Conquest

  But then suddenly the nature of the Sisterhood had changed. Led by Ezil, the oldest of their order, they had emerged from the Marque, and some had even taken husbands. If it was considered an honor for a daughter to join the order, so too did ambitious men realize the advantage that might be gained from having the knowledge of the Sisterhood close at hand. Ezil decided which of the sisters should be permitted to marry, and to whom they should become betrothed, but she herself did not marry, and neither did the four other most senior sisters. Instead, they had made themselves indispensable as advisers, attaching themselves to the Diplomatic Corps. Soon, no decisions were made without consulting them.

  All this had occurred many years before Syl was born, and Ezil and the senior sisters, known as the First Five, had not been seen outside the Marque in decades. But the emergence of the Sisterhood had marked the beginning of what was now known as the Second Empire. It was the Sisterhood that had given the Empire the means to expand, for they had discovered the location of the wormholes. The universe teemed with them; they were gateways between galaxies, allowing the Illyri to travel vast distances with previously unimagined speed.

  Syl’s father had explained the nature of the wormholes to Syl when she was a small child. Holding a sheet of paper, he told her to imagine that it represented millions and millions of miles of space. At the far right side of the page he made a mark with his pen, and placed a similar mark on the far left.

  “Now,” he said, “imagine that this first dot is Illyr, and this second dot is Earth. How long would it take to travel from one to the other?”

  “Years,” the young Syl had replied. “A lifetime.”

  “Many, many lifetimes,” said her father. “But using the wormholes, we can cover the distance in an instant.”

  He gently folded the paper, aligning the marks, then pierced them with his pen.

  “That is what the wormholes do. They link distant points in the universe.”

  “But how do we know where they lead?” asked Syl.

  “We send drones to explore the systems in advance. Sometimes the Sisterhood tells us.”

  “And how does the Sisterhood know?” asked Syl, and her father had not answered her, because, as Syl had come to realize, he did not have an answer. If the Illyri loved secrets, the Sisterhood lived for them.

  The Second Illyri Empire had explored over one hundred systems, each targeted because it contained a habitable planet with life-forms, however primitive, and commodities that could support the Empire’s further conquests: food, fuel, minerals, methane, water. Through the Sisterhood and the wormholes, the Illyri had established that the universe was fundamentally a lonely place, and complex civilizations like their own were extremely rare. So far, the Illyri had found only one species, humanity, who could, given time, become as powerful as they, if not more so. The humans had drawn the Illyri down upon them: by sending radio signals out into the universe, they had alerted the Empire to the presence of another advanced race. As one of her father’s generals had remarked, it was better that they be conquered now on their own world than battled later on another.

  The Sisterhood had agreed, and so the plan to invade Earth was set in motion.

  Any mention of the Sisterhood always made Syl’s father mad.

  “Witches,” he would mutter. “Damned witches. And Syrene is the damnedest of them all.”

  Ezil still lived, although she was now nearly two centuries old: a great and unusual age even for an Illyri. She was reported to be frail, and control of the Sisterhood had gradually passed to Syrene, who had once been Ezil’s novice. Syrene had the ear of Grand Consul Gradus, for she was his wife, chosen for him by Ezil herself.

  The Military had resisted the approaches of the Sisterhood, and soldiers were unofficially forbidden from entering into relationships with Nairene sisters, but the reality was that the sisters had barely tried to infiltrate the Military. They seemed content to infest the ranks of the Diplomats, and leave the Military to the work of conquest, but their influence on the Diplomatic Corps was one of the factors contributing to the hostility between the Empire’s two main forces.

  Syl remembered all of this as she watched Lord Andrus smoothly rid himself of McGill, and now she stepped in front of her father as he was about to pass, so that he almost tripped over her. Behind him, Balen stood up at his desk, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He gave Syl a cold smile. Clearly, like Althea, he felt that she should not be disturbing her father at this time.

  “Syl!” said Lord Andrus. He looked tired. “What are you doing lurking in dark corners? Why aren’t you in class?”

  He spoke to her in the Illyri tongue, harsh to human ears yet lovelier to her than any language on this world. Syl, like many young Illyri, had learned human languages as part of her schooling, and spoke English, French, and a little Spanish. In private, the youths spoke the languages of the conquered more frequently than their own, but older Illyri preferred to discuss their affairs in the tongue of the homeworld. It was part of their efforts to maintain their identity as conquerors, and their links by birth to Illyr, but the relationship to the planet of those young Illyri born and raised on Earth was both more intimate and complex.

  “I wanted to see you. It is the anniversary of my birth. I—”

  He placed his hands upon her shoulders and kissed her forehead.

  “I have not forgotten. There is a gift waiting for you in your chambers, and later we’ll have dinner together, but for now you must go back to your studies, or else I’ll have Toris complaining that I allow you to wallow in ignorance, and Althea accusing me of indulging you.”

  “But that’s—”

  Her father raised a hand to silence her. “I have an important meeting, Syl. We’ll discuss it later. For now, back to class. Go, go!”

  He hustled her ahead of him, and when they came to the main corridor he turned left, and she right. She walked on for a time until she was out of sight, then halted. This wasn’t fair. Her father had promised always to keep the anniversary of her birth special, not just because she was his only child, but because her mother had placed great store by such occasions. With her mother no longer alive, her father maintained that he had to celebrate Syl’s birth for both of them, and each year he had done his utmost to make it a day to remember. On her tenth birthday, they had taken his private skimmer to South America, and picnicked at Machu Picchu in Peru. On her thirteenth birthday, they had traveled to Florence, and he had given her a Michelangelo cartoon saved from the destruction of Rome, for she adored art.

  But today he was too busy for her, and Syl feared that this might be setting a pattern for the future. Her eyes felt hot. She tried to hold back the tears, but one managed to escape. She brushed it away furiously. No, she would not cry, not here. Running back to her chambers, she lay down on her bed to concentrate on stemming her tears. She tried to imagine what her mother might have said to her were she still alive. She’d probably have told her that she was acting like a spoiled child, and that her father loved her but sometimes the requirements of his job meant that he could not spend as much time with her as she might wish. He would make it up to her later.

  Syl sat up and rubbed her face. On her desk, unnoticed until now, was a box tied with brightly colored ribbons: her father’s gift to her.

  “Oh!” she said aloud, childlike in anticipation as she bounded from her bed to inspect the parcel. It was heavy, so she unwrapped it where it was, exposing a plain wooden box. Inside the box, nestled in tissue, lay the bronze sculpture of a man’s hand. She recognized it immediately and gave a yelp of glee, for it was La Main, a cast of Picasso’s right hand sculpted by the artist himself. It had been part of the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland before the building was looted and burned during the unrest that initially followed the invasion. Some of the collection had been recovered, but the gallery had not been rebuilt, and paintings that had previously been housed
there now adorned the walls of Edinburgh Castle. La Main, though, had been believed lost. The cast was one of a series of ten, but the whereabouts of the rest were unknown.

  Syl loved to paint, and there was something in the way that Picasso depicted the world, the way in which he made the familiar strange and new, that appealed deeply to her. She liked the idea of the hand that had created such wonders being rendered in bronze, and now she touched her fingers to it, feeling the cool metal beneath her skin. She smiled despite herself.

  There was a note with it: Art is universal. Let one great artist inspire you to become another.

  She stroked the bronze, finding on it the marks of its maker’s fingers.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  L

  ord Andrus found himself wondering what his daughter would think of his gift to her, even as his personal guards fell into step behind him. She was angry with him now, he knew, but she would not be for long, and he smiled as he thought of the pleasure she’d take in La Main.

  His smile faded as he arrived at the door of the private meeting room adjoining his offices. His guards took up position outside, and he gave them strict instructions that no one, and definitely not his daughter—not again—should be permitted to enter.

  Andrus activated his private lens, not wanting to call up a screen from the castle’s own systems. The tiny lens lay on his right eye, and enabled him to see virtual images superimposed on reality, from street names to weather information and private messages from his general staff if he was away from the castle. Lenses had first been developed for battlefield use; aided by information from drones and overhead satellites, they provided soldiers with maps, direction of enemy fire, and, most important, the enemy’s position. Now many Illyri used them the way humans had once used cell phones: they took calls through lenses, searched for information, watched movies, and even played immersive games. It irritated Andrus to see such amazing technology being used for such frivolous ends.

  Danis appeared on Andrus’s lens. The remains of the fort at Birdoswald smoldered behind him. The old general was one of Andrus’s most trusted soldiers, and his closest friend.

  Adding to the men’s closeness was the not insignificant matter of Danis’s daughter, Ani. Danis’s wife, Fian, had given birth to the girl while Syl was still digesting her first meals at her mother’s breast; only a difficult, extended labor had stopped Syl and Ani from being virtual twins, and they had settled for being sisters under the skin. Had Danis actively sought a governorship, then Syl and Ani would have been separated, breaking the hearts of both the young Illyri. To some degree Danis had sacrificed personal ambition at the altar of his daughter’s happiness.

  “Talk to me, Danis,” said Andrus, pouring himself a glass of wine as he did so.

  Danis looked cold and damp. On his own lens, he watched enviously as Andrus settled into his chair.

  “Good wine, I hope?” he said.

  “Very,” said Andrus.

  “You’re developing the tastes of a Diplomat. Next you’ll be shaving your head, and you won’t be able to lift your hands for all the jewelry on your fingers.”

  “I’ll give you a bottle when you return,” said Andrus. “Now tell me about Birdoswald.”

  In a corner of his lens, images of the fort appeared, transmitted by Danis. Bodies lay scattered throughout.

  “It was a carefully planned and well-executed attack,” said Danis. “A year ago, the Resistance wouldn’t have had the guts or the manpower to carry out a raid like that.”

  “So what has changed?”

  “Their organization, their weaponry, and their intelligence gathering. It’s the last that worries me most.”

  “They have spies among us?”

  “You know they do. We use human workers, after all. Nothing would get done if we didn’t. And even those that we keep at a distance watch us—they know our comings and goings, our troop movements. . . . But there’s also the issue of traitors.”

  “Ah,” said Andrus, looking troubled. The Illyri frowned on the mixing of the two races, but the biological similarities between them meant that some Illyri had secretly taken human partners. No human-Illyri hybrids had yet been born alive, but there had been pregnancies, and it was only a matter of time before nature overcame the differences between the species. Meanwhile, the monitoring of relationships fell to the Securitats, and punishment for such affairs was separation and exile. A number of Illyri had fled with their human lovers to avoid banishment; many on the island of Britain were believed to have gone to ground in the Scottish Highlands, the most lawless region of the country. Officials suspected that some of these Illyri were providing information to the Resistance, probably in return for protection.

  More images of bodies flashed up on Andrus’s lens. They were all Galateans.

  A thought struck him. “Where is Thaios’s body?” asked Andrus.

  “I don’t know,” said Danis. “The Corps got to the scene before we did.”

  Andrus leaned forward in his chair. This was news.

  “How could that be? Birdoswald is a Military base. All communication should be conducted directly through us, and we block all non-Military transmissions. Did you have it swept for devices?”

  “Of course I did,” said Danis. “The equipment that we recovered from the rubble was clean.”

  “Well, could Thaios have notified the Corps as soon as the attack commenced?”

  “I’d imagine he had enough on his hands just trying to survive. Even though he was a Diplomat, his first instinct would have been to fight, especially if his own life was at stake.”

  “And yet still the Corps knew of what was happening before our own Emergency Response Team.”

  “Yes.”

  It was very peculiar. Andrus didn’t say so, but he was certain that Danis and his team must have missed a communications device of some kind; that, or the Diplomats had removed it along with Thaios’s body.

  “So you’ve found nothing helpful?” he said.

  “I didn’t say that. I may not have gotten to examine Thaios, but I did take a look at the bodies of the Galateans.”

  “What about them?”

  Danis frowned. “I can’t be certain, but I’d say that some of them were killed when they were already down. Executed, even.”

  “By the Resistance?” Andrus couldn’t disguise his shock.

  “The Resistance here isn’t in the habit of finishing off the wounded on the ground, Galatean or Illyri. In other places, yes: they put our heads on spikes in Afghanistan, and they sent them to us in boxes in Mexico and Texas, but here the humans tend to abide by the civilities, more or less. Even if they have changed their tactics, it still doesn’t explain why the Diplomatic Corps was so quick to clean up after the raid. Besides, the Galateans were not killed by bullets.”

  “How then?” said Andrus.

  “Pulses were used. This was Diplomat work: Diplomats, or their Securitat killers.”

  Anger clouded Andrus’s face. While the Military still favored variations on standard ammunition—bullets and shells—the Diplomats preferred infrasonic pulse weapons that induced resonance, or vibration, in their targets. Skulls, chests, and abdomens were particularly effective resonance chambers. Depending on the level of power used, the target might experience nausea or chest pain. At the highest levels, the pulses destroyed inner organs, bursting hearts, lungs, and brains. It was a bad way to die.

  So Diplomats had trespassed upon a death scene at a Military base, and the loss of one of their own was no excuse. But now Danis was suggesting that they might have killed Military Galateans in the attack’s aftermath. They might not have been Illyri, but they were still his soldiers, and that was murder.

  “Why would the Diplomats kill Galateans?” Andrus asked.

  “My suspicion is that they were finished
off so that they couldn’t talk about what they’d seen, so we’d have no witnesses as to what might have occurred in the final moments at Birdoswald.”

  “If that’s the case, then it worked.”

  “Not entirely. It seems that Thaios’s body was taken to the main Diplomat facility in Glasgow. It just so happens that I have a contact there who owes me favors. He didn’t get to examine the body either, but he did catch a glimpse of it as it was being placed on a slab.”

  “And?”

  “It didn’t have a head.”

  “Shotgun blast?”

  “Must have been a big shotgun. All the cervical vertebrae were gone. According to my source, there was nothing left of Thaios above the shoulders—not that he had a lot above them even when he was alive.”

  “Some new type of weapon?”

  “If it is, then the humans must have stolen it from us. But how would they convert it to use?”

  All Illyri weapons were encoded to Illyri or Galatean DNA, a precaution introduced to prevent hostile alien races from using Illyri technology against its creators.

  “They could have found a way,” said Andrus. “They went from fish struggling in slime to space exploration in no more than a blink of the universe’s eye. It was only a matter of time before they applied themselves to adapting our weapons.”