The Empress

  “Rise,” Tyrus said. He never kept them lingering on their knees as Randevald had been wont to do.

  We moved through the parted sea of bodies, and Tyrus glimpsed Astra nu Amador, a nervous young vicar who worked for Senator von Amador.

  Tyrus inclined his head in silent thanks to Astra. She returned it with a smile. She was ambitious enough to see that she might become Vicar Primus if she impressed us, replacing Fustian nan Domitrian. Tyrus and Fustian had been at odds since the coronation, when Fustian refused to bless me. Fustian would not have performed this ceremony with me present.

  Now, as I raised my eyes to take in our surroundings, the sheer force of the light blasting in through the windows truly registered, though it cast only a faint warmth over my skin. The heliosphere was designed to refract starlight in myriad ways for services. No mirrors were needed to amplify the starlight this close to the red hypergiant star, Hephaestus, for the Ritual of Pardon.

  So large, so bright was Hephaestus that the distant, smaller stars of the Cosmos were drowned out against the black. The crowd would have appeared but silhouettes against the great blaze of its light, but for the glowing pigment under their skin that set their features in stark relief. I didn’t recognize any of the faces.

  We stood alone in the innermost circle as the Vicar Astra set about placing sacred chalices throughout the chamber.

  The Excess prisoners shuffled inside in a silent line. They’d all converted to the Helionic faith in prison, and they were the fortunate dozen due to be pardoned this year as reward for their penitence.

  Tyrus’s role in this ceremony was brief. He stepped forward, and the men and women knelt before him, displaying their pitifully bared heads, where they’d shaved away their hair to exhibit their faith. He spoke the short litany of pardon, and then the vicar took it from there.

  Astra moved between the converts to aid them in shedding their clothing. Then she led each of the converts by the hands to the window to position them in the glare of the sacred hypergiant. The naked men and women pressed up against the window, spreading their arms, their fingers, soaking light into every square centimeter of their skin.

  Tyrus took my arm, nudged me gently, and we stepped back, and back, as the vicar slowly adjusted the optics so more light from the hypergiant could seep into the chamber.

  Then the hypergiant’s light grew so bright, it seemed to lance into my pupils. The white skein of starlight scorched my eyes, and my hand flew up instinctively to protect my face. Through the veil over my vision, I heard the rustle of other people raising their hands to do the same. Then heat followed, a great, terrible wave of it that pummeled the air about us, stinging my skin, and I knew it was too much heat.

  Something was wrong.

  The pardoned men and women scrambled back from the windows, dark silhouettes contorting as their terrible screams knifed the air. The vicar’s garb flared ablaze and the oil chalices spouted columns of heat.

  I comprehended several things all at once: flames, hundreds of bodies all about me, and one exit.

  This was a death trap.

  2

  I REACTED before anyone. Tyrus was in my grasp before I gave it conscious thought, and then I hurled him directly over the heads of those between me and the exit. It was strength I hadn’t had since being whittled down to a normal woman’s size.

  I leaped over the heads of the people now stirring, beginning to turn, to react, to shout. They moved as though in a swamp, but I shot past them. Tyrus caught his balance and then I was there, and he couldn’t have stopped me from forcing him forward if he’d tried.

  We broke out of the now sweltering and oppressive air of the sacred chamber as flames swelled out behind us. The mass of bodies I’d anticipated now swept toward me, saturating the air with screams and shouts and the pounding of trampling feet.

  The human tide spat out the first handfuls of lucky ones. The others filled the doorway and then filled it more, arms and legs and frightened, screaming faces stuffing any gap. Then the logjam, and hysteria edged the cries of terror as they found themselves trapped.

  Tyrus pointed at a nearby Excess. “Call for help! NOW! Tell every nearby vessel to send med bots!” Then he surged forward toward the jammed doorway.

  Trapped people reached for him.

  He vaulted forward to pull them free and I thrust aside the pitiless thought that there would be more to take their place. I joined him in his efforts to wrench the people free. In their panic, their grasping hands latched onto my arms, yet it was difficult to rip them free of one another. Each one I dragged clear never loosened the clog to enable escape. Instead others wedged into the place of those freed and trapped everyone. Then we began to make progress and gaps expelled the dark smoke from within the heliosphere, but there was a cost. The grasping hands were no longer clawing at me, at anything. . . . Screams dimmed and then were silent and the great wedge of people were now blue of lips, glazed of eyes.

  Long after some of those we pulled out were scanned by med bots that floated away—determining them beyond revival—Tyrus worked to drag others out. I just stepped back to survey the survivors. A med bot soared over to me and neutralized the radiation exposure.

  Finally, I laid my hand on Tyrus’s shoulder.

  His hands fell to his sides.

  He turned about, his pale gaze skipping over the survivors, lips moving as he silently counted them up.

  “How did this . . .”

  His face was smudged with ash. He raked his hand through his hair, setting it askew, smudging it.

  A bot hummed over to him, and he started when its red beam flared out to treat him for the radiation exposure.

  “You did all you could have done,” I told him.

  He just seemed dumbstruck. “I don’t understand what happened.”

  I counted up the survivors too. A mere eighteen. Hundreds still in the heliosphere. Mostly the dead were servants and employees of Grandiloquy. People held each other, others lay on the ground on their backs . . . or wherever they’d been deposited as they died. Burns had left ugly, blistered red skin. I gazed at a bot hovering over the head of a boy on his hands and knees, puking from the radiation exposure.

  More med bots had been floated in with us, but the number—a mere dozen—was starkly low. And Tyrus had that Excess call for more. The med bots should have flocked here as soon as the system noticed a breach.

  And the breach . . .

  I turned to gaze back toward the Great Heliosphere, bewildered. It was as though the star reached straight through the Great Heliosphere and burned us. It was a catastrophic structural failure, the sort repair bots should have caught long before it took place.

  Then a cold thought came to me: The Helionics will point to this. They will say it is a rebuke from the Living Cosmos.

  Stars were the expression of the will of the divine Cosmos, and was there any show of displeasure more stark than this one? Even I felt a superstitious shiver at the thought.

  I couldn’t say I knew for certain whether I believed in the Living Cosmos, but I knew that the Cosmos didn’t believe in me. Every vicar had told me as much.

  When I turned to Tyrus, he’d withdrawn his Imperial Scepter and now just gazed at it.

  “I think I did this,” he said, so quietly I barely made out the words.

  “Tyrus . . .”

  But we couldn’t speak. Already, there were political allies and foes who’d flocked to the Valor Novus at the first hint of tragedy, and there were dead bodies to be dealt with and families to be notified. I backed out of the way so servants could gather the dead, and my heel met something solid.

  My gaze flew down.

  A dead girl. Young, the skin of an arm riddled in ugly blisters, dark eyes open to the ceiling with that sludgy and fixed gaze of the dead. . . .

  Sidonia.

  I blinked and it wasn’t her. It was not.

  Yet the specter of her seemed to rear up into my mind, reminding me that she would never exist in this
universe again. Whenever I pondered this, all in this galaxy seemed dark and empty. I drew in a breath of the acrid air to force myself to stay in this moment. So I made out the words being told to Tyrus.

  Another tragedy. One we’d missed.

  “. . . think it was poison . . .”

  My head swiveled toward them. Please . . .

  “Salivar is dead?” Tyrus said.

  No. No, no.

  Devineé’s husband. He had drunk the wine.

  She lived. She would threaten us still.

  I’d missed my target.

  • • •

  For a month, I’d been trapped in solitary confinement, awaiting my impending death at Tyrus’s hands. I passed that month loathing myself for the longing I still felt for him, though I’d been certain—so certain—he’d been the agent of Sidonia’s death. He knew I believed that of him.

  Though he’d overcome his grandmother, forced a confession from her about deceiving me, and though we’d kissed before the entirety of the most powerful in the Empire . . .

  There was still a thread of uneasiness between us.

  And I still had those treacherous doubts.

  I’d both welcomed and dreaded the evening we’d planned to spend entirely alone together after the Ceremony of Pardon, for the duties of an Emperor had kept him so busy, it was our first time to ourselves.

  Now, it would not happen.

  Of the dead, most had perished from crushing or trampling injuries, not so much the burn of the star. Senator von Amador’s replacement vicar was dead.

  And when Tyrus’s servants began to investigate, they discovered that one victim was my would-be assassin. They showed us the surveillance of the poisoning. Tyrus and I watched the images of the gathering of Grandiloquy before we’d departed. . . . I saw myself moving through the crowd, looking toward a stumbling Grande hanging off the shoulder of his wife . . . while a Grande from a minor offshoot of the Rothesays poured several droplets into my drink.

  Then, that Rothesay watched me. He clearly hadn’t noticed my drink swap with Devineé, but he had followed me into the Great Heliosphere. The better to see me succumb to his poison.

  “That certainly backfired on him,” I noted, recognizing his face from the corpses. I felt Tyrus’s gaze pinned upon me, and added, “I was totally unaware my drink was poisoned. To think, I unwittingly passed it along. . . .”

  “Yes,” Tyrus said knowingly. “I am certain that is devastating knowledge.” To his servants, “Make it known this Grande poisoned Salivar. Leave Nemesis out of the account.” His gaze returned to that video, and he gestured for it to replay.

  “What?” I said quietly.

  “Question that man, too,” he said, jabbing his finger at the one who’d stumbled, who’d drawn my gaze while my drink was doctored. “Frighten him if you must. Make sure he wasn’t helping.”

  “Good thinking,” I told Tyrus with a smile.

  He didn’t return it. He was gazing down at the list of dead from the heliosphere once again.

  • • •

  Tyrus and I retreated to the Hera as planned, but there was no pleasure to be had in these stolen hours. He’d given me this magnificent asteroid starship crafted by his grandmother; it was an engagement present, a Domitrian starship for a future Domitrian.

  Now we sat together in the great jade chamber Cygna had intended to turn into a shopping promenade, but never lived to do. So there was a gurgling fountain feeding a stream that meandered across the garden of bronze trees and plants.

  Tyrus and I sat alone in the middle of that great, echoing promenade. He reached into the sheath attached to his waist, pulled out a rod of palladium. A flick of his fingers, and the end jutted into six pointed spikes.

  The Imperial Scepter. I’d caught him staring at it with a strange intensity ever since his coronation. It appeared but a decorative rod, yet it was a powerful machine in its own right. It was the device that made the Domitrians the foremost family in the galaxy.

  “What is it?” I finally asked him.

  He dragged his gaze over to mine. “You know what this is, I presume?” At my nod, he said, “I received this as all other Emperors have. My uncle died. I ascended.” He raised a palm, hovered it over the six spikes. “These penetrated my skin to sample my blood. They registered me as a Domitrian, and this became my scepter. With possession of this scepter, I received possession of the Chrysanthemum. Every single machine fell into my control.”

  It wasn’t just every machine in the Chrysanthemum. It was every single machine within several light-years and even some quite far across the Empire. The Emperor controlled them all. This was the reason the Domitrians were the imperial royals.

  “Not every Domitrian is skilled with this,” Tyrus said. “My great-grandmother, Acindra, could give orders to the machines about her with a thought, but my uncle . . . he was clumsy. He needed to make hand gestures. Vocalize his command. I was certain I’d do better than that.”

  I hadn’t seen him use it yet. “And how are you with it?”

  Tyrus looked at me. “Nemesis,” he said very quietly, “I can’t get it to do anything at all.”

  I stared at him.

  Then, “What?”

  He shrugged, and spoke to the air: “I need a security bot here now.”

  We waited.

  Nothing.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’ve tried to avoid showing this in public until I figured it out,” he told me. “This is a big problem, Nemesis. This scepter isn’t just the way I control the machines. It unifies the Chrysanthemum. This is why two thousand individual ships form one large superstructure.” He tightened his fist about the scepter. “This is why a tiny structural instability can lead to a catastrophe in the Great Heliosphere. The only repair bots that mobilized to fix the breach were the ones already on board the vessel, not the ones on other vessels nearby. That breach needed a hundred repair bots, not a handful.”

  “That’s what happened today,” I surmised. “And that’s why the med bots only came after you called for them.”

  He nodded. “I can’t control any of these machines, and right now we are sitting on one ship amid two thousand individual ships with nothing linking them. There’s no network sensing potential problems in need of repair, and triaging the repair bots for the most important places. That heliosphere would have been tended long before it breached, especially this close to a hypergiant star. This shouldn’t have happened. Repair bots aren’t doing their job, and external security bots are offline. . . . This is a very serious problem.”

  The other safety implications hit me.

  “Tyrus, do you think others realize you don’t have control of it?”

  “I think after today, it will be glaringly obvious.”

  If Tyrus didn’t have security bots at his command, if he didn’t have control over every ship in the same star system, why . . . he was as vulnerable to attack as he’d been before he’d become Emperor.

  More vulnerable, in fact, because there was a target on his back.

  “If any enemy means to move on you,” I realized, “or . . . or on us, they’ll do it now. That’s what you’re saying.”

  Tyrus nodded.

  There were many threats to us, but one man posed the greatest threat of all.

  He wasn’t merely the most powerful Senator in the Empire and the leader of the Helionic opposition to everything Tyrus meant to do—he was also father to a girl I’d recently killed.

  “How long before Senator von Pasus hears about this?” I said to Tyrus.

  He opened his mouth to answer me—and that was when his palladium glove began to vibrate with an incoming transmission. He turned his hand over to see the sender’s name, and I knew it without looking.

  “Not long at all,” Tyrus said with a sardonic smile. Then he answered Senator von Pasus.

  3

  WHEN I’D LAST SEEN Senator von Pasus, he’d adopted the look of a dignified elder, perhaps in deliberate contrast t
o his daughter, Elantra, whom he wished to wed to Tyrus. Most Grandiloquy used false-youth, but sometimes they selectively adopted signs of aging, whether to give themselves a different look, or more likely, to deal with the Excess in their territories. Planet dwellers had no access to beauty bots, so they associated visible age with experience. So Pasus had not seemed too odd, with that gray hair, that short beard.

  Now he appeared before us in holographic form, lacking those former ravages of age. His hair had become a stark coal black that seemed to devour the light, his eyes an icy blue, his now-unlined features even and seemingly cut with the precision of a beauty bot that aimed to lend him not handsomeness so much as grandeur.

  He dipped to his knees with a perfunctory grace before rising just as swiftly. “Your Supreme Reverence.”

  I’d retreated so I wouldn’t appear in the holographic image on Pasus’s end.

  “Senator,” Tyrus said icily, “your alteration is most surprising.”

  “Your Supremacy inspired me,” Pasus said. “I felt as though I would be truly meeting my new Emperor for the first time, so I should follow suit and present myself anew.”

  Yes. He was one of the many Grandiloquy who’d known Tyrus only as his assumed persona—the mad heir to the throne. Not the clever young man he actually was. Tyrus turned his head and offered me his hand.

  So he wanted me in the transmission. Though I’d be inflammatory, he wished Pasus to see me.

  I moved to Tyrus’s side and appeared on Pasus’s end.

  “Your call is most unexpected,” Tyrus said, taking my hand. A message. Very deliberate.

  Pasus stared downward a moment, and I knew his cold gaze was fixed on the image of those linked hands.

  “You must forgive me for abstaining from attendance at your Convocation speech, and your coronation before that. I was most distraught over the recent death of my daughter, as well Your Supremacy knows.”

  “Everything about that situation was most regrettable,” Tyrus returned with the same remote courtesy, “including the circumstances that directly led to the tragedy.”