded by the light, and heard the distant hiss of the sea.
Looking up, he discovered he was surrounded by several of Zelia’s machine-men. For one terrible moment he thought perhaps Zelia had sent them to kill him, but they kept their distance as he staggered to his feet, gel still dripping from his clothes.
One of the creatures gestured towards Zelia’s laboratory, a short walk away, a faint buzzing emerging from the grille where its mouth should have been. Luc nodded warily, then watched the creatures shuffle out of his way as he stepped forward.
Part of the building housing Zelia’s laboratory had caved in, while the twisted wreckage of a Sandoz mechant lay nearby. Burned, ragged shapes scattered around the surrounding land were recognizable as fallen soldiers in Zelia’s army of machine-men. Dark smoke rose from the mansion next door, the wind carrying an acrid smell of ashes down to the sea.
He found Zelia inside the laboratory, wearing a bloodied smock and perched on the edge of a chunk of masonry that had smashed a work table, having fallen from the ceiling, wrecking the room’s carefully-wrought astronomical mural.
She was not alone. At least a dozen other men and women stood or sat where they could amidst the scattered laboratory equipment, all turning to stare at Luc with varying degrees of suspicion as he entered from the greenhouse. A few of them looked as if they had been through their own trials: one had a heavily bandaged arm, while another appeared to have suffered serious burns to one side of her face. He ignored them all, focusing his attention on Zelia as he stepped over to her.
‘Who is he?’ one of the others shouted. ‘He’s not a member of the Council!’
‘Mr Gabion is working for me,’ said Zelia, without looking around. ‘He found the evidence that Cheng is responsible not only for Sevgeny Vasili’s assassination, but that of Ariadna Placet before him.’
‘That doesn’t mean he should be here,’ said another voice. ‘Send him away, Zelia.’
She glanced around them all with an irritated expression. ‘I brought you all here so we’d have some chance at salvaging something from this mess,’ Zelia shouted, ‘not so you could dictate terms to me. Gabion being here is my choice, not yours.’
‘Who are all these people?’ Luc asked her quietly.
She slid down from the chunk of masonry. ‘Members of the Council who’ve made the mistake of opposing Cheng in any number of ways. He’s accused us all of being Black Lotus sympathizers and ordered our arrests.’
‘But why bring them here?’ he demanded. ‘Surely you’re making it easy for Cheng to kill or capture you all at once?’
‘There is strength in numbers, Mr Gabion.’ She nodded towards the steps leading down to the basement. ‘There’s something I need you to see.’