The Collapsing Empire

by John Scalzi

  “So you think it was hijacked.”

  “Yes. I think it was hacked into somehow and then either autopiloted or remotely piloted to the Sing Out.”

  “Did you tell that to the Imperial Guard?”

  “They didn’t ask, and I decided I’d let them figure it out. They just came onto the ship, downloaded everything they could, and set up shop in one of the cargo holds. They’re still there. They questioned me and the senior staff, but that was hours ago. We’re not allowed to leave. I don’t know what they’re up to right now.”

  “There was no one else on the shuttle except Xi?”

  “No.”

  “What about before? She piloted the shuttle to Imperial Station, yes? Was anyone with her then?”

  “Hold on,” Blinnikka said. Kiva waited, and while she waited, decided that she really did need a shower; she and Sergeant Pitof had been pretty exuberant. She stripped down, put her tablet into speaker mode, and got into the shower.

  “There were a couple of passengers,” Blinnikka said when he came back on. “Three, actually. A husband and wife named Lewyyn, and a man named Broshning. They were departing the Yes, Sir for good.”

  “Do we know where they were going?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “But someone does, yes? Isn’t there some way to find out?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a captain, not a private investigator.”

  “Ask Gazson Magnut. If they had cargo in the holds that they didn’t take on the shuttle with them they would have to arrange to have it sent somewhere.”

  “We just offload it. Imperial Station handles it from there.”

  “Then have someone ask them.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “We’ve got the fucking Imperial Guard thinking we are trying to assassinate the emperox,” Kiva said. “I think we can make a little effort.”

  Blinnikka was quiet for a moment. “Do you have me on speaker?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I thought you said you were trying to avoid being heard.”

  “I decided I needed an actual shower more.”

  “I wish I didn’t know that.”

  “Find those people for me. Tell me where they are.”

  “No promises.”

  “Then I guess I’ll see you in prison.”

  Kiva heard Blinnikka sigh. “I’m not calling you back. I’m afraid of what you’ll be doing when you pick up. I’ll send you a message.”

  “Encrypted.”

  “Obviously,” Blinnikka said, and disconnected.

  Kiva finished cleaning up, turned off the shower, toweled off, and opened the door to find Sergeant Pitof directly on the other side.

  “You know there’s an easier way to find those people,” Pitof said.

  “You fucking listened at the door?” Kiva said, incredulous.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Most of what was said after you turned on the speaker.”

  “You’re unbelievable.”

  “Just because we had sex doesn’t mean I stop doing my job, Lady Kiva.”

  Kiva opened her mouth and then closed it. “I have no good response to that,” she said, finally. “Now tell me what you mean about there being an easier way to find these people.”

  “Everyone who arrives at any imperial station for permanent immigration has to let customs know where they are staying. Immigration needs to keep track of them until they are cleared for permanent residency.”

  “So customs knows where they are.”

  “Probably.”

  “Sometimes people lie about where they are going.”

  Pitof shook her head. “You have to present your hotel reservation or the name and address of the people with whom you are staying before you leave customs, and check in once you arrive.”

  “And then you walk out the door and are never heard from again.”

  “At the very least you’ll be one step closer to finding them than you are at the moment.”

  “So how do I talk to customs?”

  “You don’t. I do.”

  “Why would you help me?”

  “There’s no reason I couldn’t help you. Just as long as you know that I’m going to report everything I do for you to my boss.”

  Kiva arched an eyebrow. “Probably not everything.”

  “No, I’ll report the sex too.”

  This gave Kiva pause. “Isn’t it actually unethical to fuck the person you’re trailing?”

  Sergeant Pitof shrugged. “I was told to keep you close.”

  Kiva laughed at this. “I think I like you, Sergeant Pitof. You’re my kind of asshole.”

  “Thank you, Lady Kiva. Now tell me those names again. I couldn’t really make them out over the sound of your showering.”

  * * *

  Taffyd and Chun Lewyyn were staying on Imperial Station, at a moderately priced hotel called the Primrose. That was no good for Kiva; she was stuck on Hub. She’d deal with them later. She was waiting for information on Geork Broshning when she heard a crash and then screaming in the hotel lobby. Kiva reached into the closet for a robe and then opened the door and looked down three floors into the hotel atrium, and the crumpled body there, looking up at the ceiling of the hotel, sixteen stories up.

  “Found him,” Sergeant Pitof said, from the room. She put on the other robe and walked out into the walkway to show Kiva the information on the tablet, which included a picture of Broshning.

  Kiva looked at it. “Pretty sure I just found him too,” she said, and pointed to the body on the atrium floor, surrounded now by people, and which had now begun to leak. Then she noticed something else and started walking down the hallway in her robe, toward the elevators. Pitof followed.

  On the lobby floor, Kiva walked into the atrium, past the dead body and the scrum of people around it, and over to one of the planters there, stuffed with attractive artificial plants. In the planter was a keycard, nestled into the leaves of a large, fake succulent. Kiva snatched it up, walked again past the dead man and his admirers, and headed over to reception, where she got the attention of a very shaken-looking hotel assistant manager.

  “Would you be a dear and ping Geork Broshning for me? He’s expecting me but I’ve forgotten his room number.”

  “Yes … of course,” said the hotel assistant manager, activating his screen to search for the name, and then swiping over to a communication panel to punch in the room code. “No response, ma’am,” he said, after a minute.

  “I don’t suppose you could just tell me the room number?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m not allowed to do that.”

  “Of course,” Kiva said, and then turned just as Pitof walked up to her. Kiva walked straight past her minder and back onto the elevator, pressing the button for the twelfth floor as Pitof walked on. Pitof noted the floor but didn’t say anything.

  On the twelfth floor Kiva got off, walked to room 1245, the number she had seen the assistant manager punch into his screen, and pressed the card to the door. It unlocked.

  “You probably shouldn’t follow me in here,” she said to Pitof. “You might be accused of tampering with the evidence. In a bathrobe.”

  “Shut up and open the door,” Pitof said. Kiva shrugged and went in.

  The bed in the room was rumpled but the sheets were not pulled back; someone had lain on the bed but maybe hadn’t slept in it. Otherwise the room was neat with suitcases and other effects unpacked. Kiva looked to the desk and found a notepad and a pen there, with letters on the sheet on the top of the notepad. She went over to the desk and without touching it read the words, written in a tight, small script.

  I grew maize and banu on End, it said. The banu died because of a fungus. They say citrus caused it but I think it was from the maize. It failed too. I lost everything and then the war forced me out. I tried to leave but I couldn’t afford it. Then Ghreni Nohamapetan asked to see me. Told me he’d pay my way. Said he felt responsibl
e for what happened to my banu. Said I had been a good franchisee.

  He said when I arrived at Hub to contact a customs official named Che Isolt who would tell me what to do from there. Isolt came onto the ship and gave me a transmitter box. Told me to leave it on the shuttle when I departed. I did. Then when I came to the hotel I turned on the monitor and found out what happened to the shuttle.

  I know they’ll figure out how it happened. I know they’ll find me. I know no one will believe me. I’ve already lost so much and have been played for a fool. I thought I might have a chance for a new life on Hub. I was wrong.

  Sorry for the mess.

  “Motherfucking Nohamapetans,” Kiva said, and turned to Pitof. “Do you have your tablet?” Pitof held it up. “Call your boss.”

  “What do you want me to tell him?”

  “Tell him I found something that gets me and my house off the goddamn hook.”

  “He’s not going to be convinced by a suicide note,” Pitof said.

  “It’s not just a suicide note,” Kiva said.

  “It’s still going to take some time.”

  Kiva nodded. “Yeah. When you’re done, let me use your tablet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to call my captain and tell him to stop looking for Broshning. And then I’m going to call someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone I’m pretty sure can speed up the process of getting my house off the hook a whole fucking lot.”

  Chapter

  18

  The imperial guard pushed the door open and Marce Claremont walked into the ornate and cavernous room where the executive committee was having its first meeting of the morning. Marce sported a folder and eyes as large as plates as he took in the baroque design of the immense room and realized that no matter how long he stayed at the imperial palace he would probably never get used to its ridiculous sumptuousness. It was, in a word, excessive.

  He reached the table where the executive committee sat, save the emperox, who was still recovering from her assassination attempt. The member at the head of the table, the one Grayland II told him would be Archbishop Korbijn, essayed him quietly. Marce bowed to her and briefly scanned the table for the other person he was looking for, Nadashe Nohamapetan. He’d never seen her before but he recognized her quickly enough—younger than any other member of the executive committee, and bearing a strong family resemblance to her brother Ghreni. She looked back at him, neutral, as she should have, because she had no idea who he was, or what he represented.

  “You’re new,” Archbishop Korbijn said, to him.

  Marce nodded. “Yes, Your Grace. I am Marce Claremont, the emperox’s new assistant for science policy. I was hired just yesterday on my arrival from End.”

  This got Nadashe’s attention, but she hid it well; if Marce hadn’t been directly looking for a reaction, he would have missed it.

  Korbijn smiled and acknowledged the committee. “This might be a lot for your second day.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. It’s a lot. More than you know.”

  “I understand you have an update for us on the emperox’s condition,” Korbijn said.

  “I do, and I have another piece of business that the emperox wished me to present to the committee, if you will indulge her wishes.”

  “Of course.”

  “The emperox’s condition is improving,” Marce said. “She’s still suffering from the effects of cold and hypoxia from being trapped in that leaking tenner spoke, but fortunately her guards—or what remained of them—were able to retrieve her before she suffered any genuinely life-threatening injuries. She was lucky. Luckier than the five guards who were lost protecting her, and the four guards who were lost trying to rescue Lord Amit Nohamapetan.” He turned and nodded to Nadashe. “My condolences, Lady Nadashe, for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Of course.” Marce turned back to Korbijn. “Dr. Drinin has told her that he wants to keep her on bed rest and observation for a few more days, to let her body heal further, and suggested to her that this executive committee be allowed to handle any issues that come up. I believe he was hinting to her that this committee should take on the parliamentary authorization of force against End and its rebels.”

  “What did the emperox say to this?” Korbijn asked.

  “She said that absent her presence, the committee may act in her stead to implement the authorization—”

  “No time like the present,” said Upeksha Ranatunga, who in parliament had voted to send the troopship Prophecies of Rachela to End.

  “—but only after I presented this committee with the second piece of information she wished to share with you.”

  “And what is that?” Korbijn asked.

  “This,” Marce said, and opened the folder he was carrying, which contained nine printed documents, each containing a substantial number of pages, stapled together. He began distributing the reports to the committee members.

  “What is this?” Ranatunga asked.

  “It’s an early draft of a scientific paper my father received several years ago, from a doctoral candidate named Hatide Roynold. She’d sent it to him because, although my father was the imperial auditor on End, he was there performing another task given to him by Emperox Attavio VI. My father was a Flow physicist, as I am, and the late emperox had him collecting data on the health of the Flow streams inside the Interdependency. Attavio VI was concerned, despite the best assurances of nearly all reputable Flow physicists, that these critical trade routes might collapse.”

  “And will they?” Ranatunga asked.

  “It’s happened before,” Marce said. “Most obviously we lost the Flow stream to Earth, our ancestral home, more than a millennium ago. Another stream collapse, involving the Dalasýsla system, happened a couple hundred years later. However, since then, the Flow streams have been remarkably stable, a fact which has allowed the Interdependency to thrive and prosper.”

  Korbijn shook the report, which she was not bothering to flip through at the moment; others on the committee had also set them down; Nadashe Nohamapetan had put hers down to make some notation on her tablet. “Does this paper suggest the Flow streams are collapsing?”

  “No,” Marce said. “The paper actually proposed that the streams are likely to undergo a radical shift, rearranging themselves over the course of a very few years. Most of the Flow streams that we have now will go away, but they’ll be replaced by emerging ones that will allow trade in the Interdependency to continue—but with End the nexus of the new Flow stream network, not Hub.”

  “Is that accurate?” Korbijn asked.

  “That’s what Roynold wanted to know, which is why she sent the draft to my father, who had written an earlier paper along the same lines, the findings of which he discussed with Attavio VI, with whom he shared a friendship. It was by Attavio’s request that he stopped publicly researching the topic, but the early paper was still out there. Roynold supposed that he was the only person who would take her seriously on the topic.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Nothing; he was researching privately for the emperox. The only person I think he ever shared the draft with was me, because I was working with him on his research. And publicly, at least, Hatide Roynold stopped researching on this topic. Her doctorate addresses another vector of research entirely. But the imperial guards have just spoken to her overnight. It turns out that like my father, Roynold had a private patron who allowed her to continue her research on the topic of the Flow streams shifting. Nadashe Nohamapetan.”

  All eyes turned to Nadashe, who smiled. “I knew this was coming,” she said, and addressed Korbijn directly. “Hatide is a friend of mine from university. She came to me in financial straits and wouldn’t take charity. So I funded her research on this topic instead. I gave her a stipend to finish this and her other work, and she gave quarterly updates. Which I never read because that was never the point.”

  “I’m sorry, Lad
y Nohamapetan, but there is reason to believe otherwise,” Marce said.

  Nadashe turned to Marce and would have glared a hole in his chest if she could. “And what reason is that, Mr. Claremont?”

  “It’s Lord Claremont, Lady Nadashe,” Marce said. “And because your brother suggested otherwise.”

  “To whom?”

  “To us,” said Emperox Grayland II, from the doorway. Everyone stood, except for Marce, who was already standing. He smiled at Grayland’s sudden appearance. They had not planned it when they had spoken earlier, but he could tell she had been agitated when he came to her and disclosed what Kiva Lagos had told him, along with his own personal information. When the emperox told him the things she knew, everything, appallingly, fell together. After she had made calls to follow up on loose ends, the two of them planned this presentation, which Marce was to deliver.

  But she also made him wear a microphone so she could hear the entire exchange, which is why she had a response to Nadashe Nohamapetan when she was too far away to possibly have heard what she was saying as she walked through the door. Marce had to admit it made for a nice psychological effect.

  Grayland walked slowly to the table and waved at everyone to sit. Archbishop Korbijn moved to sit elsewhere besides the head of the table, but Grayland signaled she should stay where she was. She reached Marce and leaned on him instead.

  “Your brother, Lady Nadashe, revealed to us that your family knew about Dr. Roynold’s work,” Grayland said. “He told us that just before he died, torn apart by that shuttle that crashed into your new tenner. We didn’t know what he meant at the time. But then we had a conversation with Lord Claremont here, and he knew what your brother was talking about, because he’d seen her early work. He knew what it said, and he also knew it was wrong.”

  “It is wrong,” Marce agreed. “The math was sloppy. I haven’t seen her latest work yet, but if she’s still suggesting a Flow shift, then she never corrected her initial errors.”