The Risen Empire (7 page)

The car descended, and he stepped from it filled with a regret suddenly remembered from childhood, the sad and foiled feeling that this carnival ride was over, that his feet were on solid, predictible ground again.

"Lovely car," came the voice of Captain Marcus Fentu Masrui.

"Yes, sir," Zai answered with a mumble, still overwhelmed, barely managing to salute his old commander.

The two watched silently as the vehicle was grasped by conventional transports, carried away to be cowled and caged like some exotic, captive bird of prey.

"Welcome to the palace, Lieutenant-Commander," Masrui said. With an outstretched arm, he gently pulled Zai's eyes away from the car and toward the diamond edifice before them. Its shape was familiar to any of the Emperor's subjects, especially one Vadan-born, but from this close it seemed monstrously distorted. Laurent Zai was used to seeing the palace rendered in the scale of votive paintings, with the sun playing on its shiny surfaces. Now it was black and looming, darker than the starless night that it threatened to crowd from the sky.

"Power has an extraordinary glare, doesn't it," Masrui observed.

The captain was looking up, but Zai still wondered whether he meant the palace or the gravity car.

"After my elevation," Masrui continued, "I took that ride. And it finally dawned on me why I'd spent all those years learning physics at academy."

Zai smiled. Masrui was famous for his doggedness. He had failed the Academy's minimal physical science class for three years running, almost exhausting the dispensations that his genius in other areas had afforded him before finally obtaining a commission.

"Not the better to command my ship, of course. A ship is men and women, after all; AIs have done the math for millennia. But I needed to understand physics, if for no other reason, then to understand fully that one Imperial gesture."

Zai looked into his commanding officer's eyes. He wondered for a moment if the man, as usual, were being cynical. But the buoyant memory of riding in the craft convinced him that even Masrui might be sentimental about those minutes of flight.

They walked up the broad stairs together. The sounds of the party flowed out between columns and heroic statues.

"Strange, sir, to have looked down on worlds, and still be amazed by a ... mere flying machine."

"It makes you realize, Zai, that you've never
properly
flown. We've been in aircraft and dropships, free fall and lifter belts, but the body always fights it at some level. Even the excitement comes from adrenaline, from some animal panic that things aren't right."

"But it's right in that car, sir. Isn't it?" Zai said.

"Yes. Flight as effortless and natural as a bird's. Or a god's. Did we join the Navy for service and immortality, I wonder? Or for something more akin to
that."

The captain trailed off. A group of officers was approaching. Zai felt the subject disappear between him and his old friend, the words pulled back from the air and hidden somewhere like the conspiracies of mutineers.

"The hero!" one of the officers said too loudly. She was Captain Rencer Fowler IX, whom Zai, if the rumors were true, would soon displace as the youngest starship commander in the fleet. Zai saw Fowler's eyes sweep across his medaled chest, and felt briefly naked again in the covering of clever ants. The others looked comfortable in their dress uniforms, the particulate nature of the garments completely disguised. Zai knew his ants were no more obvious than theirs. He determined not to think of the uniform again.

"Only a humble servant of Empire," Masrui answered for him.

Zai and Masrui shook hands with the men among the officers, and touched closed fists with the women. Zai's head began to spin a bit with the surfeit of ritual greetings and realized how convenient the usual salute was. But this was a dress occasion, forms had to be followed, and the pattern of bare wrists as gloved hands flexed and touched seemed to hold meaning, like animals flashing signals of bare-toothed dominance at each other. The glint of Zai's metal wrist caught starlight.

They went into the palace hall together, and a crescendo of voices echoing from stone rose up around them like a sudden rain.

Faces turned toward Zai as the group moved across the great black floor. The hero of Dhantu, or as the gutter media called him: the Broken Man. He realized that the group of officers, arrayed casually around him, had done him a kindness, forming a shield between him and the stares of the crowd. He wondered if Masrui had planned their meeting on the steps. They moved slowly, to nowhere in particular, his entourage hailing familiar faces and pulling them into the group, or fending off interlopers with a deflecting touch of greeting. One of them cadged a tray full of drinks and passed it round the group.

Zai drifted along like a child in his parents' tow. The great hall was crowded. The lucent dress uniforms of Navy personnel were mixed with the absolute black of the Political Apparatus. There were civilians dressed in formal bloodred or the white of the Senate, guildfolk in colored patterns he couldn't begin to read. The high, fluted columns that climbed to the vaulted ceiling channeled this mass of people into swirling eddies. After a few minutes of this promenade, Zai realized what would have been instantly obvious to an observer in the upper reaches of the hall: everyone was walking in circles.

Fowler's voice came from his side.

"How's immortality, Lieutenant-Commander?"

Fowler, despite her meteoric early career, had not been elevated yet.

"I hear it's not much different for the first hundred years," Zai answered. "Certainly, the first week isn't."

Fowler laughed. "Not missing the specter of death yet, are you? Well, I guess you saw enough of that on Dhantu."

A chill crawled up Zai's spine at the word. Of course, the planet that had seen his art of heroism—if that's what it could be called—was implicit everywhere tonight. But only Fowler would be graceless enough to mention its name.

"Enough for a few centuries, I suppose," Zai answered. He felt movement on one flank. It was the ants, reorganizing themselves for some vital bit of tailoring. They
would
pick this moment.

Then Zai realized their purpose: a trickle of sweat had appeared under his real arm.

Fowler's face was close in the pressing crowd. "Well, the Rix are playing rough again, my connections on the frontier are saying. We may need heroes on that side of the Empire soon. They say you'll be promoted soon. Maybe get your own ship."

Zai felt overheated. The sense of a nakedness had disappeared in the close air of the crowded room, as if the ants were linking ever more tightly, closing their ranks against Fowler's rudeness. Could they detect the woman's hostility and react to it as they did to light? Zai wondered. The little elements writhed in a column down and around Zai's side, carrying his suddenly prodigious sweat to the small of his back.

"And the specter of death always joins heroes at the front," Fowler added. "Perhaps you'll become acquainted again." The woman's false camaraderie was growing thinner by the word. Zai looked around for Masrui. Was he among friends here, really?

He caught the eye of a young woman by the nearest column. She returned his glance with a smile and the slightest bow of her head.

"She's quite pretty," Zai said, interrupting whatever Fowler was saying. That basic touchstone of desire had its desired effect, and Fowler immediately turned to follow the path of Zai's gaze.

She turned back with an undisguised sneer.

"I think you picked the wrong woman, Zai. She's as pink as they come. And perhaps a bit beyond your rank."

Zai looked again and cursed his haste. Fowler was right. The sleeves of her white robe were hatched with the mark of a Senator-Elect. She seemed terribly young for that; even in an age of cosmetic surgery, a certain gravitas was expected of members of the Senate.

Zai tried not to show his embarrassment. "Pink, you said?"

"Anti-imperial," Fowler supplied, speaking slowly as though to a child. "The opposite of gray. A brave defender of the living. That's Nara Oxham, the mad senator-elect from Vasthold. She's rejected elevation, for heaven's sake. By choice, she'll rot in the ground."

"The Mad Senator," Zai murmured. He'd read that moniker in the same garbage media that had dubbed him the Broken Man.

The young woman smiled again, and Zai realized he'd been staring. He raised his glass to her and looked sheepishly away. Of course Zai knew what
pink
meant. But his native Vadan was as politically gray as any planet in the Empire. The dead were worshiped there, everyone claiming a risen ancestor as his or her personal intermediary with the Emperor. And of course the Navy was gray from admirals to marines. Lieutenant-Commander Zai wasn't sure if he'd met a pink in his entire life.

"Mind you, I'm sure she'll accept the elevation when she's a bit closer to death," Fowler said. "Just as long as she doesn't have an accident in the meantime. Wouldn't
that
be a pity, losing eternity for one's principles."

"Or one's arrogance," Zai added, hoping Fowler would suspect whom he really meant. "Perhaps she just needs a talking-to."

He pushed past Fowler, feeling the woman's skin against his own as their ants briefly conjoined.

"For heaven's sake, Zai, she's a
senator,"
Fowler hissed.

Zai turned briefly toward his adversary and spoke calmly.

"And tonight I am a hero," he said.

SENATOR-ELECT

Nara Oxham's eyes widened as Lieutenant-Commander Laurent Zai pushed his way out and headed toward her. The purpose on his face was unmistakable. He gripped his champagne glass with all five fingers, as if it were a club, and his eyes locked hers.

A group of officers had surrounded him since his arrival, cutting him off from the rest of the party in a display of protectiveness, and perhaps pride that one of theirs had been elevated so young. The handlers in Nara Oxham's secondary audio listed names and academy years as she moved an eyemouse across their faces. All were older than Zai. Senator-Elect Oxham suspected that their claim on him was newly minted; the hero of Dhantu would make a fine addition to their clique.

For some reason, though, Zai had moved to extract himself from their attentions. The young lieutenant-commander almost stumbled as he left them behind, as if pulling his feet from some invisible tangleweed on the marble floor. Nara Oxham fingered her apathy wristband ruefully. She would love to feel what was going on in Zai's mind, but the party was too crowded to dare a lower dosage.

Oxham's entourage parted slightly to admit the young officer.

Although the senator's empathic powers were currently suppressed, for most of her life she'd been able to compare facial expressions with what her extra sense told her. Even with the wristband at full strength, she was extraordinarily perceptive. When Lieutenant-Commander Zai stood before her, she could see that he didn't know what to say.

Vadan greeting,
she subvocalized.

Five appropriate salutations appeared in synesthesia, but in a flash of instinct, Nara ignored them all.

"You don't look very happy, Lieutenant-Commander Zai."

He glanced over his shoulder at his friends. Turned back.

"I'm not used to crowds, ma'am" he said.

Nara smiled at the honorific. He must be without a handler to have used
ma'am
instead of
excellency.
How did the Navy ever win wars, she wondered, when they couldn't manage a cocktail party?

"Stand here by the column," she said. She held her glass up to the light. "There's a certain security in having one's back covered, don't you think, Lieutenant-Commander?"

"Sound military thinking, Senator-Elect," he answered, finally smiling back at her.

So at least he knew her rank. But her politics?

"These columns are stronger than they look," she said. "Each is a single diamond, grown in an orbital carbon whisketter."

His eyes arched up, no doubt considering their mass. Making huge diamonds was easy in orbit. But getting an object that big down the gravity well safely—now
that
was a feat of engineering. Oxham held her glass of champagne up to the light.

"Have you noticed, Lieutenant-Commander, that the shape of the glasses matches the column's fluting?"

He looked at his own glass. "No, Excellency, I hadn't."

Excellency,
now. The officer's etiquette training was kicking in. Did that mean she had made him comfortable enough to remember his manners? Or was he feeling her rank?

"But I suppose I personify the analogy," he continued. "I had begun to feel rather like a bubble floating aimlessly. Thank you for offering a safe haven, Senator-Elect."

Out of the corner of one eye, Oxham had watched the rest of the officers in Zai's group. With a glance here, a hand on a shoulder there, they were spreading the news of Zai's defection. Now, an older man of captain's rank was watching. Was he headed over to rescue the young lieutenant-commander from the Mad Senator?

Captain Marcus Fentu Masrui, Elevated,
Oxham's handlers informed her.
Nonpolitical as far as we know.

Nara raised an eyebrow. Nothing human was nonpolitical.

"I'm not sure how much of a haven you've found, Lieutenant-Commander." She let her attention over Zai's shoulder become obvious. "Your friends seem disturbed."

Zai glanced down at one of his shoulders, as if arresting a turn of his head back toward the officers. Then his eyes met hers again.

"I'm not sure about that, ma'am."

"They certainly look upset." Captain Masrui was still hovering nearby, unwilling to plunge in after Zai.

"Oh, of that I'm positive," Zai said. "But whether they are my friends or not..."

He smiled, but was not entirely joking.

"Success brings a certain amount of false friendship," Oxham said. "At least, speaking from my own perspective, political success does."

"No doubt, Senator. And, in a way, I suppose my own celebrity does have a political aspect to it."