The Empire of Ruin

by Robert I. Katz

  The third guard, Ingrid Jones, was never found, but a woman who looked very much like her was noted on videocam entering a ship heading out toward the farthest reaches of the Empire. Facial recognition software was inconclusive. Maybe it was her, or maybe the real Ingrid Jones had already vanished into an anonymous, obscure life somewhere on Dancy. Or maybe her dead body lay rotting under a few tons of earth or at the bottom of the sea.

  None of the dead, neither the servants nor the guards, had neural networks concealed in their brains.

  They had one chance left, a servant named Timothy Rice.

  “Solomon Towne hires his own security. So does Richard Salazar, the Comte de Sevigny and Lord Benedict Devlin.” Arcturus smiled. “So did Lydia Prescott Jones.”

  “You find that significant?” Michael said. Actually, so did Michael.

  Egidia Colbert relied upon an agency to provide her with guards. Davida Emerson didn’t have any, which might have been stupid considering her considerable wealth, but she was a free agent and old enough to make her own mistakes.

  Arcturus shrugged.

  “There’s no honor among thieves, is there?” Michael said.

  “I think we can postulate that it’s not one group. It’s a bunch of smaller groups that sometimes work together but have no real loyalty to each other.”

  Michael, Anson and Arcturus were sitting at a table on the patio of what appeared to be a bar and grille overlooking the harbor. All of the tables were protected by privacy screens, which might have been overkill since nobody here should have been a security risk, but then, it would have been enormously stupid to assume that. Anson and Michael were both disguised.

  The sun shone brightly overhead. The windows were open, allowing the warm, sea breeze to blow through the room behind them. Dried echinoderms and sand dollar shells decorated wooden shelves along the side walls. Anson drained his glass, refilled it from a pitcher of beer and took another sip. A platter of boiled, spicy shrimp with cocktail sauce, another of fried squid and a third of yellow rice and red beans were almost empty.

  “Lydia’s kids inherit the estate?” Anson said.

  Arcturus nodded. “They never did have much to do with her. They were mostly raised by servants and they’ve been out of the house for more than a century. All of them have shares from the family trust. None of them are in debt. If they were involved in Lydia’s illegitimate activities, it would have been smarter to quietly replace the help, or make them quietly vanish, than have them killed in this public way.”

  Anson grunted and sat back in his seat. “Sending a message?”

  Michael tried the idea on for size and didn’t like it. “Not likely. Probably eliminating people who knew too much and had no loyalty to any side.”

  Anson grimaced. “Sending a message.”

  “I suppose.” Michael shrugged, spooned some more of the squid, along with some rice and beans onto his plate. Excellent food here, he thought. Interesting that Arcturus had invited them. This was the first time that Arcturus had appeared publicly with either one of them, not that the place was public, exactly, but they had been given a number of curious glances from diners at other tables, all of them agents of Imperial Intelligence and all of them presumably known to each other.

  “Do you trust your own men?” Michael asked.

  Arcturus eyes gleamed. “That is an interesting question, isn’t it?”

  Anson stolidly chewed. Michael gave Arcturus a long look. Arcturus smiled back.

  “Sooner or later,” Anson said, “if we continue to make no headway, we’re going to have to take the bull by the horns.” This, Michael reflected, was not exactly changing the subject, though on the surface, it might have seemed so.

  “I realize that,” Arcturus said. “Devlin is a member of the nobility. Salazar is very well connected, and anyway, he’s still off-world. Solomon Towne is rich but has lived a more private life. He has fewer friends in high places. He’s the one we would go after.”

  “When?” Michael asked.

  “If nothing else breaks? Soon.”

  The weather was pleasant, the sun shining. They decided to walk back to the ship.

  “Sneaky bastard, isn’t he?” Anson said.

  Were they being followed? He wouldn’t have been surprised but so far, neither of them had spotted a tail. “Talk about the case, set us up, see which of his men might be taking a little too much initiative. Three birds, one stone,” Michael said.

  Anson snorted.

  A lot of shops here, none of them cheap, all selling excellent merchandise. Restaurants of all sorts, fancy, plain, large and small, cuisine exotic or rustic or down home. All of it good. A great place to live, if you had money. The streets were clean, the buildings in good repair. The citizens looked happy, prosperous, well fed.

  “That one?” Anson said.

  Michael didn’t turn his head but he had already spotted the character Anson meant. His disinterest seemed just a bit too interested, lounging back on a bench, pretending to be focused on his interface. Above their heads, a small cloud of insects, about half of which actually were insects, swarmed slowly toward them.

  “This way,” Michael said, and stepped into an alleyway between two streets. Anson followed. Michael pulled out a small device and pressed a button, then another. The swarm of insects seemed to hesitate, then drifted past the mouth of the alley.

  They emerged on the opposite street and ducked into a public restroom. They turned their shirts inside out, revealing a different pattern in a different color, changed their wigs and adjusted the height of their shoes. Both of them knew how to change their posture and their gait. A minute later, they emerged, one at a time.

  Michael waited for a full two minutes, enough time for Anson to be well on his way. Three men in casual clothes walked past him on the street, then two more. All of them were well built. All peered keenly at the faces of the people they passed. Michael ignored them. He walked for almost an hour and didn’t spot another tail, then headed back to the ship.

  Chapter 22

  “We have another job for you,” Devlin said.

  A slow smile spread across Michael’s face. “Oh?” About time. A sense of anticipation filled him. His fingertips almost tingled.

  Devlin smiled back. “I see that you like the idea.”

  “I do. Truthfully, I’m not used to staying in one place for this long.”

  Devlin cocked his head to the side and looked at Michael thoughtfully. “Perhaps we should be utilizing your talents more than we have.” He shrugged. “Can your ship be ready to leave by 09:00 tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “The cargo will be delivered at 08:00. Take off as soon as it’s all loaded.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Devlin grinned. “To start, Alesandra,” he said.

  Michael stared at him. Oh, fuck, he thought.

  “Alesandra is a ghost world,” Curly said.

  “So?”

  Curly gave him a wounded look. “Don’t bullshit me.”

  Michael barely cracked a smile. “Alesandra is our destination. We’ve been given codes that are supposed to provide access.”

  “I’ve never heard of anybody going to a ghost world,” Curly said.

  Truthfully, neither had Michael.

  Anson grimaced when informed of their destination. He stared at Michael, his face growing pale but finally, he shook his head and walked away without saying a word. Arcturus was bewildered at the news but ecstatic. “Why Alesandra?” he asked. Michael found the wide smile on his face unaccountably annoying.

  “No idea,” Michael said. “We’ll be informed once we arrive.”

  “Finally, something we didn’t know. Something new,” Arcturus said. He grinned. “Good luck.”

  The cargo had arrived a few hours before and they took off as soon as it was loaded. Scans revealed crates full of heavy metals. A few were mildly radioactive but were well shielded. None contained drugs and none contained bodies, living
or dead. It seemed an entirely legitimate cargo.

  Three days later, they emerged from slipspace and found themselves surrounded by a fleet of small ships, none of them more than ten meters in length, most considerably smaller. All of them had very effective screens. The London’s scans revealed nothing of the other ships’ contents.

  “Please identify yourself,” a voice said. The voice was male and pleasant, with a strange, lilting accent and a noticeable lisp. Michael recognized the accent. It had been common to First Empire nobility more than two thousand years before.

  “We are the starship London,” Michael said. He read off the codes that Devlin had provided him.

  There was silence for a moment. “We have not seen a ship like yours in many centuries,” the voice said. “Your identification is accepted. Please land at these coordinates.” A string of numbers followed. Michael entered the information into the nav system and the London began to move.

  “Spooky,” Rosanna muttered.

  “Datamorphs usually are,” Michael said.

  Curly frowned at him. Matthew and Marissa exchanged grins. Rosanna stared at Michael’s face and Michael immediately regretted having said it. None of them had ever encountered a datamorph before, only Michael.

  The exact number of ghost worlds was unknown, probably dozens, maybe hundreds. They had little use for humanity and humanity wished no contact with them. Most were not worlds at all, but minor asteroids floating anonymously in abandoned systems. Seventeen were known for certain to exist, all supposedly closed to outsiders.

  The denizens of the ghost worlds had given up humanity long ago, integrating themselves with their machines, first modifying their bodies, then replacing them, then abandoning them to live, if it could be called living, within the virtual cores of their processing units; and then these had evolved, or so the legend said, almost beyond the material, to a series of particle fields in n-dimensional space, held together by a few wisps of dark matter.

  Humanity was afraid of the ghost worlds, when it thought of them at all. Their lure was too seductive. Join us. Live forever. Never age, never die, an entire universe contained in a mechanism that could sit on a desktop…or so the legends said. Michael did not know the truth of it.

  Finally, the First Empire had quarantined them, which concerned the ghost worlds not at all, and declared the technology that led to sublimation into an AI core restricted. Some worlds had outlawed such technology completely, but most had not. It was too useful, for both education and entertainment, to be forbidden, but all devices capable of personality immersion came with cutoffs and limitations. The illusions that they created were never allowed to be perfect, the times spent plugged into such devices restricted to only a few hours each day.

  Even today, however, some poor idiot was occasionally found plugged into a machine whose controls he had managed to hack, his body starved to death. In all such cases, the machine was destroyed down to its component atoms.

  Alesandra was a desert, the landing coordinates a patch of sand, without vehicles or buildings or anything man made to mark the spot. The atmosphere was thin, the wind continuous across the planet’s dry, desolate surface. A few wispy shrubs poked their heads above the ground, a few insects burrowed at their bases. An attempt had been made, thousands of years before, to terraform the little world, but had been quickly abandoned. What was the point?

  “What now?” Gloriosa asked.

  “Our sensors report an underground complex beneath the ship,” Romulus voice issued from a speaker. “Extent unknown, but at least a kilometer in each direction.”

  “Then we’ll wait,” Michael said. “I imagine something will show up.”

  He was right. A few minutes later, a patch of sand near the ship began to swirl, then shift. A cube, black and featureless, approximately ten meters by ten meters slowly rose. A door in the side of the cube opened and a figure that appeared to be human, plus two round bots, about twenty centimeters in diameter emerged. The human was male, tall and well-built, with brown hair and green eyes. The bots pushed a flat-bed piled with small crates toward the London.

  “Let them in,” Michael said. The airlock opened. The ramp extended outward, then lowered toward the ground.

  A few minutes later, the human, the bots and their cargo entered the London’s lounge. Michael stepped forward, the crew plus Henrik Anson standing behind.

  The human looked around, curious. “A Scorpion class corvette,” he said, and smiled at all of them.

  Michael felt a query in his internal server. The human transmitted a military code that Michael recognized but had not heard in thousands of years. He responded with a code of his own. The human nodded. “Michael Glover,” he said. “Omega Force—an elite outfit, with an illustrious history.” He drew a deep breath and grinned. “First, my name is Stefan Markovich. We have fulfilled our contract with your employer by delivering these crates. We thank you and wish you well on the next stage of your voyage.”

  Michael’s instructions regarding their next destination were contained on a coded chip. The chip would divulge its information only once they had arrived on Alesandra and entered the proper code, which was the name of their contact. Clever. There would have been no way in advance of their arrival to guess the name ‘Stefan Markovich.’

  Michael eyed the crates. “What’s in them?”

  “A substance called Blue Ice. It is a natural product, refined from the pheromones of an insectoid native to this planet. It is valuable in the human worlds.”

  “I know Blue Ice,” Michael said. “It’s a narcotic.”

  Stefan Markovich shrugged. “The substance has psychotropic properties, including analgesia and the treatment of clinical depression. It can be refined into many useful agents.”

  Michael frowned. “And what do you get out of this?”

  The ship’s sensors told him that the cargo they had brought was even now being transported down the ramp. “Our ancestors were perhaps not as farsighted as they might have been, when they chose to settle on Alesandra,” Stefan Markovich said. “They wanted a harsh, barren environment that would offer little competition to the attractions of the virtual world that they intended to inhabit, and Alesandra certainly fulfills that requirement, but this is a small world, lacking in heavy metals. Our microprocessors degrade after a few centuries and need to be replaced. Our ships and defenses also require substances that do not exist in the Alesandra system.”

  “Don’t you have transformers?”

  “No, actually. We could construct them but their energy requirements are enormous. It’s much cheaper to simply bring in what we need from outside.”

  The Empire, the Second Empire, knew nothing of this. To them, the ghost worlds were a complete mystery. “The people that you deal with, who are they?”

  “They call themselves the Cognoscenti. You don’t know them?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Strange,” Stefan Markovich said. “We have been dealing with them for over three thousand years.”

  Romulus’ voice echoed through his server. “Another being, female this time, has exited from the transit cube. She is requesting entrance.”

  “Let her in,” Michael transmitted.

  A few seconds later, footsteps came clattering up the ramp. A woman walked through the airlock. She stopped suddenly and stared at Michael with parted lips. “Michael?” she whispered.

  She was young and pretty, with honey gold hair and bright blue eyes. He had no idea who she might be. “Yes?” he said.

  “I’m Susan,” she said. A smile lit up her face. “Your sister.”

  Chapter 23

  Stefan Markovich had taken his cargo and left. Susan and Michael sat together in a small lounge, where the crew had discreetly left them alone. “You always liked chocolat,” Michael said.

  “And you preferred coffee,” Susan said. “This is very good.” She smiled and raised her cup to her lips.

  “You don’t look like Susan,” Michael said doubtfu
lly.

  “Of course not, silly. This is an off-the-rack body. Anybody can use it. We keep a whole bunch of them in storage. My original body has been dead for thousands of years.

  “I was very old, you see. Mother had died, oh, almost a century before. You had disappeared, presumed a casualty in the war. Diane had passed away and I knew that I didn’t have a lot of time left. Diane had children and grandchildren and their children had grandchildren as well. So did I, but Diane was tired of living and she didn’t believe that immersion into a core was actually life. She regarded what I am”—she waved a hand down at the body that she wore—“as a simple copy. She didn’t see the point.” Susan sighed and sipped her chocolat, looking wistful. “I felt differently. Empire policy toward the ghost worlds was still being formulated. Anybody who wished to emigrate was free to do so. I decided that I wanted to go on living and here was my opportunity. I came here. A lot of us did.

  “Alesandra is the largest of all of them. Did you know that?”

  Michael shook his head. “No.”

  “Alesandra is a real world rotating around a real sun. That felt safer, somehow. Most of the ghost worlds are on asteroids, some of them really tiny, just rocks careening around their star, some of them drifting beyond any known system. A few were placed on abandoned ships or small habitats, hidden somewhere deep in space. I don’t know; maybe it was just prejudice, but most of us preferred an actual planet. It’s comforting somehow, to have gravity and an atmosphere.”

  “I can see that,” Michael said.

  She shook her head, annoyed. “And so they forgot all about you? I suppose it’s too late to sue them.”

  “It was wartime. Things happen.”

  She gave a tiny snort. “So now what?”

  “Now? I have a mission.” He leaned forward. “Tell me, who are the Cognoscenti?”