‘He deserves no better. Now listen, so you understand the important facts. Moreland made his way back down from orbit to Temur in just the last few hours.’
‘Do we know exactly what it is he brought back?’
She nodded. ‘Something called a “quantum disruptor”.’
‘A what?’
She glanced back at Cripps with a thoughtful look. ‘Apparently the device can pull time and space apart like moist tissue paper.’
Luc recalled the war he had witnessed when Sachs had taken his hand, and felt his blood chill.
‘So far as I understand it,’ Zelia continued, ‘Moreland is on his way here, to Vanaheim, to present the artefact in person to Cheng – assuming he didn’t get here already. After that, the plan was to pass it on to Cripps so he could take charge of transporting it to Benares. Obviously that isn’t going to happen, but we still have only a short window of opportunity while the artefact is here before Cheng finds someone else to finish Cripps’ job for him. That’s another reason I gathered everyone here – I figured there was at least some chance one of them might turn out to have information that could help us pinpoint either Moreland or the artefact.’ She shook her head. ‘Unfortunately, we’ve had no luck so far.’
‘I can find the artefact,’ said Luc. ‘Sachs gave me the means to track it. It’s in Liebenau, somewhere inside Cheng’s Red Palace.’
Zelia stared at him in surprise, then faltered. ‘That’s great, Luc – and I guess there’s nowhere it’d be more likely to be. But it does mean it’s going to be surrounded by Sandoz security.’
‘Those people upstairs – do they have the resources to take Cheng on and win? Do you?’
She regarded him uncertainly. ‘As far as my own resources go, the Red Palace security have their own, dedicated communications network, which means I can’t tie them up in knots the way I can the Sandoz elsewhere on Vanaheim. As for the rest, it depends. Some of them, I think, have been stockpiling weapons against a day like this, but as far as the rest go, all they have are their personal mechants – not nearly enough to take on anyone’s army.’
‘You make it sound hopeless. Is it?’
She hesitated for a moment. ‘I watched your departure from the Sequoia remotely. I saw what happened to that Sandoz platform – was Ambassador Sachs responsible for that?’
‘I did that,’ Luc said quietly. ‘You told me yourself that the lattice in my skull is like no other you’ve seen before, and you were right. Antonov got it from the Coalition.’
‘So the Coalition really have been supplying technology to Black Lotus?’
Luc nodded, and reached a hand towards one of the mechants hovering above Cripps, concentrating. After a moment the machine wobbled in the air, then moved towards the centre of the passageway.
Luc brought his hand sweeping down, and the mechant landed on the dusty flagstones with a thump, becoming dark and silent.
‘How could you do that?’ Zelia rasped, staring at the mechant with wide, frightened eyes.
‘To be honest with you,’ he said, turning back to her, ‘I don’t really know. But I’m pretty sure I can do a lot more than just that.’ He nodded back towards the stairwell. ‘We need to figure out our next move before Cheng has a chance to get that artefact anywhere near Benares.’
The lights dotting the ceiling above them flickered, and they both felt a tremor run through the floor and walls around them, one that had nothing to do with the machinery lurking beneath Zelia’s home. A commotion of voices and screams flooded down from the upper floor.
‘What the hell happened?’ Luc demanded.
Zelia ran towards the stairwell. ‘The networks are down,’ she shouted back at him. ‘I’ve lost control of them again. My guess is that the Sandoz have found us.’
They ascended the steps into chaos. Luc glanced up towards the sky, visible through the ruined ceiling, and caught sight of a couple of fliers rocketing upwards. Zelia’s co-conspirators were making a run for it.
Something huge drifted between the escaping fliers and the clouds, blocking out the sky. A Sandoz cruiser, its underside studded with sensors and defensive systems.
Luc followed Zelia through the greenhouse and outside in time to see several more fliers erupting upwards. One disappeared in a blaze of heat and light before it had ascended more than a few hundred metres. He glanced back up at the belly of the vast ship overhead, seeing a stream of tiny dots descending towards them. Mechants.
Zelia grabbed hold of his arm. ‘What you just did to that mechant – can you do it again?’
The dots had by now resolved into multi-armed silhouettes, approaching rapidly. A burst of incandescent light indicated the destruction of yet another flier.
Stop, thought Luc, focusing on the approaching mechants.
As he watched, the mechants broke formation, spinning off in different directions. Several hit the dirt close by the mansion house, sending up clods of soil. Others span out of control, their limbs flailing spasmodically.
‘Come on,’ said Zelia, tugging him by the arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Luc stumbled after her and inside her own flier, which had barely enough room for the both of them. Luc’s insides lurched as he saw the ground dropping away from them with terrifying speed.
The flier veered wildly, and Luc gasped as he was slammed against the curved upper hull. Several seconds of free-fall followed, then another sudden wrenching burst of acceleration. The ground rushed towards them at gut-wrenching speed before suddenly spinning away once more.
‘Sorry,’ Zelia muttered. ‘Had to take evasive action. We were being targeted.’
‘Can we get away from them?’
‘Possibly,’ she replied. ‘Not that there’s that many places left to run to.’
‘Your friends,’ Luc gasped, ‘did the rest of them get away? Can they help us?’
‘I don’t know, Luc,’ she said, sounding hopeless. ‘It’s not looking good now. There’s fighting around the Red Palace now, but I don’t think we’re winning.’
‘What about the Hall of Gates? Is there any way we could get through it and escape?’
She shook her head. ‘The last I heard, the Hall of Gates was in lockdown, and guarded by a heavy contingent of Sandoz on either side.’ She turned and glanced at him. ‘You do understand, don’t you, just how bad things are? Cheng has all the cards on his side. What about Sachs? Would the Coalition be willing to help us?’
‘Sachs is gone,’ he told her. ‘He was on board the Sequoia when it was destroyed.’
‘But . . . you said he was still alive?’
‘You asked me if he was dead, and I said not in the way you meant.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘People in the Coalition maintain multiple iterations of themselves, Zelia – they jump in and out of bodies like we do fliers. Even if the particular instantiation of Sachs I met is gone, I have no doubt there’s another one somewhere back on Darwin right now reporting on everything that happened here.’
‘Shit.’ Zelia slammed the console before her. ‘Then that’s it, isn’t it? The Coalition’s invading forces are on their way, and Cheng’s got all the firepower on his side.’
‘No, that’s not it,’ said Luc, with a determination that surprised even himself. ‘We have to try, because if we don’t, all that’s left is to see who kills us first – Cheng, or the Coalition.’
And I still have one more card up my sleeve, he thought. One it might be best not to tell Zelia about.
TWENTY-TWO
The landscape below them curved in on itself as the flier carrying Luc and Zelia boosted upwards and into low orbit, the sky darkening and becoming filled with stars. They saw brief flashes of light, like lightning, from somewhere over the horizon.