The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1)(5)

“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 said.

“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.