The Risen Empire (10 page)

As it was, it hurt like hell.

The entry vehicles hit the dense air of the mesopause almost instantly, and spun a precise 180 degrees to orient their passengers feet-down, firing retrorockets to begin braking and targeting. They spread out, screaming meteors surging across the daylit sky of Legis XV. Only three were targeted near the council chamber: each vehicle that landed close to the hostages carried the risk of injuring the Child Empress. The marines would be spread out, deployed to sweep for the three remaining Rix commandos and secure the now twice-battered palace.

Dr. Vecher's entry vehicle was fractionally ahead of the others, and was aimed closest to the council chamber. It burst through the palace's three sets of outer walls, the impacts shaking Vecher as if he were trapped inside a ringing churchbell.

But the landing, in which the vehicle expended its last reaction mass to come to a cratering halt outside the chamber, seemed almost soft. There was a final bump, and then Dr. Vecher spilled from the vehicle, the gel that carried him out hissing as it hit the super-heated stone floor of the palace.

ADMIRAL

For the hostages, the transition from anxious fatigue and boredom to chaos was instantaneous. The smartalloy slugs reached their targets well before any sound or shock waves struck the council chamber. The roaring whirlwind seemed to come from nowhere. Blood and liquefied gristle exploded from the four captors. The hostages found themselves choking on the airborne ichor of the eviscerated Rix, mouths and eyes filled with the sudden spray. Moments later, the booms of the palace's shattered and collapsing outer walls came thundering in at the tardy speed of sound, overwhelming the vain shriek of the transponder on the table.

Admiral Fenton Pry, however, had been expecting something like this. He had written his War College graduate thesis on hostage rescue, and for the last four hours had been quietly stewing over the irony. After a seventy-subjective-year career, here he finally was in a hostage situation, but on the wrong end. The latest articles in the infrequent professional literature of hostage rescue even lay on his bedside, printed and handsomely bound by his adjutant, but unread. He hadn't been keeping up lately. But he knew roughly how the attack would unfold, and had palmed a silk handkerchief some hours ago. He placed it over his mouth and rose.

A horrifying cramp shot through one leg. The admiral had tried dutifully to perform escape-pod stretches, but he'd been in the chair for four hours. He limped toward where the Child Empress must be, blinking away blood from his eyes and breathing shallowly. The floor rolled as a heavy portion of the palace's ancient masonry collapsed nearby.

Marines coming in?

They're too close,
the admiral thought. This was a natural stone building, for His Majesty's sake. Admiral Pry could have taught whoever was in charge up there a few things about insertions into pre-ferroplastic structures.

Vision cleared as the ichor began to settle in an even patina on the exposed surfaces of the room. The Empress was still seated. Admiral Pry spotted a Rix commando on the floor. She had landed on her side, doubled up as if put down by a punch to the stomach. The entry wound was invisible, but two pieces of the commando's spine thrust from the gaping exit wound at forty-five-degree angles.

Pry noted with professional pleasure that the slug had struck the commando's chest dead center. He nodded his head curtly, the same gesture he used to replace the words
well done
with his staff. Her blaster, extended toward Child Empress at arm's length, was untouched.

The admiral lifted her hand from it, careful not to let the rigid fingers pull the trigger, and turned to the Empress's still form.

"M'Lady?" he asked.

The Empress's face was twisted with pain. She clutched her left shoulder, gasping for air with ragged breaths.

Had the Reason been hit with a slug? The Empress was of course covered with Rix blood, but under that her robes seemed to be intact. She certainly hadn't been shot by anything as brutal as a blaster or an exsanguination round.

Admiral Pry had a few seconds to wonder what was wrong before the heavy ash doors burst open.

CORPORAL

Marine Corporal Mirame Lao was the first out of her dropship.

A veteran of twenty-six combat insertions, she had set her entry vehicle to the highest egress speed/lowest safety rating. At this setting, the dropship vomited open at the moment of impact, spilling Corporal Lao onto the floor in a cascade of suddenly liquidized gee-gel, through which she rolled like a parachutist hitting thick mud. She came up standing. The seal that protected her varigun's barrel from clogging with gel popped out like a champagne cork, and her helmet drained its entry insulation explosively on the floor around her. Inside her visor, blinking red diagnostics added up the price of her fast egress: her left leg was broken, the shoulder on that side dislocated. Not bad for a spill at highest setting.

The leg was already numbing from automatically injected anesthesia; her battle armor's servomotors took over its motion. Lao realized that the break must be severe; as the leg moved, she could feel that icy sensation of splintered bone tearing into nerve-dead tissue. She gritted her teeth and ignored the feeling. Once during a firefight on Dhantu, Lao had functioned for six hours with a broken pelvis. This mission—win, lose, or draw—wouldn't last more than six minutes. She confirmed a blinking yellow glyph with her eye-mouse, and braced herself. Her battle armor huffed as it contracted implosively, shoving her dislocated shoulder back into place. Now
that
hurt.

By now, some fourteen seconds after impact, the marine corporal was oriented to the wireframe map in her secondary vision. To her right, the marine doctor was rising gingerly up from the gel vomited by his own drop-ship, disoriented but intact. The vehicle that had brought the Apparatus initiate down hadn't spilled yet—it looked wrong, as if the door had buckled in transit.

Tough luck.

Corporal Lao loped toward the heavy doors that separated her from the council chamber, gaining speed even with her lopsided gait. She was right-handed, but she hit the ashwood doors with her already wounded left shoulder; no sense injuring the good arm. Another spike of pain shot through her as the doors burst open.

She tumbled into the council chamber with weapon raised, scanning the room for the Rix commandos.

They were easy to find. All four had fallen, and each was the origin of a long ellipse of thick red ejecta sprayed on walls and floor. A lighter, pink shroud of human blood coated everything in the room, from the ornate settings on the table to the stunned or shrieking hostages.

These four Rix were definitely dead. Lao clicked her tongue to transmit a preconfigured signal to the
Lynx: Council chamber secured.

"Here!" a voice called.

The word came from an old man who wore what appeared—beneath its bloody patina—to be an admiral's uniform. He knelt over two figures, one writhing, one still.

The Child Empress, and a dead Rix.

Marine Corporal Lao ran to the pair, reaching for a large device on her back. This move caused her wounded shoulder to scream with pain, and her vision reddened at the edges. Lao overrode the suit's suggestion of anesthesia; she needed both arms working at top efficiency. There were three surviving Rix in the building; this might turn into a firefight yet.

The diagnostics on the generator blinked green. It had survived the jump in working order. She reached for its controls, but movement behind her—the helmet extended her peripheral vision to 360 degrees—demanded her attention. Lao spun with her weapon raised, shoulder flaring with pain again.

It was the marine doctor.

"Come!"
she ordered, her helmet uttering one of the preprogrammed words she could access with a tongue click. Her lungs remained full of drop-goo, whose pseudo-alveoli continued to pump high-grade oxygen into her system.
"Sir!"
she added.

The man stumbled forward, disoriented as a recruit after his first high-acceleration test. The corporal grabbed the doctor's shoulder and pulled him into the generator's radius. There was no time to waste. The com signals from the rest of the drop were running through her secondary audio, terse battle chatter as her squadmates engaged the remaining Rix.

Corporal Lao activated the machine, and a level one stasis field jumped to life around the five of them: Empress, lifeless Rix commando, admiral, doctor, and marine corporal. The rest of the council chamber dimmed. From the outside, the field would appear as a smooth and reflective black sphere, invulnerable to simple blaster fire. The hiss of an oxygen recycler came from the machine; the field was airtight as well.

"Sir,"
Lao commanded,
"heal."

The marine doctor looked up at her, an awful expression visible on his face through the thick, transparent ceramic of his helmet visor. He was trying to speak; a terribly, terribly bad idea.

Despite the howl of pain in her shoulder, the imminent danger of Rix attack, and the general need for her attention to be focused in all directions at once, Lao had to close her eyes when the doctor vomited, two lungfuls of green oxycompound splattering onto the inside of his faceplate.

She reached over to unseal the helmet. The doctor wouldn't drown in the stuff, naturally, but it was much nastier when you inhaled it the second time.

CAPTAIN

"Stasis field up in the council chamber, sir," Executive Officer Hobbes said softly.

The words snapped through the wash of visual and auditory reports streaming through the
Lynx's
infostructure. Captain Laurent Zai had to replay them in his mind before he would believe. For the first time in four hours, he allowed himself to feel a glimmer of hope.

Acoustics had finally analyzed the explosive sound in the council chamber, which had turned out not to be a firearm at all. Probably the glass in which the Intelligencer had secreted itself had been overturned, and the crash magnified by the small craft's sensitive ears. So Zai had launched the rescue needlessly, but thus far the rescue was working. Such were the fortunes of war.

"Rix number five dead. Four more marines lost," another report came.

Zai nodded with approval and peered down into the bridge airscreen. His marines were spread across the palace in a nested hexagonal search pattern, its symmetry only slightly distorted by the exigencies of crashing down from space, avoiding booby traps, and fighting the remaining two Rix commandos. His men were doing quite well. (Actually, seventeen of the two dozen marines were women, but Vadans preferred the old terms.)

If the Child Empress was still alive, Zai thought, he might yet survive this nightmare.

Then doubts flooded him again. The Empress could have been killed when the council chamber had been railgunned. Or when the marines had burst in to take control. The Rix might have murdered the Empress the moment they took her hostage, insurance against any rescue. And even if she was alive now, two more Rix commandos remained concealed somewhere in the tangled diagram of the battle.

"Phase two," Zai ordered.

The Lynx shuddered as its conventional landers launched, filled with the rest of the
Lynx's
marine complement. Soon the Imperial forces would have total superiority. Every minute in which disaster did not befall him took Laurent Zai closer to victory.

"Where's that damned Vecher?" the captain snapped.

"He's under the stasis field, sir," Hobbes answered.

Zai nodded. The doctor's battle armor couldn't broadcast through the field. But if the marines had bothered to put the stasis field up, that implied that the Empress was still alive.

"Rix fire!" the
synthesized voice of a marine came from below; they were still breathing oxycompound, in case the enemy used gas. The bridge tactical AI triangulated the sound of blaster fire picked up by various marines' helmets; a cold blue trapezoid appeared on the wireframe, marking the area where the Rix commando should be.

Zai gritted his teeth. In urban cover, Rix soldiers were like quantum particles, charms or fetches that existed only as probabilities of location and intent, never as certainties—until they were dead. The nearest edge of the marked area was almost a hundred meters from the council chamber. Close enough to threaten the Empress, but far away enough to...

"Hit that area with another round of railgun slugs," Zai ordered.

"But, sir!" Second Gunner Thompson protested. "The integrity of the palace is already doubtful. It's not hypercarbon, it's
stone.
Another round—"

"I'm counting on a collapse, Gunner," Zai said. "Do you think we'll hit that Rixwoman with dumb luck?"

"The stasis field is only level one, sir, but it should hold," Hobbes offered quietly. At least his executive officer understood Zai's thinking. Falling stone wouldn't harm anyone inside a stasis field. Everyone else—the other hostages, the marines, the rest of the palace staff—was expendable. In fact, the Rix and the Imperials were in battle armor, and wouldn't be killed by a mere building falling down around them. They would simply be immobilized.

"Firing," came the first gunner, and straight bolts of green light leapt onto the airscreen, lancing the blue trapezoid like pins through a cushion. The thunk of the shots reached Zai's soles, adding to all the other sensations of movement and acceleration.

What a powerful weapon, he thought, to shake a starship with its recoil, though the shell weighed less than a gram.

After four shudders had run through the
Lynx,
the gunner reported, "First rounds fired, sir. The palace seems to be holding up."

"Then fire again," Zai said.

SENATOR

The other three senators stood a few meters away from the legislation, a bit daunted by its complexity, its intensity.

As Nara Oxham took them through it, however, with simple words and a soothingly cobalt-blue airmouse pointing out particulars, they drew gradually nearer. The legislation consumed most of the aircreen in the Secularist Party Caucus chamber. A galaxy of minor levies formed its center: nuisance taxes on arms contractors, sur-tariffs on the shipment of strategic metals, higher senatorial assessment for regions with a large military presence; all measures that would, directly and indirectly, cost the Imperial Navy hard cash. Surrounding this inner core were stalwart pickets of limited debate, which restricted ammendments and forestalled filibuster, and loopholes were ringed with glittering ranks of statutory barbed wire. More items in the omnibus floated in a disorganized cloud, cunningly indirect but obvious in their intent to the trained eye. Duties, imposts, levies, tithes, tariffs, canceled pork, promised spending temporarily withheld—a host
of
transfers of economic strength firmly away from the Spinward Reaches. All carefully balanced to undo what the Emperor and Loyalists intended.