The Thousand Emperors by Gary Gibson Read Free Book Online Page 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