How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse--Book One of the Thorne Chronicles
Page 38
And so:
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• • •
In the chaos that followed Rory’s wedding—an ultimately failed pursuit of the Regent, which involved two days and through each level of Urse, several stolen weapons, one firefight, and a civilian casualty (an amateur journalist attempting to acquire exclusive footage)—it was noticed that a Tadeshi military shuttle was missing. It had been the Prince Ivar’s vessel, scheduled to depart after the coronation, and so it was fueled and waiting, unattended, in a secure bay.
There should have been extra security assigned to it, but with the Regent and Merrick at large on the station, and the first disturbances of what would become a civil war, there was no extra security. The local station security forces had taken sides, and were either engaged in pursuit of the Regent, or conducting internal investigations to root out traitors. It would be poetic, perhaps, to say that no one at all noticed a small party of dockworkers (who of course were not dockworkers at all) moving cargo through the secure sections of the aetherport while the station ran to riot. It would also be untrue. People noticed, and made reports; Rory and Jaed were somewhat distinctive, even when wearing a dockworker’s canvas coveralls, which are designed to make observers dismiss their wearers as the help. But there were simply not sufficient personnel available to investigate in a timely manner. When security finally arrived, the dockworkers had penetrated the military half of the aetherport using codes fabricated from at least three Ministers’ pass-strings, and the shuttle had disappeared.
It was at that point that the Ministers realized that Rory Thorne was also missing (the Consortium embassy having filed no such report), as were her body-maids and Jaed Moss (whom the Lanscottar had also not reported as missing, having, as the saying goes on Lanscot, better sheep to steal). It was presumed that the Ivar clone had accompanied them.
Ivar’s loss was a worry, but as everyone knew a clone’s lifespan is measured in days, the urgency to recover him faded after the first month. Since, by all accounts, the monarch of the Free Worlds had died years ago on Beo, the recovery of a clone was not important except as evidence in the Regent’s trial, and the files themselves were sufficiently damning.
Unfortunately, to hold a trial, one needs the accused, and although Merrick Moss was recaptured while trying to crawl into a maintenance shaft, Vernor Moss managed to escape. He resurfaced clutching a distant Valenko cousin some months later, exchanged the title of Regent for the neologistic Primarch, and promptly launched an attempt to weld the fractured Free Worlds of Tadesh back together. It was noted by people less immediately involved in the conflict that primarch seemed to be functionally equivalent to monarch, and that the distant Valenko cousin was at best a puppet, and at worst a fiction, and in either case, Vernor Moss had not altered his ambitions of sovereignty.
Unluckily for those ambitions, the unrest begun on Urse had spread during the intervening months throughout the Free Worlds. Local governments were finding themselves challenged, and in some of the more extreme cases their members were escorted out of aetherlocks without hardsuits. Dame Maggie of Lanscot, feeling (correctly) some responsibility for the violence, collected the secessionists into the Confederation of Liberated Worlds, aptly (and unimaginatively) named after all the colonies, stations, and planetoids who shared Lanscot’s discontent and desired some measure of political freedom. Although they represented the majority of the former Free Worlds of Tadesh, they were not perhaps the wealthiest or best equipped of those worlds. The wealthiest saw nothing wrong with the monarchy, as they benefited most from it, and chose to remain with the loyalists.
Dame Maggie named Lanscot as the Confederation’s capital and set about attempting to organize her far-flung constituents into some kind of functioning organization, a task akin to herding cats or trying to schedule an interdepartmental meeting of academics. Her eventual success was brought about in part because when Vernor Moss resurfaced at the head of the royalist faction, he did so with the majority of the Tadeshi navy intact. He proclaimed his intent to reunify the Free Worlds by firing on a Confederation station and seizing control, at which point the recalcitrant Confederation members set aside their differences and started cobbling together a navy of their own.
And so a very uncivil war began and, as such wars tend to do, soon spilled beyond its own borders. The remaining monarchies collapsed with varying degrees of alacrity and violence, including the Thorne Consortium, though the Regent-Consort’s deft political maneuvers delayed that inevitability until Jacen’s ascension. The independent pan-galactic corporations in the Merchants League, including Johnson-Thrymbe, survived the upheaval without significant bloodshed. The Tadeshi civil war inspired the creation of no fewer than seven separate, inter-company workers’ unions; rather than disrupt their war-profiteering, the various CEOs and presidents together entered into negotiations with their workers, prompting the philosopher-economist Rand Pin-Ko to write his treatise on anarcho-syndicalists, war, and economic justice, which sparked a further series of wars (this time, thankfully within academia, and thus mostly bloodless) that would last almost a hundred years.
And then, as is well documented elsewhere, the League encountered both the alwar Harek Empire and the tenju merchant clans, raising the number of known xenos to four. Humanity had little time to marvel at how crowded the multiverse was, however. Shortly after meeting the Harek Empire and the tenju clans, the vakari Protectorate and their Expansion—a pretty way of saying a war that walked on the twin legs of conquest and religious fanaticism—reached human space.
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• • •
Perhaps we can declare Rory Thorne’s story finished: for having set off the chain of events which destroyed the multiverse, surely the Princess of Thorne has earned a bit of privacy. The official record aids us in this endeavor, for it shows that shortly after her departure from Urse, the Princess renounced her title. Thus we may say with honesty that Rory, Princess of Thorne, literally disappears from the records.
We might imagine that, having managed their escape, everyone settled on Kreshti, where Rory became a successful musician and tutor of arithmancy, while Ivar took up raising fancy koi. Perhaps Zhang became a bush pilot, Thorsdottir a local constable, and Jaed a horticulturalist, raising Kreshti ferns for export. Or perhaps everyone emigrated to Lanscot instead, having earned the regard of the Confederation (and the Consortium being somewhat uncomfortable for a former princess), and so lived their lives in happy obscurity.
But because we pursue accuracy here, rather than seeking comfort (we leave those sorts of accounts to popular entertainments that are inspired by true events), we must note that Rory, Jaed, Thorsdottir, and Zhang did not settle on either Kreshti or Lanscot, to which they were invited (nor, in fact, anywhere else). The four of them elected to remain in their stolen vessel, christened it Vagabond, and struck out for the unaffiliated human settlements on the edge of the k’bal Verge, where they turned to a life of salvaging, privateering, or piracy, depending on one’s perspective. The Vizier, Grytt, and Ivar did settle on Lanscot, where they took up farming sheep and attempted to retire from public life.
They all failed.
But that is another story.
About the Author
K. Eason is a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, where she and her composition students tackle important topics such as the zombie apocalypse, the humanity of cyborgs, and whether or not Beowulf is a good guy. Her previous publications include the On the Bones of Gods fantasy series with 47North, and she has had short fiction published in Cabinet-des-Fées, Jabberwocky 4, Crossed Genres, and Kaleidotrope.
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oyed the Multiverse--Book One of the Thorne Chronicles