“I vow to use the powers granted me only for the public good, and to uphold the constitution to the best of my ability, so help me Helios.”
A prickle moved over my skin; I barely dared blink. I watched the vicar hand Tarantis a knife, with which the young man sliced his palm. As the blood welled, he brushed his palm across the scepter—a ceremony not unfamiliar to me. This was how new Domitrian Emperors officially claimed the power invested in their bloodline.
But it was not his Domitrian ancestry that legitimized Tarantis.
Nor was he an Emperor.
The chamber applauded as the vicar raised the anointed scepter for all to see. But that scepter was not imperial. It wasn’t even royal. This took place only five hundred years ago, just before the great supernova had destroyed half of civilization, and yet no one knelt to Tarantis or treated him as royalty. He must not have been an Emperor at all.
As the group of representatives proceeded to discuss their business—laws, the interests of their provinces—it dawned on me that these weren’t even Grandiloquy. These people held power over Tarantis, but they hailed from individual planets. When they used titles, it was “Representative,” not “Senator.”
“There was no Empire,” I said to Plyno.
“So it seems,” he murmured.
No Empire. Just this governing body at the center of what they called the United Republics.
When the first hologram winked out, Plyno muttered, “I don’t understand how this could be.”
All the lies of Tyrus’s reign swirled through my head, and more besides.… The mistruths and propaganda the Grandiloquy used to control the Excess…
What if there were lies even greater than we knew, long used to bury the truth? Why, this was the past. The true past of this galaxy.
“I think I know what this is.” The smile that curved my mouth felt dangerous. “Our entire history is a lie.”
24
ON LEAVING the data archives, I hastened my people onto the Atlas, anxious to depart though we’d plundered only a fraction of the wealth we’d hoped to gain. The supporters I left behind swore to conceal, deny, and lie about what had happened after our onslaught, but I knew it was inevitable that someone would leak the news. The Chrysanthemum would soon learn that we had used the Atlas to attack the Repository, after which we would be hunted in truth.
There was no time to waste. Only once we were safely into the pitch darkness of hyperspace did I unveil the data chip containing the holographics. Then I showed the first one to Anguish and Gladdic.
After the conclusion, Anguish began to pace. “It’s a forgery,” he said. “It must be. There is no possibility the Grandiloquy could have concealed such a truth. Everyone would know the Empire was but five hundred years old—”
“How?” I asked. “It was half a millennium ago.”
“Word would have been passed down through the—”
“Half a millennium, Anguish. And in all that time since, the Grandiloquy have had total control over the provinces, the educational system, the media. Even the galactic forums are censored by the Chrysanthemum’s automated network! How would the truth have been ‘passed down’? By word of mouth? How many would dare to speak, if it got them killed?” I caught his arm to draw him to a standstill. “How many dare, even now, to say aloud that Tyrus is no god, only a man?”
Anguish, scowling, looked mutinous. With a sharp shake of his head, he stepped out of my grasp.
“What’s the second holographic?”
Gladdic’s quiet voice startled me. I’d almost forgotten he was there.
I looked into his pale, grave face and saw that he understood the implications. “You believe this. You know it’s true.”
He glanced past me. Whatever he saw in Anguish’s face caused him to avert his gaze to the floor. “I don’t know it’s true. But I know there were many secrets that I was not trusted with, even after I became Senator. And we both know that Domitrians are skilled at conspiracy.” He offered me a wan smile. “Skilled enough to rewrite histories, even. Does the next holographic show more of these… United Republics?”
“The next one,” I said, “is why we had to flee. The next one is what we need to protect and share.”
Then I played it for them—this transmission Tyrus had watched twenty-two times at the Repository before copying.
The one that had changed his whole life, and might yet destroy the galaxy.
In this holographic, the Grand Sanctum again was crowded with representatives of various territories. The Spymaster Tarantis looked a good twenty years older, heavier through the shoulders and waist, with ruddy cheeks and hair grown long.
His demeanor had also transformed. Two decades of power over the Empire’s security and surveillance machines had invested him with an insouciant confidence. Rather than standing at respectful attention before the galaxy’s greatest leaders, he lounged in his floating central chair, his legs kicked out and crossed at the ankles.
“As instructed, I present myself today before this noble assembly, after two decades of faithful service, so the duly elected representatives of our United Republics might vote on whether to strip me of office.” As he glanced over the crowd, the recorder caught the gleam of contempt in his pale blue eyes. His tone was lilting, sardonic. “However, I invite you to spare yourselves the effort of making a case about my incompetence. Rather, I intend to make a case for your collective incompetence to you.”
Cries of outrage sounded around him. Tarantis’s lips twisted in amusement.
“I used to wonder why my predecessors aged so quickly once in this exalted position. Now I understand. You granted me the eyes to monitor every surveillance machine in the United Republics, and the power to collect all your secrets. I’ve come to know the entire lot of you better than many of you know yourselves. I’ve never been a spiritual sort, but the more I learn of you, the more I understand that hell is real—because I see so many of you busily creating it.”
He sat back in his chair—supremely relaxed, conspicuously indifferent to the shouts of objection. Fixing his eyes on some distant point, he continued casually, “Power has sickened you. You have become so inured to your excesses that you seek ever more lurid depravities to stimulate you. I am the eyes gazing through your surveillance cameras. I am the ears listening to your furtive messages. It is my mind reading your texts—and, yes, your discreet-sheets, which you never expected me to glimpse. So you see—I am not just a man. I am a network of interlinked machines with a human interface. I am your surveillance state. I am your security state. I am the bulwark between you and those whom you represent—your ‘subjects,’ as you call them.”
His voice grew cutting. “ ‘Tarantis,’ you say, ‘it is your job to ensure our security. It is your job to neutralize the radicals on my planet! Silence those who speak against me. Imprison them, destroy them, for if you do not, we will replace you with a Domitrian who will!’ ”
He shook his head in disgust.
“It’s no accident that a revolutionary spirit now burgeons across the provinces. You’ve been clumsy in your crimes—the stealing, the murders, the perversions. One man can be silenced—or a hundred, or a thousand. But you cannot silence an entire galaxy. Your collective perfidy has grown too obvious. The people will no longer abide it. And so—what is your solution? To blame me. I, who have kept your secrets just as my ancestors did, as my entire family has done since you enslaved us fifteen hundred years ago.”
A stirring passed through the crowd of representatives. Having studied this holographic repeatedly, I knew why. Throughout the Grand Spymaster Tarantis’s speech, his security bots had been stealthily infiltrating the Grand Sanctum. Only now did the representatives notice their increased presence overhead and all around.
“Yes, I said ‘enslaved,’ ” Tarantis bit out, as the security bots assembled into a gleaming metal formation above him. “For I am not my ancestor, Melchoir, your first ‘Grand Spymaster.’ You enslaved the first Domitrians
for the crime of what we are. You used us as your tools, and over time, you chose to please Melchoir and offer him an official title, as though that legitimized our slavery. He was appeased by this. I have never been deceived. Involuntary servitude was our sole family inheritance.”
A few of the representatives—too uneasy to remain—made for the doors of the Grand Sanctum.
Tarantis’s gaze cut toward them.
One of his machines, weapons extended, zipped down and blocked their exit.
A hush fell over the chamber as they finally realized they were in peril.
“Yet was not the crime of we Domitrians convenient for you? For fifteen hundred years, you have used it as an excuse to force Domitrians to be your puppets. You’ve interbred us to keep the power in our blood, and bound the most powerful of us in each generation to slave for these”—his lips twisted sarcastically—“great republics of freedom! Now you call me here, who never asked to serve you, and demand that I account for my failure to protect you from the consequences of your own actions.”
Gasps and shrieks went up as Tarantis’s bots, now fully encircling the representatives, deployed their weapons. He threaded his fingers together and smiled down on the scene.
“Naturally, I know what you’ve been plotting. You wish for a unified galactic government. You wish your powers to be permanent, not subject to the whims of voters. You wish your corruption to go unpunished. And you are correct in one regard: we have reached a turning point in history. Either you will succeed, or there will be a vast, sweeping revolution across this entire galaxy, ending only with your deaths. Why should I protect you? Give me but one reason.”
Uneasy stirring and murmuring across the chamber.
“Tongue-tied? All of you?” Tarantis sighed, impatient as a tutor with disappointing pupils. “Very well, I will supply it: Domitrian machines were what enabled your corruption. The galaxy will see me not as your tool, but as your co-conspirator—for without all my work, your subjects would have overthrown you long ago. Even if I disavowed your actions and killed you where you stand, the people would not spare me for long. Liberated from your tyranny, they would turn on the Domitrians who’d guarded you. They would seek to destroy us along with you.”
A pause ensued, in which the mood of the room shifted tentatively toward hope. Shoulders loosened; a few people coughed; others leaned toward one another, relief and speculation fueling their whispers.
“There’s an alternative to all our deaths… one only I can effect. The masses of the United Republics agitate against you, but they might be shocked into total submission, if I but lifted a finger and acted. I have the means of unleashing malignant space at will. I could weaponize it to create a disaster unprecedented in our history, one from which all in this chamber and their loved ones will remain totally immune—but the masses will bear the brunt in full. In the aftermath, they would crawl on their knees to us for safety. They would beg for the yoke they now decry as oppression. Of course, you know I will have a price for this.”
A security bot floated near Tarantis’s shoulder. Theatrically, he cupped one ear, as though to hear its message. “Ah,” he said after a moment. “Indeed. You are all growing willing to pay my price. How good of you. Here it is, then: I require a permanent investiture of my own. For me, and for all my descendants. We will have an Empire. You will be its nobility. And I? I am no longer your slave. You will instead become mine. Today, you will declare me your Emperor.”
The holographic went dark.
“What happened next?” Anguish said.
“Ten days later,” I said to him, “there was a supernova. You saw Tyrus cause a supernova with malignant space. He learned of the possibility from somewhere, and I think it was here. I suspect Tarantis did it first. Tyrus figured that out, and he replicated it.”
Silence fell as the implications registered.
That other supernova, in Tarantis’s time, had enabled a new galactic order. The supernova had wiped away all electronic databases, all records of contemporary society. To replace them, the powerful had concocted a new version of “history” in which Domitrians had always ruled. And they had persuaded the Interdict to declare scientific education to be blasphemy, ostensibly to prevent another mass disaster, but now I suspected another motive: a scientifically educated people might one day figure out what Tarantis had done.
No doubt some people passed the truth on to their children. But fear must have constrained most to whispers—and over time, whispers faded. And so the truth of the pre-supernova galaxy had been eradicated from the collective memory.
“So,” Anguish said, “the Grandiloquy are thieves and liars.” He glanced stonily toward Gladdic, who cleared his throat and crossed his arms defensively.
“To lie,” said Gladdic sheepishly, “one must first know the truth.”
“It’s not just the Grandiloquy,” I said. “ ‘Tarantis the Great’ saved civilization from the aftermath of a supernova—so we are told. But that was the disaster he promised the Grandiloquy, the one that ended all the rebellions brewing on their planets, the one that made them all the new nobility.… He caused the supernova. Just as Tyrus did. With malignant space.”
Gladdic flinched. From Anguish’s throat came a low, deep growl. “That’s mad,” he said. “Billions died in the great supernova.”
“Hundreds of billions,” I corrected. “Perhaps more. You say he changed after the Repository, Gladdic, and I think this was why. He discovered the destructive potential in his hands. Who is to say he wasn’t doing just as Tarantis did—following his actions?”
I glanced again toward the data chip holding the holographics of Tarantis. A chill slipped down my spine as I belatedly realized what Tyrus had been doing with beauty bots.
Lightening his hair, resculpting his jaw, hollowing out his cheeks…
He’d been slowly but steadily emphasizing his resemblance to Tarantis.
It dawned on me that he was not merely emulating Tarantis’s looks. He was copying Tarantis’s strategies. Like his ancestor, he was deploying malignant space in order to consolidate his power.
What if he chose to cause another supernova? He had the means on hand, and he clearly had no care for the cost. A billion lives—what would that matter to a mind poisoned beyond repair?
We needed to kill him—quickly, before he found some new reason for murder. But how did one vanquish an enemy whose weapon could annihilate whole solar systems?
There was no other choice. “Anguish,” I said. “We need to make contact with Neveni.”
25
GLADDIC had no memory of saving my life, but learning himself capable of such a feat had given him the courage to do what I asked. He was nervous, though. I had promised him that Anguish and I would follow a half block behind, ready at any moment to assist. But as he promenaded down a street in the city of Tribulation, capital of Atarys, the only threat he faced was a surfeit of public adoration.
This was an Aton province, after all, and Gladdic was one of the few Grandiloquy who could claim in full truth to be beloved of the Excess in his domain. Especially now that Tyrus had raised his profile by appointing him chief propagandist.
“Grande von Aton!”
“That was him, I swear it!”
“That was Gladdic von Aton who just passed! Come on, let’s catch up to him!”
While I was no stranger to fame, I’d been an inaccessible and distant figure, as those of true power often are. I wasn’t accustomed to being swarmed by admirers. At imperial events requiring my appearance, I had been kept at a controlled remove from the crowds.
But today, on Tribulation’s high street, Gladdic’s devotees surrounded him. Another man might have been cowed by their wild enthusiasm, but Gladdic was all smiles. He hugged babies, slapped backs, and dispensed kisses with charm and ease.
At the top of the high street, with hundreds of people trailing in his wake, he mounted the steps of the capitol building and then lifted his hand for silence. Into the en
suing hush, he spoke—his words captured by countless recorders held aloft.
“Some of you have asked me: What am I doing on Atarys? I confess, it’s a complicated story.” Gladdic paused, his sigh tragic. “It goes back to an incident that happened several years ago. Back before Lumina was destroyed.”
Lumina. That single word silenced the remaining chatterers gathered below him. All waited raptly now for him to continue. The recorders remained aloft. His words would be circulated across the galaxy by nightfall. They would draw attention.
And Neveni Sagnau would hear them.
Anguish and I had parted with Neveni on ill terms, to say the least. Her fellow Partisans would know that we were no longer trusted allies. Our old contacts would not help us find her.
So somehow, we had to lure her to us.
And Gladdic was the way.
“You see,” Gladdic went on, “I was staying as a guest at… ah, I can hardly bear to speak his name; I’ve tried so hard to forget it. But I will tell you now: it was the husband of Viceroy Sagnau. A proper ruffian he was! Sometimes, at the oddest moments, I’m reminded of that dark time, of how disgracefully I was treated. There was some trifling dispute between my father and the Emperor, and I was ordered to stay in the residence of the Sagnaus. They quite mistreated me. There were…” He cleared his throat, finding my eye through the crowd. I nodded encouragingly. “There were beatings,” he said—not very persuasively, although the adoring crowd offered up a sympathetic hiss, which seemed to hearten him. “Yes, beatings,” Gladdic repeated more firmly. “And cruel words! And—and—oh, force-feeding of spoiled meals!”
The crowd gasped and booed. “Curse Sagnau!” an older man yelled. “Curse the Viceroy!”
Too late for that. The Viceroy, along with the rest of Neveni’s family, was dead—victims of the Grandiloquy who’d deployed Resolvent Mist on Lumina.
Neveni had rage she could never hope to satisfy.
I was counting on it. Nothing would enrage or agitate Neveni more than hearing her late loved ones unjustly smeared. To fend off Grandiloquy retaliation over the technology Tyrus had offered Lumina, the Sagnaus had indeed kept Gladdic as a hostage at their home—but they had treated him like visiting royalty.
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