The Emperor's New Clothes (Royce Ree #1)

Royce Ree #1

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

Copyright 2013 Aldous Mercer

Smashwords Edition

The Emperor’s New Clothes (Royce Ree
#1)

Drivepolitik (Royce Ree #2)

The Gorilla In The Vent (Royce Ree
#3)

Madman’s Rue (Royce Ree #4)

Imperial Command (Royce Ree #5)

On The Take (Royce Ree #6)—
Coming
2014

Regia (Royce Ree #7)—
Coming
2014

This is—just in case the FTL travel
didn’t clue you in—a work of fiction. All characters in it are
fictitious. Unfortunately. Any resemblance to real persons, or our
respected Alien overlords, is purely coincidental. Except for the
gorilla in Part 3; Him, I based off a cub I once saw at the Toronto
Zoo.

Design by Aldous Mercer

3D Model by percy999 from fiverr

Pismis 24 and NGC 6357: NASA, ESA, and
J. Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía,
Spain)

Under the “wing” of the Small Magellanic
Cloud: NASA, ESA, CXC and the University of Potsdam, JPL-Caltech,
and STScI

Star-Forming Region S106 & Hubble
Sees a Horsehead of a Different Color & The Pencil
Nebula/Remnants of an Exploded Start (NGC 2736): NASA, ESA, and the
Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

YESTERDAY

8 DAYS AGO

7 DAYS AGO

A REQUEST…

Excerpt: THE PRINCE AND THE PROGRAM (The
Mordred Saga, Book 1)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Starlight lit the most tastefully
decorated interrogation room Royce had ever been in. Not that that
was the room’s normal function, but to Royce’s mind, any room where
one was being interrogated…

The Spymaster’s sigh brought Royce back
to immediate concerns. Dressed in the most severely formal style,
the glitter in the Spymaster’s eye
could
have been
amusement.

“Tell me again, agent Ree,” he said,
“did you understand your mission objective?”

Royce swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“And what was it?”

“Covert retrieval from the Baldasshi,
sir.”

As the Spymaster’s silence lengthened,
Royce stared straight ahead at the wall behind his employer’s head.
The swirled green-in-green pattern brought to mind the gentle sway
of grass in a summer breeze.

“Retrieval of
what
, agent?” asked
the Spymaster, finally.

“Their impeccable sense of style,
sir.”

“And yet…and yet what you actually
brought me was their Royal Princess, intent upon marrying the
Emperor.”

Royce didn’t dare shift his gaze from
that perfectly neutral wall to look at the other occupant of the
room.

“You also,” continued the Spymaster,
“brought me half of Baldessh’s parliament, six hundred Nova class
battleships, and a menagerie of wild animals.”

“Psychic wild animals, sir,” ventured
Royce.

“Of course,” said the Spymaster.
“
Psychic
wild animals.”

“I finished my mission, sir!”

A soft laugh greeted Royce’s protest.
Not from the Spymaster’s direction—
he
looked even more
pissed off, though it was hard to tell.

“Tell us,” said the voice Royce was not
supposed to acknowledge, “How this happened. From the
beginning.”

“
The Empire has survived wars,
supernovae, democracy, and the collapse of a neighborhood universe.
Let us hope it survives the good intentions of Agent Royce
Ree.”

-personal communication to the
Emperor

Author unknown

Royce crouched behind a molecular
analyzer in the basement of the planet’s most secure laboratory.
The Baldasshi workday had ended a while ago, and now the only
people in the building were the guards—armed, vigilant,
un-bribable.

The laboratory’s network power-cycled
just once every two months, giving Royce a half-minute window to
retrieve the data he was looking for.

He was two hours overdue at the orbital
transfer station, where mission specifications dictated he should
be. But it would be a cold day on Prion-5 before anyone at HQ
acknowledged that the mission specifications were utterly
stupid.

The network would power-cycle in fifteen
seconds.

Fourteen.

The lab’s bright lights flickered once,
imperceptibly, their spectrum uncomfortably rich in UV. If he was
captured, it would embroil three civilizations in one of the
nastiest diplomatic incidents in recent memory.

Nine
.

The legalities of extraditing him would
take
years
. And that was
if
anyone at HQ even
acknowledged Royce as an Imperial Agent, after this little
self-assigned break-and-enter exercise.

Five.

The Imperial tattoo on the inside of his
wrist glowed a pale blue under the UV; it might get him shot on
sight. A clean, fatal, shot, if he was lucky. It’d be easier to
take than the Spymaster’s caustic sarcasm during the post-mission
debriefing.

Death was certainly preferable to
returning home without the one thing he had come to this planet
for.

Two
.

Royce darted out onto the floor, towards
the lead scientist’s console.

One
.

“Ree?”

Royce whirled around, drawing out his
ballistic without conscious thought. And stopped shock-still, a
hairsbreadth from pulling the trigger.

Because in the doorway, dressed in a
Baldasshi lab-technician’s uniform, stood the man Imperial Agent
Royce Ree had once been married to.

“
The moment a planet discovers
Faster-Than-Light travel, it attracts the attentions of every other
civilization in the universe. We descend like vultures, to pick
clean any unique tech the planet has managed to accumulate in its
pre-FTL isolation. Some consider it a rite of passage for the poor
world.”

-Commentary on First Contact

Cytus Solei’el, left-wing historian

Royce decided that a ventilation duct
was the absolute worst place in the universe to have a post-marital
argument.

“Six
months
working my way up
that lab’s hierarchy,” Les snarled, “and the one night you decide
to drop by is the night
I’m stealing their damned tech
?”

Royce felt a passing regret for the
canapés he could have been eating right now in the spacestation’s
VIP lounge.

“Look,” he said, “it wasn’t personal. HQ
had to assign someone to another tech-acquisition, I was in the
area.”

Les looked at him through narrowed
eyes.

“And the last time anyone gave me an
update,” continued Royce, “
you
were running a desk on
Trinity.”

“Fine,” said Les, then immediately
started shucking off his lab coat. The space was narrow, and Les
had to contort himself into unnatural shapes to accomplish the
task. Les hadn’t lost any of his flexibility in the past three
years.

Royce gritted his teeth and turned away,
continuing his crawl up the ducts to street level. His ex followed,
the air quickly taking on the overtones of Les’s scent.
Cloves,
dipped in sugar.

Royce cleared his throat. “I thought,”
he began, “that you left fieldwork to be closer to civilization.”
Like you left me
.

Les, perceptive as always, heard the
unspoken thought. “
You
left
me
,” he hissed. “On a
backwater outpost so far away from home that…that it took my family
four months to convince a courier ship to pick me up.”

Royce decided it was time to change the
subject. “What did you steal anyway?”

“Need to know.”

Royce stopped, and half-turned to look
Les straight in the eye. “Considering the fact that were are
crawling through a ventilation duct while guards with a
vaporize-on-sight order look for us,” he said, “I think we can
safely assume that I am very much in the ‘Need to Know’.”

Les’s shoulders slumped. He expelled one
shaky breath, then another, and he looked down at his fist, curled
tightly around a small object. He’d been clutching it since his
surprised exclamation of “
Ree
?” triggered the facility-wide
security claxons.

Les’s fingers uncurled.

Royce took in the glittering,
tightly-wound coils sitting on the palm of Les’s hand, and a cold
sweat broke out all over his body.

“Are you
insane
?” he whispered.
“Stealing another civ’s
drive
?”

“The Emperor commanded me,” said
Les.

“Bullshit,” said Royce. “The Emperor
hasn’t issued an Imperial Command since—”

“How would
you
know?”

Royce snorted. “My classification’s
about as high as it can go without running out of air.”

“Which means nothing on Trinity, and
less
than nothing in the Emperor’s social circle,” said Les.
“My mother dines with His Imperial Majesty on a regular basis.”

“I know,” said Royce. “She reminded me
of that each time she came to our house.”

Les had the grace to look away.

“And it’s not a matter of being pals
with the Emperor,” continued Royce, “it’s a matter of Protocol.
Imperial Commands involve the do-or-die, trillions of lives on the
line sorts of missions, not
tech-theft
. Everyone who’s ever
seen a historical drama knows this, alright?”

Silently, Les twisted his torso, then
drew his hair away from the nape of his neck.

There, embedded into the flesh just
beneath Les’s hairline, was an implant bearing the Imperial Seal.
The do-or-die.

Shit
.

“
An Imperial Command has been put
into play…we feel the Emperor may be transcending his
Authority.”

“
To what end?”

“
To the only End there is, old
friend. Drivepolitik.”

-Transcript, Casual Conversation,
Trinity Prime 20.1881.93

Despair curled around Les’s limbs,
leaden, made him want to curl up and sleep, right there in the
vent.
My mother dines with the Emperor
? His ex-husband
should have seen that line for the bullshit it was. Royce hadn’t
twitched.

Les had held out for months, waiting,
ignoring the increasingly strident commands from HQ to evacuate
Baldasshi Space. He smiled, bitterly, in the dark. He’d been
convinced the Imperial Command was a forgery.
The Empire does
not play drivepolitik
.

The Merakavwi, a species of biped on the
other side of the universe, were a complex people, with a history
marked both by unspeakable atrocities and profound philosophy. They
had over a thousand definitions of ‘rape’. One of those, sandwiched
somewhere between coercive sterilization and mutagenic warfare, was
Vanakhi
- theft of a civilization’s FTL drive.

He’d knew that if he didn’t return with
the drive, they—whoever “they” were—would send someone else to
retrieve it. It was just a matter of time before he came
face-to-face with a ballistic as he rounded a corner. He’d prepared
himself for that.

But nothing could have prepared him for
Royce Ree.
Who is a nightmare so detailed, so absorbing, that
you wake from him, gasping in remembered fear, then long to go back
to sleep so you can enter that twisted landscape again.
Royce
was the Emperor’s man, heart and soul.
No,
I’m
the
traitor here.

“Why did you waste
six months
on
this retrieval anyway?” asked Royce, his voice both echoing and
muffled in the confined space. “Baldasshi security is crap.”

So why did they send an agent of
your
caliber?
Anger twisted, deep in Les’s stomach, turning
soul-weariness to energy that propelled his limbs, faster, closing
in on the crawling half-shadowed form of Royce.

My Emperor sent the only man I've ever
loved to kill me.

“Close call, though,” said Royce, his
tone batting ineffectually at the uncomfortable silence in the air.
“If you hadn’t gotten your hands on it just now….”

Les had been cleared to work in the
drive-core laboratory—albeit on an unrelated project—two months
ago.

“I assume you’re getting off the surface
ASAP,” said Royce.

Les made a noncommittal noise. Tonight
was the third night he held vigil in that lab, caught in the throes
of selfish indecision: to leave the drive where it was, and die, or
take it with him.

My honour or my life, can’t have
both.