by Greg Cox
That those last two statements were mutually contradictory did not bother any of the students, who divided their efforts between toppling the now-mutilated statue and assailing the safeties, who suddenly found themselves outnumbered and unarmed. No safety had carried any physical weapons for years; why bother when any implement that might be needed could be summoned instantaneously by means of their rings? All at once, the senior safety found herself longing for an old-fashioned meson rifle—or even a big stick.
She tried to summon reinforcements, only to discover that the communicator at her throat had gone as dead as the silicon ring on her finger. Gritting her teeth, she tried to will the ring back into operation, but the accursed thing couldn’t even produce a faint orange glow anymore. Its failure—impossible, inexplicable—left her with no hope of quelling the disturbance, let alone protecting herself. A tide of shrieking students, intoxicated with the heady bouquet of insurrection, flooded over her. She felt frenzied hands grabbing her, tugging at her ring, nearly breaking her finger in the process. The ring slipped free, scraping her knuckles red, and the crowd tossed her aside. She went stumbling across the floor of the plaza, falling onto her knees and barely throwing her hands out in time to stop her face from hitting the hard ceramic tiles.
A moment later, there was a ghastly wrenching noise, as the statue was torn from its pedestal and its heavy weight crashed to the ground, shaking the tiles beneath her palms and knees. A marble head bearing a marble crown rolled across the plaza until it came to a rest only a few arm’s lengths away from the shaken safety. Its features, once beautiful and serene, were now chipped and gouged, looking up at the night sky with only the scarred vestiges of its former grace.
The empress had fallen.
“Yes!” Jenole crowed to the students below him, Gorgan perching behind him like a shadow. “No one in the empire can ignore us now!” His victorious compatriots hooted and howled in jubilation, letting the battered safeties creep away to safety. A blond-haired girl danced atop the empty pedestal while her friends in the crowd tossed fragments of the shattered statue among themselves, claiming pieces as souvenirs.
“That’s right, celebrate!” Someone tossed Jenole the head of the empress, which he held aloft triumphantly, his golden eyes aglow, his cheeks flushed with excitement. “We’ve won. The night is ours.” His gaze swept over the throng of ecstatic students, making certain he had their full attention. “But this is just the beginning.” Gorgan’s lips moved soundlessly and the words emerged from Jenole’s throat, his voice alive with passion and commitment. “But this is just the beginning. There’s an industrial transfer station only a few blocks from here, down by the River Hessari, where thousands of cauldrons of pure tmirsh are marked for delivery to the Great Expenditure. Raw material, torn from our planet and our people, never to return!”
The rioters booed and shouted profanities. Gorgan felt his power grow with the crowd’s intensity. This was just like the old days, before 0’s downfall. This time it will be different, he vowed. No one can hinder us.
“Those cauldrons belong to us,” Jenole declared, “and I say they’re not going anywhere. Now is the time for us to take back our destiny.” He dropped the defaced marble head and let it roll awkwardly down the steps into the crowd, eliciting a full-throated hurrah from his peers. “Those cauldrons are waiting for us,” he asserted, pointing past the plaza toward the riverfront. “Are you with me?”
The crowd’s response was both overwhelming and inevitable. Any possible opposition had either fled in retreat or succumbed to the revolutionary fever. Unwilling or unable to defy the mob, the governor remained locked inside his mansion, while fresh safeties, summoned no doubt by observers within the palace, cordoned off the plaza, reluctant to engage the demonstrators until the mystery of their equipment’s failure could be adequately explained.
But there was no time for answers. Running down the steps, taking them two at a time, Jenole set off a stampede of eager and unthinking young men and women streaming toward the far end of the plaza—and the line of turquoise figures who waited to halt their progress. Seen from above, as Gorgon levitated above the fray, the rampaging students resembled a surging sea, their knotted tresses bobbing like waves driven by a storm.
The newly arrived safeties never stood a chance. A deluge of amok Rzom youth crashed against them, meeting only inactive technology, and broke through their ranks, pouring into the city streets and shattering the quiet of the evening with their chants and cries and uninhibited laughter. The gates of the transfer station presented even less resistance than the cordon around the plaza. The night shift stepped back, frightened and uncomprehending as their sons and daughters tore through the unguarded facility, wreaking havoc on data files and delicate apparatus, shoving fragile exports off transporter platforms and stasis units alike, then converging on the preservation dome where materials allocated for the Great Endeavor were kept until needed.
The pillar of steam that rose from the River Hessari as countless units of molten tmirsh were dumped into its rushing amethyst currents could be seen from one end of the city to another. Some said, and they were correct, that the gigantic plume of heated vapor was even witnessed by imperial satellites in orbit around Rzom, who transmitted the image instantaneously to the empress herself.
Gorgan basked in the satisfaction of a job well done. He had planted the seed. Now it was up to his allies to nurture and cultivate the crop.
Until it was time for the harvest.
Nine
In the tenth year in the reign of the empress:
The imperial fleet waited just past the asteroid belt that divided the inner worlds of the Tkon Empire, including Tkon itself, from their rebellious siblings beyond the belt. At the prime-control of the scout ship Bastu, at the forward tip of the formation, Null Pilot Lapu Ordaln stayed attuned to his long-distance surveyors and wondered if he could ever possibly be ready for what was to come.
A battle such as was about to take place had not been fought since the Age of Xora, innumerable generations ago. Indeed, it was practically unheard-of to have this many vessels in the void at one time; safe and effective travel by transference had largely rendered nullcraft obsolete, except for exploration and warfare. The average citizen had not needed to ride a rocket from one planet to another since his grandfather’s time, at least until recently, when the present crisis brought commerce and contact between the empire and the rebel worlds to a halt. “Hell-wings,” he cursed aloud. Why couldn’t Rzom and the other outer planets simply go along with the Great Endeavor like the rest of the empire? What in Makto’s name had driven them to mount this insane rebellion, putting everyone at risk? Rend it all, he had friends on Rzom, even a cousin or two. Why, then, this senseless war?
To be fair, sages and opinionators still argued about who had truly started the war, the empire trying to quell uprisings on the outer worlds, or the rebels encroaching on imperial space to sabotage the Great Endeavor. Never mind who began it, he told himself, trying to ready his spirits for the confrontation ahead. Our job now is to end it, one way or another.
He glanced around the habitation bulb of Bastu, exchanging a glance with his subpilot, Nasua Ztrahs, strapped into her own control less than an arm’s length away. Aside from them, no other living creature breathed within the bulb; all of the vital functions of the vessel, including attack and defense modes, were operated by the ship itself, with its organic pilots ready to override the thinking chips only in the event of some genuinely unforeseen circumstance. One pilot was practically superfluous; a subpilot to take over if the prime was disabled was an extra level of redundancy, dictated as much by tradition as by cautious calculation. Besides, Ordaln thought bitterly, if there wasn’t some flesh and blood at stake, how could you call it a war?
There. Here they come. The ship’s surveyors detected the approach of the enemy armada, alerting the null pilot at the speed of thought. Funny, it still felt wrong to think of Rzom as the enemy. Defensive systems came
to life all around the bulb as the cerebral imager projected three-dimensional graphics of the oncoming ships directly into his mind. He heard Ztrahs suck in her breath and knew that she had received the same input. Testing the imager compulsively, as if every component of Bastu had not already been checked out by imperial shipwrights, he confirmed that he could switch back and forth at will between a subjective ship’s eye view of the battle to an objective, omniscient overview of the entire conflict. He was relieved to note that, just as their informants had reported, the imperial ships outnumbered their rebel counterparts at least three to one. We’ll make short work of them, he thought, no matter how bloody a business it proves to be.
“For Tkon and the empress,” he said, loud enough for Ztrahs to hear. It was a null pilot’s job to maintain proper morale, even for a crew of two.
“For Tkon and the empress,” she answered back, her voice tense but controlled. It dawned on Ordaln that she probably had friends and relations on the other side, too.
Then the first of the enemy vessels was upon them….
Almost, (*) thought hungrily. The clash it had been waiting for was only instants away. At the moment, it sensed more dread than anger among the participants, more apprehension than aggression, but that would change once the fighting started. Hate would come to the fore, and then (*) would feed.
And feed well.
Holding the enemy within their sights, monitoring each other’s advance to the tiniest degree, neither side took notice of a flickering sphere of crimson energy spinning fiercely less than a light-year away, emitting a faint red radiance that failed to register on either imperial or rebel sensors. (*) also observed the disparity in strength between the two forces, and resolved to address that problem soon enough. It held no favorites in the coming contest, only a determination that both victory and defeat be forestalled for as long as possible. Only the war itself mattered; the fury and strife were their own reward.
The imperial fleet fanned out in three dimensions, assuming a pyramid formation with its point aimed straight at the heart of the rebel armada, which responded by angling outward and away from their center, forming a sideways funnel whose open mouth expanded as if to swallow the advancing pyramid. For a brief moment, as the forward end of the armada spread out like concentric ripples upon the surface of a pond, it looked like the larger, imperial fleet might pass through the opposing forces without even engaging the enemy, but the imperial pyramid flattened out abruptly as the warships that comprised its base raced to intersect the circumference of the gigantic, empty loop the invading armada had become. All along the periphery of both fleets, imperial and rebel ships rushed headlong at each other, unable to evade direct confrontation any longer.
Not even (*) could tell which side fired first. As swiftly and nigh simultaneously as if a switch had been activated, bursts of incandescent energy jumped from ship to ship to ship, linking hundreds of nullcraft in an intricate and ever-shifting lattice of red and purple beams of light that knitted the edges of both fleets to each other, locking them into a taut, violently twisting tapestry that only total defeat or victory could rip apart. Projectile weapons, powered by their own destructive energies, carried the battle deeper into the masses of the opposing forces, arcing through the void to hurl themselves at inhabited vessels several hundred times larger than the unmanned missiles that perished in sacrificial blazes against the hulls of their targets. The narrowing space between the contending fleets filled with fire and debris.
Despite heavy shielding on the part of both adversaries, the furious exchange of armaments claimed its first casualties within minutes. Unscratched, untested void fighters, subjected to dozens of assaults from above and below, succumbed to destruction and/or decompression. Transitory flashes of unfettered plasma strobed the battle lines, sparking anguish and desire for revenge among the surviving combatants. Abstract political differences suddenly became deadly personal as pilots on both sides dived and ducked amid the chaos, striking back with every tactic and weapon at their command. More ships fell before the inferno, leaving the remaining ships ever more intent on exacting retribution.
(*) savored the unleashed hate and fury of the volatile humanoids within their metallic conveyances. Its only fear was that the hostilities would terminate too soon, before it had drained every last drop of sustenance from the unsuspecting mortals. Avidly, it examined the ongoing encounter, subjecting the entire battle to its keen and far too experienced analysis. How best, it meditated, to prolong the conflict?
Ironically, the ships, large and small, that comprised both fleets were virtually identical in design, not surprising considering that not long ago they had indeed composed a single unified force, before time and trouble outpaced their common ancestry. Only carefully guarded meson signatures kept allied vessels from firing upon each other in confusion. (*) rotated thoughtfully, seeing all the possibilities.
For the first few minutes, Lapu Ordaln found himself at the still, silent center of the storm. The Rzom nullcraft had all darted away to the perimeter, leaving behind an empty hole at the core of their formation. He experienced a moment of private relief at this momentary respite, even though he knew he couldn’t allow the rebels to evade him this easily. If fortune was with Tkon, his comrades behind him would halt the enemy’s advance long enough for Bastu to reverse course and catch up with the fight.
“Let’s go get them,” he stated decisively, while psionically urging his ship to switch to pursuit mode. Bastu executed a flawless crescent turn that sent them speeding toward the action, which, as the imager showed him, had already begun. In his mind’s eye, he saw the fighting flare up at the outskirts of the rebel armada, then work its way inward, zigzagging through the rapidly intermeshing fleets like spidery cracks fragmenting a sheet of ice. The meson tracking system functioned perfectly, tracing imperial ships in blue and rebel vessels in red. To his dismay, he watched as, one at a time, graphics both blue and red vanished neatly from the display.
We could be next, he realized, feeling a bitter resentment toward the Rzom lunatics who had brought them all to this sorry pass. He wanted to look away, but the cerebral imager made that impossible. The more he squeezed his eyelids shut, the more clearly he saw the deadly conflagration that was drawing him closer by the second, like a charged particle to a blazing atomic core. He braced his back against the gravity cushion and tugged on the straps of his harness to make certain they were secure. Bastu was coming within range of its weapons capacity, not to mention close enough to draw fire from the enemy. Time to kill or be killed. Thank Ozari that the ship actually did the targeting, sparing him and Ztrahs that awful responsibility.
Without warning, the red and blue outlines marking each nullcraft disappeared from the display. His eyes opened wide in surprise, but the image remained the same. Suddenly there was no way to distinguish imperial ships from the rebels, friend from foe. Bastu’s attack systems froze even as the ship plunged into the melee, the thinking chips paralyzed by this unexpected loss of crucial data.
“Lapu?” his subpilot asked, confusion evident in her tone. Obviously she was receiving the same inadequate display from the imager.
“Reinitialize the entire system,” he replied. “Do whatever you can to get the accursed thing up and running again. Quickly.” In the meantime, he realized with a start, he would have to take over control of the weapons from the ship. He was fighting this war for real.
But what good could he do? Bastu weaved effectively through the crowded null-space, avoiding collisions with the other warships, but Ordaln did not know what else could be done. He couldn’t just fire blindly; given the relative size of the fleets, he was more likely to hit one of his own ships than a rebel. “Lapu—I mean, Pilot Ordaln!” Ztrahs reported within moments, visibly aghast. “It’s not just us. It’s everyone, us and the enemy both. Nobody’s markers are working.”
How was that possible? A solar flare? A transreal anomaly? Ordaln didn’t even try to figure it out; he was a pilot, no
t a techner. Instead his mind instantly grasped the strategic implications of what had happened; all at once, the empire’s numerical superiority had become a liability. Without the meson tags, the rebels had better odds of hitting their enemies than he did.
“They did it on purpose!” he blurted, blood pounding in his temples as the truth struck him with the force of orbital acceleration. What manner of crazed, reckless ploy was this? Fighting in the dark like this might get them all killed. Didn’t so many lives, Tkon or Rzom, mean anything to them? “They’re insane, all of them! Fanatics!”
But he wouldn’t let them get away with it….
Yes, (*) approved, basking in the renewed waves of enmity suffusing the sector. The warriors of the inner planets would not overcome those of the outer worlds so easily now. Their frustration fed their animosity, feeding (*), just as the desperation of all concerned only heightened the intensity of their violent passions. This was more than mere nourishment now; it was an exquisite delicacy.
(*) spun silently in the depths of space, lapping up the hate that spilled like blood. Best of all, it had not yet approached the very peak of its feeding cycle. The more the organic specimens hated, the stronger (*) grew, and the stronger it became, the better it could fan the flames of the conflict, toying with the minds and matter below it to yield ever greater rewards.