The Risen Empire (5 page)

"The Empress finds herself in a doubly dangerous situation. If she is wounded and a doctor examines her, the Secret could be discovered. I trust Initiate Barris to deal with that situation, should it arise."

Farre opened her mouth, but no words came. Her Apparatus training roared within her, drowning out her thoughts, her will. Such direct mention of the Secret always sent her mind reeling. Adept Trevim had silenced her as surely as if the courier ship had suddenly decompressed.

"I believe my point is made, Initiate," the adept finished. "You are too pure for this tempestuous world, your discipline too deep. Initiate Barris isn't fit to share your rank, but he'll do this job with a clear head."

Barris began to sputter, but the adept silenced him with a cold glance.

"Besides, Farre," Trevim added, smiling, "you're far too old to become an orbital marine."

At that moment, the shudder of docking went through the ship, and the three uttered not another word.

CHILD EMPRESS

Two hundred seventeen kilometers below the
Lynx,
the Risen Child Empress Anastasia Vista Khaman, known throughout the Eighty Worlds as the Reason, waited for rescue with deathly calm.

Inside her mind were neither worries nor expectations, just an arid patience devoid of anticipation. She waited as a stone waits. But in those childish regions of her mind that remained active sixteen hundred years Imperial Absolute since her death, the Empress entertained childish thoughts, playing games inside her head.

The Child Empress enjoyed staring at her captor. She often used her inhuman stillness to intimidate supplicants to the throne, the pardon- and elevation-seekers who invariably flocked to her rather than her brother. Anastasia could hold the same position, unblinking, for days if necessary. She had crossed into death at age twelve, and something of her childishness had never died: she liked staring games. Her motionless gaze certainly had an effect on normal living humans, so it was just vaguely possible that, after these four hours, it might disquiet even a Rixwoman. Such a disquiet might be disruptive in those sudden seconds when rescue came.

In any case, there was nothing else to do.

Alas, the Rix commando had shown signs of inhuman constancy herself, keeping her blaster trained unerringly on the Empress's head for just as long. The Empress considered for a moment the flanged aperture less than two meters away. At this range, a single round from the blaster would eliminate any possibility of reanimation; her brain would be vaporized instantly. Indeed, after the spreading plasma storm was over, very little of the Empress's body would remain above the waist.

The cheating death—the one which brought no enlightenment nor power, only nothingness—would come. After sixteen hundred years Absolute (although only five hundred subjective, such were her travels) she would finally be extinct, the Reason for Empire gone.

And it was the case that the Empress, despite her arctic absence of desires in any other normal sense, very much did not want that to happen. She had said otherwise to her brother on recent occasions, but now she knew those words to be untrue.

"The room is now under imperial surveillance, m'Lady," a voice said to the Child Empress.

"Soon, then." The Empress mouthed the words.

The commando cocked her head. The Rix creature always reacted to the Empress's whispers, no matter how carefully she subvocalized. She seemed to be listening, as if hoping to hear the Empress's invisible conversant. Or perhaps she was merely puzzled, wondering at her prisoner's one-sided conversation, the Empress's absolute stillness. Possibly the soldier thought her captive mad.

But the confidant was undetectable, short of very sophisticated and mortally invasive surgery. It was woven through the Empress's nervous system and that of her Lazarus symbiant like threads braided into hair. It was indistinguishable from its host, constructed of dendrites that even bore the royal DNA. The Empress's immune system not only accepted the confidant, but protected the device from its own illnesses without complaint, although from a strictly mechanical point of view, the device was a parasite, using its host's energy without performing any biological function. But the device was no freeloader; it too had a reason to live.

"How is the Other?" the Empress asked her confidant.

"All is well, m'Lady."

The Empress nodded almost imperceptibly, though her eyes remained focused on the Rix guard. The Other had been well for almost five hundred subjective years, but it was good in this strange, almost trying moment to make sure.

Of course, every tribe of scattered humanity had developed some form of near immortality, at least among the wealthy. Members of the Rix Cult preferred the slow alchemical transmutation of Upgrade, the gradual shift from biology to machine as their mortal coil unwound. The Fahstuns used myriad biological therapies—telomere weaving, organ transplant, meditation, nano-reinforcement of the immune and lymphatic systems—in a long twilight struggle against cancers and boredom. The Tungai mummified themselves with a host of data; they were frantic diarists, superb iconoplasts who left personality models, high-resolution scans, and hourly recordings of themselves in the hope that one day someone would awake them from death, somehow.

But only the Risen Empire had made death itself the key to eternal life. In the Empire, death had become the route to enlightenment, a passage to a higher state. The legends of the old religions served the Emperor well, justifying the one great flaw of his Lazaru symbiant: it could not bond with a living host. So the wealthy and elevated of the Empire spent their natural two centuries or so alive, then moved across the line.

The Emperor had been the first to pass the threshold, taking the supreme gamble to test his creation, offering his own life in what was now called the Holy Suicide. He performed his final experiment on himself rather than on his dying little sister, whom he was seeking to cure of a childhood wasting sickness. Anastasia was the Reason. That gesture, and sole control of the symbiant—the power to sell or bestow elevation upon his family's servants—were at the root of Empire.

The Child Empress sighed. It had worked so well for so long.

"The rescue attempt grows nearer, m'Lady," the voice said.

The Empress did not bother to respond. Her dead eyes were locked with her Rix captor's. Yes, she thought, the woman was starting to pale a bit. The other hostages were so active, sobbing and fidgeting. But she was as still and silent as a stone.

"And, m'Lady?"

The Empress ignored the confidant.

"Perhaps you should drink some water?"

As always, the request that had been repeated insistently over the last fifty years. After its centuries of biological omnipotence, the Other needed water, far more than a human, growing ever more insistent in its thirst. There was a full glass at the Empress's side, as always. But she didn't want to break the contest of wills between herself and the Rix. For once, the Other could wait, as the Empress herself was waiting: patiently. Soon, the Rix woman would begin grow nervous under her gaze. The commando was human somewhere behind her steely, augmented eyes.

"M'Lady?"

"Silence," she whispered.

The confidant, at the edge of its royal host's hearing, just sighed.

DOCTOR

Dr. Vecher settled against a bulkhead heavily. The horrible feeling of suffocation had finally begun to ebb, as if his medula oblongata were finally giving in. Perhaps the instinctive quarters of his brain had realized that although Vecher wasn't breathing, he wasn't dying.

Not yet, anyway.

He was supposed to be in the entry vehicle by now. All twenty-three marines were packed into their individual dropships, as tight and oily as preserved tuna. The black, aerodynamic torpedos were arranged in a circle around the launch bay; the room looked like the magazine of some giant revolver. Vecher felt heavy. The cold weight in his liquid-filled lungs and the extra mass of the inactive battle armor pressed him back against the bulkhead, as if the launch bay were spinning rapidly, pinning him there with centrifugal force.

The thought made him dizzy.

The marine sergeant who was supposed to be packing Dr. Vecher into his entry torpedo was working frantically to prep the tall, young political with the nasty sneer. This initiate had shown up at the last moment, bearing orders to join the insertion over the marine commander's (and the captain's) objections. They were doing the physical prep now, even as the armor master cobbled together a full suit of battle armor over the initiate's gangly frame. Vecher's own intern was injecting the man's skull, thickening the dura mater for the crushing pressures of braking. At the same time, the initiate had his lips grimly pursed around a tube, straining to fill his lungs with the green goo.

Dr. Vecher looked away from the scene. He could still taste the bright, cheerful strawberry-flavored mass that threatened to fill his mouth if he coughed or spoke, although the marine sergeant had claimed you
couldn't
cough with the stuff in your lungs. That is, until it ran low on oxygen and its mean intelligence decided it was time to eject itself from your body.

Vecher couldn't wait for that.

They finally got the initiate prepped, and the marine sergeant crossed the launch bay with a foul look on his face. He popped open Vecher's entry vehicle and pushed him in backwards.

"See if that young idiot gets himself shot down there?" the sergeant said. "Don't go out of your way to fix him, Doctor."

Vecher nodded his heavy head. This sergeant pulled down Vecher's chin with one thumb and popped a mouthguard in with his free hand. It tasted of sterility, alcohol, and some sort of gauze to absorb the saliva that immediately began to flow.

The visor of Vecher's helmet lowered with a whine, his ears popping as the seal went airtight. The door to the entry vehicle closed with a metal groan a few inches from his face, leaving the marine doctor in total darkness except for a row of winking status lights. Vecher shuffled his feet, trying to remember what was next. He'd jumped once in basic training, but that was a memory he'd spent years consciously repressing.

Then a coolness registered down at his feet even inside the battle armor's boots. Vecher remembered now. The entry vehicle was filling with gel. It came in as a liquid, but set quickly, like a plastic mold capturing the shape of the skintight armor. It pushed uncomfortably against the testicles, constricted the neck to increase Vecher's sense of suffocation, if that were possible. And worst of all, it entered his helmet through two valves at the back of his head, wrapping around Vecher's face like some cold wraith, sealing his ears and gripping closed eyelids.

There was no longer any part of Vecher that could move. Even swallowing was impossible, the green goo having completely suppressed the gag reflex. The tendons of his hands could be flexed slightly, but the armored gloves held the fingers as still as a statue's.

Vecher stopped trying, let the terrible, omnipresent weight press him into inactivity. Time seemed to stretch, plodding without any change or frame of reference. With his breathing utterly stilled, he only had his heartbeat to mark the passing seconds. And with sealed ears, even that rhythm was a dulled, barely felt through the heavy injections that reinforced his rib cage.

Dr. Vecher waited for the launch, wanting something,
anything
to happen, dreading that something would.

 COMPOUND MIND

Alexander had found something very interesting.

By now, the tendrils of its spreading consciousness reached every networked device on the planet. Datebooks and traffic monitors, power stations and weather satellites, the theft-control threads in clothing awaiting purchase. The compound mind had even conquered the earplugs through which aides prompted politicians as they debated this crisis on the local diet's floor. Only the equipment carried by the Rix troopers, which was incompatible with imperial datalinks, remained out of Alexander's grasp.

But, somehow, the compound mind felt an absence in itself, as if one lone device had managed to escape its propagation. Alexander contemplated this vacuum, as subtle as the passing cold from a cloud's shadow. Was it some sort of Imperial countermeasure? Trojan data designed to stay in hiding until the hostage situation was resolved, and then attack?

The mind searched itself, trying to pin down the feeling. In the shadow-time, there had been nothing like this, no ambiguities or ghosts. The missing something began to irritate Alexander. Like the itch in a phantom limb, it was both incorporeal and profoundly disturbing.

The ghost device must have been shielded from normal communication channels, perhaps incorporated into some innocent appliance, woven into the complex structure of a narrowcast antenna or solar cell. Or perhaps the ghost was hidden within the newly emergent structure of the compound mind itself, half parasite and half primitive cousin of Alexander: a metapresence, invisible and supervalent.

Alexander constructed a quick automodel, stepped outside itself and looked down into its own structure. Nothing there to suggest that some sort of superego had arisen atop its own mind. Alexander ransacked the data reservoirs of libraries, currency exchanges, stock markets, searching for an innocuous packet of data that might be ready to decompress and attack. Still nothing. Then it opened its ears, watching the flow of sensory data from surveillance cams and early warning radar and motion sensors.

And suddenly, there it was, as obvious as a purloined letter.

In the throne wing of the palace, in the council chamber itself: a clever little AI hidden in the hostage Child Empress's body (of all places). Alexander extended its awareness to the sensors built into the council chamber table. These devices were sophisticated enough to read the blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and eye movements of courtiers and supplicants, in search of duplicity and hidden motives. The Empress was very paranoid, it seemed. Alexander found that it could see very well in this particular room.