War Against the White Knights (36 page)

From the plane they decanted to an elevator, giving Arun little chance to take in his surroundings. Metal conduits, blisters and protrusions of opaque purpose, and a vague impression of activity despite the fact they encountered only a few people – all of them White Knights – and then their party was being whisked upwards. It took a matter of seconds to complete an ascent that must have covered a considerable distance – ten klicks, twenty? – but seemed as smooth as silk.

“Here we are,” the Emperor said as they stepped out onto surprisingly comfortable flooring. “The Habitat.”

Arun wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but the reality confounded any preconception. They were in a vast room – though the ceiling was comparatively low, perhaps twice the Emperor’s height. The industrial feel of the tower he had glimpsed so briefly before entering the elevator had done nothing to prepare him for this. Soft lighting, with furniture – at least he assumed it was furniture, though it certainly hadn’t been designed for any human form – placed in clusters around the room, and beneath his chair there was
carpet
, or something like it. Soft, springy, but seemingly alive – he could swear he saw the fibers adjusting to people as they shifted their feet and weight. Everything was curved and rounded – the chairs bore no corners, the room was ovoid in design, with the walls arcing to become the ceiling rather than simply joining it, and the color of the décor varied from off-white to a very pale yet warm orange.

The whole scene was so far removed from anything Arun would have associated with the White Knights that for a moment all he could do was stare. And it was then that he heard it. A sound; so quiet that at first he wondered if he’d imagined it. He found himself straining to be certain, to isolate this, what, music? No, not that. Murmured conversation? No, not that either. Something mechanical…? No, this was none of those. It was… in truth, he couldn’t work out what it might be.

“What’s that sound?” he asked, fearing that he risked making a fool of himself.

“Ah.” The Emperor appraised him for a moment. “We call it
aichajor
, and well done: I was wondering if you would be able to detect it. The Habitat is vast and, despite the number of us living here, there are times when any one of us may enter a space such as this,” and he gestured to take in the empty room, “and find ourselves alone.
Aichajor
prevents that. Pitched to fall just short of our conscious grasp of sound, it conveys a sense of something happening just out of sight, of a quiet conversation taking place around the corner.
Aichajor
permeates every corner of the Habitat. It fills the gaps in sentient experience and ensures that no White Knight need ever feel alone.

“Psychological balance is important to us, and this is one of the ways we maintain it. Now, let me show you another.”

The Emperor led the way to the right hand side of the room, where the apparently seamless wall split apart at their approach, granting access to a long arc-walled corridor – a tube with a flat floor – in which the mellow color scheme and soft flooring continued, as did the
aichajor
, its constant presence leading Arun to wonder how this almost-sound could ever be considered comforting. He was finding it just plain annoying, more likely to drive a person mad as they strained to capture it than aid their ‘psychological balance’.

“Is all the Habitat like this?” Arun asked. “Carpeted and so…”
Cozy, bland?
“…comfortable?” he finished.

“Much of it, yes,” the Emperor confirmed, “though there are quarters far more elegantly appointed, and sectors that are industrial in nature, or so I believe – for food production, power generation, that sort of thing.”

“And do White Knights work in these industrial sectors?”

“You already know the answer.”

Interesting. The Emperor had already mentioned that industry was conducted by lesser races, and the Legion had captured millions of servants and workers in their seizure of Australia, largely permitting them to go about their business. But Arun wanted to know more. If the White Knights were outnumbered on their own world, what kept them in power? And could their hold on power be disrupted?

“Much of it is automated, of course,” the Emperor added, as if sensing the direction of his thoughts.

“Of course.”

They reached the far side of the corridor, which ended in a blank wall. One of the royal entourage gestured and the wall turned translucent. What lay beyond sent a chill down Arun’s spine: a roiling turmoil of orange-brown mist.

“Flek!”

“Indeed.”

Looking at the corridor filled with churning gas, Arun was reminded again of the Night Hummers swimming in their sealed chambers. “Why?” he asked, ignoring a warning look from Del. Diplomacy could go hang itself. “Why bring Flek up here?” For surely it had to have been deliberately installed, whether ferried from the surface or artificially created here. He could accept that Flek was a natural phenomenon on Athena, but why would any sane being choose to take this poisonous stuff with them when given the chance to escape from the surface and leave it behind?

“Our race evolved under the constant shadow of Flek.” The Emperor’s words were delivered in the same majestic manner that all his speech was, but this time more than ever Arun felt that he was being talked down to, that he was a child having the obvious explained to them by a far more knowledgeable adult. “As a result, Flek has played a crucial role in shaping the race you know as the White Knights, in enabling us to evolve into a superior lifeform that has established dominion over such a large sector of space.”

Arun kept his thoughts to himself on the ‘superior’ part; even he couldn’t deny that the Knights’ achievements were remarkable, made all the more so because they had sustained their dominion for such an impressively long time.

“It is important you understand this,” the Emperor continued, “for only then can you hope to understand us and appreciate the nature of our rule. Emerging in an environment dominated by Flek has made us stronger by forcing our ancestors to adapt or perish. Flek is a mutagen, an avatar of evolution. Those who survive its touch are changed, which has enabled our race to evolve at a giddy rate, new forms emerging in the space of a generation that would normally have taken centuries or millennia to develop, while adaptations that may never have been realized in the natural order of things, might never have emerged from the tangled confusion of genetic potential, have become viable and established.

“In many ways Flek is responsible for who we are. Why would we ever want to leave that behind?”

“So you view Flek as a
positive
thing.”

“Most certainly.”

For a moment Arun had nothing to say, as he tried to digest the implications.

“Our whole philosophy is built around the principle that you change or stagnate, and to stagnate is to die,” the Emperor said into the silence. “To change is to improve, and it’s that improvement that has driven us to become the dominant sentience in this sector of the galaxy. It’s a philosophy that we have extended to all our client races, making it a tenet of the empire, ensuring that every component race is the best they can possibly be, to serve us and so themselves in superior fashion.”

A dreadful suspicion had begun to form in Arun’s mind. “And how does this philosophy of change apply to humans?” he asked.

“Humans? When it comes to junior species, we leave the details to senior, more established client races; in your case that would be the Jotuns. It was for them to decide how best the principle of survival of the fittest should be built into your culture. They chose, naturally enough, to implement the same system their own species follows. I believe you call it the Cull.”

Arun was conscious of Del tensing beside him, though to his credit his face remained calm – Arun doubted he did as well himself.

“Naturally, whatever agreement we reach in the coming days,” the Emperor said, perhaps noting the two humans’ reactions despite their best efforts, “your continued adherence to the Cull is non-negotiable.”

“Perhaps, Your Elevance,” Del said, while Arun’s thoughts were still reeling, “we might find a different way of applying your noble principle, one that could replace the Cull while achieving the same result?”

“It is possible, I suppose,” the Emperor said, answering Del’s point but addressing Arun, “that an alternative system might be considered, but we would need convincing that any alternative would be as effective as the current method, and that will take time, generations even. For now, the Cull must remain. Ah…”

For a moment Arun had a sense that the Emperor was gazing through him rather than at him, which was just as well because if Arun had legs, he would be advancing on his Imperial master and punching him in his gilded frakking face.

Del had warned him of this. The Emperor would negotiate hard, the initial demands would be outrageous, and designed to unsettle the Legion negotiators as well as being opening gambits. The nightmare prospect of a continued Cull had been hotly debated throughout the Legion for decades. If the balance of power was more even, then Arun might have acceded to a modified form of Cull. But for all his regal posturing, the ruler of the Old Empire was negotiating from weakness.

The Emperor’s eyes focused again.

“General McEwan, I have excellent news. It seems we can draw this tour to an end and return to the Citadel to begin the serious business of negotiating. I am informed that several systems within what you undoubtedly consider to be your territory have thrown off the yoke of Legion conquest and returned to the beneficial fold of their true masters, the White Knights.”

So that was it. The ‘Tour’ had never been intended as an ingratiating gesture. Instead it had been a delaying tactic, buying Imperial forces a few precious days in which to retake Legion systems. Arun had begun to suspect as much, but that made the confirmation no less bitter. Precisely
what
Imperial forces was a matter of conjecture – the Emperor had approached him for aid on the basis that his own fleets were too scattered and weakened. The Emperor had clearly been holding out on him. He and Del needed to get information, needed to discover just how much damage had been done.

Evidently guessing the direction of his thoughts, the Emperor said, “It would seem your negotiating position is not as strong as you might have thought.”

“Perhaps not,” Arun said, “but then neither is yours.”

“Oh?”

Throughout the Legion’s history, Arun had always maintained one tenet. The Legion was loyal to the White Knights. The fact that the Knights were divided into different factions gave plenty of leeway, meaning that whatever he and his followers did could be viewed as loyal to
some
variety of White Knight, which gave all their actions to date a veneer of legality. That was important. He knew that without such justification the Legion would fracture, that some of the races would have been unwilling to pursue an illegal war.

“We know about the Night Hummers,” he said.

Until that moment he had harbored suspicions but hadn’t been certain. Now there could be no doubt. For a fleeting instant the Emperor’s face, which had always been such an unfathomable mask, displayed what Arun could only describe as dismay.

With growing confidence, he pushed home his advantage. “We know that the Hummers are White Knights too. Perhaps
they
are more deserving of our loyalty; perhaps they would be more fitting rulers of the Empire.”

Training Area 2 covered three frames of
Holy Retribution
’s Deck Seven. It was the largest enclosed space available to the Legion fleet orbiting Athena, and that made it the most appropriate location for a new body to consider the Emperor’s peace terms that had been hammered over the past few weeks as the balance of power seesawed between the Human Legion and the Emperor.

The Emperor had clearly been preparing for this moment for many years, secreting his forces around the most lightly defended worlds of the Human Autonomous Region. His claim to have conquered the Human worlds was premature in many cases. The light Imperial forces expecting easy demonstrations of their power, instead found themselves stung by zero-point defensive batteries that were heavy enough not only to repulse an invasion but also to defeat the traditional tactic of forcing a world to submit by threatening to throw rocks into its gravity well.

Nonetheless, several Legion systems were now back in the Emperor’s grip, and a dozen others were disrupted, their principal worlds blockaded and constantly harassed. It was a situation that could only worsen for the Legion. The New Empire faction was showing its strength again, and the Muryani Accord – the White Knights’ traditional enemy across the frontier – had abandoned an initial alliance with the New Empire and now seemed intent on burning its own route of conquest toward Olympus Ultra and Athena.

And then there were the Hardits. Arun had no idea what Tawfiq was up to, but the two of them had unfinished business.

Concentrating Legion forces in order to seize the White Knight homeworld had always been a gamble. To make that strategy worthwhile they had to emerge with a peace deal that could effectively end this civil war – or, at least, its first phase. Arun knew that. Unfortunately, the Emperor knew it too, and made frequent references to how the Legion had overextended itself.

Throughout each side’s attempt to adjust the balance of power in their favor, there had been one constant in the negotiations, a single issue that developed into the pivot that everything else had to balance upon: the Emperor’s insistence that the Cull must remain.

At first the Imperial negotiating position was a flat refusal to even discuss the issue. But then Del-Marie seized upon reports of fresh Muryani advances, combined them with the lie that Legion was negotiating with the Night Hummers to recognize them as the legitimate White Knight authority, and pushed the Emperor to negotiate a
token lessening
of the Cull’s severity, as Del put it. They all knew this was more than a token, and the Emperor gave his concessions added bite by placing a strict time limit upon them, after which the offer would be withdrawn. This was as good a deal as the Human Legion would ever win, and since the Emperor had mobilized his hidden forces, it was, frankly, better than Arun thought he would achieve.