‘I’m guessing the fighting turned nuclear,’ Zelia said quietly from beside him when he turned to look at her. She studied the console. ‘No direct hits on any major targets yet, but only because there are still enough functioning countermeasures to take out the missiles before they reach their targets.’
‘How many dead?’
‘Hard to say,’ said Zelia, pressed up close beside him in the tiny cramped cockpit. ‘A hundred, maybe more. The majority of the dead were on our side, I’m afraid to say.’
A hundred, maybe more. More deaths within a few hours than had occurred amongst the Temur Council in centuries.
‘You’re planning something, aren’t you?’ she asked quietly.
He regarded her. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Centuries of observational politics,’ she replied. ‘That, and the fact of what you did to that mechant in my laboratory, not to mention an entire Sandoz weapons platform.’
‘Just before I left the Sequoia,’ Luc explained, ‘Sachs did something remotely to my lattice. He said he’d optimized it.’
‘“Optimized”?’
‘He said I wasn’t using its full potential.’ He glanced at her. ‘It’s also how I know where the stolen artefact is.’
She turned away from him, looking unsettled. ‘I just hope whatever it is you’re planning is good, because we’re going to need nothing short of a miracle if we’re going to get out of this alive.’
A sombre silence settled over them, and Luc distracted himself by keeping an eye on the flier’s screens. He didn’t want to tell her that survival wasn’t part of his plan; he’d given up any hope of surviving Antonov’s lattice some time ago.
‘I’ll tell you what, though,’ said Zelia, suddenly. ‘If, by some fucking miracle, I actually get out of this alive, I’m going to go a long, long way away and never come back.’
He glanced at her. ‘Where would you go?’
She waved a hand towards the cockpit’s ceiling. ‘Out there, somewhere. With the right instantiation equipment and a growth-tank for clone bodies, I could extend my lifespan to thousands of years, maybe even longer. I’d travel out into the galaxy and see what I could find.’
‘You mean you’d travel through the Founder Network?’
She gave him a bemused look. ‘No, I’d build a ship, one that could take me out amongst the stars as close to the speed of light as I could push it. The Founder Network is a trap.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I’m not saying it was intentionally built for that purpose, but I have a theory that once a species finds its way inside the Network, they either stumble across something that wipes them out, or they . . . they lose themselves inside it.’
‘How?’
‘Think about it. How big is the Network, really? Some of the earliest expeditions into it travelled as far as a hundred trillion years into the future. That’s an unimaginable length of time. Think of what might happen to a civilization with access to the Founder Network over thousands of years, and not just centuries, like the Coalition. I wouldn’t give it more than a couple of millennia at the outside before civilizations become sufficiently fragmented as they spread through the Network that they wind up forgetting where they came from. Plus, it explains the Fermi Paradox.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘It’s a question that used to get posed before they discovered how to build transfer gates,’ she explained. ‘If you make the assumption that there must be intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe, and if you also assume it’s inclined to spread out through space as we have, then why didn’t our ancestors on Earth ever encounter them?’
‘If there are aliens, then why aren’t they here?’
‘That’s it exactly. But what we know now is that the Founder Network’s been in existence for billions of years, apparently vacuuming up every intelligent race that comes across an entrance to it. That’s why we never encountered living aliens before – because they discovered the Network first.’
‘What does that have to do with not wanting to take a shortcut through the Network?’
‘There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, Luc, with God knows how many intelligent civilizations out there who never had either the luck or the misfortune to stumble across the Network. None of us have any idea just what’s out there, because as soon as we discovered a way inside the Network’ – and here, she put a hand out in front of her chest, palm forward – ‘we more or less came to a dead stop as far as the rest of the universe was concerned.’
‘I guess it makes sense when you put it that way.’ The flier was already tilting nose-up as it dropped out of orbit, shaking as it hit the upper reaches of the atmosphere.
Luc glanced at a screen and saw it would not be long before they reached Liebenau. The stars were fading from sight once more, and before long they were racing towards the rising sun, the terrain beneath them becoming increasingly mountainous the lower they dropped. Vast swathes of green and blue to the south marked the confluence of several rivers on their long journey to the coast.
In less than half an hour, they’d be at the Red Palace.
‘Is there still fighting going on?’ he asked Zelia.
‘Some,’ she replied. ‘But most of the strikes I know about came from Sandoz ships in orbit, aimed at fabricant complexes.’
‘Why them?’
‘The fabrication systems here on Vanaheim are built for large-scale industrial construction. It’s how we build our homes, but it’s not that hard, if you know how, to retool them to manufacture weapons.’
‘And that’s what your friends have been doing?’
She nodded. ‘The Sandoz are attacking fabrication plants fairly indiscriminately. Pretty much anything, really, that could be used to resist them.’
Another bright flare of light erupted from just over the horizon and the flier began to drop, losing altitude fast. The light grew in intensity, the flier responding by darkening the transparent sections of the hull until they were entirely opaque.
Screens and virtual panels flashed red all around them. One screen showed a swathe of green jungle rushing up towards them at a furious rate, and Luc swore under his breath when the flier suddenly levelled out, flying low over the treetops. The flier’s AI announced critical damage to its hull.
‘That was bad,’ said Zelia, her voice high and tight. ‘We got broadsided by an A-M missile. It was six kilometres from us when it detonated. Any closer, and neither of us would be here.’
Luc checked the view to their rear and saw a column of smoke rising up into a mushroom high above the landscape. He pulled his eyes away from the screen, heart palpitating.
The jungle gave way to level grasslands, and the flier dropped lower until it was barely skimming above the ground, rushing over shimmering oxbow lakes and gaining height only when it encountered patches of forest.
Luc saw they were headed for a series of rounded hills to the north, stretching across the horizon. The upper parts of several pale and shimmering towers could be seen rising from beyond the hills: Liebenau.
Zelia half-mumbled a series of commands, the fingers of her right hand twitching as she focused on a screen immediately to one side of her. The hull began to de-opaque, making it easier to see their surroundings.
The flier banked hard, following the course of a river. Incandescent beams of light split the sky a moment before a ball of light, as bright as the midday sun, bloomed far overhead. The flier’s skin opaqued immediately in response.
‘That was a strike in near-orbit,’ Zelia announced tersely. ‘Doesn’t matter. We’re here.’