The Risen Empire (33 page)

Magus turned to the young ensign. "ExO Hobbes doesn't care if the Apparatus suspects that mutiny occurred, as long as they can't prove it. She believes her initiative will be appreciated."

Hu looked at her with a kind of horror. He had entered into this to save the
Lynx,
not advance anyone's career. He was obviously aghast that she was thinking past the current crisis of survival. Good, she thought. Hu needed to be focused on the long term. Even if this conspiracy fell apart here and now, he'd already changed his life forever.

"So, sometime in the next twenty-five hours," Thompson said, "Laurent Zai will take the blade of error."

"The later the better," Hobbes said. "My decision to pull the
Lynx
back makes more sense if there isn't time left to get new orders from the Navy. The captain should go off his watch the day after tomorrow at 9.50, twenty-two hours from now."

"Are we all agreed then?" Thompson asked.

They were silent for a moment. Hobbes hoped that someone would say something. There must be some quiet, cutting remark, she thought, that would bring them all to their senses. At this point she could still imagine the conspiracy sputtering out. The right words could break the spell that Thompson had cast. Only, it couldn't be her to speak up. Hobbes couldn't let them suspect her real purpose in joining their conspiracy.

"There's only one thing," Hu said.

They waited.

The young ensign cleared his throat. "This makes Captain Zai look like a coward. As if he'd been pardoned, but killed himself anyway because he couldn't face the Rix."

Hobbes saw the truth of this dawn on the conspirators' faces, and wondered if Hu had found the right words.

For a few moments, no one said anything. They were all from gray families. Posthumous honor was not a thing to be trifled with. In a world ruled by the living dead, the ghosts of the past were taken very seriously.

Of course, it was Thompson who finally spoke.

"He is a coward," he said bitterly. "He couldn't face the blade. That's why we're in this mess."

Magus nodded, then King, and finally Hu, and they placed their hands palm up in the center of their little circle. An old academy team ritual, enjoined to this perverted purpose. But Hobbes joined them. Thompson placed his last, palm down.

The plan was locked.

COMMANDO

H_rd stood still for a moment as the siren began to wail, watching the crowd's reactions at a calm remove. She noted that the siren cycled with a two-second period between 15 and 25,000 Hertz. At both its extremes, this sine wave went beyond the range of normal human hearing. It dug down low enough to shudder in the gut like a pneumatic hammer, and high enough to shatter fine glass.

The siren was evidently designed to paralyze anyone whose hearing was unprotected. Most of the crowd on H_rd's side of the sniffer covered their ears, their knees bending as if suddenly under high gravity—a few dropped straight to the ground. Poor brainbugged Rana Harter, for whom sounds were solid and visible, crumpled like a column of sand.

Only the two militia guards and the Imperial marine remained effective. H_rd waited for their slow reactions to unfold. As one, they turned their backs on the Rix commando to face Rana Harter, who lay in the sniffer corridor. They pulled weapons, activated helmet displays, took up firing poses.

Satisfied with their incompetence, H_rd sprang into action.

In a few steps, she was behind the Imperial marine, the only real threat to a Rix commando. Her monofilament knife found the seam between helmet and breastplate. The knife was so sharp (sixteen molecules diameter) and her cut so fast that she decapitated him without a drop of blood touching her. She could feel a gurgling sound vibrate the breastplate, but the marine's death rattle was drowned out by the still-protesting siren.

The two militia soldiers were side by side, stepping toward the ragdoll Rana Harter with exaggerated caution. H_rd leapt toward the space between them. She saw one stop, cocking his head to listen to a voice inside his helmet. Someone in tactical control had seen her on-camera, was trying to warn them. It was far too late for that.

She stepped between the militia soldiers and laid a firm hand on their variguns, pulling the barrels away from Rana Harter and toward each other. One obliged her by firing, knocking his partner back three meters. H_rd punched him in the face—he had forgotten to lower his visor—and pulled the weapon from his grasp. She turned it on him. The varigun was set to a concussion stun, a wide-area effect meant for crowd control. At a range of ten centimeters, it burst the man's eyeballs and pushed his jawbone back far enough that it severed his jugular. H_rd reached the sniffer before his body, limbs still flailing with old, irrelevent intentions, hit the ground.

Rana Harter was light as a bird. She draped over H_rd's shoulder like something without bones. The siren was focused here in the sniffer corridor, almost loud enough to damage even Rix hearing. Some sort of gas was drifting upward in the sniffer's draft, but H_rd hadn't breathed since the siren began sounding, and had another thirty seconds or so before she would need to.

Her burden secured, the commando began to run at speed in a zigzag course away from the facility entrance, dropping the few standing workers in her path with the appropriated varigun's concussion effect. She was a hundred yards away when the siren cut off, leaving a staggering silence. For a few moments, static filled her ears, and H_rd thought that her hearing was damaged. But with a quick glance backward she saw the dust rising behind her and realized what the sound was.

A pair of small flechette autocannon were raking the outer grounds of the facility, orienting on the sound of her thudding steps. According to Alexander's researches on the array facility, these cannon used listening devices in the ground to triangulate an intruder's position. But they were falling short, calibrated to hit someone running at normal human velocity. Even in the few meters between her footfalls and the listening devices, the tardy speed of sound made a difference. The incompetence of local militias here in the Spinward Reaches always amazed her; she was glad the few hundred Imperial soldiers had been stretched so thinly across the planet.

Suddenly, the dusty arcs of flechette fire rose up in front of her. Someone was recalibrating the autocannon in realtime, trying to compensate for the Rixwoman's inhuman speed. The gun would catch her soon enough, if only by trial and error; at the moment, she was only a single-variable problem. H_rd asked her internal software for a string of random numbers, and shifted directions to irregularize her course.

But the autocannon were spraying wildly now, their screeching reports pitched above a thousand rounds per minute. They would find her eventually. A few hits wouldn't kill her, but she didn't have time for wounds. One arm wrapped around Rana Harter, H_rd adjusted the varigun to a new setting at random with her teeth.
Damn,
the thing was badly designed—if only she had a spare second to pull her own weapon.

H_rd aimed blindly, without turning her head—her eyes were a soft spot where even a mere flechette could kill her—calculating on the fly the center of an arc of impacts before her. Her weapon recoiled with a satisfying
thump.
Three seconds later, a sharp boom rang out and one of the cannon was silenced.

She swung the varigun the other way, aiming at the center of the remaining arc of dust that swept toward her. Her finger closed on the firing stud.

The gun beeped twice, with that apologetic timbre recognizable in all simple and stupid machines. The weapon had contained only one round at that setting. The stream of flechettes raced along the ground, reaching for her, and H_rd made a rare mistake.

She timed the jump perfectly to clear the arc of fire, but didn't fully take into account the burden of Rana Harter over her shoulder. The commando's leap reached only two meters vertical, and four flechettes plunged into her.

One struck her kneecap, flattened against the exposed hypercarbon, and slid off without leaving a scratch. Another hit a buttock, the small metal arrow tearing bloodily across a broad swath of skin as it bounced off the flexible subdermal armor that protected Rix soldiers from falls. A third passed through her abdomen, nicking the impervious spine and shattering. The shrapnel perforated her stomach, which began healing itself immediately, and destroyed two of her seven kidneys—an acceptable loss.

The only real damage came from the round that struck her left arm. It lodged in the radial notch, wedged as tight as a doorstop in the hypercarbon. Her forearm's flexibility was suddenly reduced to zero. A workaround radius activated itself instantly, allowing the arm to move again, but the strength of the needle-thin workaround was less than ten percent normal. As they landed, Rana Harter fell from H_rd's suddenly weakened grasp, and tumbled across the tundral grasses like a lifeless body thrown from a train.

The commando regained her footing and turned to face the still-shrieking autocannon. With the shaking hand of her damaged arm, she twisted the varigun's controls through its settings, raking the cannon's emplacement with infralaser, magnetic sniper rounds, antipersonnel explosives, a burst of tiny depleted uranium slugs, and a stream of microfoil chaff that set the air to sparkling brightly around her.

The autocannon stuttered to a halt a few seconds before its firing arc would have found her again, either destroyed or overheated.

H_rd's eyes spotted the thermals of more militia soldiers emerging from the array facility, now a kilometer away. They were staying low, moving forward nervously. She fired more microfoil chaff in their direction to baffle any sensors that could image Rana Harter's body heat, then emptied the rest of the chaff straight into the air. She scooped up her fallen burden. The glittering microfoil drifted along with H_rd, the wind at her back, falling like metal snow as she plunged into the tundral waste.

She traveled twenty kilometers before she thought to check Rana Harter for wounds—another mistake.

A host of bruises from the fall covered the woman's skin, and H_rd's thermal vision showed increased bloodflow, the body responding to a sprained wrist. Rana's lower lip was bleeding. Her eyes were starting to flutter open; only time would tell if a head injury had been sustained. Then H_rd saw, barely visible in the winter night's starlight, the fingertip-sized, dark circle of blood staining the militia fatigues.

H_rd knelt, blinded momentarily by a wave of some strange and awful emotion. Then she gathered herself and inspected the wound more closely.

A flechette had passed straight through Rana's chest, hardly slowed by the flimsy calcium rib cage. The projectile was meant to turn to shrapnel inside the body, but had been designed for an armored target. Nothing in the woman's chest had resisted the shell enough to shatter it. It had missed her heart and spine, but had holed one lung.

The woman's breath was fast and shallow. H_rd put her ear to the wound and listened for the telltale whisper of tension pneumothorax, but no pressure was building in the chest cavity. The bleeding had stopped.

H_rd sighed with relief, and something filled her, vibrant and expansive. Not the mere satisfaction of a mission parameter fulfilled, but an animal feeling like the vigor of sex or the calming scent of her home orbital's familiar air.

The cause of this feeling, this swelling of joy: Rana Harter would live.

SENATOR

The war changed everything.

The council met throughout the week, setting broad guidelines for the tumultuous shifts that would shake the Eighty Worlds for the next few decades.

In the Spinward Reaches, the council altered the reproduction and education laws. The next generation would have to be numerous, and it would have to grow up quickly. The Expansionist senator on the council presented the proposal, using terms like "replacement population." Nara Oxham found the euphemism repulsive: why not simply call them war orphans?

But she voted with the unanimous Council, setting a generous birth dowry to be paid off in lands from the Imperial Conservancy. On twenty planets, virgin climax-stage forests were parceled into bribes, remuneration for the most productive parents. By the time the hundreds of warships from anti-spinward reached their new assignments on the Rix frontier, the babies of this demographic bulge would be old enough to become marines, ground troops, replacements for the technical personnel sucked into the war effort. This oversized generation raised in the hinterland would stand ready to repopulate smashed cities, to recolonize dead planets if necessary.

The stately pace of the constant was a convenience in the prosecution of war, Oxham realized. Across the thirty-light-year diameter of Empire, war was slowed to a time scale in which human seed could be sown like summer crops, stacked and stored in preparation for leaner times. Even on her native Vasthold, seven light-years from the Rix frontier, Oxham was forced to accept population increases that would cut deep into the unspoiled continents of the planet: biomes that had taken centuries to stabilize razed overnight to make room for a generation of cannon fodder.

The Empire girded itself for a bloodbath that might consume tens of billions.

The Expansionist senator sometimes waxed ecstatic as she outlined these plans, her mind alight with partisan fever. Her faction had long called for increased birthrates. The Expansionists shared with the Secularists and Utopians a wariness of the growing power of the dead. But their motto was "Bury the dead with the living." They sought to redress the balance of power through sheer numbers, an ever-expanding population (and thus, an ever-aggressive Empire) in which the dead would never predominate.

The Utopians took the opposite, equally unpragmatic tack: they promised universal elevation, in which the symbiant would be bestowed upon every citizen of Empire upon death. Thus, the dead would represent all classes, and everyone would have a stake in immortality.

To Senator Oxham and her Secularist Party, both these strategies were patently absurd. The great living masses of the Expansionist vision were doomed to become an underclass. As an ancient philosopher had once said, "The poor are only poor because of their great number." Add the immortality of the wealthy dead to the equation, and the class divisions in the Risen Empire could only worsen. The Utopian future, in which billions were elevated every year, was equally untenable. It would choke the Eighty Worlds and bow the vital living under the weight of their ancestors. Both schemes would create population problems that could only be solved by conquest.