The Risen Empire (13 page)

He pulled the seal, the sucking
pop
faint in his ruptured hearing.

In the lightless capsule, Barris was unsure what setting the varigun defaulted to. The marine sergeant onboard the
Lynx
had warned him not to use fragmentation grenades at short range, which certainly seemed a sensible suggestion. Barris swallowed, imagining shrapnel bouncing around in the coffin-sized payload space.

But his conditioning was insistent; it would not brook further delay. Barris gritted his teeth, pointed the varigun at the dropship door, and fired. A high scream, like the howl of fresh hardwood cut on a rotary saw, filled his ears. A bright arc appeared, the light from outside stabbing in through the perforating metal. Then in a sudden rush he was tumbling outward, the rent door bursting open under the weight of the gel.

He stumbled to his feet and looked around.

Something was missing, Barris dully thought for a moment—something wrong. The world seemed halved. He looked at the gun in his hands, and understood. Its barrel faded into darkness...

He was blind in one eye.

Barris reached up to touch his face, but the battle armor stiffened. He pulled against the resistance, thinking a joint or servomotor was damaged, but it wouldn't budge. Then a diagnostic glyph—one of many mysterious signs alight inside his visor—winked frantically. And he realized what was happening.

The battle armor
wouldn't let him touch his face.
The natural instinct to probe the wound was contraindicated. He looked for a mirror, a reflection in some metal surface, but then thought better of it. The numbness in his face was anesthetic; who knew what awful damage he might see.

And the Emperor's work needed doing.

The map projected on his visor made sense after a few moments of thought. Concentrating was difficult. He was probably concussed, or worse. With grim effort, Barris walked toward the council chamber, his body shaking inside the smooth gait of the body armor's servomotors.

Sounds of a distant firefight pierced the ringing in his head, but he couldn't ascertain their direction. The clipped phrases of Imperial battle-talk buzzed in his head, incomprehensible and strangely tinny. His hearing was damaged as well. He strode doggedly on.

A series of booms—two groups of four—shook the floor. It seemed as if the
Lynx
were trying to bring the palace down around him. Well, at least that might get the job done if Barris couldn't.

The initiate reached the doors to the council chamber. A lone marine, anonymous in battle armor, waved to him from a kneeling position just outside. The chamber had been secured. Was he too late?

Perhaps there was only one marine here.

Initiate Barris leveled his varigun at the figure and pressed the firing stud. The weapon resisted for a moment, held in check by some sort of friendly-fire governor, buzzing at him with yet another alarm. But when Barris ignored it and squeezed again, harder, a stream of the ripping projectiles sprayed across the marine.

The barrage knocked the figure down, and ejected a wave of dust and particles from the marble wall and floor. The fallen marine was swallowed by the cloud, but Barris moved forward, spraying his weapon into the debris. Once or twice, he saw a struggling limb emerge from the cloud; the black battle armor fragmenting, gradually beaten to pieces by the insistent hail of projectiles.

Finally, the gun whined down into silence, expended. Surely the marine was dead.

Barris switched the varigun to another setting at random, and stepped into the council chamber.

CAPTAIN

"Shots fired near the chamber, sir."

Captain Laurent Zai looked at his executive officer in surprise. The battle had been going well. Another of the Rix was dead, and the sole surviving enemy commando had been hounded almost to the outer wall of the palace complex. She was clearly in retreat. Zai had just ceased the railgun bombardment. The second wave of marines and a host of local militia had begun to secure the crumbling palace.

"Rix weaponry?"

"Sounds friendly, sir. According to the squad-level telemetry, it's Initiate Barris. His suit diagnostics look dodgy, but if they're reading true, he's just expended his projectile ammo. One casualty."

Zai swore. Just what he needed: a run-amok political ruining his rescue mission. "Crash that idiot's armor, Executive Officer."

"Done, sir," Hobbes said with a subtle flick of her wrist; she must have had the order preconfigured.

Zai switched his voice to the marine sergeant's channel.

"Forget the last commando, Sergeant. Secure that council chamber. Let's evacuate those hostages before anything goes wrong."

CORPORAL

Marine Corporal Mirame Lao had just decided to lower the stasis field when the shooting outside started. The railgun bombardment had ceased, and the ceiling of the council chamber seemed stable. One marine was stationed outside the chamber, and a few of the hostages had crept out from under the shelter of the council table. Lao had suspected the situation was secure, and wanted to check in with the
Lynx.

But then the muted scream of varigun fire had erupted, a cloud of firefight dust rolling in through the chamber doors. Lao listened for the thudding of Rix blasters, but she could discern nothing through the heavy veil of the stasis field. She kept the field up, positioning herself between the Empress and the doors.

Vecher was talking to himself, a low murmur of disbelief as he probed the ultrasound wrap with instruments and his fingers. Some sort of tumor had afflicted the Empress's symbiant, apparently. What had the Rix done to her?

The sounds of the firefight ended after a few seconds. A broken figure stumbled through the dust and into the council chamber. An injured marine in battle armor. The helmet was crushed on one side. As the figure shambled toward them, Lao could see the face through the cracked visor. She knew all the
Lynx's
marines by sight, but the hideous mask was unrecognizable. The man's left eye had exploded out of its socket, and the jaw on that side was slack with anesthetic. It looked more like an insertion injury than blaster fire.

The figure walked toward her, waving frantically. A few steps away, the marine crumpled, dropping with the sudden ragdoll lifelessness of an armor crash, the dozens of servomotors that enabled marines to carry the heavy armor failing all at once. The marine sprawled helplessly on the floor.

Lao listened. It was silent outside.

"Doctor?" she said. "How is the Empress?"

"I'm not sure if I'm helping her or not," the doctor answered. "Her symbiant is ... unique. I need diagnostics from spaceside before I can treat her."

"All right. Admiral?"

The admiral nodded.

Lao lowered the field, squinting for the second it took her visor to compensate for relatively bright light of the chamber. With her varigun aimed at the chamber doors, she reached out and dragged the wounded marine inside the field perimeter. If the firelight started again, the man might as well be protected.

The marine rolled onto his back.

Who was he?
Lao wondered. Even with his ruined face, she should be able to recognize him. She knew every marine aboard the
Lynx.
The man's rank insignia was missing.

More marines appeared at the door. They were moving low, battle-wary. Tactical orders were still flying in secondary hearing: one more Rix commando remained.

The wounded marine attempted to speak, and a mouthful of oxycompound emerged from his lips.

"Rix ... here," he gurgled.

Lao's fingers shot for the generator's controls again, raised the stasis field.

"Damn!" the doctor swore. "I lost the connection. I need
Lynx's
medical AI!"

"Sorry, Doctor," she said. "But the situation is not secure."

Lao looked back at the wounded marine to offer assistance. He was crawling toward the dead Rix commando, dragging the deactivated armor he wore with the last of his strength.

"Just lie there, soldier," she ordered. In the few seconds the field had been down, Lao's tactical display had been updated. A host of friendly troops were converging on the council chamber. Help was only moments away.

The man turned to face her. He brought up the Rix blaster, leveled at her chest.

At this range, a blast from it would kill everyone inside the field.

EXECUTIVE OFFICER

"The stasis field in the council chamber is down again, sir."

"Good. Contact them, dammit!"

Hobbes frantically tried to establish a link with Corporal Lao. By the process of elimination, she had determined that Lao was the marine inside the stasis field. A few seconds before, the shield had dropped, but then had popped up again, and there hadn't been time to connect.

"Lao!" she ordered on the marine broadband. "Do not raise the field again. The situation is secure."

The second wave of marines had secured the council chamber. And a rotary-wing medevac unit from the capital's hospital was in position on the palace roof.

There was no response from Corporal Lao.

"Dr. Vecher," she tried. Neither of the marines' armor telemetry was active. Even the diagnostic feed from the doctor's medical equipment had disappeared.

"Sir," she said, turning to face her captain. "Something's wrong."

He didn't answer. With a strange smile of resignation, Captain Zai leaned back into his bridge chair and nodded his head, murmuring something beneath his breath.

It almost sounded like, "Of course."

Then the reports came in from below, fast and furious.

The council chamber was secure. But Lao was dead, along with Dr. Vecher, Initiate Barris, and two hostages, victims of Rix blaster fire. The shield generator had been destroyed. Apparently, a last Rix commando had been alive, having survived the railgun attack, and had been
inside
the stasis field. In those close quarters, a single blaster shot had killed all six of them, even the Rixwoman herself.

In a few more moments, it was determined who the two hostages were.

One was Admiral Fenton Pry, General Staff Officer of the Lesser Spinward Fleet, holder of the Order of John, the Victory Matrix, and a host of campaign medals from the Coreward Bands Succession, Moorehead, and the Varei Rebellion.

The other was Child Empress Anastasia Vista Khaman, sister to His Imperial Majesty, the Risen Emperor.

The rescue attempt had failed.

Hobbes listened as Captain Zai recorded a short statement into his log. He must have prepared it earlier—Hobbes realized—to save the lives of his crew.

"The marines and naval personnel of the
Lynx
performed admirably and with great bravery against a perfidious enemy. This mission was carried out with distinction, but its basic plan and direction were flawed. The Error of Blood is mine and mine alone. Captain Laurent Zai, His Majesty the Emperor's Navy."

Then the captain turned and slowly left the bridge under the eyes of his stunned crew, shambling rather than walking, as if he were already a dead man.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS EARLIER

(IMPERIAL ABSOLUTE)

HOUSE

The house was seeded in the range of mountains that almost encircled the planet's great polar tundra. The seed braked its fall with a long, black drogue chute made of smart carbon fibers and exotic alloys, rolling to a stop in the soft five-meter snows that shouldered the chosen peak. At rest and buried in the snow, it lay silent for three hours, performing an exacting diagnostic routine before proceeding. It was a complex mechanism, this seed, and an undiscovered flaw now could doom the house to years of nagging problems and petty repairs.

It was certainly in no hurry. It had decades in which to grow.

At length, the seed determined that it was in fine shape. If there were any problems, they were of the sort that hid themselves: a corrupted diagnostic routine, a faulty internal sensor. But that couldn't be helped; it was one of the natural limits of any self-aware system. In celebration of its good health, the seed took a long drink of the water that its drogue chute had been collecting. The chute's dark surface was splayed across the snow, absorbing sunlight and melting a thin layer of snow beneath it. This water was carried to the seed by a slow capillary process, a few centiliters each minute reaching the core.

The seed's gut quickly broke the water into hydrogen and oxygen, burning the former for quick energy, saving the latter. It radiated the heat of this combustion back to the drogue chute. More snow was melted. More water collected. More hydrogen burned.

Finally, this cycle of energy production reached a critical point, and the seed was strong enough to make its first visible movements. It tugged at the drogue chute, drawing it inward, and, as deliberately as a patient on a carefully measured diet, it consumed the clever and useful materials from which the chute was made.

From these, as the heat of its labors caused the seed to sink deeper into the snow, it began to make machines.

Cylinders—simple thinking reeds whose mouths gnawed, whose guts processed and analyzed, whose anuses excreted subtlely changed materials—crawled through the mountain peak on which the seed found itself. They mapped its structure, and determined that its steep but sound shoulders were as stable as a pyramid and capable of withstanding howling gales, construction tremors, even ten-thousand-year quakes. The cylinders found veins of useful metals: copper and magnesium, even a few grams of meteoric iron. They sent gravity waves through the peak, scrying its flaws and adjusting them with a compression bomb here, a graviton annealment there. Finally, the seed deemed the building site sound.

Carbon whisker butterflies pulled themselves out of the snow. One flew to the summit of the icy peak, others found crags and promontories that looked out in all directions. Their wings were photosensitive, and the butterflies stood stock still in the light breeze, taking slow, rich exposures of the peak's splendid views. The artificial insects then glided down into the valleys and across to neighboring peaks, photographing sightlines and colored lichens and the delta-shaped flows of meltwater. Sated with these images, the butterflies flew back to the seed, crawling back into the snow. The data coiled in their bellies were unwound and digested, views constructed and cropped with possible windows, sunsets and seasonal shifts calculated, the happenstance waterfalls of an extrapolated midsummer sculpted and regarded.

The butterflies ventured forth every day for weeks, gathering sights and samples and leaving behind survey markers no bigger than grains of rice.

And the seed found that its aesthetics concerns were also met; the peak was deemed acceptable in function and in form.

The seed called for its second stage, and waited.

Scattered across likely sites in the great polar range were other seeds, sown at some expense—the devices themselves were costly, as were prospecting options on land ownership even in the cold, empty south of Home—but almost all the others had fallen on fallow ground. The seed was one of very few successes. So when the second stage arrived, it was repletely stocked: a large supply of those building materials unavailable on site, detailed plans created by real human architects from the seed's data, and best of all a splendidly clever new mind to manage the project. This artificial intelligence was capable not only of implementing the architects' plans, but also of improvising its own creative flourishes as the work unfolded. The dim awareness of the seed felt incorporation into this new intelligence as a mighty, expansive rush, like an orphaned beggar suddenly adopted by a wealthy and ancient family.

Now work began in earnest. More devices were created. Some of them scurried to complete the imaging of the site. Others began to mine the peak for raw materials and to transmute it to its new shape. Thousands of butterflies were built, swarming the neighboring mountains. Their wings now reflective, they focused the near constant summer sun on the building site, raising its temperature above freezing and providing the laboring drones with solar energy when the last of the snow on the peak was finally melted, its load of hydrogen expended.

A latticework began to enclose the peak, long thin tubes sculpted from the mountain's igneous base material. This web of filaments covered the site like a fungal growth, and moved material around the peak with the steady pulse of the old seed core, now transformed into a steam turbine. Within this mycoid embrace, the house began to take shape.

In the end, there were six balconies. That was one of the few design elements the new mind retained from the original plan. At first the human architect team approved of the project mind's independence. After all, they had set the mind's operating parameters to highest creativity; they reacted to its changes the way parents will to the improvisations of a precocious child. They applauded the greenhouse on the northern face, and complimented the scheme of mirrors that would provide it with sunlight reflected from distant mountains in the wan winter months. They failed to protest the addition of a network of ornamental waterfalls covering the walls of the great cliffs that dominated the house's western view. What finally raised the architects' ire was the fireplace. Such a barbaric addition, so obviously a reference to the surrounding snows, and so
useless.
Already, the house's geothermal shaft extended 7,000 meters into the planet's crust. It was a very warm house when it wanted to be. And the fireplace would require chemical fuel or even real
wood
imported via sub-orbital; a gross violation of the original design's self-sustaining aesthetic. These sorts of flourishes had to be stopped. The architects drafted a strong attack on the project mind's changes, ending the missive with a series of unambiguous demands.

But the mind had been alone—save for its host of mechanical servitors, builders, masons, miners, sculptors, and assorted winged minions—for a long time now. It had watched the seasons change for a full year, had sifted the data of four hundred sunrises and sunsets from every window in the house, had attended to the play of shadows across every square centimeter of furniture.

And so, in the manner of smug subordinates everywhere, the project mind managed to misunderstand its masters' complaints. They were so far away, and it
was
just an artificial. Perhaps its language interpreters were faulty, its grasp of human usage undeveloped due to its lonely existence, perhaps it had sustained some damage in that long ago fall from the sky; but for whatever reason, it simply could not comprehend what the architects wanted. The project mind went its own way, and its masters, who were busy with other projects, threw up their hands and forwarded the expanded plans, which changed daily now, to the owner.

Finally, only a few months late, the house decided it was finished. It requested the third stage of its deployment.

The final supply drone came across the harsh, cold southern skies. It landed in a cleverly hidden lifter port that raised up amid the ice sculptures (representing mastodons, minotaurs, horses, and other creatures of legend) in the western valley. The drone bore items from the owner's personal collection, unique and irreplaceable objects that nanotechnology could not reconstruct. A porcelain statuette from Earth, a small telescope that had been a childhood gift to the owner, a large freeze-dried crate of a very particular kind of coffee. These precious items were all unloaded, many-legged servitors straining under the weight of their crash-proof packing.

The house was now perfect, complete. A set of clothing exactly matching that in the owner's capital apartments had been created, woven from organic fibers grown in the house's subterranean ecologies. These gardens ranged in scale from industrial tanks of soyanalog lit by an artificial sun, to neat rows of Belgian endive in a dank cellar, and produced enough food for the owner and three guests, at least.

The house waited, repairing a frayed curtain here, a sun-faded carpet there, fighting a constant war with the aphids that had
somehow
stowed away with the shipment of seeds and earthworms.

But the owner didn't come.'

He planned several trips, putting the house on alert status for this or that weekend, but pressing business always intervened. He was a Senator of the Empire, and the First Rix Incursion (though of course it wasn't called that yet) was underway. The prosecution of the war made many demands on the old solon. In one of its quiet moments, he came so close as a takeoff, his suborbital arcing its way toward the house, which was already brewing a pot of the precious coffee in breathless anticipation. But a rare storm system moved across the range. The senator's shuttle forbade an approach (in wartime, elected officials were not allowed to indulge risk levels above 0.01 percent) and carried its grumpy passenger home.

In fact, the senator was not much concerned with the house. He had one just outside the capital, another back on his home planet. He had seeded the house as an investment, and not a particularly successful one at that; the expected land rush to the southern pole had never materialized. So when the Rix invasion ended, the owner placed himself in a long overdue cold sleep, never having made the trip.

The house realized he might never come. It brooded for a decade or two, watching the slow wheel of the seasons, and made a project of adjusting once again the play of light and shadow throughout its domain.

And then the house decided that, perhaps, it was time for a modest expansion.

The new owner was coming!

The house still thought of her that way, though she had owned the house for several months, and had visited dozens of times. That first absentee landlord still weighed on its mind like a stillborn child; the house kept his special coffee hidden in a subterranean storage room. But this new owner was real, breathing.

And she was on her way again.

Like her predecessor, she was a senator. A senator-elect actually, not yet sworn into the office. She suffered from a medical condition that required her to seek periodic solitude. Apparently, the proximity of large groups of humans could be damaging to her psyche. The house, which over the years had expanded its sculpted domain to twenty kilometers in every direction, was the perfect retreat from the capital's crowds.

The senator-elect was the perfect owner. She allowed the house considerable autonomy, encouraged its frequent redesigns and constant mountain-scaping projects. She had even told it to ignore the niggling doubts that it had suffered since its AI rating had increased past the legal threshold, an unintended result of its last expansion. The new owner assured the house that her "senatorial privilege" extended to it, providing immunity from the petty regulations of the Apparatus. That extra processing capacity might come in handy one day in the business of the Senate, she had said, making the house glow with pride.

The house stretched out its mind again to check that all was in readiness. It ordered a swarm of reflective butterflies to focus more sunlight on the slopes above the great cliff face; the resulting melting of snow would better feed the waterfall network, now grown as complex as some vast pachinko machine. The house rotated the central skylight so that its faceted windows would in a few hours break the setting sun into bright, orange shards covering the greatroom's floor. And in its magma-warmed lower depths, the house activated gardening servitors to begin preparations for a meal
or
two.

The new owner was, for the first time ever, bringing a guest.

The man was called Lieutenant-Commander Laurent Zai. A
hero,
the house was told by the small portion of its expansive mind that kept up with the newsfeeds. The house jumped into its preparations with extraordinary vigor, wondering what sort of visit this was to be.

Political? Of military import? Romantic?

The house had never actually seen two people interact under its own roof. All it knew of human nature it had gleaned from dramas, newsfeeds, and novels—and from watching its senator-elect spend her lonely hours here. Much could be learned this weekend.

The house decided to watch very carefully indeed.

The suborbital shuttle was a brilliant thing.

The arc of its atmospheric braking was aligned head-on with the house's sensors, so the craft appeared only as a descending, expanding line of heat and light—a punctuation mark in some ecstatic language of moving, blazing runes.

The house received a few supplies—those exotics it could not produce itself—via suborbital, but those arrived in small, single-use couriers. This shuttle was a four-seater, larger and much more violent. The craft was preceded by a sonic boom, flaring hugely in the house's senses, but then became elegant and avian, its compact maneuvering wings spreading to reduce the speed of its entry. It topped the northern mountains with a dying scream, and swooped down to settle on the landing pad that had risen up from the gardens.

The dusting of snow on the landing pad began to melt in the shuttle's heat, the pad becoming wet and reflective, as if mist were clearing from a mirror. Icicles hanging from the nearest trees began to drip.