The Collapsing Empire Read online

  “I see it.” Gineos punched at her screen. “You’ve got navigation,” she said to Inverr. “Get us out of here, Ollie.”

  “We have a problem,” Bernus said.

  “Of course we do,” Gineos said. “What is this one?”

  “The shoal is picking up speed and is shrinking faster.”

  “On it,” Inverr said.

  “Are we still going to make it?” Gineos asked.

  “Probably. Some of the ship, anyway.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that depending how big the shoal is, part of the ship might get left behind. We’ve got the stalk and we’ve got the ring. The stalk is a long needle. The ring is a klick across. The stalk might make it through. The ring might not.”

  “That’ll destroy the ship,” Dunn said.

  Gineos shook her head. “It’s not like we’re hitting a physical barrier. Anything not inside the shoal circumference will just get left behind. Sliced off like with a razor. We seal the bulkheads to the ring spokes and we survive.” She turned her attention back to Inverr. “That is, if we can shape the bubble.” The bubble was the small envelope of local space-time, surrounded by an energy field generated by Tell Me, that accompanied the ship into the Flow. Technically there was no there inside the Flow. Any ship that didn’t bring a pocket of space-time with it into the Flow would cease to exist in any meaningful sense.

  “We can shape the bubble,” Inverr said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “If I’m not, it won’t matter anyway.”

  Gineos grunted at this and turned to Dunn. “Put a ship-wide alert to get everyone out of the ring and into the stalk.” She turned back to Inverr. “How long do we have until we reach the shoal?”

  “Nine minutes.”

  “A little longer than that,” Bernus said. “The shoal is still speeding up.”

  “Tell them they have five minutes,” Gineos said, to Dunn. “After that we seal off the ring. If they’re on the wrong side of the seal, they might get left behind.” Dunn nodded and made the announcement. “I assume you’ll let out some of the people you sealed into their quarters,” she said to Inverr.

  “We welded Piter into his,” Inverr said, of the security chief. He was looking at his monitor and making tiny adjustments to the path of the Tell Me. “Not much time to fix that one.”

  “Lovely.”

  “It’s going to be a close thing, you know.”

  “Making the shoal?”

  “Yes. But I meant if we leave the ring behind. There are two hundred of us on the ship. Nearly all the food and supplies are in the ring. We’re still a month out from End. Even in the best of circumstances, we aren’t all going to make it.”

  “Well,” Gineos said. “I assume you’re already planning to eat my body first.”

  “It will be a noble sacrifice you’ll be making, Captain.”

  “I can’t tell whether you’re joking or not, Ollie.”

  “At the moment, Captain, neither can I.”

  “I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell you I never really liked you.”

  Inverr smiled at this, but still didn’t turn his attention away from his monitor. “I know that, Captain. It’s one reason I was okay with a mutiny.”

  “That and the money.”

  “That and the money, yes,” Inverr agreed. “Now let me work.”

  The next several minutes were Inverr showing that, whatever his deficiencies as an XO, he was possibly the best navigator that Gineos had ever seen. The entrance shoal was not retreating linearly from the Tell Me; it appeared to dodge and skip, jumping back and forth, an invisible dancer traceable by the barest of radio frequency hums where the Flow pressed up against time-space. Bernus would track the shoal and call out the latest data; Inverr would make the adjustments and bring the Tell Me inexorably closer to the shoal. It was one of the great acts of space travel, possibly in the history of humanity. Despite everything Gineos felt privileged to be there for it.

  “Uuuuuhhh, we have a problem,” Interim Chief Engineer Hybern said, over the communication lines. “We’re at the point where the engines have to start taking energy from other systems.”

  “We need push fields,” Gineos said. “Everything else is negotiable.”

  “I need navigation,” Inverr said, still not looking up.

  “We need push fields and navigation,” Gineos amended. “Everything else is negotiable.”

  “How do we feel about life support?” Hybern asked.

  “If we don’t do this in the next thirty seconds it won’t matter whether we breathe or don’t,” Inverr said to Gineos.

  “Cut everything but navigation and push fields,” Gineos said.

  “Copy,” Hybern said, and immediately the air in Tell Me began to feel cooler and more stale.

  “Shoal is almost down to two klicks across,” Bernus said.

  “It’ll be close,” Inverr agreed. “Fifteen seconds to shoal.”

  “One point eight klicks across.”

  “We’re fine.”

  “One point five klicks across.”

  “Bernus, shut the fuck up, please.”

  Bernus shut the fuck up. Gineos stood up, adjusted her clothing, and went to stand by her XO.

  Inverr counted down the last ten seconds, abandoning the countdown at six to announce he was shaping the space-time bubble, resuming it at three. At zero, Gineos could see from her vantage point behind and just to the side of him that he was smiling.

  “We’re in. We’re all in. The whole ship,” he said.

  “That was some amazing work, Ollie,” Gineos said.

  “Yeah. I think it was. Not to toot my own horn or anything.”

  “Go ahead and toot it. The crew is alive because of you.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Inverr said. He turned to face Gineos, still smiling, and that’s when she jammed the barrel of the dart-pusher she’d just retrieved from her boot into the orbit of his left eye and pushed the trigger. The dart unloaded into his eye with a soft pop. Inverr’s other eye looked very surprised, and then Inverr slumped to the ground, dead.

  From the other side of the bulkhead, Inverr’s lackeys shouted in alarm and raised their bolt throwers. Gineos held up her hand, and by God, they stopped. “He’s dead,” she said, and then put her other hand on Inverr’s station monitor. “And now I’ve just armed a command that will blow every airlock the ship has into the bubble. The second my hand goes off the monitor, everyone on the ship dies, including you. So now you get to decide who is dead today: Ollie Inverr, or everybody. Shoot me, we all die. If you don’t drop your weapons in the next ten seconds, we all die. Make your choice.”

  All three dropped their bolt throwers. Gineos motioned to Dunn, who went over and collected them, handing one to Bernus and then handing the other to her captain, who took her hand off the monitor to take it. One of the lackeys gasped at this.

  “For fuck’s sake, you’re gullible,” Gineos said to him, flicked the bolt thrower setting to “nonlethal,” and shot all three of them in rapid order. They fell, unconscious.

  She turned to Dunn and Bernus. “Congratulations, you’re promoted,” she said to them. “Now, then. We have some mutineers to deal with. Let’s get to work, shall we.”

  PART ONE

  Chapter

  1

  For the week leading up to his death, Cardenia Wu-Patrick stayed mostly at the bedside of her father, Batrin, who, when he was informed that his condition had reached the limits of medical competence and that palliative care was all that was left to him, decided to die at home, in his favorite bed. Cardenia, who had been aware for some time that the end was close, had cleared her schedule until further notice and had a comfortable chair installed near her father’s bed.

  “Don’t you have better things to do than to sit around here?” Batrin joked to his daughter and sole surviving child, as she sat to begin her morning session with her father.

  “Not at the moment,” she s
aid.

  “I doubt that. I’m pretty sure every time you leave this room to go to the bathroom, you’re accosted by minions who need your signature on something.”

  “No,” Cardenia said. “Everything right now is in the hands of the executive committee. Everything is in maintenance mode for the foreseeable future.”

  “Until I die,” Batrin said.

  “Until you die.”

  Batrin laughed at that, weakly, as that is how he did everything at this point. “This is, I’m afraid, all too foreseeable.”

  “Try not to think about it,” Cardenia said.

  “Easy for you to say.” They both lapsed into a quiet, companionable silence for a few moments, until Batrin grimaced silently at a noise and turned to his daughter. “What is that?”

  Cardenia cocked her head slightly. “You mean the singing?”

  “There’s singing going on?”

  “You have a crowd of well-wishers outside,” Cardenia said.

  Batrin smiled at that. “You’re sure that’s what they are?”

  Batrin Wu, Cardenia’s father, was formally Attavio VI, Emperox of the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds, King of Hub and Associated Nations, Head of the Interdependent Church, Successor to Earth and Father of All, Eighty-seventh Emperox of the House of Wu, which claimed its lineage to the Prophet-Emperox Rachela I, founder of the Interdependency and Savior of Humanity.

  “We’re sure,” Cardenia said. The two of them were at Brighton, the imperial residence at Hubfall, the capital of Hub and her father’s favorite residence. The formal imperial seat lay several thousand klicks up the gravity well, at Xi’an, the sprawling space station that hovered over the surface of Hub, visible to Hubfall like a giant reflective plate flung out into the darkness—or would be, if most of Hubfall were anywhere near the planet surface. Hubfall, like all the cities of Hub, was first blasted, then carved, into the rock of the planet, with only occasional service domes and structures peppering the surface. Those domes looked out on an eternal twilight, waiting for a sunrise the tidally locked planet would never offer, and which, if it did, would bake Hub’s citizens, screaming, like potatoes in a broiler.

  Attavio VI hated Xi’an and never stayed there longer than absolutely necessary. He certainly had no intention of dying there. Brighton was his home, and outside it, a thousand or more well-wishers pooled near its gate, cheering for him and occasionally breaking out into the imperial anthem or “What Say You,” the cheering song for the imperial football team. All of the well-wishers, Cardenia knew, had been thoroughly vetted before they were allowed within a klick of Brighton’s gate and within earshot of the emperox. Some of them didn’t even have to be paid to show up.

  “How many did we have to pay?” Batrin asked.

  “Hardly any,” Cardenia said.

  “I had to pay all three thousand people who showed up to cheer my mother on her deathbed. I had to pay them a lot.”

  “You’re more popular than your mother was.” Cardenia had never met her grandmother, Emperox Zetian III, but the tales from history were toe-curling.

  “A rock would be more popular than my mother,” Batrin said. “But you shouldn’t fool yourself, my child. No emperox of the Interdependency has ever been that popular. It’s not in the job description.”

  “You were more popular than most, at least,” Cardenia suggested.

  “That’s why you only had to pay some of the people outside the window.”

  “I could have them dismissed, if you like.”

  “They’re fine. See if they take requests.”

  Presently Batrin napped again and when Cardenia was sure he was asleep, she got up from her chair and exited into her father’s private office, which she had commandeered from him for the duration and which would be hers soon enough in any event. As she exited her father’s bedroom she saw a squadron of medical professionals, headed by Qui Drinin, imperial physician, descend upon her father to clean him, check his vitals, and make sure he was as comfortable as someone who was dealing with a painful and incurable disease from which he would never recover could be.

  In the private office was Naffa Dolg, Cardenia’s recently appointed chief of staff. Naffa waited until Cardenia had reached into the office’s small refrigerator, acquired a soft drink, sat down, opened the drink, had two swallows from the container, then set the drink down on her father’s desk.

  “Coaster,” Naffa said to her boss.

  “Really?” Cardenia said back.

  Naffa pointed. “That desk was originally the desk of Turinu II. It is six hundred fifty years old. It was a gift to him by the father of Genevieve N’don, who would become his wife after—”

  Cardenia held up a hand. “Enough.” She reached over on the desk, grabbed a small leather-bound book, pulled it over to her, and set her drink on it. Then she caught Naffa’s expression. “What now?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Naffa said. “Just that your ‘coaster’ is a first edition of Chao’s Commentaries on the Racheline Doctrines, which means it’s nearly a thousand years old and unspeakably priceless and even thinking of setting a drink can on it is probably blasphemy of the highest order.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Cardenia took another swig of her drink and then set it on the carpet next to the desk. “Happy? I mean, unless the carpet is also unspeakably priceless.”

  “Actually—”

  “Can we stipulate that everything in this room except the two of us is probably hundreds of years old, originally gifted to one of my ancestors by another immensely famous historical personage, and that it is priceless or at least worth more than most humans will make in their lifetimes? Is there anything in this room that does not fit that description?”

  Naffa pointed to the refrigerator. “I think that’s just a refrigerator.”

  Cardenia finally found a coaster on the desk, picked her drink up off the carpet, and set it on it. “This coaster is probably four hundred years old and the gift of the Duke of End,” she said, then looked at her assistant. “Don’t tell me if it is.”

  “I won’t.” Naffa pulled out her tablet.

  “But you know, don’t you.”

  “You have requests from the executive committee,” Naffa said, ignoring her boss’s last comment.

  Cardenia threw up her hands. “Of course I do.” The executive committee consisted of three guild representatives, three ministers of parliament, and three archbishops of the church. In other times, the committee was the emperox’s direct link to the three centers of power in the Interdependency. At the moment they were charged with maintaining the continuity of government during these final days of the emperox’s reign. They were driving Cardenia a little batty.

  “First, they want you to make an appearance on the networks to, as they put it, ‘calm the fears of the empire’ regarding your father’s situation.”

  “He’s dying, and quickly,” Cardenia said. “I’m not sure that’s calming.”

  “I think they’d prefer something a little more inspiring. They sent over a speech.”

  “There’s no point reassuring the empire. By the time my speech reaches End he’ll have been dead for nine standard months. Even Bremen is two weeks away.”

  “There’s still Hub and Xi’an and associated nations in-system. The furthest of those is only five light-hours out.”

  “They already know he’s dying.”

  “It’s not about him dying. It’s about continuity.”

  “The Wu dynasty stretches back a thousand years, Naffa. No one is really that worried about continuity.”

  “That’s not the continuity they’re worried about. They’re worried about their day-to-day lives. No matter who would become emperox, things change. There are three hundred million imperial subjects in-system, Cardenia. You’re the heir. They know the dynasty won’t change. It’s everything else.”

  “I can’t believe you’re on the side of the executive committee here.”

  “Stopped clock. Tw
ice a day.”

  “Have you read the speech?”

  “I have. It’s awful.”

  “Are you rewriting it?”

  “Already rewritten, yes.”

  “What else?”

  “They wanted to know if you’ve changed your position on Amit Nohamapetan.”

  “My position on what? Meeting with him or marrying him?”

  “I would think they’re hoping the first will lead to the second.”

  “I’ve met him once before. It’s why I don’t want to meet with him again. I’m definitely not going to marry him.”

  “The executive committee, perhaps anticipating your reluctance, wishes to remind you that your brother, the late crown prince, had agreed in principle to marry Nadashe Nohamapetan.”

  “I would rather marry her than her brother.”

  “Anticipating that you might say that, the executive committee wishes to remind you that option would also probably be acceptable to all parties.”

  “I’m not going to marry her either,” Cardenia said. “I don’t like either. They’re terrible people.”

  “They’re terrible people whose house is ascendant in the mercantile guilds and whose desire for an alliance with the House of Wu would allow the empire a lever with the guilds it hasn’t had in centuries.”

  “Is that you talking or the executive committee?”

  “Eighty percent executive committee.”

  “You’re at twenty percent on this?” Cardenia offered mostly feigned shock.

  “That twenty percent recognizes that political marriages are a thing that happens to people, like you, who are on the verge of becoming emperox and who, despite having a millennium-long dynasty to fall back on for credibility, still need allies to keep the guilds in line.”

  “This is where you tell me of all the times in the last thousand years the Wu emperoxs were basically puppets for guild interests, isn’t it?”

  “This is where I remind you that you gave me this position not just out of personal friendship and experience with court politics but because I have a doctorate in the history of the Wu dynasty and know more about your family than you do,” Naffa said. “But sure, I could do that other thing, too.”