The Risen Empire (19 page)

"There were no Rix in the palace at that point," Hobbes said firmly. "Nor had Barris seen any Rix at all. For some reason, he lied."

Zai shook his head. "He'd just had a firefight with another marine, whom he must have thought was Rix. Initiate Barris wasn't lying, just unbelievably stupid."

"Can we see Barris's visuals?" someone asked. "From when he killed the marine?"

"I'm afraid his helmet transmitter was trashed on entry. But we do have that event from the other side."

New visuals loaded onto the screen. The administrative text identified the viewpoint as Private Ernesto. From a kneeling position, he held a position in front of the council chamber's door, facing out into the palace's broad hallways. The black hemisphere of the stasis field could be seen in Ernesto's rearmost vision.

Initiate Barris, recognizable from his smashed helmet, staggered into view. Ernesto waved at him, but Barris raised his weapon.

The initiate's varigun fired, and Ernesto's viewpoint spun as he was knocked back by a hail of small projectiles. The barrage went on, the damage to suit and soldier recorded in grim little glyphs along the bottom of the screen. A second before Ernesto must have died, the armor lost its ability to transmit, and the screen froze.

"Not much fog of war there," Maradonna commented.

"Barris would have to override the friendly-fire governor," the marine sergeant added. Zai wondered if these observations had been scripted in advance. What were his senior staff suggesting, anyway? That the initiate had gone in purposefully to kill Ernesto? Or the Empress, for that matter?

That was unthinkable. Politicals were bound by governors far more insurmountable than some failsafe on a varigun. Their minds were fixed to a state of selfless loyalty by years of painful conditioning; on some gray planets, they were selected from birth for genes that showed high susceptibility to brainwashing. They were beyond suspicion.

"The fog was in Barris's mind," Zai said. "He'd suffered a grevious head injury on entry. He probably thought every suit of armor he saw was Rix."

"Exactly, sir," Hobbes agreed. "'Rix ... here.' His last recorded words."

The screen split into three parts. In the first two frames, the Rix soldier lay in her now familiar position, looking dead as ever. But in the last frame her body was a blackened husk, even the marble floor beneath her scorched by the blaster shot that had killed everyone inside the stasis field. It was evident now from the trio of images: all three positions were much the same.

Although the commando's body had been jostled by the blast, there was no sense that she had sprung back to life and raised her weapon. Indeed, in the last frame the ruined Rix blaster lay across her left ankle, much closer to the burned hands of Barris than her own.

"Where is the initiate's weapon?" someone asked.

Hobbes's response was instantaneous. These questions must be scripted, Zai thought with growing annoyance. The screen again showed the last recording from Lao's viewpoint. As she dragged Farre's body into the stasis field's perimeter, his varigun stayed outside. He had dropped it when the
Lynx
had crashed his armor. '

A murmur came from the assembled officers.

"He had no weapon," Hobbes said. "But the Rix blaster was already within—"

"Hobbes!" Captain Zai snapped.

The anger in his voice shocked the room into silence. The officers sat as motionless as the image from doomed Mirame Lao's helmet.

"Thank you all for this briefing," Zai said. "Executive Officer, in my observation blister. Now."

He stood and wheeled away from the surprised faces, and strode from the command bridge. He was gone so fast that it took a few moments for Katherie Hobbes to catch up in the corridors outside.

Zai and his executive officer walked in silence back toward the plastic bubble that faced the void.

COMMANDO

The commando's heart, if you could call it that, was closer to a turbine than a pump. A pair of long screws, one venous and the other arterial, rotated inside her chest, threading the vital fluid through her body at an inhumanly fast and even rate. The liquid carried oxygen and nutrients but was not, properly speaking, blood. It also served the purposes of a lymphatic system, transporting uptake nanos from thousands of tiny lymph nodes distributed along her arteries. The substance in the commando's veins had little else to do with her Rix immune system, however. It contained no white blood cells, whose functions had been delegated centuries before to a scattered population of organs roughly the size of rice grains, themselves generated by small machines hidden in the marrow of her bird-light, aircraft-strong, hypercarbon bones.

The surging fluid did, however, contain enough iron to oxydize red when it was spilled, a situation that the commando was currently attempting to avoid.

She was tucked into an area smaller than an overnight bag, a space that normally housed a cleaning robot. The Rixwoman had disassembled the previous occupant, hoping the scattered parts would not reveal her appropriation of its home, and folded herself into the space, limbs bending at sharp angles like some origami construction. According to the messages sent to her from Alexander, her invisible and omnipresent benefactor in this chase, the local militia were searching for her with sonic sweeps. These devices were designed to find escaped fugitives by detecting that steady, unstoppable, telltale rhythm of humanity: the heartbeat.

Apparently, no one had told the locals that she, a Rix commando, had none.

The tiny turbine purred inside her chest, an infrasonic hiss without rhythm or vibrato, and the nervous, soft-shoed sweep operators passed by her hiding place, blissfully unaware.

The commando, who was called H_rd, had gone to ground in a building that was called, in the local language, a
library.
This structure served as a distribution point for proprietary data, information not available in the public infostructure. Corporate secrets, technological patents, personal medical records, and certain erotic poems and images available by paid subscription were deposited here, accessible only to those with special physical keys, totems of information ownership. Alexander had guided H_rd here, helping the commando fight and creep her way across a hundred kilometers of dense city that swarmed with militia, police, and the occasional Imperial marine, all searching for her. But Alexander was a powerful ally, and even a single Rix commando was deadly quarry. The local forces made a show of the pursuit—evacuating buildings, running sweeps, and occasionally firing their weapons—but were more interested in self-preservation than glory. And the Imperial marines numbered fewer than a hundred.

The commando waited in the library with inhuman patience. For seven hours, she lay folded in her compartment.

It was strange here in the darkness, so alone. H_rd had spent her entire life in the intimate company of her drop-sisters, never separated from the sibling group for more than a few minutes. The fifteen commandos in her dropship had been raised together, trained together into a perfect fighting unit, and were supposed to have died together. The commando felt no grief, an unknown emotion in her warrior caste, but she did mourn her lost sisters. Surviving this suicide mission alone had left her in limbo, ranging this hostile planet like the truant ghost of some unburied corpse. Only duty to the nascent Alexander kept her from mounting a sudden, glorious, and fatal counterattack against her pursuers, the quickest way to join her sisters.

Finally, the search moved on. A trail of clues—disrupted traffic monitors, inexplicably triggered fire alarms, disabled security devices—led her pursuers toward a planetary defense base at the southern edge of the city, which the Imperials moved hastily to reinforce. Alexander had orchestrated these deceptions as the commando lay motionless, teasing pursuit away. Let the Imperials guard their space defenses. The planet's armaments did not interest the compound mind; it wanted information.

Alexander sought secrets.

A tapping came on the metal door of the compartment, a tattoo in the distinctive rhythms of Rix battle language. The commando rolled out of her hiding place, unfolding into a human shape like a marionette pulled by its strings from a box, and found herself facing a small librarian drone. Alexander never narrowcast instructions to the Rixwoman; she was incompatible with the Empire-born mind. Rather, the compound mind guided its commando through a host of avatars—gardening robots, credit terminal screens, traffic signals sputtering battle binary. The drone wheeled about and headed down the hall of the still-evacuated library, its single rubber wheel emitting a mousy squeak as it accelerated. H_rd favored one leg as she followed, circulation returning with painful pricks and noodles after the lengthy confinement. The librarian drone moved almost too fast for her, and its squeaking wheel tortured her high-frequency hearing. H_rd felt the slightest temptation to kick the small machine, even though it was a messenger of her god. It had been long seven hours in that compartment, and the Rix were not
completely
without emotion.

The librarian led H_rd to a staircase, and whirred down a spiral ramp scaled to its small size as she limped down the stairs in pursuit. They descended to a deep sub-basement of the library, a place of low ceilings, narrow hallways choked with unshelved data bricks, and dim red lighting tuned for sensitive drone eyes. The Rixwoman, her circulation restored by the long climb, slipped deftly after the squeaking librarian. In a dark corner of the sub-basement, reached through a heavy blast door and smelling of disuse, though it was
very
clean, the drone halted and extended its data-plug. It rapped on a shelf encased in metal and webbed with security fractals and the Imperial glyph for medical records (H_rd was fluent in Imperial Navy iconography).

H_rd charged her blaster, and cycled the weapon's output down to a cutting torch. She brought the whitehot finger at its muzzle across the dense weave of security fractal, melting circuitry and metal alike.

The library system detected this depredation, and sent a flurry of messages to the local police, the Political Apparatus, and the winter and summer homes of the Master Librarian. All these were intercepted by Alexander, who responded with the official codes for a maintainence procedure. This part of the library was rated for Apparatus-grade secrets, but even the most extensive security did not anticipate the entire
planet's
infostructure being in the hands of the enemy. In the data-systemic sense, of course, Alexander was not the enemy at all, merely an unwanted aspect of self. Like an autoimmune disease, the defensive measures of the body infometric had been turned against itself.

With the alarm quelled, the librarian drone watched quietly as H_rd worked. The metal of the security case was slowly reduced to burn-fringed panels stacked on the hallway floor. Smoke rose to curl around insensate detectors on the ceiling, and the drone reached its dataplug into the case and began to probe one brick after another, searching for the faint scent of the data it sought: the secret implementation specs of the Empress's confidant, the key that would unlock its recordings of her final moments alive.

The compound mind smiled as fresh information began to trickle in through the narrow pipeline of the drone's dataplug. Alexander was the master, was the
data
here on Legis XV. Whatever secrets it chose to seek would eventually be found.

Soon, another weapon would be in its hands.

SENATOR

"So I was right."

Roger Niles had said this at least five times over the last hour. He repeated it with the glazed look of someone told of a friend's unexpected death, the periodic iterations necessary to fight off fresh surges of disbelief.

"You sound surprised," Oxham said.

"I was hoping to be wrong."

They were in Niles's den, the most secure room among her senatorial offices. The jagged spires of communication gear reddened in the setting sun, soaking the insect cities in blood. Niles was half in data fugue, trying to predict who the other members of the War Council might be. Oxham wanted forewarning about the personalities who would surround her in council, the agendas and constituencies that would be represented there.

"One from the Lackey Party," Niles said. "Probably not toothless old Higgs, though. The Emperor will pick whoever is really running things in Loyalty these days."

"Raz imPar Henders."

"What makes you say that? He's first-term."

"So am I. He's the new power in Loyalty."

"His seat isn't even safe."

"I can feel it, Roger."

Niles frowned, but Oxham could see his fingers begin to flicker as he redirected his efforts.

The senator hovered in her own synesthetic wash of data, searching the Forum gossip channels and open caucuses, the newswires and polling engines. She wanted to know if her legislation, presented and then hastily withdrawn, had left any traces on the body politic. Somewhere in the hordes of media analysts, muckrakers, and political junkies, someone must have wondered what that strange and massive omnibus meant. It was only a matter of time before someone with the interest and expertise would decode the legislation, unraveling the skein of taxes, liens, and laws.

Of course, in a few days—possibly hours—the news of the Rix raid would become public. Hopefully, the reordering of power alignments and alliances, the panicked shift of markets and resources, the tidal data-surge of war would overwhelm any notice of her legislation. That was fine with Oxham. It was one thing to take jabs at the Emperor in times of peace, quite another when Empire was threatened, and still another when sitting on his War Council. Most importantly, the young senator didn't want it to look as if her seat on the council had been bought with the withdrawal of the legislation.

At least, it hadn't seemed that way to her.

"Someone from the Plague Axis, as well," Niles announced.

"Why, for heaven's sake?"