INITIATE

Just before the courier ship docked, Initiate Viran Farre of the Imperial Political Apparatus tried one last time to dissuade the adept.

"Please reconsider, Adept Trevim." She whispered the words, as if the sound might carry through the dozen meters of thermosphere between the courier ship and the Lynx. Not that there was any need to shout. The adept's face was, as it had been for the last four hours, only centimeters from her own. "I should be the one to accompany the rescue effort."

The third person in the courier ship passenger tube (which was designed to hold a single occupant, and not in luxury) made a snorting sound, which propelled him a few centimeters bowward in the zero-gee.

"Don't you trust me, Initiate Farre?" Barris sniffed. His crude emphasis on her rank was typical of Barris. He too was an initiate, but had reached that status at a far younger age.

"No, I don't." Farre turned back to the adept. "This young fool is as likely to kill the Child Empress as assist in her rescue."

The Adept managed to stare into the middle distance, which, even for a dead woman, was certainly a feat in the two cubic meters they shared.

"What you don't seem to understand, Farre," Adept Harper Trevim said, "is that the Empress's continued existence is secondary."

"Adept!" Farre hissed.

"May I remind you that we serve the Risen Emperor, not his sister," Trevim said.

"My oath was to the crown," Farre answered. "It is extremely unlikely under the circumstances that the Empress will ever wear that crown." The Adept looked directly at Farre with the cold eyes of the Risen.

"Soon she may not have a head to wear it," the always appalling Barris offered.

Even Adept Trevim allowed a look of distaste to cross her visage. She spoke directly to Farre, her voice sharp as needles in the tight confines of the courier ship. "Understand this: The Emperor's Secret is more important than the Empress's life."

Farre and Barris winced. Even to hear mention of the Secret was painful. The initiates were still alive, two of the few thousand living members of the Political Apparatus. Only long months of aversion training and a body full of suicide shunts made it acceptable for them to know what they knew.

Trevim, fifty years dead and risen, could speak of the Secret more easily. But she had reached the Adept level of the Apparatus while still alive, and the training never died; the old woman's teeth were clenched with grim effort as she continued. It was said among the warm that the risen felt no pain, but Farre knew that wasn't true.

"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.

The ghost presence was distributed throughout the Empress's body, woven into her nervous system and terminated in the audio portion of her brain. Obviously an invisible friend. The device was incompatible with standard Imperial networks, only passively connected to the infostructure. It was clearly meant to be undetectable, a secret confidant.

But there could be no secrets here on Legis XV. Not from Alexander, whose mind now stretched to every retina-locked diary, every digital will and testament, every electronic pal or pleasuremate on this world. The secret device belonged, by rights, to Alexander. The mind wanted it. And how perfect, to strike at something so intimately close to the Risen Emperor.

The compound mind moved suddenly and with the force of an entire living planet against the Empress's confidant. CHILD EMPRESS

The Child Empress heard something, just for a moment.

A kind of distant buzzing, like the interference that consumes a personal phone too near a broadcast array, the sort of brief static that contains a phantom voice or voices. It had an echo to it, a phase-shifted whoosh like a passing aircar. There was just a hint of a shriek deep inside it, something giving up the ghost.

The Child Empress looked about the room, and saw that no one else had heard it. The sound had come from her confidant.

"What was that?" she subvocalized to the machine.

For the first time in fifty years, there was no answer.

"Where are you?" the Empress whispered, almost out loud. The Rix commando peered at her quizzically again, but there was no answer from the confidant.

The Empress repeated the question, this time dutifully subvocalizing. Still nothing. She pressed her thumbs to her ring fingers and blinked, a gesture which called up the confidant's utility menus in synesthesia. The confidant's voice volume was set at normal, its cutout was inactive, everything functioned. The device's internal diagnostics detected no problems--except for the Empress's own heartbeat, which it constantly monitored, and whose rate was crawling upward even as the Empress sat open-mouthed. The rate incremented past 160, where the letters grew red and the confidant always made her take a pill or stick on a patch.

But the confidant didn't breathe a word.

"Where the hell are you?" the Child Empress said aloud.

Through the eyescreen debris overlaying her vision, the Empress saw the other hostages and their captors turn to look at her. A heat grew in her face, and her heart was pounding like a trapped animal in her chest. She tried to will away the eyescreen, but her hands were shaking too hard to work the gestural codes.

The Empress tried to smile. She was very good at reassuring everyone that she was healthy and comfortable, regardless of what the last fifty years had brought. She was after all, the sister of the Risen Emperor, whose symbiant kept her in perfect health. Who was immortal. But the smile felt wrong even to her. There was a metal taste in the Empress's mouth, as if she'd bitten her tongue.

More out of force of habit than anything else, the Empress reached for the glass of water by her side. That's what the confidant would have suggested.

She was still smiling when her shaking hand knocked it over.

EXECUTIVE OFFICER

A sudden noise rang out in Katherie Hobbes's head.

She raised a combination of fingers, separating into source categories the audio channels she was monitoring. When on duty, her mind's ear was spread like a driftnet across the ship's activities. The clutter of thirty-two decks of activity was routed to the various audio channels in her head; she surfed among them, darting like a spirit among the ship's operational centers. Over the past few seconds, she had listened to the banter of jump marines as they prepped, the snapped orders of rail gunners targeting the Rix below, the curses of Intelligencer pilots as they fought to fly backup small craft toward the council chamber. On board the Lynx she was as famed for her omniscience as for her exotic Utopian appearance; no conversation was safe from Katherie Hobbes. Eavesdropping was the only real way to take the manifold pulse of a starship at its highest state of alert.

At her gesture, the audio events of the last few seconds split into separate visual strip charts in front of her, showing volume and source. In seconds, she had confirmed her worst fears.

The sudden, angry sound had come from the council chamber. She played it again. The sovereign boom filled her head like a peel of thunder.

"Ma'am!" the situation officer began to report. He'd been monitoring the room directly, but he'd also had to replay the event before believing it. "We've got a--"

"I heard it."

She turned to the captain. He looked down from the con and their eyes locked. For a moment, she couldn't speak, but she saw her expression drain the color from his face.

"Captain," she managed. "Shot fired in the council chamber."

Zai turned away, nodding his head.

TEN YEARS EARLIER

(IMPERIAL ABSOLUTE)

LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER

His full-dress uniform crawled out of its case like an army of marauding ants.

Lieutenant-Commander Laurent Zai suppressed a shudder and turned the lighting in his hotel room to full. The uniform reacted instantly, turning a reflective silver. Supposedly the garment could shift quickly enough to reflect a laser before it burned the wearer; the uniform was fully combat-rated. Now it looked like a horde of mercury droplets scattered roughly in the shape of a human. A little better.

The garment still moved, though. Its tiny elements tumbled over one another to probe the bedcover, sniffing to determine if it was Zai's skin. Losing interest when they decided it wasn't, they shifted aimlessly, or maybe with hidden purpose. Perhaps the uniform kept its shape through an equilibrium of these small adjustments and collisions.

Like ants, Zai thought again.

He decided to quit stalling and put the damn thing on.

There were more dignified ways to do this, but he hadn't attended enough full-dress occasions to become proficient at any of them. He turned his back to the bed, dropped his dressing gown, and fell backwards onto the writhing garment. He rotated his arms in their shoulder sockets and flailed his legs a little, as if making a small-winged angel in the snow. Then he closed his eyes and pretended not to feel the elements of the uniform, now discernibly and unpleasantly individual, crawling onto him.

When the sensation of motion had mostly stopped (he knew from experience that the uniform's minute adjustments of fit and tailoring were never entirely finished) he sat up and regarded himself in the hotel suite's large and gold-framed mirror.

The machines that composed the armor were now one continuous surface, the facets of their tiny backs splayed and linked, their overlapping plates shining in the bright roomlights like galvanized steel. The garment clung to Zai's skin closely. The lines of his muscular chest had been reproduced, and the scars on his shoulder and thighs concealed. The suction of the machines' little feet was barely perceptible. Overall, it felt like wearing a light mesh shirt and trousers. The draft through his open window mysteriously penetrated the armor, as if Zai were naked, regardless of what the mirror told him. The regulation codpiece he wore (thank the Emperor) was the only undergarment that dress-code regulations allowed. He wondered if an EMP or sudden software crash could kill the little machines, cause them to tumble from him like shards from a shattered mirror. Zai imagined a roomful of brass at a full-dress occasion suddenly denuded. He didn't smile at the thought.

A crash like that would do worse things to his prosthetics.

He asked the lights to return to normal, and the armor lost its metallic reflectivity, sinking back to the earthy colors of the hotel room. Now it looked like dark brown rubber, glinting as if oiled in the capital's lights, which played on Zai through the suite's large windows. He finished dressing. The absorbent cushioning inside his dress boots shaped itself to his bare feet. The short formal gloves left his wrists uncovered, one line of pale white floating in the mirror, another of metal.

He didn't look half bad. And when he stood absolutely still so that the uniform stopped its constant tailoring, it wasn't really uncomfortable. At least if he found himself starting to sweat at the Risen Emperor's party, the clever little machines would handle it. They could turn perspiration and urine into drinkable water, could recharge themselves from his movement or body heat, and in the unlikely event of total immersion, they would crowd into his mouth and form a water rebreather.

He wondered how the uniform would taste. Zai had never had the pleasure of eating live ants.

The lieutenant-commander placed a row of campaign ribbons on his chest, where they affixed automatically. He wasn't sure where to place his large new medal--the award that was focus of this party--but the uniform recognized it. Invisibly tiny hands tugged the decoration from his grasp and passed it to a position just above the bar of campaign ribbons.

Evidently, the small machines were as versed in protocol as they were in survival tactics. The very model of modern military microtechnology.

Zai supposed he was ready to go.

He made an interface gesture that felt distinctly wrong in the tight gloves, and said his driver's name out loud.

"Lieutenant-Commander," the response came instantly in his ear.

"Let's get this over with, Corporal," Zai commanded brusquely.

But he did stay at the mirror, regarding himself and keeping the corporal waiting for perhaps another twenty seconds.

When Zai saw the car, he touched his chin with the middle three fingers of his real hand, the Vadan equivalent of a long, low whistle.

In response, the car lifted from the ground silently. The pair of wheeled transport forks that had carried it here pulled away, scraping the streets like respectful footmen in low bows. The car's rear door raised before Zai, elegant and fragile as the flexing wing of some origami bird. He stepped into the passenger compartment, feeling too cumbersome and brutish to enter such a delicate vehicle.

The corporal's face turned back as Zai sank into the leather rear seat, a glaze in the man's eye. They looked at each other for a moment, their disbelief forming a bridge across rank.

"Now this," Zai said, "is lovely."

Scientifically speaking, the Larten Theory of Gravities was three decades outmoded, but it still served well enough for Navy textbooks. So, as far as Lieutenant-Commander Laurent Zai was concerned, there were four flavors of graviton: hard, easy, wicked, and lovely.

Hard gravity was also called real gravity, because it could only be created by good old mass, and it was the only species to occur naturally. Thus fell to it the dirty and universal work of organizing solar systems, creating black holes, and making planets sticky. The opposite of this workhorse was easy gravity, unrelated to mass save that easy gravity was hapless against a real gravity well. Hard gravitons ate easy ones for lunch. But in deep space, easy gravity was quite easy to make; only a fraction of a starship's energy was required to fill it with a single, easy gee. Easy gravity had a few problems, though. It was influenced by far-off bodies of mass in unpredictable ways, so even in the best starships the gee-field was riddled with microtides. That made it very hard to spin a coin in easy gee, and pendulum clocks, gyroscopes, and houses of cards were utterly untenable. Some humans found easy gee to be sickening, just as some couldn't stand even the largest ship on the calmest sea.

Wicked gravity took up little room in the Navy's manuals. It was as cheap as easy gee, and stronger, but couldn't be controlled. It was often called chaotic gravity, its particles known as entropons. In the Rix Incursion, the enemy had used wicked gee as a devastating but short-range starship weapons. Exactly how these weapons worked was unclear--the supporting evidence was really a lack of evidence. Any damage that followed no understood pattern was labeled "wicked."