"Is that war, or just patronage-as-usual?" Oxham asked dubiously. The Risen Emperor and the Senate levied taxes separately, their sources of revenue as carefully delineated as the Rubicon Pale around the Forum building. But however separate crown and government were meant to be, the Loyalty Party—true to its name—always followed the Emperor's lead. Especially when it helped the voters back home. Loyalty was traditionally strong in the Spinward Reaches, as it was in every outskirt region where other cultures loomed threateningly close.
"Normally, I'd say it was the usual alms for the faithful," Niles answered. "But the Coreward and Outward Loyalist regions aren't sharing in the largesse. On the contrary, those ends of the Empire are taking a big hit. Over the last twelve hours, I'm seeing higher honoraria tributes, skyrocketing futures on titles and pardons, even hundred-year Imperial loans being called. The money isn't earmarked yet, but
only
the military could spend amounts like this."
"So the Navy's being strengthened, and the Spinward Reaches fattened up," Oxham said. It sounded like war with the Rix. Riches to fund military forces, and comfort for the regions threatened by reprisal.
Her chief of staff cocked his head, as if someone were whispering in his ear. "Labor futures on Fatawa tightened by three points this morning.
Three.
Probably reservists being called up. No one left to sweep the floors."
Oxham shook her head at the Risen Emperor's madness. It had been eighty years since the Rix Incursion; why provoke them now? Though not numerous, the Rix were unspeakably dangerous. The strange technologies bestowed on them by their AI gods made them the deadliest combatants the Empire had ever faced. Moreover, war with them was always a less-than-zero-sum game. They owned very little worth taking, having no real planets of their own. They seeded compound minds and moved on. They were spores for the planetary beings they worshiped, more a cult than a culture. But when injured, they made sure to injure in return.
"Why would the Risen Emperor want another war with the Rix?" she wondered aloud. "Any evidence of a recent attack?" Oxham silently cursed the secrecy of the Imperial state, which rarely allowed the Senatorial Government detailed military intelligence. What was going on out there, in that distant blackness? She shivered for a moment, thinking of one man in particular who would be in harm's way. She pushed the thought aside.
"As I said, this has all been in the last few hours," Niles said. "I don't have raw data from the frontier for that timeframe."
"Either precipitated by an emergency, or the Imperials have hidden their plans," Senator Oxham said.
"Well, they've blown their cover now," Niles finished.
Oxham interleaved her fingers, her hand making a double fist. The gesture triggered a sudden and absolute silence in her head, shutting off the din of orating solons, the clamor of messages and amendments, the pulse of polls and constituent chatter.
War,
she thought. The galling domain of tyrants. The sport of gods and would-be-gods. And, most distressingly, the profession of her newest lover.
The Risen One had better have a damn good reason for this.
Senator Oxham leaned back and glared into Roger Niles's eyes. She allowed her mind to start planning, to sort through the precisely defined powers of the Senate for the fulcra that could impede the Emperor's course. And as she felt the cold surety of political power flowing into her, her anxieties retreated.
"Our Risen Father may not want our advise and consent," she said. "But let's see if we can't get his attention."
CAPTAIN
For the first twelve years of his life, Laurent Zai had been, embarrassingly, the tallest of his schoolmates. Not strongest, not quickest. Just a lofty, clumsy boy in a society that valued compact, graceful bodies. Since long before Laurent was born, Vada had elected and reelected as its governor a short, solid woman who stood with arms crossed and feet far apart, a symbol of stability. As young as seven standard, Laurent began to pray to the Risen Emperor that he would stop growing, but his journey toward the sky continued relentlessly. By age eleven it was too late merely to cease getting taller; he had already passed the average height for Vadan adults. He asked the Risen Deity to shrink him, but his biology mentor AI explained that growing shorter was scientifically unlikely, at least for the next sixty years or so. And on Vada one did not pray to the Risen Emperor to change the laws of nature, which were His laws after all. Ever logical, Laurent Zai implored the Emperor to effect the only remaining solution: increased height among his schoolmates, a burst of growth among his peers or a demographic shift that would rescue Laurent from his outcast status.
In the summer term that year, transfer students from low-gravity Krupp Reich flooded Laurent Zai's school. These were refugees displaced by the ravages of the New German Flu. The towering Reichers were gawky, easily fatigued, and thickly accented. These survivors were immune to the flu and had of course been decontaminated, fleeing the societal meltdown of population collapse rather than the virus itself, but the stench of contagion still clung to them, and they were so disgracefully
tall.
Zai was their worst tormentor. He mastered the art of tripping the Reichers from behind as they walked, nudging a trailing foot so that it hooked the other ankle with their next step. He graffitied the margins of chapel prayer-books with clumsy stick figures as tall as a page.
Laurent was not alone in his misbehavior. The Reichers were so mistreated that a month after their arrival the entire student body was assembled around the soccer field airscreen. In the giant viewing area (over the field upon which Laurent had been so often humiliated by shorter, quicker footballers) images from the Krupp Reich Pandemic were shown. It was pure propaganda—an art for which Vadans were justly famous—a way to shame the native children into ceasing their torments of the newcomers. The victims were carefully aestheticized, shown dying under white gauze to hide the pulsing red sores of the New German Flu. Photos from preflu family reunions were altered to reflect the disease's progress, the victims fading into sepia one by one, until only a few smiling survivors remained, their arms around ghostly relatives. The final image in the presentation was the huge, monolithic Reich Square in Bonnburg, time-lapsed through successive Sunday afternoons over the last four years. The population of tourists, hawkers, merchants, and strollers on the square dwindled slowly, then seemed to stabilize, then crashed relentlessly. Finally, a lone figure scuttled across the great sheet of copper. Although only a few picture elements tall, the figure seemed to be rushing fearfully, as if wary of some flying predator overhead.
Twelve-year-old Laurent Zai sat with his jaw slack amidst the overwhelming silence peculiar to shamed children, thinking the same words again and again.
"What have I done?"
When the airscreen faded, Zai bolted down the stairs, shaking off the restraining hand of an annoyed proctor. He fled to sanctuary under the bleachers and fell to his knees in the litter of spectator trash. His hands together in the clasp of prayer, he started to ask for forgiveness. He hadn't asked the Emperor for
this.
How could he have known that the Reich Pandemic would be the result of his request for taller classmates?
With his praying lips almost against the ground, the stench of cigarette butts and old honey wine bottles and rotten fruit under the bleachers struck him like a blow to the stomach. He vomited profusely into his prayer-locked hands, in an acid stream that burned like whiskey in his mouth and nose. His hands remained faintly sticky and smelled of vomit the rest of that day, no matter how furiously he washed them.
As if some switch deep within him had been permanently thrown, the position of prayer always brought back a glimmer of that intense moment of shame and nausea. The murmurs of morning chapel seemed to coalesce into an acid trickle down the back of his throat. The airscreen rallies in which the Risen Emperor's visage slowly turned over an ululating crowd filled his stomach with bile.
Laurent Zai had never prayed to the Risen Emperor again.
He never drank, for every toast on Vada asked the Risen Deity for luck and health. And even as Cadet Zai waited for word of admission into the Imperial Naval Academy, he lay silent in the endless minutes before sleep every night, recalling every mistep and victory in his six-week application trial. But not praying.
Thirty subjective years later, however, seated in the shipmaster's chair of His Majesty's frigate
Lynx,
Captain Laurent Zai took a moment to pair his hands over nose and mouth.
He still smelled the bile of that long-ago shame.
"Make this work," he demanded in a harsh whisper. "As for me, I want to return to my beloved. As for her, she's
your
damned sister."
The bitter prayer ended, Zai brought his hands down and opened his eyes.
"Launch," he commanded.
EXECUTIVE OFFICER
ExO Katherie Hobbes noted from her status board that the entry vehicle carrying the Apparatus Initiate Barris had not been fully gelled. The safety AI began to protest the dangers posed by an incompletely prepped insertion vehicle.
Hobbes smiled grimly, canceling the safety overrides, and the order went through.
"Operation is launched, sir."
Almost simultaneously, four specially reconfigured turret blisters along the underside of the
Lynx
each fired one railgun and one plasma burst. A pair of each type of projectile headed toward four carefully plotted targets below.
The plasma bursts bolted ahead at twenty percent lightspeed, their 12,000-degree core temperatures burning a tunnel of vacuum through the atmosphere. Their burn length perfectly timed, they scattered into gouts of flame upon impact, leaving as their only marks four smooth, concave hemispheres burned into the palace's stone walls.
The railgun projectiles followed in their wake.
COMPOUND MIND
The attack was registered by the warning system erected by the Rix compound mind still propagating across the planet's data and communication systems. The plasma bolts left a long, bellicose streak behind them, clearly originating from the point Alexander had already predicted that an Imperial warship would station itself to attempt a rescue. The mind required less than two milliseconds to determine that such an attempt was underway, and to order that the hostages be killed. However, the Rix commandos were not datalinked to the still-propagating mind. Alexander was a composite of Imperial technology, after all, which was incompatible with Rix communications. Alexander was forced to relay its order through a transponder sitting in the center of the table in the council chamber. The transponder received the compound mind's signal and immediately let out a loud squawk, a dense static whose crenellations were coded like some ancient audio modem. The squawk began its journey from the transponder outward toward the Rix commandos at the speed of sound. The nearest commando was four meters away, and the sound would reach her in roughly eight milliseconds, a hundredth of a second after the attack had begun.
Racing against this warning were the four structured smartalloy slugs launched from the
Lynx's
railguns. These projectiles, massing less than a few centigrams, barreled at ten percent lightspeed through the near-vacuum cylinders burned for them by the plasma bolts, flying straight as lasers. They traversed the distance to the palace in far less time than it took for Legis's atmospheric pressure to slam closed their vacuum paths. They reached the plasma-smoothed hemispheres of their entry-points into the palace within seven milliseconds.
The slugs were cylinders no wider than a human hair follicle. They sliced through the ancient palace walls, releasing a carefully calculated fraction of their awesome kinetic energy. The stone around the entry points ribbed with sudden webs of cracks, like safety glass struck with a hammer. The impact altered the slugs, transforming them into their second programmed shape, a larger spheroid that flattened on impact, braking the projectiles as they slammed through the floors and walls of the palace. In the seconds after their passage, the old palace would boom and shake, whole walls exploding into dust. Localized but terrific wind storms would soon rise up as the air inside the palace was set in motion by the slugs' passage.
After the seventh such collision, a number calculated by the
Lynx's
AI using precise models of the palace's architecture, the slugs ballooned to their largest size. The smartalloy stretched into a mesh of hexagons, expanding outward like a child's paper snowflake, and attaining the surface area of a large coin.
These much-slowed slugs struck their targets, hitting the Rix commandos while the warning squawk from the transponder was just under a meter away, eight thousandths of a second after the attack had begun. The slugs tore through the commandos' chests, leaving tunnels that were momentarily as exact as holes drilled in metal. But then the wake of the slug's passage pulled a pulverized spray of blood, tissue, and biomechanical enhancements through the exit wounds, filling the council chamber with a maelstrom of ichor. The four commandos tumbled to the ground, their bones shattered and implants liquifacted by the blow.
For the moment, the hostages were safe.
DOCTOR
Above, the marines were on their way.
Twenty-five entry vehicles accelerated down launch tubes, riding electromagnetic rails at absurd velocities. Thirty-seven gees hit Dr. Vecher like a brain hemorrhage, shifting the color behind his closed eyes from red, to pink, to the white of the hottest flame. A roar filled his gel-sealed ears, and he felt his body malform, squashed down into the floor of his vehicle under a giant's foot. If not for his yolk of gel and the injected and inhaled smart-polymers that marbled his body tissue, he would have died in several instantaneous and exotic ways.