Zelia had been so badly beaten he almost couldn’t recognize her. Her face had swollen up, severely distorting her features, her whole body a patchwork of bruises and welts. Although fresh bandages had been placed over her chest wound, there were burn marks all across her breasts and thighs.
But that wasn’t the worst thing.
Her eyelids had been cut away, along with her nose. Luc slowly understood that the same had been done to him, that this was the reason he could neither blink nor close his eyes. A second Sandoz warrior stood by Zelia, occasionally squirting moisture onto her exposed eyeballs, to prevent them from drying.
‘Zelia has been most helpful,’ said Cheng, stepping up beside Luc and nodding towards her, ‘if initially uncooperative. But thanks to her wise decision to work with us, we now understand the full extent of your involvement in Winchell Antonov’s revolution, as well as the nature of the Coalition technology inside your head.’
Cheng turned to the man in the dark tunic beside Luc. ‘Jacob,’ he said with a gesture, ‘if you please.’
Jacob squirted more moisture onto Luc’s face, regarding him with pitiless eyes.
‘Jacob Moreland,’ Luc managed to rasp.
‘I understand,’ said Moreland, ‘that you came here hoping to prevent me from completing my mission. Don’t you understand that everything Father Cheng does, he does out of love?’
It took an effort for Luc to say anything more, his tongue sliding across the ragged ruins of his teeth. ‘Ambassador Sachs told me everything,’ he said, spitting the words at Cheng and ignoring Moreland. ‘You’d kill a whole world, rather than risk falling out of power.’
Cheng smiled sadly. ‘It’s a terrible price for so many people to pay, I agree entirely. But do you think I would do any such thing, if I really believed there could be any possible alternative?’
‘Alternative to what?’ Luc rasped. ‘The Coalition are going to wipe you out. Don’t you understand that?’
‘Regardless of whatever offensive action the Coalition are planning, our Sandoz forces are well equipped to engage them.’
‘You’re insane. The Inimicals—’
‘—are a product of Ambassador Sachs’ imagination,’ Cheng snapped. ‘They do not exist. Jacob, please tell Mr Gabion what we’re going to be doing here today.’
‘The plan,’ said Jacob, squirting more moisture onto Luc’s naked eyeballs, ‘is to perform a live dissection, starting with the lattice inside your skull. You’ll be kept awake and conscious throughout, in order that your responses may be measured and assessed.’
A door slid open, and a mechant floated into the centre of the room. Razor-tipped instruments glinted from its underbelly.
‘The artefact,’ Luc rasped. ‘I know it’s close to here.’
‘Now do you see how badly we’ve let things slip over the years?’ Cheng declared, turning angry eyes on those of his advisors who were present. ‘Do you see how much this man knows?’
They all glanced away, as if the walls around them were of sudden and unexpected interest.
‘Father—’ one of the men tried to say.
‘Shut up!’ Cheng shouted, his face twisted in fury. ‘You’ve failed me. You’ve all failed me. I should send you all to the same hell as these two. Do you understand?’
‘The artefact is here, yes,’ Moreland told Luc with a smirk. ‘But not, I assure you, for much longer.’
Luc laughed, the sound descending into violent, hacking coughs. His eyes were becoming painfully dry once more, but Moreland made no move to squirt more moisture onto them.
He looked back over at Zelia. He tried to script to her, but got no answer. She gazed dully back at him.
‘I’m sorry, Zelia,’ Luc whispered. ‘I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid you might stop me.’
Her lips moved fractionally, and a faint mumble emerged from the bruised wreckage of her mouth.
‘What was that?’ Cheng demanded sharply.
Luc licked dry, cracked lips, and shuddered with relief when Moreland finally stepped forward and sprayed moisture onto his eyeballs.
‘When I met Ambassador Sachs that last time on the Sequoia,’ Luc said to Cheng, ‘he gave me the means to track the artefact Moreland brought back here. But on the way here, I realized he’d given me much more than just that.’
‘I am not in the mood for speeches, Mr Gabion,’ said Cheng, sounding irritable. ‘Please get to the point, and all this unpleasantness will be over that much sooner.’
‘At first I wondered, why me? But then I realized he didn’t see it as being a decision he could make. The choice had to be made by someone from the Tian Di – someone like me.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ demanded Cheng, his tone suspicious.
‘I realized the Ambassador had given me a way to control the artefact, not just track it down.’ Luc smiled through cracked and broken teeth. ‘Even activate it, should it happen to be within sufficient proximity.’
Cheng gaped at him. They all did.
‘Kill him,’ Cheng barked. ‘Now.’
‘Too late,’ Luc whispered, and triggered the artefact.
EPILOGUE
He sat on a bench and watched an entire world die.
First, the atmosphere rippled outwards from a central point, as if an object the size of a moon had struck it. A haze spread up and out from that same central point like dark smoke, spiralling upwards with sufficient velocity to escape the gravitational tug of the planet itself.
Seen from a distance of some tens of thousands of kilometres, it made for a startlingly beautiful sight, until he remembered that hurricanes of a ferocity unseen since the planet’s formation were tearing the soil from its bedrock, and sending vast, towering tsunami sweeping across its continents, scouring it clean of any evidence that men had ever been there.
He kept watching, as the crust was stripped away from the hot molten core. By now, much of Vanaheim had been reduced to a smear of dust and gravel spread along the path of its orbit.
The laws of physics, briefly interrupted by the activation of the quantum disruptor, began reasserting themselves. He saw trillion-ton chunks of debris collide with each other, obscured by that same dense haze, still spreading out into a circle around the nearby sun.
I made this happen.
No matter how many times Luc said it to himself, he couldn’t quite take it in. Perhaps he never would.
Finally, he dismissed the recording. No matter how often he watched it, it always had the same effect, like being punched in the gut at the same time as having his head submerged in a bucket of ice-water.
He looked around the communal lounge, one wall of which displayed an entirely different view – that of a supermassive black hole orbited by blue-shifted stars, caught in slowly decaying orbits that would eventually send them spiralling to their doom. The lounge itself was vast, filled with dozens of couches and tables, all of them currently unoccupied. He was quite alone, but not, he knew, for very much longer.
He passed the time in silent contemplation, unsure of what he would say or do when his visitors finally arrived.
When he grew bored enough, he ran the recording a second time.
He stiffened on hearing a door open at the far end of the lounge, somewhere behind him. Footsteps echoed as they crossed the floor, growing closer. He felt a tightness in his chest, suddenly afraid to turn around.
‘A magnificent sight, is it not?’ asked Antonov, coming to stand by him and nodding towards the footage. ‘Zelia would have had much to say about this, I think.’