She wasn’t alone. Her companion was Isaak Lethe, SecInt’s Director of Operations, his brow marked by worry-lines. He took a seat to one side of Luc’s bed, the corners of his mouth jerking up in a half-smile as if this were the same as any other debriefing. Eleanor remained standing, her expression carefully neutral.
‘Mr Gabion,’ said Lethe. ‘You’re looking a lot better than you did when they first brought you in here.’
‘I’ve had better days,’ Luc croaked, his voice scraping like rusted razors. He tried to catch Eleanor’s eye, but she glanced away. ‘Just how long have I been here?’
‘You got back to Temur just a couple of days ago,’ Lethe replied. ‘Medician Merlino told me how much work they had to do on you.’
‘Apparently,’ said Luc, ‘they had to replace pretty much everything.’
‘They also rolled your age back about a half-decade or so. My understanding is that made things easier for them.’
‘You were lucky,’ said Eleanor, eyes finally settling on him. Her nostrils flared slightly, a sure sign she was still angry at him, despite everything he’d been through. ‘Really lucky.’
‘I know you’re only just out of the tank, but I need to talk to you about what happened on Aeschere,’ said Lethe, his expression becoming apologetic. ‘I know you probably don’t feel ready for it.’
Luc shook his head. ‘It’s fine. What do you need to know?’
‘Sandoz Command are facing questions over how they managed to lose an entire Clan on what should have been a straightforward operation. And it’s not like we can ask Marroqui or any of the rest of them what happened.’
‘Why not? They’ll be re-instantiated, won’t they?’
‘Yes, and Karlmann Sandoz has already given the order to prep their clone bodies. Unfortunately, since the explosion that destroyed the complex left no trace of them . . .’ Lethe regarded him from beneath shaggy eyebrows.
Meaning, Luc guessed, that their instantiation lattices had also been destroyed. ‘So they won’t be able to reboot them from the point when they were actually killed,’ Luc finished for him. ‘I get it.’
‘Which makes you our only material witness to what happened down there,’ Lethe continued. ‘The version of Master Marroqui they’re about to shovel into a new body hasn’t even heard of you. That means at some point you’re going to find yourself standing in front of an investigative committee, possibly several of them. And they’re all going to ask difficult questions.’
‘And that’s why you’re here?’
Lethe smiled stiffly. ‘Actually, it concerns Antonov. You told a Sandoz investigator he was still alive when you reached the lowest level of the complex.’
Luc shook his head. ‘I don’t recall speaking to anyone from the Sandoz.’
‘They sent one of their own here to interrogate you without getting our clearance first,’ Lethe explained. ‘You were still only half-conscious at the time. One of the medicians told me it’s unlikely you’d recall any of it. I filed a protest and managed to get the details of what you told the investigator. So Antonov – was he still alive?’
Luc nodded. ‘He was, yes.’
‘You also told him Antonov compromised Marroqui’s mosquitoes.’
‘Also correct.’
‘Mostly correct. It turns out those mosquitoes were still transmitting some data back to the orbital platform parked around Grendel.’
Luc sat up with extreme care. ‘So you managed to recover at least some data?’
Lethe nodded. ‘Enough to prove your version of events. Up to a point.’
Up to a point. ‘Go on,’ said Luc, sensing Lethe was leading up to something.
‘Your CogNet link stopped recording just before you reached the lowest level of the complex, and didn’t start again until you contacted Master Siedzik. That means we have no idea what happened during the period it wasn’t functioning.’
‘You think Antonov compromised it in some way?’
Lethe ignored the question. ‘Apparently you told this investigator that after your encounter with Antonov, you headed straight for the cryo units, but not before sending a warning to Siedzik. Why?’
‘Antonov told me he was going to destroy the complex. He even told me the cryogenic pods were my best bet at staying alive.’
‘Let me just be clear on this. Antonov told you he was going to trigger a detonation?’ asked Lethe.
Luc shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a bomb or anything like that. Antonov had a transfer gate set up down there on the lowest level, connected to a ship orbiting close to 55 Cancri’s photosphere. He set the ship to dive into the sun before knocking me out. When I woke up he was dead, and I checked the readings in one of the navigation booths for just long enough to see he hadn’t been lying.’
They both stared at him like he’d started barking profanities.
‘Didn’t I tell the investigator . . . ?’
‘No, you didn’t,’ said Lethe, looking outraged. ‘A transfer gate? How the hell could Antonov get his hands on technology like that?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Luc, ‘but I swear to you it’s the truth. He was badly wounded, dying.’
Luc stopped, his head throbbing with sudden, unexpected pain. It wasn’t hard to guess Lethe didn’t believe a word.
‘How badly wounded?’ asked the Director.
Luc swallowed with some difficulty. Sharp spikes of pain radiated from inside his skull, getting worse with every passing second. ‘He had a deep chest wound. At first I thought he was too weak to be any danger. But he fooled me. He managed to dose me, then drag me through to the ship’s bridge.’
‘Why in Heaven didn’t Antonov just kill you?’ asked Lethe. He had a look on his face like a man trying to figure out a particularly intractable puzzle, one he was sure contained some central flaw that, once identified, would cause all the rest to fall apart.
‘I don’t know. By the time I came to, he was dead and the ship was locked into its course. All I could do was get the hell out. I made my way back through the gate and up to the higher levels.’
‘And the rest of Antonov’s people?’ asked Eleanor. ‘The Black Lotus insurgents?’
Antonov put something inside my head, Luc wanted to say, but as soon as the thought crossed his mind, sweat burst out all over his newly-minted skin, the pain in his skull doubling.
It felt almost like something was trying to stop him talking about it. He gripped the bed sheets, twisting the soft cotton around his fingers.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Eleanor, stepping around the side of his bed and placing one hand on his upper arm. The sensation of her fingers against his skin was almost unbearably sensual. She glanced back at Lethe. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t . . .’
‘No,’ Luc gasped. ‘It’ll pass.’
He saw Eleanor and Lethe exchange a look.
‘Look,’ said Lethe, ‘if we go to an investigative committee and try and tell them Antonov had transfer gate technology without any proof, there’s going to be hell to pay. There are already questions about how badly you might have been affected by the trauma of what happened to you.’
‘You don’t believe me,’ Luc said hollowly.
Lethe sighed. ‘It’s not a question of whether I believe you or not.’
‘Just other people.’
‘Even if there really was a transfer gate down there, Aeschere’s got a low enough average density that the explosion, or whatever the hell it was, brought the roof down on half the complex. It’d take months, maybe years to dig down far enough before we could even begin to verify your story. Come to think of it, it was probably sheer damn luck you didn’t wind up buried under half a million tons of rock along with everything else.’
‘So you think Antonov was never there, that I hallucinated the whole damn thing. Is that it?’
‘No, he was definitely there,’ Lethe replied. ‘We managed to get visual corroboration of that much, at least, from Black Lotus’s own security networks just prior to the raid. It looks like he died there as well. Whether I believe there was a transfer gate or not doesn’t really matter, not without hard evidence. With no CogNet data and no proof to the contrary, any committee you wind up in front of is going to dismiss every word that comes out of your mouth.’
Luc opened his mouth to protest, but then realized that if their roles had been reversed, he’d have said exactly the same damn thing. He’d have assumed the story about the transfer gate was a delusion, triggered by the dreadful trauma of having half his body burned away.
But it had been real. He could feel it, deep in his bones. The proof was in his skull, put there by Antonov. All he had to do was tell them, but even the thought of doing so filled his head with a furious ache.
‘I was pretty torn up, right?’ Luc managed to blurt. ‘When they pulled me out of that cryo unit, they must have scanned me pretty thoroughly, inside and out.’
Lethe frowned, then gestured at something behind him. A mechant drifted forward until it hovered just centimetres above the bed, its sensors directed at Luc.
The ache grew worse. It took all Luc’s strength just to force the next words out.
‘Listen to me,’ he gasped. ‘In my head. Antonov put—’
The pain escalated beyond all endurance. His body snapped rigid as something tore at the inside of his head. He was vaguely aware through the haze of agony that two human orderlies had come rushing into the room.
The mechant reached out and did something to his arm where it lay on top of the sheets. Everything began to recede, as if he were seeing the hospital room and its occupants from down the far end of a long, dark tunnel. The pain wasn’t any less, but he found he no longer cared about it.
He experienced a kind of fugue, and the next thing he knew lights were slipping by overhead as he was taken somewhere else. Then there were more mechants, and other, unfamiliar faces, and finally another room where he was given into the care of a machine that pressed in close all around him.
Whatever they’d pumped into his veins, it felt good.