Revenge of the Damned

by Chris Bunch

  The Emperor's privy council was like a man who suffered from obesity: bloated with all the rich meals but terrified that the next banquet was about to be canceled.

  For most beings in the Empire, the war with the Tahn had created hardships of historic proportions. But for the six members of the council, it had been a time of historic profits and opportunity. And after the stunning Imperial victory at Durer they were faced with not only an end to the enormous profits but huge losses as the Emperor looked about for the means to pay the butcher's bill.

  And at the moment, it appeared the first place the Emperor would look was at his six lords of industry: Volmer—mass media; Malperin—agriculture, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals; Lovett—banking; the Kraa twins—mines, mills, and foundries; Kyes—artificial intelligence; and finally, Sullamora—ships and trade.

  Sullamora had approached his duties as a member of the Emperor's private cabinet with a great deal of reluctance and cynicism. Until the moment the Emperor had appointed him to the council—in a chilling and, for Sullamora, revealing conversation—he had not even been aware of its existence. And the appointment had been made in a halfhearted way when Sullamora had questioned the Emperor's strategy in dealing with the Tahn if and when they were defeated.

  The Emperor was planning to remove the government and eliminate all vestiges of the Tahn culture, then to follow up with a massive rebuilding program. Sullamora saw that as pure weakness and foolishness. All Tahn should have to suffer for what they had wrought. Besides, the beings who had loyally supported the Emperor from the very beginning would therefore have to forgo vast potential profits. That did not make sense, and Sullamora said so—although he put it as a carefully worded suggestion, not a criticism.

  When he had first met with his colleagues of the privy council, Sullamora had kept all that to himself. Groping for direction, he had bided his time until he had taken each member's pulse a hundred times and had their profiles drawn and redrawn as many times more by key people in his psych division.

  Looked at from afar—something Tanz was not capable of doing—the privy council presented a strange but accurate portrait of the Empire itself: an odd kind of blend of vigorous entrepreneurism and dynastic capitalism. Seen up close, it was a confusing puzzle of wildly different interests and goals. Little by little, however, Sullamora gradually uncovered a common note.

  Volmer was the most vocal of the group. Usually, when the others danced about a point, it was Volmer who tended to be openly and harshly critical of the latest Imperial policy they were deploring. That did not mean that anyone—much less Sullamora—trusted him.

  As head of one of the oldest family dynasties in the Empire as well as the chieftain of the largest news-gathering, polit-prop, and advertising companies in the many systems that made up the Empire, Volmer was the least vulnerable of the six. He also had a private reputation among the various companies that made up his barony as a bit of a waffler, a man who would encourage his underlings to take hard stands when it suited him and then leave them hanging if the wind switched direction. Still, as the war dragged on and when even an idiot could see what a hollow shell the privy council in fact was, Sullamora was sure Volmer was moving out of the swamp of his own indecision onto the firmer ground shared by his colleagues.

  It was the raw, open greed of the Kraa twins that made Sullamora put them in his potential allies column. They had a deserved reputation as the most corrupt, vicious, self-serving beings in the brutal world of high-stakes business. The two women were second-generation megarich. Their father had been a wildcat miner who had parlayed a minor fortune in Imperium X into a virtual empire consisting of minerals, exotic and common, and whole systems whose sole occupation was the milling and smelting of the same. Their father had been a canny man whose word had been his religion.

  Upon his death, the twins had instantly dissolved the religion and sent his high priests howling into the wilderness, where they then had their economic assassins hunt them down one by one. The Kraa twins delighted in nasty plots and wild schemes that took their fortunes on wild roller coaster rides from treble profits to near bankruptcy and back again. Although they had been born identical twins, fifty years of indulgent living had stamped out two entirely different-looking beings. One was gross and banded with bulge after bulge of greasy fat. The other could best be described as anorexic—bones jutting nearly through pasty, unhealthy flesh. But appearance was the only difference. In everything else they thought and acted as one, seemingly taking turns as the dominant twin. Sullamora noted with minor interest their first names and then wisely forgot them. To think of them as anything but one was a fatal mistake too many others had made.

  It was to Sullamora's credit that he saw the Kraa twins as the easiest members of the council to manipulate. With the Kraas, one only had to hoist the carrot and they would follow. If they did not, they had more than enough vulnerable spots to probe. And one did not have to be subtle about it.

  Malperin, on the other hand, had only one area of vulnerability. She was a woman with an exterior and interior of ten-point steel. She was the ultimate chief operating officer, armed with academic degrees and hands-on management experience that stretched for three small forevers. It did not matter what kind of company she was called upon to manage, be it toy widgets or sophisticated electronics. In her case, it was an ability that was a two-headed coin. Because her viewpoint was necessarily fixed on the upper level, she had no feeling or gut instincts about specifics. That almost meant she had no loyalties to things, only to procedures.

  It was for that reason that the Emperor had tapped her to head up ACP, one of the most bizarre but vital megacorporations going. Even an industrial historian's eyes would glaze over tracing the hydra head back to its beginnings. Suffice it to say that in a bewildering series of small fish somehow swallowing big fish swallowing whole schools of other fish actions, ACP came tentatively into being. It was a tacked-together conglomerate that operated millions upon millions of kilometers of farms and ranches, oversaw massive vats of brewing chemicals and gases of every nature, and also produced most of the basic important drugs and medicines in the Empire. It was a company born of business warfare, and it never got better after that. Each division was bred and educated to hate and distrust the others. The situation had been threatening to spin out of control when the Tahn war broke out. At any other time the Eternal Emperor would have let matters take their course. ACP was a dinosaur doomed to extinction. But there was no way that he could allow evolution to take its course while fighting a war. The only solution was to suggest strongly—read “you'd clottin’ better or die"—that the various boards of directors go outside ACP for a chief operating officer.

  After a great deal of squabbling and threatening, Malperin was picked. To firm up her position, the Emperor also named her to his private cabinet. That would give her temporary prestige. But as the war seemed to be winding down, Malperin was beginning to realize that her overlong honeymoon at ACP was as good as over. She would also have to be stupid not to realize that at any moment the Emperor could and would withdraw his support and let economic gravity settle the rest. Malperin was not stupid. She did not look upon her future gladly.

  The next to last member of the privy council was the money man, Lovett. Like Volmer, he was from a great family dynasty. There were Lovetts who had acted as financial go-betweens in some of the Eternal Emperor's earliest business dealings. The newest Lovett scion was handsome, dashing, and daring.

  Tragically, through a series of misfortunes, he was the last member of his clan, and he had taken over the helm of the banking empire upon his mother's death. He was also the wildest of wild cards, who refused to listen to his advisers and had a habit of taking large and unnecessary risks. Some said it was out of remembered gratitude to the Lovetts that the Emperor had stepped in. Others said that it was because the Lovett banks were too integral to the Emperor's plans to be allowed to collapse and that it had been purely in self-interest that the Emperor had
reacted. Both were right. And so history would someday record that on such and such a date Lovett became the youngest being ever to head up the Imperial Monetary Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose charter was to play banker to the poorest systems in the Empire. In short, it was a position of extreme glitter and no substance at all. Sullamora grinned to himself, knowing that Lovett had just figured that out. Tanz Sullamora saw Lovett as the easiest one of all to manipulate.

  If Lovett was paper, Kyes was stone. Kyes was a Grb'chev, one of the saddest creations of the gods of madness. He was a tall, slender, vaguely humanoid being of immense dignity, just entering his 121st year. His coloring was silver leaning toward white, except for a triangular slash of scarlet that rode across his bony skull. When he spoke, his limbs were animated and his eyes flashed with impatient intelligence. But in repose, the face slackened, the eyes went blank, and the great splash of red pulsed like an infection that had reached crisis. Kyes was two separate beings with one dominant will and a weaker, genetically suicidal other. The Grb'chev were the result of an odd form of symbiotic bonding. Before the bonding, when the Grb'chev were merely tall and slender and very white, with no red “birthmark” on their skulls, there was nothing to distinguish the race except for their great stupidity and even greater genetic luck. They had brains that were no more than a large pimple on the end of a spinal stalk. They favored a particular type of fruit that was edible only when the pollen was most active. The pollen was deadly poison to anything, including the Grb'chev. The Grb'chev developed an exotic system of nasal filters topped by superefficient sinuses that gradually bulged out their heads until they were oversize.

  They also developed an immune system that was impenetrable to any form of virus and bacteria on their homeworld. Left on their own, the Grb'chev would have spun out their destinies of exceedingly stupid, exceedingly lucky beings who spent most of their waking hours gaping, scratching, and eating fruit. But although stupid did not bother nature one bit, happy seemed to give it problems. Enter, stage right, a lowly virus looking for a home. It was a virus that had only one ability to brag about: It could mutate its protein sheath to pierce any genetic structure, no matter how invulnerable. Usually that meant the instant infection and almost as instant extinction of any living forms it encountered. It was a closed-end deal, so that although the virus could giggle on into virus paradise, it could never be anything more than what it was, a wolf with changeable clothing.

  It encountered something different in the Grb'chev. As quickly as it cast off its sheath and fitted on another, the Grb'chev's immune system threw up another shield. The virus finally found its home in the sinuses, the most recent addition to what made a Grb'chev a Grb'chev. The mutating virus met cells in the middle of their own transition. They met and formed an entity consisting entirely of brain cells, nerves, and nerve receptors, an entity operating with—but separately from—the bodily parts and functions. The brain cells were also far stronger and more durable than any main body cells. The closest cells one could compare them with were cancer cells. In short, they were immortal.

  Next came awareness. And after that, despair. Because the Grb'chev came complete: an efficient fuel and waste-disposal system. Smooth locomotion. An ability to easily duplicate the Grb'chev structure as many times as necessary. And a perfect time clock that spelled out beginning, middle, a long senility, and an end. When Kyes entered his 121st year, he knew he had no more than five more years of awareness before the agonizingly slow deterioration of intelligence led to his ending up as a vegetable that gaped, bubbled, and then died.

  In his hundred-plus years of adult-active life, Kyes believed that he had eliminated all the seven deadly sins from his system one by one. Ninety years before, he had rolled out of a prestigious institution armed with a degree in artificial intelligence, a sheaf of job offers, and a double sheaf of ideas. He ignored the job offers and struck out on his own. Twenty-five years later he was richer than any being's wildest dreams. He was also famous for the hundreds of vital patents he personally owned and the lean-mean company he had created that could identify and exploit any fad in the most faddish of fields years before his competitors. Kyes was good. And he was arrogant—as he had every right to be.

  Then the big boys got together, kicked sand in his face, and took his company, wealth, and arrogance away from him. Kyes disappeared for fifteen years. But when he returned, he was a remade being. He had spent every second of every waking day studying his old foes. As he learned their weaknesses, he eliminated weaknesses of his own. He came on stage again quietly. He was still creative and inventive, but he buried his inventions in masses of partnerships and cutout companies. Just before his hundredth birthday, Kyes found himself the master of the greatest computer, robotic, and artificial intelligence conglomerate ever known. He was famous again, sought after for his views and insights. He even met the Eternal Emperor and had reason to believe that he had met him on as nearly an equal level as possible. Had not Kyes been one of the first beings the Emperor had come to for advice in his dealings with the mechanics of the Tahn conflict? And was he not one of the first appointees to the privy council?

  And then, little by little, Kyes began to believe that he was being used. After that, he began noticing that his firm was becoming more and more dependent on the Emperor's contracts. He had enjoyed enormous expansion in the past few years, but he was beginning to realize just how delicate the expansion was. A frown from the emperor would mean starting all over again. Except that with only five years left, to start again would be impossible.

  Kyes became obsessed with newly realized vulnerability. He could see no way of stopping it. It seemed as inevitable as the winding down of his biological clock. Then he began thinking about the Emperor. The Eternal Emperor. And he realized there was nothing empty about either word in the title.

  Kyes met envy face-to-face. And it was just about then that Tanz Sullamora began whispering in his ear.

  After Durer, the whispering was replaced by louder and louder mutterings of discontent. At first, Sullamora just complained about how the Emperor's busy schedule prevented him from consulting his privy council for their thoughts on how to deal with the depression that was sure to follow after the war. The others not only agreed but became encouraged to complain that the few times they had been consulted, their advice had been ignored.

  "Take me, for instance,” Volmer had said. “The last time I spoke with the Emperor I strongly suggested that we had to start planning for the future right now. A good propaganda campaign isn't created overnight.

  "We've got to come up with our message. Target our audience. Tailor the message for the various target groups. And then deliver it in a carefully orchestrated way."

  The message, as Volmer saw it, was: “Hope through sacrifice. Each of us is going to be called upon to sacrifice for the good of the Empire. And of our children. And our children's children."

  "I like it,” Lovett had said, immediately thinking about some ideas he had concerning interest rates pegged to inflation, with a high floor to take care of any unexpected deflation. “What did he say?"

  Volmer frowned. “He asked me what I was planning to sacrifice. He said for a message like that to work, people would want to see their leaders do a little suffering ... Suffering, what a negative word! Sacrifice is much easier to sell ... Anyway, I told him flat out that was an insane idea. Why, if people see us hurting"—he waved, including his colleagues in—"what would they have to hope for? Destroys the whole concept."

  He found no disagreement in that.

  Each of the other members had similar horror stories. Malperin wanted wage controls but no ceiling on prices. The Kraas wanted “more enlightened” pollution and safety laws.

  Sullamora wanted a one-sided tariff arrangement to shield his merchant empire. And as for Kyes, well, Kyes did not say anything for some time. The others wondered at that for a while, disturbed that the Grb'chev was not reaching in for his share of the pie. What they did not know was
that Kyes, with one huge exception, already had all that he wanted. And he figured that if he ever thought of anything else, he was quite capable of getting it on his own, without the benefit of Imperial intervention. Still, there was the exception...

  Several meetings went by before he moved his first pawn. He opened on the king's bishop side. And when he spoke, everyone was respectfully silent, waiting for him to finally declare himself. They were not disappointed.

  "Perhaps we are doing our Emperor a disservice,” he said slowly, as if he were thinking out loud. Every member of the council knew better. “From his point of view, perhaps we are firing ideas at him from all directions. He has so much on his mind now. How can he pick here and there when he can see no whole?"

  His colleagues nodded wisely, merely to mark time until Kyes got the rest of it out.

  "Let's make things simpler for him,” Kyes said. “We need to speak as one. To present a coherent view. And then have the authority to enact the needed reforms. With the Emperor's concurrence, of course,” he added quickly.

  "Emperor's concurrence ... of course,” everyone muttered.

  What Kyes proposed was deceptively simple. The privy council would call upon the Parliament and then the Emperor to create a quasi-public agency—consisting of members of the sitting council, to start with—that could act independently of the whims and fads and pressure of any special-interest group.

  Said agency would take the long view of the economy, carefully managing the AM2 pump to control the strength of the Imperial credit, keep a close eye on vital industrial and agricultural supplies, make sure that the government always spoke with one voice, and serve as a much needed check and balance between the competing views of business and the public good.

  There was no disagreement. Sullamora, the man with the most direct clout with Parliament, would take point. The first step would be approached cautiously. The skeleton of the proposed agency would be buried in a “sense of Parliament” resolution which, once enacted, would be difficult for the Emperor to shoot down without causing a very loud fuss. The trick was to keep anyone—especially the Emperor's back-bench toadies—from even guessing that something was up. The privy council decided to praise Caesar rather than to damn him. The praise took the form of a lengthy document profusely congratulating the Emperor for his victory over the Tahn at Durer and calling for Empirewide support of the Emperor to carry the victory forward to a final surrender and then beyond. Even on the surface, it was not an empty document. It was worded in such a way to make even the fence sitters who had been the bane of the emperor for some time to back his act. If approved, and Sullamora's people went out and twisted every arm and tentacle available to assure its passage, the resolution would break the back of the neutrals.