Empire's End

by Chris Bunch

  … and the squiggle that was Kilgour's signature. "We just wait," Otho interpreted.

  Cind growled—a noise that dignified her Bhor training—and then gritted, "We wait."

  The Emperor's feet touched down, and he slid down to his knees. He broke the climbing thread off and discarded the jumars.

  A few guardspots glared around the three ships on the landing field. Once again, there was no movement except for the single sentry at the Normandie's ramp.

  Crouching, he made for the picketboat.

  The broken static-buzz signaled to yet another ship.

  Hannelore La Ciotat was awake, feet out of her bunk and on the tacship's deck. Her tacship's GQ alarm was a civilized bonging, the synthesized sound of a bell. It was more than loud enough to cover the cramped crew area.

  La Ciotat sealed the front of her shipsuit and damned near physically threw her onwatch weapons officer/XO out of the command seat.

  "I relieve you, Mister." Her fingers were like fluid across the panel. POWER… UP… SYSTEMS STANDBY… CREW READY… WEAPONS READY…

  She touched keys, and the tacship lifted clear of the ground on McLean drive, ripping away from the camouflage net that La Ciotat and her crew had staked over the tiny ship a day earlier.

  The tacship was hidden just inside the first twist of one of the canyons leading to the great valley the Guesting Center was in the middle of.

  La Ciotat ghosted the ship around the bend.

  "I have the center on visual," she told her XO.

  "Roger. All screens show same."

  "Drive status?"

  "Drakh-hot, Hannelore."

  And she, too, waited.

  "Up, lad! Th' Emp's movin'!"

  Sten's mind groped out of a disremembered, terrible dream, and Kilgour was pulling him up.

  "What's the—"

  "Shut up!"

  Alex tossed him a phototropic suit, and Sten pulled it on. He looked around for some boots.

  "No time, Sten! Move!"

  Kilgour shoved him toward the door that yawned into a deserted open corridor, light glaring, and Sten was in a stumbling, nightmare run, not sure if he was still asleep and dreaming, but the rough carpet hurt his feet, and Alex slung him around a corner and up a ramp, toward the top of the crater.

  "Which way—"

  "I' y' speaki't again, Ah'll coldcock y', Ah swear! We're i' th' eye ae th' storm!"

  A great door, barred, that led out onto a balcony on the outer wall of the crater. Alex, without slowing, crashed into the door and sent it pinwheeling away. Some sort of alarm—fire, intrusion, it didn't matter—began sounding.

  The Eternal Emperor came in the picketboat's port. The duty officer jerked in surprise, even though he'd been briefed.

  "Lift ship," the Emperor snapped, as he turned and slapped the PORT CLOSE switch.

  "Broadcast as ordered!"

  "Yessir."

  The officer lifted a security cover, and slid the port of the recently installed control across, and the machine across the field, in the Normandie, began ticking seconds.

  Overhead, in space, the signal yammered the Durer and its escorts and sailors into combat alert.

  The McLean drive brought the tiny picketboat clear of the ground.

  Across the landing field, the sentry at the Normandie's portal came fully awake, his willygun coming up in his hands. What the clot was going on? Nobody told him anything? Clottin' corp of the guard hadn't said anything—

  A predawn wind whistled across the balcony, a wind Sten never felt. Alex had his com up.

  "Pickup! On this station!"

  "Got you," came a calm, unhurried woman's voice that Sten thought he recognized. "On the way."

  "So you were right," Sten recovered.

  "Aye. The bastard's ducking out the back door. Solo."

  "Oh, Christ. We've got to alert the Manabi," Sten said, knowing futility.

  "What can they—" Kilgour winced as the com screamed at him, as a transmitter aboard the Normandie obediently began jamming cast on all freqs.

  Across the valley, they saw a tiny miniature sun. La Ciotat's tacship, blazing toward them.

  The Imperial picketboat's commander lifted his ship onto its tail, and kicked in full Yukawa drive, shooting the craft straight toward the stars. Barely clear of the crater, he went to stardrive, and the picketboat vanished into space.

  A relay closed aboard the Normandie.

  The whine/roar of the picketboat shattered Ecu's sleep. His sensors came instantly aware, forcing him from that other universe he inhabited in times of differing consciousness, a universe of soft-chiming crystal in mild winds where thought itself was sentient, beautiful and visible, a universe of nonflesh and forever widening horizons.

  He had drifted toward one clear panel in his alternate state, a panel looking out on the center of the Guesting Center. His sensors picked up the flash as the Imperial picketboat went into space.

  Ecu felt the wings of his mind spread, spread like his own great lifting sails, and that other universe open to him, welcoming him, like a silken bridge.

  La Ciotat bashed the com into silence when the jamming started its screech.

  "Ma'am, I lost—"

  "Shut it!" She had the balcony on visual. La Ciotat brought the tacship screaming toward the Guesting Center, flipped it end for end, McLean antigrav lagging far behind trying to define down, braked on Yukawa drive, and skidded down on the balcony, backward, fins grinding at the synthetic stone.

  Her bosun had the port open, just as Sten came through it—in the air. Alex had picked him up and hurled him five meters as the port opened. A second later, the bosun was ground zero as Kilgour impacted on her. The woman wheezed, sure that ribs were broken. Kilgour rolled off, not noticing, hit the port-closing switch, shouting, "Get out of it!"

  La Ciotat hit the Yukawa switch, spitting the tacship off, into the air. Her thumb was stretching for the STARDRIVE panel when

  The final switch closed.

  The Emperor had chosen the Normandie not only because he was reluctant to sacrifice the Durer, but because the yacht/liner had great galleries and banqueting rooms.

  Great rooms that had been stripped and filled with AM2. And now, on command, they detonated.

  An unanswerable question: Was Sr. Ecu "dead"—by conventional beings' definition of the word—before the blast, or when the kilotons of Anti-Matter Two, the single mightiest power known, were detonated?

  When the Emperor's bomb went off, it would have looked from deep space, for nanoseconds, as if the Guesting Center were a real volcano that had erupted.

  Then the valley itself vanished in a sympathetic explosion, a blast moving faster than the eye could see, catching and obliterating its own debris.

  Perhaps half of the Manabi died in that instant holocaust, as a quarter of their planet ripped and tore in a quake beyond all measurement.

  And then, from the Durer, a planetbuster was launched, a nearly destroyer sized missile, or rather two-stage missile, given a stardrive generator, Imperium X armor, and more tons of AM2 as a warhead. The first stage impacted directly where the Guesting Center had been, and the second stage was set off, driving at full power, toward the planet's core.

  It did not need to break through the mantle before the main charge detonated to function, but, given the head start of the Anti-Matter Two blast from the Normandie, nearly did.

  For a moment the Manabi home world looked like a holiday lantern, as if its landmass were clear and a viewer could see directly to the planet's molten core. It bulged… grew… and exploded.

  Seilichi rocked and shattered, pitching its land, its oceans, and its atmosphere up, out into space, and then the planet itself broke, magma spilling like the liquid center of a child's candy.

  In space, battlescreens blanked, then secondary power went on.

  The Eternal Emperor looked at the boil that had been Seilichi without expression. "Do you have contact with the Durer?

  "Affirm."

&nbs
p; The Emperor took the proffered microphone.

  "This is the Emperor," he said without preamble. "Were any transmissions or ships picked up from Seilichi after we lifted?"

  "One moment, sir… No sir. One minor transmission, intended receiver unknown, no response found, from the Center itself. Nothing else."

  The Emperor gave the microphone back to the picketboat officer.

  Very well, he thought. It is over. There will be a certain amount of housecleaning and damage control necessary. But the problem has been solved.

  It was almost a pity Sten hadn't had a chance to know he'd never been a serious threat to the Empire or the Eternal Emperor. No one had, really. Not ever.

  Not from the beginning.

  And when, his mind rambled, was the beginning?

  Perhaps…

  Perhaps on the island of Maui.

  Thousands of years ago. When time's measurement dated from the birth of a dead god.

  Maui…

  And a shatter of broken glass…

  Book Three

  Dragon Variation

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Maui, A.D. 2174

  THE BOY HURTLED across the sagging plank onto the next hulk, arrowing across its foredeck. He saw the tarred cable anchoring the scow to its brother just in time, and jumped—foot skittering on the gunwale—then he was in the air, the muck and slime of Moaloea Bay below him, sullen tide splashing the polluted water against the black hulls. He landed, almost falling, and darted around the high-piled scrap on the bow's deck and flattened.

  Behind him yelps turned to shouts. There were six of them. All of them older, all of them bigger.

  All they had wanted, they said, was to see what the boy had in his ragged military-surplus knapsack. What they said, what they wanted, did not matter. Their intent was clear. The boy had taken a new way across the bay, moving through the maze of grounded ships, half-sunk hovercraft, trawlers of the fisher families, and oared houseboats that might have belonged to the rich two generations ago. He slipped past the tiny junks of the Chinese boat families, unchanged for thousands of years, working steadily toward the ship channel. Across the channel was the far shore and Kahanamoku City.

  The boy knew that when the six found him, they would not kill him. Probably not, at any rate. But he would certainly be beaten. That was not a problem. He'd taken beatings before, and would take them again. And those who would thrash him would have bruises of their own for mementos. It was what was in the knapsack that had made him run, and would make him fight.

  Because they would take the pack from him, and open it. The treasures inside would be mocked, ripped, and tossed into the murky waters. Three books. Real books. Books the old man who owned the pierside junkshop had not wanted. One fat book. Two slender. The fat one was very old, had small type, and was called The Thousand Nights and a Night. He knew nothing of what it was about, but a glance inside promised adventures with strange beings in strange places, with creatures called rocs and djinn. The second book looked equally impenetrable, but was equally promising: Freedom From Gravity, The Equations and Early Experiments of Lord Archibald McLean. Perhaps he could understand just how those great landbarges could fill themselves with cargo, and then effortlessly lift into the sky and float over the watery slum of the bay, out past the barriers to where the great torchships berthed. The last volume was medium-sized: Starchild. Growing Up in Deep Space. The holo of the author inside the front cover made her look a proper dwonk, but what did that matter? She'd at least gotten off this planet, and she looked to be not much older than the boy.

  Thumps. Now they were on this barge. Gleam of violet, gleam of yellow. No. Leong Suk would be shamed. A thought crossed his mind—a thought far older than the boy's years. There's nothing wrong with being ashamed of yourself—if you're alive to feel that way later.

  A howl. He'd been seen! A hand clawed down at him, to drag him up to meet a balled fist or a stick. The boy grabbed the long-abandoned glass vase and slapped it across the stanchion next to him. The glass shattered, and the boy bounded up, whipping the vase like a saber across the face of the older boy.

  Blood. A scream. Another scream, from the boy himself, as the older one fell away, and the boy leapt toward the second of his pursuers. Again he slashed, and blood spurted from the second one's arm. Then there were shouts, clattering, and five teenagers ran like a demon of the sea was behind them. One lay writhing on the barge, hands covering the ruins of what had been a face.

  The boy came back to himself. He twisted sideways and pelted down the deck of a dredger, ignoring the shouts of the crewmen cleaning the chains and buckets, jumped over its stern, onto a small boat, then another leap… and he disappeared. He did not stop his flight until he'd scrambled onto the stern of a just-departing crosschannel towboat. He slumped against its wire railing, panting. He still held the broken vase in one hand. Now it was violet, yellow… and scarlet. The boy dropped it into the water.

  He thought about what had happened. He did not feel as if he'd won a victory or something. He didn't feel proud. But the three books were still safe in his knapsack. He decided he knew something he hadn't known before. You had to know what you might encounter. And you always should give yourself an edge. More than anyone knew you had. Maybe a weapon… maybe… maybe just knowing something. He shook his head. He was not sure where this thought was taking him, but he would return to it later. He had learned something valuable this day.

  The boy's name was Kea Richards. He was eight years old.

  By the twenty-first century, Hawaii was a rotting slum. Its few natives were living on reservations, supported by government guilt checks. Its native flora and fauna were nearly extinct outside of a few botanical gardens and zoos. And its population was close to twenty million humans. As always, world events had not been kind to the islands, from the Chinese descent into barbarism before they once more closed the bamboo curtain at the end of the twentieth century, to the anarchy that disrupted Japan, the religious wars that turned Indonesia into an illiterate theocracy, and the earthquakes and exclusionary (anti-Asian) laws passed by the government of North America in the opening decades of the century, before its collapse and takeover when Earth finally achieved a single government.

  Of the islands, Kaui and Oahu were the least spoiled, since they had the greatest wealth. Least spoiled from original paradise in the same sense that Manhattan Island of the twentieth century was identical with the rock Peter Minuit purchased in the seventeenth century. The Big Island of Hawaii was not rural, not urban, but dirt-poor, serving as a labor pool for cheap manual workers.

  The center of Hawaii was now Maui/Molokai/Lanai/ Kahoolawe/Molokini. In the dim past, they had been a single island, and Man was now in the process of making them one again, with floating barricades and causeways. The reason was Space. Hawaii was the perfect midpoint launch station for torchships headed offplanet to the terraformed worlds of Mars and some of the Jovian/Saturnian moons. Or else, less frequently, to where the great sailships waited to build their crews for the generations-long journey to the stars. And Hawaii had been the launch point for two of the five true starships Earth had been able to build and send out on their government-bankrupting explorations.

  Businesses blanketed Maui, from bars to machine shops to import/export to who-really-knew. The sea itself was covered with ships, anchored or tied one to another, from skiffs to huge restaurant boats. The islands were encircled with huge floating Hamilton barriers, patterned after the Thames tidal palisades that required only a few minutes to automatically lift into floating breakwaters, in the event of hurricanes or tsunamis. There were even larger breakwaters circling the deeps—what had been Kealaikahiki Channel—where the torchships ported.

  When Kea Richards was born, his family ran a small diner on Big Island, in the city of Hilo. Kea vaguely remembered his father and grandmother talking about the old days back on the mainland. The diner served anything and everything, and Kea remembered his father boasting they could make an
ything anybody wanted, given a recipe and the ingredients. He even thought they'd been challenged a few times, and, he dimly remembered, had been victorious making some strangely named and even-more-strange-tasting dishes. He himself was thrilled when his father would pile a box on a chair near the grill and put his infant son atop it, and pretend to consult him as he cooked. To this day, he still remembered recipes or parts of recipes.

  He had trouble remembering his mother, except that she was very pretty. Or maybe he remembered her beauty because Leong Suk would talk about it. But not in a complimentary way. She was half-Thai, half-Irish, which is where Kea got his eyes, as blue as the skies above in the winter, when the trade winds blew away the pollution. Kea was her only child and that was just as she wanted. The boy never knew why his father would sometimes sing a song, which Kea couldn't remember any of the words to except "Oblahdee/Oblahdah/Life goes on…" but it would instantly spark a blazing row.

  When Kea was only five, his mother disappeared. His father searched, fearing the worst, not sure what the worst meant. And he found his wife—or, rather, found what had happened to her. She had volunteered for a longliner. The elder Richards shuddered, a reaction Kea did not understand for years, until he was able to find some of the declassified accounts of the misery, murder, and insanity that happened on the monstrous sailing ships, even before they were beyond contact in their reach for the stars.

  Kea Richards cried a little. Then they told the boy that it did not matter. His mother would be happier, somewhere out there. And they could be happier here. Just the three of them. Two years later, the tsunami struck.

  * * *

  Kea was climbing a tree when the ocean left. A girl had said that the tree had a coconut, and Kea wanted to see what the fruit looked like. Pollution had killed the native coconut palms decades earlier. He had looped rope between his feet, put a single safety line around the tree trunk, and was shinnying up the palm when he chanced a look out to sea. He gaped. It was as if the tide was going out, except going out in a roar, receding far into Hilo Bay. He had never seen such a sight. There were fish, stranded and flopping in the exposed bottom mire. A wreck of a boat was being turned over and over as the Pacific was sucked away, just as if someone had pulled the plug from a washtub.