The Empress

by S. J. Kincaid

  “Despite all of that,” Tyrus murmured, “Arion ended up letting me stay. I was there almost a year. I might’ve passed my life there.”

  My breath caught. “The malignant space?”

  He closed his eyes. “The Excess on that planet honestly believed they could . . . just solve it themselves. They wouldn’t evacuate. They embargoed information from the planet, and that meant they risked delaying a proper evacuation force until it was too late for anyone to reach them. It was ludicrous and they didn’t understand it. And how could I explain to them that they were making a mistake? I was a kid. The Grandiloquy looked at me as a Domitrian above all, but to the Excess, age matters. A child is insignificant, a creature to be reassured by meaningless words and sweet candy and hugs. They were all going to die and I couldn’t get them to see otherwise.”

  “They truly believed they would solve a problem the entirety of the Empire had not?”

  “They had no perspective,” Tyrus said. “Most hadn’t even left the atmosphere of that planet. The scale of this Empire can’t be understood unless one has seen it. I knew how much effort had disappeared into studying and fixing that monster in their sky, but they didn’t. And when it became absolutely clear there was no convincing them to see it my way, I had to . . . I had to call my uncle and tell him I was alive.”

  “Oh.”

  And that’s what he’d done. Tyrus had told his Domitrian family where to find him. The Empire then had to have learned of that planet’s situation, and evacuated it.

  “And your father?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  Of course Arion hadn’t survived. Randevald and Cygna would have no mercy with Excess who dared to hide a Domitrian from them.

  “Maybe we’ve done enough,” Tyrus said quietly. “The Interdict is training his vicars. He will make certain his decree is widely known. Maybe this is the solution I vowed to pursue. Perhaps we are done.”

  I slipped out of the covers and sifted through his clothing and the lump beneath it all: the box with the Interdict’s decree. The restoration of the sciences. The goal Tyrus had sought his entire life, the justification for outliving so many others.

  There were a great many ways we could get this out there and known to the galaxy without returning.

  “Where would we go?” I asked him.

  He was staring at the box. “We wait for the next gravital window and then we aim for the black hole. It wouldn’t take long for us. A few months. The key is, we stay somewhere we won’t end up torn apart.”

  A few months outside of time and we could leave it all behind us. What a strange thought.

  I could do it. All I’d leave was Neveni, but she likely believed me dead, and had moved on already. I could shed this present with ease. This starship had value. We could sell it, or use it, and live quite well, I assumed. . . .

  Then I regarded Tyrus, and grew very certain he couldn’t do this.

  Not the way I could.

  I tightened my grip about the box with the decree. He’d secured it. The first step toward vindication. But this was a decree, and it needed an enforcer. The Interdict was a well-learned man of theories, not one who oversaw their application. If we abandoned this galaxy and entered the future, only to find no one had solved this . . . Tyrus would never be at peace again.

  Even if malignant space was fixed, he wouldn’t live with his own defection. No. Not Tyrus. I knew him too well. Everything we saw that was wrong—for there was always something wrong—he would see as his own failing. He would see it as something he’d allowed when he’d washed his hands of this responsibility.

  The conviction welled up within me, because I knew this, even if he didn’t realize it.

  So I would refuse this, and take the burden of refusal out of his hands.

  He was afraid of what awaited us. The unknown we would soon confront. I would be his strength.

  “No, we can’t leave,” I said, crossing back over to him, letting him draw me down into his arms. “Not because it isn’t tempting”—my hand stroked over the plane of his cheek—“but because this isn’t you. What of the imbalance between the Excess and the Grandiloquy? What of the stagnation of this Empire?”

  “Someone else will fix it. Someone always does.”

  “Yes, someone like you comes and fixes it. So that is what you’ll do. We go back, we do whatever we must to survive, and then we do exactly what we planned. Whatever happens, we’ll face it.”

  He was silent a long moment, my words sinking in. Then his lips grazed my bare shoulder. “One condition, then. We contact Sagnau—but only after you tell me what it is you want from this.”

  “What I want?”

  He reached over for the scepter, left lying across the bedside table. “This,” he said to me, “is a lifelong commitment. It’s more final than any marriage. You will exist as public property, with demands that never cease even when you are tired, even when you grow old, and there is no getting away from it once it begins. Tell me what you want to do as this galaxy’s Empress. Give it thought before you get trapped in this role for good.”

  I plucked the scepter from his hands and considered it. The device was a warm weight, resting in my hand, the jewels winking in the starlight.

  This should have been an easier question to answer: what did I wish to do as Empress of this galaxy? I’d always wrapped my thoughts in his own visions. And before him, in Donia’s. Had I given thought to my own desires?

  Yet . . . I did have one dream. There was something I wanted. The realization ripped through my mind.

  “I want to ban Servitors.”

  The words were in the air, and then I knew this was something I could do that was profoundly right. Excitement drove me upright. “Tyrus, they do nothing that can’t be done by a service bot. They can’t even save their own lives. We saw your uncle order one to skin herself alive, and she . . . that pitiful girl did it. How can Grandiloquy ever see creatures as anything but worthless when they have Servitors about them their entire lives?”

  Tyrus looked inward. “They learn to devalue others from them.”

  “Yes.”

  “The Excess despise them too.”

  “Yes.” I gripped his chin. “That’s what you can do for me.” Then, I realized, “No, it’s what I can do. That’s what I want to do. For everyone. And not just Servitors. Harmonids. Creatures, Tyrus. Humanoid creatures. We put a stop to them all.”

  “I swear that we will,” Tyrus vowed. His mouth found mine, and I met him with an insistent, eager kiss, the heady anticipation of what lay ahead for us blinding me to any lingering fears.

  And only then, only then, did we let Neveni know we were still alive.

  21

  “NEMESIS, I am so glad to hear from you.

  “The major news first: the Successor Primus died. It happened two weeks after you left. I don’t know the details, but obviously I’ve been weeping off and on ever since. . . .”

  “Sarcasm, clearly,” I said to Tyrus, since Devineé and her husband had assaulted Neveni.

  “Pasus is gone. No news of him, and from what I hear, no one has seen him in the Chrysanthemum.

  “I waited a month, and then I finally let Tyrus’s allies know what your destination was. They sent a couple of ships after you into the Transaturnine System, but they just lost contact . . .”

  I glanced at Tyrus. “Must have missed the gravital window,” I murmured.

  He nodded. We were listening to the computerized voice narrate the encrypted text transmission Neveni had sent. I’d had no idea how the cipher Tyrus left her worked, but Neveni had clearly figured it out.

  We listened to the rest. Lumina’s governing officials were still going back and forth with the Empire over the precise terms of their exit. There’d been a blackout in the galactic press on news from the planet for the last five months.

  Tyrus was visibly relieved to hear it was still happening without him. “They have to frame the departure carefully. This is entirely expe
cted.”

  Without Pasus, the mutinous coalition of Senators had fallen apart. Locklaite, Aton, and the others had slinked back to the Chrysanthemum, but they were shut out of power by Tyrus’s allies.

  Transmissions had been fabricated once a month of Tyrus addressing the galaxy to maintain the fiction that he and I were about. The entirety of the Empire was ignorant about our disappearance, and still believed he was secluded in deep mourning after losing his cousin, his last family.

  “On a last note, I’m going to the Chrysanthemum to meet you when you get back. I’ll probably beat you there by a few days. There’s a lot going on with Lumina’s independence, and it will be useful to bring you up to speed. Have a safe trip home!

  “Your friend, Neveni.”

  Silence fell.

  I cast a sidelong glance at Tyrus, where he sat with his arms crossed, gazing up at the speaker on the ceiling, rigid.

  “What’s wrong? I think that’s the best we could have hoped for.”

  He rubbed his palm over his mouth. “Yes,” he dragged out after a moment. “I just . . . That worries me. It’s too perfect.”

  “I trust Neveni,” I said. “I know I can’t ask you to trust her too, Tyrus—but can you trust my judgment?”

  “Yes. I trust you,” he said. But he remained like a tight string as we finally aimed for the six-star system and leaped into hyperspace. The journey back to the Chrysanthemum was devoid of the pleasure we’d taken heading out to Lumina.

  Tyrus had archived all the news transmissions he could gather from a mix of respectable news outlets and the sensationalist ones. Both were equally fictional. The respected gave a public narrative of current events as the Chrysanthemum wished the Excess to perceive them. . . . The “consensus” opinion, so to speak. Though factually questionable, Tyrus watched them first for an idea of what the larger Empire believed. Had the transmissions focused negatively on him, it would have warned him of danger awaiting us at the Chrysanthemum.

  Nothing to put us on guard.

  “Whoever rules at the Chrysanthemum, they’ve commanded the media not to assassinate my character. That’s what they’d do if they anticipated our return but meant to prepare grounds for my destruction,” Tyrus said. “But they’ve maintained the public image.”

  Then he passed hours sifting through the other transmissions, the ludicrous ones fed by heresay and rumor. Some were sensationalist shows, some were those underground self-styled purveyors of information who operated independently. . . . The very sort Randevald von Domitrian had occasionally ordered assassinated for airing something too close to the truth.

  Mostly the truth was lost in the swamp of ridiculous conjecture and outright lies and fabrications, but the points of alignment helped us verify elements of veracity in the official consensus.

  The evening before we were due to arrive, I walked into Tyrus’s chamber to find him asleep. Snoring, even—and Tyrus never snored. One of the silly transmissions piped in the air, earnestly discussing the alien brain parasites controlling the Grandiloquy.

  “. . . claim they use narcotics for recreation or spiritual reasons, but it’s a lie. Those narcotics are the primary food source of the Screekuth Symbionts. . . .”

  A smile crept over my lips. Tyrus’s mouth was hanging open, and his head was resting on a pile of electronic displays. I tugged one out from his sprawled hand and my gaze passed over the text.

  “. . . chemical potential of strange quark mass . . .”

  He raised his head. “S’from the Sacred City.” Tyrus’s voice was bleary. He had the misfortune of being a light sleeper. I was one, as well, but I didn’t need nearly so much sleep as a regular person.

  “Strange quark mass?” I said. “What is that?”

  “Blast me if I know. I’ve been trying to make sense of it and . . .” He threw his hand up in the air.

  “Off,” I called to the screen, and the absurd segment about Screekuth Symbionts disappeared. “That probably does not help.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Even without the noise, I don’t think I can make sense of this stuff, Nemesis. It references mathematical theorems I have never even heard of. I looked it up and I have no idea what the symbols even represent. I just can’t decipher what I’m reading.”

  “Maybe you don’t have a scientific mind.”

  He lolled his head back to look at me. “Are you saying I’m stupid, my love?”

  He’d probably never been deemed that in all his life. But I wished to tease him, to distract him, so I made a great show of thinking it over.

  “You are taking far too long to answer that,” Tyrus exclaimed, mock indignant.

  “Forgive me, Your Supremacy. I was just recalling your talent for setting fires by hand. A caveman on ancient Earth would have believed you quite stupid.”

  “I would like to see that caveman become supreme ruler of the galaxy.” He shook his head ruefully. “Although that caveman might be better prepared for the job than I am when it comes to these documents.”

  I snared his hand, tugged him to his feet—where he swayed a bit with weariness. “I just learned the Grandiloquy all have alien brain parasites.”

  “Do we?”

  “Hmm. Yes.”

  “Was that from the same reputable program that said you’re a sentient sex android?”

  “I had not watched that far.” I looped his arm in mine as he fought back a smile. “To learn you’re infested by a brain parasite—well, it explains a great deal about you.”

  “You just had to find out the truth,” he said, and then I was in his arms and his lips were on mine, and everything we would face tomorrow, everything—it was momentarily forgotten.

  Our reprieve lasted until the next morning, when we dropped out of hyperspace in the six-star system. After what must have been a shocked twenty seconds as every vessel nearby noticed us on their sensors, a sudden bombardment of transmissions hit. Greetings. So many greetings. Amador was so glad we had returned and he needed to complain about the grasping Wallstrom woman. . . . Wallstrom had a most cursory hello and she was very put out with Amador and Fordyce, and . . .

  On and on it went as the Hera navigated the gravity of the six-star system. Greetings, expressions of how thrilled they were that the Emperor was back! How they, and they alone, had been certain of his return, and how ill the conduct of this political rival or that political rival had been while Tyrus was away.

  “Helios save us,” Tyrus said, rubbing his hands over his face. “They are exactly as they were when we left.”

  But when he rolled his eyes and set about answering the most vital of the transmissions, there was ease in his posture for the first time since we’d learned of the theory of relativity. We docked with the Valor Novus and emerged into a bustling crowd of Grandiloquy favor-seekers already eager to speak to the Emperor, and Tyrus drew me closer to whisper in my ear, “First thing we do, the very first, is gather the primary Grandiloquy in the presence chamber.”

  “You have the decree in hand?”

  “That’s not all I wish them to see.” His finger brushed over my collarbone, and I smiled at the thought of the mark.

  “Nemesis!”

  There were many voices calling my name as we made our way through the jostling crowd, but that voice—Neveni’s—drew my notice. I saw her at the edge, just near a doorway, and when our eyes met, she beckoned me over.

  Tyrus saw her too.

  He tapped his ear briefly, reminding me to stay in contact at the first sign of trouble. Then I headed through the unusually bustling crowd toward Neveni. She was facing away from me by the time I reached her, looking down at the ground.

  A tingle of uneasiness washed all over me.

  “Neveni, what it is?”

  Her voice was a whisper. “I’m sorry.”

  And then a strange noise arose in the air at the same time that someone seized me from behind, driving me down to the ground. My hand flew up to my ear, but someone else had already torn away the transmitter I�
�d clipped to my lobe so I might stay in communication with Tyrus. My gaze sliced to the side as I tried to heave myself upright, as I found my arms unable to budge the weight on me. I couldn’t shake off the hand clamped over my mouth. . . .

  And Neveni stared down at me with haunted eyes, the crowd strategically arranged—I saw now—to hide me from Tyrus’s sight. Then a projection glowed up from an imaging ring. A duplicate of me. She threw a wave to Tyrus. And then another man entered my line of sight.

  My blood ran to ice.

  It was Pasus.

  One of his servants handed him the ear node. A circlet—a voice modifier—was clipped to his throat.

  “Eyes on me,” Pasus spoke. “Go on, it’s fine. Tyrus, trust me. I’ll be along shortly.”

  And my holographic double moved her lips with the words!

  Don’t, don’t believe this! I thought, my alarm mounting at the strange weakness of my limbs. Then a large Pasus servant stepped forward and drove his boot down onto my head.

  22

  I NEEDED OXYGEN. I was suffocating.

  A low, droning sound filled the air.

  My consciousness returned slowly, and I leaned my head back to escape the pressure on my throat, only to smack it against the wall, and then I was wide awake. A cold shaft of metal was looped about my throat, magnetically trapping me against the surface behind me. . . . My hand flew up, felt the contours of the clamp. A mobile restraint, the sort that was always handy on a starship.

  My hands tugged at it.

  It didn’t give. The ugly shock of realization registered in my mind just as the memory of how I’d gotten here spiraled back.

  Neveni.

  It was a trap.

  We’d been trapped.

  “Hello, Nemesis.”

  My eyes shot toward the voice, and there he was: Senator von Pasus. Alive and on the Chrysanthemum, and that’s the moment the knowledge made my stomach plummet. Neveni had been compromised. He’d forced her to send me false information, or he’d done it himself, and . . . And he tilted his head with his blue eyes glittering maliciously.