The Empress

by S. J. Kincaid

  This was reality, and reality was cruel. It would only be ignored for so long, and then it would sink in its teeth with a sharper bite.

  “Don’t!” I shouted. “Tyrus, kill me first. DON’T DO THIS.”

  “The next time she speaks, slice out her tongue,” Tyrus said to the men holding me. “Proceed, Vicar.”

  Fustian raised up a sealed container. Within would be the numbing vapor, and my face would be pressed over it so I would grow disoriented. I wouldn’t feel it when the piercer drove up through my nose and ruptured my frontal lobe. I screamed out like an animal and began to fight with all the strength the suppressor allowed me. I’d slam my head against the floor and kill myself rather than be a mindless creature they could manipulate as they willed. . . .

  But I couldn’t free myself. I was helpless to avert my fate. The vicar lifted the lid to release numbing mist, and I twisted frantically to evade the curls of vapor snaking into the air, but it registered dimly in the back of my mind . . . a slight tingle of familiarity.

  The gas billowed all about us, a self-propelling cloud of yellow-brown that hit the air in a swell, and then instantly bloomed again, again. . . . I had seen this, I knew it. Fustian, Pasus, his servant, and the pair of Excess—they knew it too. Everyone but the Emperor leaped back from the very sight of it.

  Not Tyrus. He just stood there as the dark cloud swelled about him, his calculating gaze flickering up toward the open air vents leading to general atmospheric circulation. Then the screams began and confirmed what this gas was.

  It was Resolvent Mist.

  44

  RESOLVENT MIST was an intelligent bioweapon. It registered atmospheric density and confined itself to deploying within those layers of an atmosphere where breathing, living mammals might dwell, rather than floating up to be dispersed in space.

  Each spore self-replicated until it reached a certain saturation within an area, and then those spores moved elsewhere to repeat the process in the next accessible area. It “marked” each area it had been so as not to fill the same chamber twice. In such a way, the fatal bioweapon grew denser, thicker until I could not even see anyone else in the Great Heliosphere, and then it thinned.

  My eyes picked out Pasus’s fallen servant and the two dead Excess who’d been restraining me. They were both on the ground—blood fountaining from their eyes, their ears, their noses, their mouths, ejected by their lungs as they liquefied.

  I propelled back from them and crashed into Tyrus.

  His hands caught my waist. “Shh.”

  I turned to look at him, and the detached and indifferent Tyrus who’d been pleased to have a nice green shirt, who’d been eager to be rid of me . . . He was gone. Replaced by this person who appeared carved out of stone, even as the last of the bioweapon’s tendrils snaked into the vents.

  To general circulation.

  Which would expel it everywhere.

  Pasus stood paralyzed, looking at the dead Excess. Fustian loosed a cry and dashed for the door. . . .

  “I don’t understand. What—” Pasus said.

  “I always thought the Emperor Amon had a difficult task, slipping a poison to so many people without being discovered,” Tyrus said to Pasus. “I think we’ve had a few late-night discussions, pondering that. Well, having now secretly distributed a substance myself—a counteragent to those I chose as today’s survivors—I can tell you it’s quite easy. Once the Atlas fattened my pockets, I simply paid people to obtain it and do it for me.”

  Fustian began to scream. My gaze shot to him. He was standing before the open door, gazing into the main promenade of the Valor Novus. The murky fog was there now, and through it were faint figures, and so many screams, a virtual cacophony from them.

  Sweet Helios, I thought. Fustian closed the door and plunged to his knees, huddled there, murmuring to himself. Tyrus’s cool, appraising eyes were fixed on Pasus, who seemed to now understand the implications of this.

  “The entire Chrysanthemum has interconnected atmosphere. You will . . .” Pasus realized it then. He realized that an enormous number of people were about to die. He tore back his sleeve and shouted into his transmitter, “The Emperor unilaterally deployed Resolvent Mist. I don’t know who has fallen. I didn’t plan this. I had nothing to do with it. . . .”

  Tyrus stroked a hand through my hair, regarding Pasus with faint amusement.

  “. . . bring space-sheaths,” Pasus was shouting, desperate to prove he’d had no hand in unleashing the Mist. “Bring med bots. And . . . and . . .”

  “Why waste your breath, Alectar?” Tyrus said. To me: “All this time tying his bonds to me and he thinks he can truly disavow what I’ve done.”

  “No. You are going to pay for this, not me,” Pasus said. “This is all on you! Do you know how many masters of those vessels have family here?”

  “They don’t anymore,” Tyrus said coldly.

  I looked between them, the implications sinking in: those ships were not allies in on a secret deal. Tyrus had not brokered anything in advance, and Pasus was right in thinking they would retaliate. So Tyrus had struck a blow, and now those ships would avenge those who’d fallen about us. Very well.

  I could accept doom.

  Even take advantage of it.

  “Pasus,” I said.

  Pasus turned to me. I drove my foot into his groin, doubling him over. My hand tangled in his hair, and I might’ve hurt him in earnest if Tyrus hadn’t said, “Stop!”

  “Why?” I almost growled.

  “Not yet,” Tyrus said. “Give me his transmitter.”

  I drove my boot down onto Pasus’s hand, ignoring his shout, and tore the transmitter off, flung it at Tyrus. Then I let my heel grind those bones. Since I wasn’t at full strength, he managed to dislodge me, to propel me back.

  But I smiled in savage promise at Pasus’s chalky white face, as Tyrus’s voice rippled out behind me:

  “This is your Emperor. I see you have heard Senator von Pasus’s transmission and you are moblizing in response.” He looked at those ships, so vast in number, so overwhelming. They could have formed their own superstructure with that power among them. “What the Senator told you is true. I have just killed a massive number of people. Stand down and retreat, or join them.”

  The words were an empty threat. The ships did not withdraw, but were close enough now that I could pick out the individual lights of windows from even the farthest of the ships. Soon they’d fire tethers into the Chrysanthemum, force open the airlocks, spill in wearing space-sheaths, armed and ready to take revenge.

  “Oh well.” Tyrus tossed aside the transmitter. “I tried.”

  My blood raced with fire. Heady anticipation mingled with fear for him, and I moved to his side. “We will grab weapons. We’ll fight to the end. We can take many of them with us. But first . . .” I cast Pasus a ferocious smile. “I will enjoy knowing you meet the same fate we do.”

  “I disavow this,” protested Pasus. “I had nothing to do with it. Surveillance will show them as much! They watched it through their windows. They must have seen my surprise!”

  “No, they saw you covered in fog,” I said with cruel enjoyment. “They saw you standing after it cleared.”

  “They will see reason,” Pasus insisted.

  Tyrus regarded him with icy amusement. “You put too much faith in the rationality of human beings.”

  “I put too much faith in yours!” spat Pasus. “The Venalox was supposed to remove that foolish sentimentality. . . .”

  “Ah, and it did,” agreed Tyrus, prowling toward him. “I once had such hopes for this Empire. I would unite people to address a common existential threat. Now I see those were childish delusions. People do not unite for a common cause when faced with disaster. No. That’s the last resort. That’s what happens only after they’ve clambered over each other to loot the corpse of their civilization.”

  “There is no saving you.”

  “I believed that for a while,” Tyrus said. “Then I broke the
hold of the Venalox—exactly as I told Nemesis I had in the oubliette—and I saw clearly at last your desperation for validation only I could give you. I used it. I embraced you. I invited you to dwell in the Imperial Chambers. You were so taken, you made every transmission, conducted all your business, right within my reach, right where I could see your every movement and gather every weapon I needed. Alectar: I watched your back-and-forth with the vicars. I learned all their identities through you.”

  Pasus drew a sharp breath.

  “Men and women of faith,” jeered Tyrus,” but their Living Cosmos could not protect them from the question I had put to them: lose a head, or lose a hand? And what do you know—those vicars always preferred to lose a hand! The very one with the diode that gave them power over my scepter, allowing those diodes to be reimplanted in any mercenary I chose. Those mercenaries were glad to speak any words I wished for a cut of the Atlas’s profits.”

  “You can claim the scepter,” I breathed.

  Tyrus traced his finger over his arm, just where he’d placed that sliver of metal. Outside the starship, the vessels were aiming their tethering guns. “I already have. A bead of blood in the oubliette, and I’ve felt it growing louder in my mind with every heartbeat since. Shall we test it now?”

  A frantic hope soared in my heart, for he could make these ships come to a dead stop now. . . .

  Tyrus flicked his hand. The lead vessel of the armada flared into a brilliant ray of light . . . as though it powered up for a hyperspace jump. Then it split open. It was no explosion. A crack, a rupture speared out from it like the space had been sliced open by some invisible hand. The fault line snaked in all directions and each vessel in its path spilling shining innards into the pitch black of the void, fire flowering out from its engines, but not receding. . . . No. Thickening the gash of light until it grew so bright it left an imprint on my eyes. The wound rippled, blossomed, heaved, devouring more and more. . . .

  I was aware of Pasus’s cry, of my heart thundering in my ears. A ribbonlike gash of white began to assume a horrifyingly familiar form.

  Pasus stumbled back from the window, but Tyrus just stepped closer to it.

  He placed his hands on the window. His silhouette was stark black against the great rupture gulping the starships now trying to fly away, failing.

  Stars save us all.

  Tyrus had just created malignant space.

  45

  FOR AN INSTANT of transfixed horror, the wound in the universe glowed in my vision, and it seemed almost sated . . . hanging in the void with an odd stillness. . . . The smallest pinpricks of white bled from it in all directions. The intact peripheral vessels tried to change course, but their momentum carried them to their doom. They disappeared into the tendrils of devouring brightness. Abruptly in a spasm, it resumed hemorrhaging with an urgency to consume more. . . .

  “This can’t be. This isn’t real,” Pasus said at last, his voice empty, toneless.

  The denial settled tonelessly on the air scented with Resolvent Mist. So close to us, the very fabric of the universe itself was a mutilated wound rupturing itself wider with every passing second to spill a lethal band of light that destroyed all it touched. I found myself at a curious distance from what I was seeing, for surely this was not real, as Pasus had said—this was not malignant space spreading in the six-star home system of the Domitrians.

  “You can trust your eyes, Alectar,” Tyrus said, tracing his palm over the window. “Turns out, it’s very easy to create malignant space. Just a few conditions going awry when a ship tries to leap into hyperspace . . . And there it goes. It would be a shockingly cost-effective light show for future imperial spectacles . . .”—he looked back at us with a jaded twist of his lips—“. . . if I knew how to stop it.”

  He had no way to fix it. The realization shocked me.

  He’d created something he couldn’t destroy.

  I stepped back from Tyrus, because the wrongness of this blared at me. Tyrus was illuminated by the brilliant, garish glow of this malignancy he’d vowed to fight, as he mused: “How many people on those starships laughed off the threat of this? What do you suppose they are thinking right now?” He let that sit there. “Well, I imagine they’re not thinking. They’re probably screaming.”

  The malignancy had ensnared the nearest star—and that’s when I realized the six-star system was now doomed. More of the ships were plunging in, vanishing into the brilliant depths of the light, and Tyrus had made this happen. He’d created this. He had to be using the scepter even now because the distance between the Chrysanthemum and that rippling white death mounted even as the destruction grew. Yet nothing changed what he’d done. He had knowingly created malignant space in his home system with no means of ending it.

  It was unfathomable to me that Tyrus had deliberately done this. My whole being rejected the idea that this was truly reality. Surely I would awaken soon. Pasus abruptly bolted toward the door. That snapped me out of my daze. I surged after him—and Tyrus said, “Don’t bother.”

  “Tyrus . . . ,” I protested, whipping around.

  Tyrus just looked at me. Pointed to his own eyes. “There’s nowhere he can escape me now.”

  The words were meant to reassure me.

  They chilled me.

  He calmly closed the distance to me, took my hand, and drew me toward the door. I accompanied him in a daze out of the Great Heliosphere . . . and into the Valor Novus, its floor strewn with bodies.

  The great windows showed the Chrysanthemum, reflecting the eerie light we cold not see from this angle. These docked vessels, afflicted by Resolvent Mist and not malignant space, appeared like loosely hewn limbs jostling back and forth against the background of light and emptiness where there had been so many lives just minutes ago.

  On the floor—bodies. So many dead. And kneeling amid them, a subdued and silent Alectar von Pasus.

  “You didn’t get far,” Tyrus remarked. “Did it dawn on you at last that you did exactly this on Lumina to billions of people? Far more than my number today.”

  “What do you mean to do to me?” said Pasus hoarsely. “Torture me? Cast me into a black hole? Oh, I am sure that’s your intent. You must’ve been anticipating this for ages.”

  “Once, imagining this was my foremost pleasure,” Tyrus admitted. “I fantasized about repaying degradation for degradation, and making you wish for death before I gave it to you. . . . But we are long past that, are we not? Dear Alectar, in the grand scheme of things, you’ve done me more good than harm. I have enjoyed years of total impunity. The Venalox ensured I could pin all my misdeeds on you. Even this day’s calamity, I’ll conceal behind my trusty human shield. The surviving Grandiloquy will be told this was you. All the data will show you financed it. And I will escape unscathed from a day when I’ve obliterated the entirety of my political opposition. This is our hour of victory! Look to the window. I wish to reward you.”

  The proud Senator von Pasus seemed a broken and defeated man. He obeyed—and looked.

  There was an event called the Awakening, spoken of in hushed voices. It was the moment the Chrysanthemum responded to its new master, and now I saw it. All those loosely joined starships began to contract like a muscle. Lights long gone dim flared to brilliant vibrancy again. Machines that had been drifting languidly through the void for several years abruptly snapped to alertness, powering up, aiming gun barrels in tandem. Flashes of metal and light swarmed our view, and the configuration of starships—so jumbled—began to take form into that organized Chrysanthemum shape once more.

  “You saw my uncle do this and it altered the course of your life,” Tyrus said. “It’s only fitting you die with it fresh in your mind.”

  Pasus looked at his Emperor’s back, a presentiment of doom twisting his features, and a moment later a security bot whipped down from the wall and fired a single, perfunctory slash of light at him.

  A disgraceful, unceremonious end to a man who wished to be a legend.

  And Tyru
s, his executioner, did not bother to watch.

  Instead he gazed at me with a warm, dancing anticipation. “I have something for you, Nemesis. I’ve longed to give this to you for years—and now it is yours. Look there.” He nodded . . . at one of the bodies.

  When I didn’t move, he stepped over to the young boy, moved his head with his boot. “See?” At my blank face, “A Servitor.”

  “You’re giving me a dead Servitor?” I managed.

  “All the dead Servitors.” He smiled broadly. “Look about us, my love. You will not find a single living, breathing Servitor in the Chrysanthemum, and the vast majority in the Empire were here—or on those ships. Consider them banned.” He tapped his finger to his temple. “I remembered.”

  It was the most ghastly offering I could have received.

  “Oh, Tyrus” was all that escaped me.

  Swept up in the moment, he missed my expression, my tone. Instead, he gave a flick of his hand, and the humming of the neural suppressor snapped off. The resurgence of strength to my body did not reassure me. . . . It merely emphasized the total power he’d just gained over me.

  Over everyone.

  He stepped over the bodies of his victims and approached the window so he could gaze out upon his work. The superstructure about us began to retreat more swiftly from the terrible threat of malignant space as it devoured its way through the six-star system, tearing at a second star now.

  The hypergiant Hephaestus. The very star that burned through the Great Heliosphere and propelled us into the hardships that followed.

  And soon it would be destroyed as well.

  46

  “ENOUGH.”

  Keening. Sobbing. The whimpered words, “Monstrous . . . It’s monstrous . . .”

  “Yes, yes. Now stop.”

  My eyes were closed. I forced them to open and Tyrus was sitting on his throne, and around him, immediately filling their roles—like cockroaches reproducing their numbers at once—were the new men and women. Those spared. Those to be elevated. Sly, calculating, greedy, or too debauched to care that the Emperor had just killed their predecessors to make way for them. Most had known beforehand it was coming; I could tell with a glance. All pretended to believe Pasus had done this. As they’d trickled in, they began eagerly discussing the territories they expected to receive.