The Thousand Emperors by Gary Gibson Page A

suppressed emotion.
    ‘I’m going to retire,’ he said abruptly.
    Her eyes widened.
    ‘From active service, at least,’ he continued. ‘I’m serious. With Antonov gone, there’s no reason not to let other people deal with whatever’s left of Black
Lotus.’
    ‘You never said anything about this before.’
    ‘Because I didn’t know just what was going to happen on Aeschere. I couldn’t discount the possibility I was wrong, that Antonov wouldn’t be there.’ He looked at her
and smiled. ‘But he was.’
    ‘Then . . . you’re serious? No more risking your neck?’
    ‘I’ll stay on in Archives, but if I do any more field-work, I’ll stick to the kind of low-risk background investigations you and me used to do. But nothing like
Aeschere,’ he added, shaking his head. ‘That was more than enough for this lifetime.’
    Eleanor looked almost dizzy with relief. ‘I can hardly believe you’re saying this. You were always so’ – she searched for the right word – ‘driven.’
    Monomaniacal , he remembered her screaming at him once. Obsessed. He couldn’t really deny the charge.
    ‘All I’m saying,’ he said, reaching out for her hand, ‘is that things are going to be different from now on.’
    He half expected her to pull away from him, but instead she laced her fingers through his. Luc felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest.
    ‘There was another reason Lethe came here,’ she said. ‘You’ve been invited to the White Palace for a ceremony.’
    ‘Ceremony?’
    ‘They want to make you a Master of Archives, Luc.’
    He blinked at her in confusion and surprise. ‘Seriously?’
    ‘Director Lethe thought you might like to hear it coming from me. Assuming you’ll actually accept a promotion this time.’
    Well, I’ll be damned, thought Luc. ‘The last time they tried to give me a promotion was different. They wanted to boot me up to the Security Division.’
    ‘But this time,’ she said, her mouth softening into a smile, ’you get to stay where you want to be.’
    It took time for Luc to learn how to control his freshly grafted muscles, but progress was fast. Further treatments sped up the reconnection of nervous tissues, and simple
tasks that at first represented an enormous struggle rapidly became smooth and natural. Even the food Luc ate tasted different. After just a couple of days his skin had lost much of its patchwork
appearance, and the next time he looked in a mirror, he saw someone who appeared to have suffered nothing more than mild sunburn. He touched his new face, marvelling at the wonder of it all.
    On the day his treatments came to an end, he made his way along a series of narrow paths that sliced through a small courtyard at the centre of the hospital grounds. The courtyard was filled
with small patches of greenery interspersed with koi ponds, their waters glittering under a noon sun. At first a mechant trailed after him, but he shooed it away.
    He sat on a concrete bench and took a small case from out of a jacket pocket, opening it and extracting a new Archives CogNet earpiece. He fitted it carefully to the lobe of one ear. During his
therapy, he’d been forced to rely on a general-purpose piece rather than the secure model normally used by Archives staff.
    He activated it, immediately sensing the pulse of humanity in the streets beyond the hospital’s perimeter, and soon found himself deluged with data-ghosted messages from colleagues and
well-wishers in Archives, including Offenbach and Hetaera. There were so many that their animated images jostled for space around him, some appearing to hover above the nearby koi ponds. He
listened to a few before dismissing them all. He’d have plenty of opportunity to go through them all later.
    And besides, what he had in mind might be better done without witnesses.
    Linking into Archives for the first time since his return from Aeschere, he ran a search for any files with the reference Thorne, 51 Alpha, Code Yellow