The Last Emperox

by John Scalzi

  Evanescent.

  “Holy shit,” Marce said, out loud.

  “Mnungh,” Cardenia repeated.

  Marce didn’t hear it. He was on his way out the door, moving toward his office to start work.

  And then quickly back in the door, after seeing the shocked expression of the imperial bodyguard outside the emperox’s bedroom. Marce had been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he forgot he was naked. He grabbed a robe and was back out the door, equations—real ones, without squiggles—dancing in his head.

  Chapter 10

  Kiva was expecting to have another confrontation with the House of Wolfe. She wasn’t expecting it to happen while she was having her fucking dinner.

  And not just dinner, but an actual date dinner with Senia, because the two of them were trying out that whole relationship thing, and Kiva was aware that there was more to actual relationships than just banging each other senseless until sheets were soaked and fingers were wrinkled. So here they were at Zest, the finest Ikoyian restaurant on Hub (which wasn’t saying much, since there were only three and the other two were market stalls selling street food), and Kiva was acquainting Senia with the food of her system. Ikoyian food was unsurprisingly heavy on citrus flavors, given the Lagos family monopoly, but also allegedly hearkened back to West Africa, wherever the fuck that was, where the Lagos family claimed to originally hail from.

  Kiva was not 100 percent there for the official lineage of Ikoyian food—it was difficult to maintain that the quenchfruit-marinated suya was authentic to anything back on Earth when the quenchfruit had been genetically engineered right around the same time Kiva was born—but it didn’t really matter because it was still Kiva’s native cuisine, and Senia hadn’t ever really had any of that before. Kiva was enjoying explaining moi moi and pepper soup and marmalade dogs to her, and Senia was enjoying having it explained. Kiva believed they were both looking forward to the post-dinner digestif of several unique and piquant orgasms when she noticed a pair of people looming over her and Senia’s table.

  “You I recognize,” Kiva said, looking up at Bagin Heuvel. She turned slightly to the other man. “I don’t know who the fuck you are.”

  Heuvel motioned to the other man. “Lady Kiva, allow me to introduce my employer, Drusin Wolfe.”

  Wolfe bowed slightly. “Lady Kiva. Delightful to finally meet you.”

  “We were just finishing up our meal and saw the two of you and thought to say hello,” Heuvel said.

  “Did you.” Kiva looked to Drusin Wolfe. “And what did you have?”

  “I had the jollof rice, of course, Lady Kiva. I understand it’s not exactly the adventurous choice, and sort of banal, but we all like what we like, and I like that.”

  “Well, good for you. Well, you’ve said hello. Goodbye.” Kiva went back to her menu.

  But Heuvel and Wolfe would not fucking budge. “Bagin told me your response to our request for renegotiation with regard to the Nohamapetan contracts.”

  Kiva glanced back up. “Yeah? So?”

  “I was hoping that you might reconsider your position.”

  Kiva sighed and set her menu down. “Really? You’re going to try this now? I’m at fucking dinner.”

  “With your legal counsel.” Wolfe nodded at Senia. “We’re all here, Lady Kiva.”

  “Fine. First off, it wasn’t a fucking request, and you know it. You tried to dictate terms. Second, I already gave your man my answer, and it hasn’t changed. Third, fuck off, I’m off the clock, and so is she.” Kiva pointed to Senia.

  Wolfe chucked. “Well, you don’t disappoint, Lady Kiva,” he said. “You are as Bagin advertised you. Profane and immovable.”

  “I’m not exactly a puzzle.”

  “No, you don’t appear so,” Wolfe agreed. “But it’s amusing that you think you’re off the clock right now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Except, of course, how much time do you think you have? That any of us have, Lady Kiva. The clock you’re not on measures time, and time is running out. For some of us more than others. And even in that short time, there is time enough for the mighty to fall. Or those who think they are mighty, in any event.”

  “Drusin,” Heuvel said.

  Wolfe raised a hand placatingly at his employee. “I’m done. I just want the lady to remember that I did offer her a chance, in good faith, to work with me. With us. She had her chance, and she passed on it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kiva said. “Okay, great, thanks. Now, if you’re done with your community-theater-villain monologue, fuck off and take your pissboy with you.”

  “Of course.” Wolfe bowed again. “Lady Kiva, Ms. Fundapellonan. Enjoy your dinner.” He walked off. Heuvel looked at Kiva and Senia, opened his mouth to say something, closed it, and then hurried off after his employer. Kiva and Senia went back to their menus.

  “What was that about,” Senia said, after a moment of looking at the daily specials.

  “No idea,” Kiva said, studying the starters.

  “Drusin Wolfe was very dramatic there.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Especially the bit about ticking clocks.”

  “Yes.”

  “If I didn’t know better I’d say that it sounded a little bit like a threat.”

  “Or gloating.”

  “Which would explain Heuvel hinting at him to shut up,” Senia observed.

  “It would,” agreed Kiva.

  “And suggests something maybe we should look into.”

  “Sooner than later.”

  “Are you still hungry?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Then should we go try to figure this out?”

  “Well, I’m not hungry anymore. I might still be in the mood for what we had planned afterwards.”

  “Fine,” Senia said. “No to food, yes to sex, then we figure this out.”

  “Done,” Kiva said. They both put down their menus, Kiva laid out marks for their drinks, and they stood up to go.

  “You know what the worst fucking part of that was,” Kiva said as they headed to the door.

  “What?”

  “Motherfucker ran down jollof rice. It’s not fucking banal. I was going to order that.”

  * * *

  “I think we have a problem,” Kiva said, to Grayland II, four days later. Kiva had asked for an audience with the emperox the day before; she was granted five minutes, which she was given while the emperox was walking from one meeting to another. Kiva got it; the emperox was a busy woman. “More accurately, I think you have a problem.”

  “Me having problems is the base state of my reign, Lady Kiva,” Grayland said, setting a brisk pace as she moved from one room of her palace to the next. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  Kiva nodded and handed the emperox a sheaf of documents, which the emperox immediately handed to her assistant. “A few days ago Drusin Wolfe came over to me and Senia Fundapellonan while we were having dinner, and monologued at me.”

  “He what?”

  “Monologued. You know, ‘Soon you will experience your doom, bwa ha ha ha,’ that sort of shit.”

  “I didn’t know people did that in real life.”

  “I don’t think he knew he was doing it, although his flunky sure did. He had to pull him away.”

  “And how does this monologue involve me?”

  “I didn’t think it did at first,” Kiva said. “I had stuffed his flunky pretty hard in a negotiation, and I thought that he was just announcing his plans to fire off a legal salvo against me and the House of Nohamapetan. Senia and I went back to check for filings we might not have been aware of, or other activity that would suggest action against us. We didn’t find any.” Kiva pointed to the sheaf of documents Grayland’s assistant was holding. “But we found something else. A few days before his monologue, Drusin Wolfe withdrew something like twenty million marks out of his personal brokerage accounts.”

  Grayland glanced over at Kiva for this. “And you have acce
ss to Wolfe’s personal brokerage accounts how?”

  Kiva smirked. “I spent months tracking down every single off-book account the Nohamapetan family had, Your Majesty. I know my way around a financial investigation.”

  “And how to offer some well-placed bribes, I imagine.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Kiva said, and Grayland smiled thinly. “But I’m not planning to offer any evidence in court or any such thing. The information is reliable in any event.”

  “Nobles are frequently moving wealth from one place to another, Lady Kiva,” Grayland said. “And when moving it from one account to another, much of it seems to disappear entirely. I daresay an honest audit of any house’s principals would find more of their money off the books than on it, the House of Lagos not excepted. Marks falling down a hole is simply business as usual.”

  “It’s not that the money disappeared,” Kiva said. “It’s that right around the same time Drusin Wolfe withdrew his twenty million marks, a couple dozen other nobles did the same thing, in pretty much the same amounts.”

  Grayland stopped walking, causing a rippling halt among her retinue. “How many?”

  “My source noted twenty-six individual withdrawals, all in the same time frame, all in the same amounts—or withdrawals spread across multiple accounts totaling around twenty million marks. There are probably others; my source could only track these.”

  “And you trust this source.”

  “I trust that he appreciates having his gambling debts paid off. And that he knows if he crosses me, I’ll push him in front of a fucking bus. So, yes. There’s something else, too.”

  “What is it?” Grayland started walking again.

  “All of the nobles who withdrew the marks were present at a sales meeting hosted by the House of Wu. Ostensibly they were being pitched a new generation of tenner.”

  Grayland grimaced but didn’t stop walking. “So they could say they were putting down deposits.”

  “Yeah, but the ‘deposits’ are all from personal accounts, not house business accounts,” Kiva said. “Tenners are huge and designed to last a decade in space without docking. It’s unlikely they’re going to be used for pleasure craft.”

  “The Flow collapse is coming,” Grayland pointed out. “Maybe they’re hedging.”

  “And even if they were, tenners start at a billion marks,” Kiva replied. “House of Wu demands ten percent on deposit, nonnegotiable. Your family doesn’t offer discounts, ma’am. Twenty million marks isn’t even on the table for a deposit. Someone offering that for a tenner down payment would get laughed out of the room.”

  “So it’s something else.”

  Kiva nodded. “It’s something else, and whatever it is, the House of Wu is in on it.”

  “I’m still not seeing how this involves me, Lady Kiva,” Grayland said. She made the turn down the final hall that would take her to her destination.

  “Maybe it doesn’t,” Kiva admitted. “But when Drusin Wolfe was monologuing at me he was clearly expecting a comeuppance for me, one way or another. Well, neither he nor his house are coming for me directly, or are trying to sue the House of Nohamapetan. It has to be something else. It’s known you favor me, ma’am. You gave me a seat on the executive committee—a seat I’ll remind you I didn’t fucking want—and I was standing next to you when you arrested half of the nobles in local space.”

  “Not so many as that.”

  “Enough of them, ma’am,” Kiva said. “Now a whole bunch of nobles are throwing money down a hole, and a lot of them are from houses that have family members sitting in jail waiting for their trials for treason—the House of Wu among them. And of course, fucking Nadashe Nohamapetan is still out there somewhere, doing what she does. She’s got some money but not a lot, relatively speaking, and can’t access any more directly. She’s got to get it from somewhere. So I’m thinking that when Wolfe was being smug at me, he wasn’t thinking about coming for me directly. He knows I’ll crush him if he does. He’s thinking that when you go down, I’m going to be collateral damage.”

  Grayland stopped in front of the arch of a doorway. Inside it was the Hubfall football team, which had won its league championship and would now be feted by the emperox for all of seven and a half minutes before she had to go on to something else again. Grayland was only about a third of the way through her day; and Kiva, who by now had some appreciation for the emperox’s schedule, was (uncharacteristically) quietly amazed at the fact that despite all the evidence that civilization was indeed collapsing around them at an increasing rate, so much of Grayland’s schedule was tied up in trivia like, say, congratulating a fucking sports team for being better at playing with their balls than anyone else.

  “You think Nadashe Nohamapetan has something to do with this money disappearing act,” Grayland said to Kiva.

  “Yeah, I do. She hates your guts. And you’ve made every house and guild fear you. That’s the sort of thing she’ll capitalize on.”

  “To do what?”

  “Well, ma’am. Another coup. ‘If at first you don’t succeed’ and all that.”

  Grayland nodded to the sheaf of documents her assistant held. “I could have these nobles investigated.”

  Kiva shook her head. “The second that happens, they’ll be on to you. There are too many people willing to sell you out on something like this. It’ll leak almost faster than you can order it. The nobles will cover their tracks, the marks will magically reappear in legitimate business accounts, and Nadashe, if she is behind this, will become that much harder to find.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Kiva nodded toward the documents. “My source pointed out all those nobles making withdrawals at the same time. But he also pointed out that since that event, there have been a few more withdrawals by nobles, in the same amounts.”

  “Whatever they’re doing, they’re recruiting.”

  “Right,” Kiva said. “Bringing in more disgruntled houses and nobles to their little plan.”

  “All right,” Grayland said. “And?”

  Kiva smiled. “Your Majesty, I think you and I should have a major fucking blowup.”

  Chapter 11

  Seven and a half minutes congratulating the Hubfall Dragons for their championship win over the Essex Fire, which included graciously receiving a game ball as a gift (which would—after a short, apparently magic-imbuing time in Grayland’s possession—be returned to the Dragons “on loan from the emperox” for display at their team headquarters) and ruefully noting the woeful placing of the Xi’an Shipwrights, the imperial football team, in that year’s standings.

  After that, an hour of ten-minute meetings with various infrastructure department heads for the physical well-being of Xi’an itself, the imperial space habitat that the emperox and many thousands of others lived on. Xi’an was the jewel of space living, and was also one of the oldest space habitats still extant, which made it idiosyncratic and finicky in a manner more modern habitats no longer were.

  For (just one) example, the circulation system of the Xi’an habitat was such that (the emperox learned) a specific series of routine maintenance steps, if performed out of sequence, could purge the air out of Xi’an Cathedral, directly into space. Apparently some engineer lost to time thought that purging the air would be a smart way to quell any fire that might happen there without exposing the interior of the cathedral to water or fire-retardant damage.

  A single line of code in the Xi’an habitat’s maintenance programming kept the cathedral from ever suddenly going oxygen-free—but that line of code had been recently expunged in a system update. For three months, then, nothing had kept human inefficiency from suddenly asphyxiating Archbishop Korbijn and hundreds of celebrants during morning services. Grayland allowed this would not be an optimal outcome, either for the church or its faithful congregation, and was relieved to hear this issue, at least, had been resolved.

  Twenty minutes receiving an update from a Commander Wen, Admiral Hurnen’s aide-de-camp,
about the status of the End Armada, as Grayland had taken to thinking of it in her head, although she was led to understand it would actually be a “task force,” which Grayland did not feel sounded as awesome.

  The initial estimates were not encouraging—the number of capital ships available for reassignment that could be tasked to the Ikoyi system in time was not large, nor was the number of support ships. Commander Wen assured Grayland this was merely an initial assessment and that further investigation was likely to swell the numbers. Grayland reminded Commander Wen of the time pressures involved. Neither participant walked away entirely pleased with the meeting.

  Five minutes for a break, which Grayland mostly spent in the toilet. If someone had informed Cardenia Wu-Patrick early on that one of the most valuable skills an emperox could cultivate was the ability to clamp down on their excretory functions for hours at a time, she might have passed on the gig. Cardenia had read somewhere that prisoners got so used to the regimented schedule of incarcerated life that they only felt the urge to relieve themselves at the specific times when doing so was allowed. Cardenia wasn’t at that point, but she certainly could empathize.

  Speaking of prisoners, after her brief pit stop, Grayland’s next forty-five minutes were concerned with an update from her minister of justice on the status of the oh-so-many alleged traitors she had arrested for their coup attempt and placed in jail pending their respective trials. The arrests had been so numerous and the malfeasants of such high status that there had been some confusion as to how to house and process them; treasonous scum or not, it would look bad to have leaders of some noble houses and scions of some others shivved in a common lockup.

  Grayland had solved the problem by commandeering the Jewel of the Stars, a cruise liner that plied its trade between Hub and the various habitats within that planet’s system, and then stuffing the traitors into its staterooms for the duration. The Ministry of Justice paid the cruise line to maintain the hospitality and catering services, augmented by a hefty contingent of imperial security and an extremely tight control of who came and went on the Jewel. Aside from the whining that invariably came when some count or baroness was assigned an interior lower deck room without a view, it worked pretty well. There were hardly any shivvings at all.