by Tim Pratt
Twilight Imperium
Intergalactic empires fall, but one faction will rise from the ashes to conquer the galaxy.
Once the mighty Lazax Empire ruled all the known galaxy from its capital planet of Metacol Rex, before treachery and war erased the Lazax from history, plunging a thousand star systems into conflict and uncertainty.
Now the Great Races who span the galaxy look upon their former capital hungrily – the power and secrets of the Lazax await a new emperor…
To lay claim to the throne is a destiny sought by many, yet the shadows of the past serve as a grim warning to those who would follow in their footsteps.
First published by Aconyte Books in 2020
ISBN 978 1 83908 046 3
Ebook ISBN 978 1 83908 047 0
Copyright © 2020 Fantasy Flight Games
All rights reserved. Aconyte and the Aconyte icon are registered trademarks of Asmodee Group SA. Twilight Imperium and the FFG logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fantasy Flight Games.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
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Cover art by Scott Schomburg
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For Effie, a player of games.
Chapter 1
Felix waited in the darkness on the lower deck of the Temerarious. The only illumination came from faint guide lights running along the floor, pulsing in the direction of designated exits. Carefully, silently, he began to move, confident that he wasn’t being watched, at least for the moment. He crept along a corridor and moved past unoccupied crew cabins, converted to storage for emergency relief supplies. He moved slowly, looking into each crowded room for a moment before moving on, listening for the faintest whisper of sound, and feeling for minute disturbances in the stale air.
Felix was hunting.
He considered taunting his prey, trying to provoke an error he could exploit, but it was a risky move, and better tried when he was in a more defensible position. He paused at the end of the corridor, with open doors on his left and his right. In a more demanding posting, the cabins on either side would provide housing for two crew members; instead, the cabin on the left held pallets of potable water, while the one on the right, for some reason, held crate after crate of signal flares. The mysteries of military procurement were doubtless baffling in all societies, but in the Mentak Coalition they were even stranger – the various supplies the raider fleets pillaged had to end up somewhere, and an overstocked quartermaster had taken the opportunity to cram the Temerarious, with its whole deck of unused space, full of odds and ends of no great use to anyone.
He ducked into a side room and crouched behind a pallet of shrink-wrapped air purifiers, listening hard, but the only sound was his own breath. He jostled the pallet and gasped, short and swiftly cut off, as if he’d injured himself and made an involuntary sound. He immediately, silently, moved to the far side of the room, waiting to see if his bait would be taken. There was no movement, no sound, nothing. He might have been alone down here, in the dark, but he knew better.
Felix crept back out into the corridor, carefully scanning for the most minute shift in the shadows, the slightest disturbance in the air. Nothing. His quarry was elsewhere. He considered the T-intersection before him: if he went left, he’d reach the deserted lower galley, and if he went right, he’d reach a workout room full of unused training machinery. There were more hiding places in the galley, but–
Something clattered in the cabin on his left. It sounded like a water bottle jostled by mistake, bouncing off the frame of a bunk, and skittering across the floor. Felix immediately spun and faced right instead. There was no way his subtle and deadly prey would make a sound like that by accident. The little monster was trying to distract him, which meant the ambush would be coming from the other side –
In fact, the attack came from above: a weight crashed down on Felix’s neck and shoulders, driving him to his knees, and a slick smooth limb he couldn’t see snaked around his throat. Felix was bigger and heavier than his opponent, though, and he threw his weight back, hoping to crush the attacker between his own body and the wall, or, failing that, at least dislodge her. Instead, she slithered around his body, shifting from his back to his front, so all he did was rattle his own spine on impact.
“Die, scum!” a voice hissed, hot breath on his face, but there was no face there, just a sort of shimmer that made his eyes water if he focused too hard, and strong thin fingers wrapped around his throat–
The overhead lights came on brightly, and the voice of the ship’s security officer, Calred, purred laconically from hidden speakers all over the deck: “Captain, if you and Tib are finished playing hide-and-seek, we have an urgent message from one of the colonies.”
The shimmer stopped shimmering and resolved into the round green face of Captain Felix Duval’s first officer Tib Pelta, her yellow lamp-like eyes shining as she smiled, showing all her teeth. The rest of her body, dressed in the uniform of the Mentak Coalition navy, came into focus a moment later. The Yssaril ability to hide from sight – “fading” – wasn’t technically invisibility, but functionally there wasn’t a big difference. As an infiltration specialist, her uniforms and spacesuits were woven with rare fabrics that could bend light and augmented with devices that stymied detection of heat signatures and other life signs.
Tib let go of her captain’s throat, straightened his collar, and patted him gently on the cheek, before hopping off him and heading for the elevator.
“Acknowledged, on our way up,” Felix said. Then: “We weren’t playing hide-and-seek. We were conducting tactical training exercises to keep ourselves sharp. That’s really something you should be organizing, as security officer.”
“My job is to keep you from getting killed, and to prevent this moderately valuable ship from getting blown up,” Calred said. “Not to keep you entertained.”
“I won,” Tib said as Felix fell into step beside her, though she had to take two steps for every one of his. “Current score is seven hundred and five to me, one hundred and twelve to you.”
“It’s one-thirteen to me, Tib,” Felix said. “You always leave out that time when I was fourteen, and I tracked you through the ventilation system to the station administrator’s secret wine store–”
“That doesn’t count, and it will never count. I wasn’t trying to hide from you, so the fact that you found me is not a win – it’s just you being nosy.”
“You were going there in secret, hoping to sell the wine for yourself, so you were hiding from everyone, and by extension, therefore, you were hiding from me.”
They continued the old argument �
�� which was less a real disagreement after all these years, and more a pleasant exercise in call-and-response – as they took the lift up to the command deck. Not that it was much of a command, Felix thought; he was in charge of himself, Tib Pelta, Calred, and a bunch of drones. The drones obeyed instantly without arguing, which was nice, but they were otherwise terrible company. It was hard to radiate the effortless aura of mastery Felix wanted to project when your crew consisted of your best friend since childhood and an unflappably competent and unimpressed Hacan soldier. The ship was nice enough, if nothing special: the Temerarious was a Freebooter-class cruiser, a lightly armed ship built for speed, meant to strike fast and disappear – the sort of vessel that played a crucial support role in the Mentak Coalition’s military fleet, and made up the bulk of its unofficial raider forces.
Of course, in this remote posting, there was little need for speed or armaments, light or otherwise. The Temerarious was stationed here to “defend and lend material support” to the three coalition colony worlds (two planets, and one moon orbiting a gas giant) in this system. Felix and Tib had grown up on a shipyard space station near the core of the Coalition, and being way out here on the fringes was teeth-grindingly dull. This posting was both a punishment and a promotion. Felix had been first officer on a ship in the raider fleet, and had acted with great daring and courage in a raid, winning glory (and also riches) for the Coalition… but he’d also ignored orders from his captain in order to commit said daring act. The fleet commander had been impressed and pleased with the results, but Felix’s captain had been understandably furious about the method, and after some consultation a compromise was reached: in recognition of his service, Felix would be promoted to captain of his own ship and as punishment for his insubordination, he would be assigned to the backwater Lycian system, home to a scant million inhabitants scattered over three worlds, who produced a minimal quantity of resources that nobody back home much wanted anyway.
The unstated but clear message for Felix was: show that you can obey orders by being a good boy out on the edge of everything for a few years, and you’ll be welcomed back to do something that matters. The arrangement had seemed reasonable to Felix at first, but after eight months of making a slow and pointless circuit of three colony worlds, he was bored. The colonies were small, scattered, and rural, and none of them had much of a nightlife, so even R and R was in short supply – though there was a cute medic with great legs on one of the planets, and an enjoyably burly gas-extraction engineer on the moon, so Felix wasn’t entirely without entertainment, even discounting the running game of hide-and-seek – no, damn it, tactical exercises – with Tib.
Mostly Felix fantasized about something happening, some occasion he could rise to, some world-shaking challenge he could overcome or disaster he could avert, thus shortening his penance and returning to the fast track. He wanted to sit at the Table of Captains one day, and help guide his polity to ever more greatness. The beautiful thing about the Coalition, this pan-species nation founded by prisoners of the old Lazax Empire’s most brutal penal colony, was that anyone could rise to the greatest heights, no matter how humble their origins, if they demonstrated the wit, the speed, the daring, the ingenuity – all qualities that Felix, unburdened by false modesty, knew himself to possess in ample supply.
There were no opportunities to demonstrate those qualities, though, because nothing ever happened out here. Sometimes there was a storm or a flood, and in those cases Felix delivered food and blankets. He was also responsible for picking up and delivering cargo from the colony worlds to supply ships, and bringing back medical supplies and trade goods. Not exactly the intended use for a fast warship, but the Coalition had lots of cruisers, and this one had plenty of empty room for crates.
Felix and Tib stepped from the lift onto the bridge, a semicircular room dominated by a large viewscreen that currently showed nothing but the empty star field before them, the brighter glow of Alope standing out in the lower left. Alope was the next planet on their circuit, a world rich in timber, ore, mildew, mutton, and bristly predators called wolferines, who were still delighted by the sheep and goats the colonists had introduced to the ecosystem decades earlier.
Tib went to the comms and navigation station, not that there was much navigating to do, since they more or less just went around in circles. Felix dropped into his command chair: best seat in the house, even if the house wasn’t all he might wish. “What’s the problem? Did a sheep wander off? Are we urgently needed to help with a barn-raising?”
Calred, an immense Hacan with braids in his mane, shook his leonine head. He stood at the tactical board, which was even less use here than the navigation controls. “Something stranger than that, and my requests for clarification have gone unanswered.”
“Show me.”
“The message is audio-only.” Calred manipulated the board, and a crackling voice blared out from the blank viewscreen:
– unknown – landed outside settlement – jammed – boosting as best we can – immediate assistance – armed
The message ended abruptly. “Where’s it from?” Felix said. There were scores of communities on Alope, from small timber camps and mining towns to the relatively booming trading city and sole spaceport Solymi, home to a whole fifty thousand souls (and that cute medic Felix liked to visit).
“A small farming settlement on the northern continent,” Calred said. “Doesn’t even have a name on the surveys, though I gather the locals call it Cobbler’s Knob.”
“Do they really?”
“So I’m told,” Calred said. “The message came from their emergency distress system, which is probably the only communications apparatus within a hundred kilometers powerful enough to get a message this far.”
Could this be it? Felix thought. Could something finally be happening? Probably not. It was probably a prank. Felix thought about how bored he was, and extrapolated out to how bored a teenager living in a place called Cobbler’s Knob must be. But then, if it were a hoax, you’d think they’d say something more dramatic: “We’re being attacked by alien invaders,” maybe, or at least, “Help, a wolferine ate my mother.”
“Let’s get down there,” Felix said. “It’s probably nothing, but it’s not like we were doing anything else.”
Calred nodded. “With my amazing tactical prescience, I anticipated your order. We’re already heading there at speed. Does that count as insubordination? I hope not. I’d hate to be assigned to some remote posting as punishment.”
“We’ll call it the sort of initiative that befits an officer of your stature.” Felix had no idea why Calred had ended up on this ship, but he must have annoyed someone. The Hacan would only say, “I go where I’m assigned.” He was competent, gave the impression of being effortlessly deadly, and was completely unflappable, not that they encountered many things worthy of getting into a flap about out here. In a storm last year, though, Felix had seen Calred wade into a surging river that had burst its banks, rescuing a young boy who would have been swept away, and returning him to his tearful family. Calred had done it as matterof-factly as Felix might take a bottle down from a shelf. He hadn’t known Calred anywhere near as long as Tib, but he’d already come to depend on him.
The planet grew, a greenish disc in the corner of the screen. “Something’s moving,” Calred said. “Looks like a shuttle, coming from the vicinity of Cobbler’s Knob, heading into orbit.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Felix said. “Where’s it going?” A shuttle didn’t have the range to make it to one of the other colony worlds, and there was no space station. “Is there anything in orbit for the shuttle to rendezvous with?”
“There isn’t,” Calred said. “Maybe they’re just sightseeing.”
“Or,” Tib said.
“Or what?” Felix said.
“Or there is something in orbit, and we just can’t see it. Let me see.” She bowed her head to the terminal, an
d the screen shifted through various false color arrays, visualizing discrete pulses of sensor data. “There it is,” Tib said, voice a throaty murmur. “A ship, orbiting Alope.”
Felix leaned forward. The screen was back to true color, and there was no orbiting ship to be seen, though the shuttle was highlighted, a silver lozenge rising from the planet’s surface. “Show me.”
“I can’t show you. The ship is using some sort of stealth technology – I think it’s a variant of light-wave deflection.”
“Then how do you know it’s even there?”
Tib rolled her eyes, and given the size of her eyes, that was very dramatic. “Felix. I have a particular interest in stealth, and no system is perfect. It can hide from sensors, and even bend light to avoid visual detection, and against a big expanse of empty black, that’s almost always enough. Against the backdrop of a planet, though, there are visual distortions, little shimmers and glimmers, and you can see them if you know where to look, kind of like we detect black holes by seeing the light from stars bend around them.”
Felix took her word for it. Yssaril were famed throughout the galaxy for their skill as spies – they’d taken their natural ability to fade, augmented it with technology and training, and spent centuries building their networks. The Tribes of Yssaril sold their skills throughout the galaxy, and doubtless used what they learned to pursue their own interests and imperial ambitions. Tib had never been within a billion kilometers of the Yssaril homeworld, but she had all the natural abilities of her species combined with the legacy of the Mentak Coalition, the descendants of thieves, renegades, smugglers, and survivors. The Yssaril members of the Coalition were the backbone of their clandestine forces, and Tib had vanished for a year once for “special training” that Felix assumed included plenty of spooky spy techniques. She’d certainly gotten even better at playing hide-and-seek afterward. “Who could it be?” he asked. “Why would anyone come out here in the first place, let alone in a stealth ship?”