The New Space Opera 2 (35 page)

The watery world loomed close very quickly, since the station we had just departed sat in low orbit. Within minutes, we were descending through atmosphere, and that was when the crowds began to appear.

“Ah,” Shanen exclaimed. “I did wonder what a sphere like this might be used for—I don't suppose they take so many captives that they always have the things on hand.”

The atmosphere outside seemed to fill with bubbles, and I saw that glass spheres much like the one we occupied bobbed out there, supported on iron-colored motors that had to be some form of grav-tech. They were individual transports, each occupied by one of the Lild.

“Just the plebs,” I observed. “The rulers stay down in their comfy caves.” The nautiloids within the spheres were all the smaller ones, the ones with fatter shells with a slight off-center twist, like the five smaller robot Lild accompanying our captain. Soon we left these behind us.

The sky turned pale green above us and the sea was soon clear below: flecks of white across deep jade, large enclosed vessels cruising the surface like submarine conning towers, most of their bulk probably below the surface. The sun, a blue orb nested in white and silvery clouds, fell into sunset and we fell into twilight, then night as our vessel roared and descended into the waves.

Lild again appeared around us, but we could only see them when they were picked out by the eerie green lights their fellows sported on their
shells. As we descended into the depths, I began to notice static constellations of lights, then glimpses of fairy castles under the sea, on thick stalks that speared up from the black. Then, abruptly, we were beside a great artificial cliff, and the vessel shuddered as it docked.

Our captain and five lackeys came for us then and, rather than be taken into the cave system via a docking tunnel, we were actually taken outside into the sea, toward a large round portal in the face of the artificial cliff. Much booming, twittering, and skull-thumping debate ensued. A lot of the Lild about us now were the big, flatter-shelled ones like our captain. After a little while, the huge portal began to open, but while this was happening, the five lesser robot nautiloids abruptly departed, surrounded by some of their larger kin.

“Expected,” said Ormod. “They're off for a visit to the inquisitors for detailed questioning.”

“Nice society,” said Shanen, shivering abruptly. It was getting cold within the sphere despite the life-support machinery laboring away beneath us. After a moment, she slid across and plumped herself down right beside me, resting her legs over the top of mine. I put my arm around her.

“How did you stay alive?” she abruptly asked.

“Luck,” I replied.

“I think I'm going to need help.”

“You got it,” I said, giving her a squeeze.

“I hate to break in on this touching moment,” said Ormod, “but this is it.”

Our robot captain had positioned himself on one side of the sphere while another of the higher-status ones took the other. We went in through a series of water locks, and the nautiloids around us began dispensing with their filter gear, and this was, indeed, it.

The wide coraline tunnels within were brightly lit and around us the crowd of big nautiloids grew, just as curious as their kin and prone to clink those divided tentacles against the glass. I turned my head slightly to observe our robot captain, just in time to see the first shindle wriggling from one of the many pores in his shell; a nigh-invisible flicker of movement. It then streaked across to the nearest living high-status Lild, hitting a tentacle and rapidly vanishing as it penetrated its new host. The Lild seemed not to notice. Other shindles began to surreptitiously depart our robot, gradually depleting the great compacted mass of them it held inside it.

We were brought into a large chamber occupied by Lild obviously
grander than those we'd so far seen, all of them hanging in an artificial quadrate framework that had been decorously fashioned to look a little like some kind of seaweed. Our sphere was deposited on a coraline pillar before the grandest of them all. The Theocrat stood out from all the rest, little pin-head lights gleaming all over his shell. A booming, headachy conversation ensued.

“My captain tells a good story,” said Ormod. “But judging by some of the questions, I'm not sure it is all being believed.”

Me and Shanen locked closer together in an embrace—perfectly the image of frightened humans brought before alien captors. I don't know how long this audience lasted, because my head ached intolerably and I did not feel at all well. I even began to wonder if the life-support system in there with us was working correctly. Then, abruptly, the note changed—something else now seemed to be occurring.

“Well, I was hoping you'd be shunted off to one side for later study, where the extraction would be easier,” said Ormod. “Seems not. Seems the big boss wants to demonstrate to his fellows just how feeble these human creatures are.”

“And how does he intend to do that?” Shanen asked—she looked as ill as I felt.

“He wants to open the sphere.”

“Yeah, that'd do it,” I said.

“Time to get you out of there.”

In the sea above us, the five robot nautiloids that had accompanied our captain had already released their load of modified shindles into the sea. Now one of them presented a hot and very brief surprise to those questioning it. The CTD detonation caused the cave system around us to shudder and, dislodged from its pillar, our sphere began a slow tumble to the floor. I looked around for our robot captain, spotted him easily, for the soft foreparts of his body had fallen away and a great cloud of thready shindles was rapidly spreading out.

“They'll find out about them,” I had said to Ormod as he had told me what he intended. “They'll have the technology to remove them from themselves.”

“But by then, it will be too late, the damage will be done, and they won't even know that it's been done until years later.”

Hollow now, running on Polity tech, the captain's shell descended and locked onto the sphere. Gleaming manipulators extruded from the cavity inside, as it evacuated its water, and tore away the hatch. We threw our
selves into the space previously occupied by shindles and I just hoped none of them had remained in there. As instructed, we donned the breather masks available inside and assumed fetal positions. Crash foam jetted in, filling the cavities all around us, protecting us, padding us, but we still felt the massive accelerations and I lost consciousness twice. The CTD had of course caused sufficient disruption to cover our escape, but I didn't get to see much of that.

“The problem is that galactic shape of the ruling theocratic elite,” Ormod had told us. “Those of the Lild who less closely match it are more prone to heresy.”

As we shot from the seas of the Lild homeworld, two things happened simultaneously. The
Gnostic
, parked amid the Lild fleet, abruptly accelerated away while in orbit of the Lild homeworld; Ormod undocked his segment ship, meanwhile playing a particle cannon over the space station's weapons. Some twenty minutes after that, Ormod intercepted our straight-up trajectory, then accelerated out toward the
Gnostic
.

“The shindles will spread rapidly, infecting most Lild very, very quickly. Of course, there'll be huge panic and their doctors will work fast to find a way to remove them, to kill the infection,” Ormod had continued. “Then they'll discover something quite strange: this terrible bioweapon seems to cause few ill effects at all. Obviously, inferior humans, allied with some of those shindles who managed to escape the extermination, have with this failed attack proven just how unworthy they are. They have proven that they are not the Chosen.”

The
Gnostic
dropped into U-space just as Ormod, Pladdick, Parsival, and Mace began cutting us out of the crash foam.

“It's so small a thing they do, just a little viral reprogramming, but something the Lild just don't have the technology to correct.” Ormod was a man who really enjoyed his revenge. “The tweaks are right down there in the germ plasm, and every Lild hatched from the egg of one infected by the shindles will not grow as expected; it'll be subtle at first, then blindingly obvious after their first few years. Their shape will no longer be that of a flat galactic spiral, but of a long, hornlike tube. And they will no longer be the beloved of God.”

Me and Shanen waved off the others and headed for her cabin. I'd taken far too many risks lately and she had taken enough to satisfy her self-destructive impulse for a while—for a little while. I'll watch her now, see if I can keep her alive. We're not the chosen of any god. We only have each other.

Everyone knows that it's important to be punctual. Just
how
important, though, is something realized only by the very few…

New York Times
bestselling Australian writer Garth Nix worked as a book publicist, editor, marketing consultant, public relations man, and literary agent before launching the bestselling Old Kingdom series, which consists of
Sabriel, Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr, Abhorsen
, and
The Creature in the Case
. His other books include the Seventh Tower series, consisting of
The Fall, Castle, Aenir, Above the Veil, Into Battle
, and
The Violet Keystone
; the Keys to the Kingdom series, consisting of
Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday
, and
Sir Thursday
; as well as stand-alone novels, such as
The Ragwitch
and
Shade's Children
. His short fiction has been collected in
Across the Wall: Tales of the Old Kingdom and Beyond
. His most recent book is a new novel in the Keys to the Kingdom series,
Superior Saturday
. Born in Melbourne, he now lives in Sydney, Australia.

T
he giant carrier appeared in orbit around the planet exactly on schedule, as was expected, given its method of propulsion. Though it was built to carry hundreds of other ships, including the largest battleships and colonizers, in this case there was a single slivership on its racks, and that tiny craft carried only three people: two augmented humans and the slivership's AI, who was bound to the vessel and so little more than a slave.

The humans were the One Hundred and Forty-Third Emperor of All Known Space and one of his designated adult children. As was customary, she had been raised and educated by a foster family in the far reaches of the Empire and had only a year before learned that she was not natural-born but a carefully engineered child technically known as an Imperial Daughter, though genetically she was more than 99 percent the Emperor's sister.

Her name was now Ilugia, though that was also new. The fact that the name had been borne by the Sixty-First Empress of All Known Space was of some interest to her, and to the sycophants of the court who thought that it meant she had been chosen to be the next occupant of the Star Sapphire Throne.

The Emperor did not speak as the slivership left the carrier and descended to a primitive landing field on the surface of the rust-colored, dead world. As far as Ilugia had been able to ascertain from her limited access to the ship's scans, the planet had nothing to offer. It had no mineral resources, no biological life of any kind, and its atmosphere was a mere wisp of carbon dioxide. She didn't even know where it was, and had been surprised and excited by the sudden summons to attend the Emperor on a personal excursion.

They paused for a few minutes in the airlock to allow their bodies to
store oxygen and make some minor modifications to skins and eyes, before the Emperor gestured to Ilugia to exit. He followed her out onto the smooth, nano-manicured field, and spoke aloud. Ilugia had never heard his voice, and was surprised by it. It was considered oafish and backward to speak aloud in the imperial capital, though on her homeworld it was not unusual.

“We must wait a little while,” said the Emperor. His silvered face showed no emotion, but his words were grave and Ilugia paid careful attention. “There are guardians here, which are slow to recognize friends. You must disconnect from the ship, and once we leave the field, do not attempt to integrate with any other potentiality. This is not whimsy, but a matter of utmost importance. Similarly, you must stay close to me at all times.”

Ilugia inclined her head to indicate assent, and withdrew the tertiary personality that had been using the ship's various systems to report back to her. With no secondary, tertiary, or quaternary personalities, or even any subagents deployed, she felt quite shut up inside her head. It was not a pleasant sensation to perceive the world around her entirely from one perspective.

“Be still,” warned the Emperor.

Ilugia obeyed, going so far as to pulse her heart once and then stop it. With her blood hyper-oxygenated to cope with the lack of atmosphere, she was not breathing, and so had no need to quiet her chest.

Beyond the dull surface of the landing field, the red dirt shivered and began to swirl. Hundreds of dust-devils rose and began to dance together, at the same time slowly moving counterclockwise, gradually forming the pattern of a giant whorl of red particles some several hundred meters across.

Then without warning, a vast black shape burst out of the whorl, its shadow falling upon the Emperor and Ilugia, its rise so fast and the shadow so deep that for a moment she thought it would fall and crush them. Obedient to the Emperor, she did not move or react, instead studying the thing that was still emerging from some subterranean position.

It was a flattened ovoid, tapering from the center to the rim. Her eyes measured the revealed portion to be 612.75 meters wide, with an extrapolated diameter of 1755.97 meters. It was 5.3 meters tall at the rim, and an estimated 52.5 meters at its center. The surface material was a matt black substance that could not be visually identified, and Ilugia dared not use any more invasive methods to determine its properties.

The vast ovoid continued to climb, motivated by some, again uniden
tifiable, anti-gravitic thrust. As it came free of the soil, it tilted forward and drifted low over the field, blocking out the sky above the two visitors. With all of it visible, Ilugia's eyes recalculated it to be 1761.87 meters in diameter, and told her that it had moved to position itself so that the center of the huge disk was directly above the two humans.

The Emperor slowly tilted his head back, at the same time whispering,

“Look up. Slowly.”

Ilugia obeyed. The disk was close enough to touch, but even at this range, she could not identify its construction. The black material defied visual analysis on every level, including the relatively low-powered microscopic abilities Ilugia had as part of her standard optical package.

Ilugia was looking up at the disk, when, without warning or the sensation of any application of energy or force, she was somewhere else. She could not discern any temporal aberration, but in one nanosecond she was beneath the ovoid, and then, in apparently the same nanosecond, she was inside a bare cube-shaped room made from the same dark material as the exterior of the ovoid. The Emperor was next to her, also still looking up.

He turned to Ilugia and said quietly, “Good. It has accepted you.”

“What is this place?” asked Ilugia. Noting that movement was allowed, she restarted her heart.

“You might consider it a guardroom or perhaps a sentry post,” said the Emperor. He sat down, cross-legged on the floor. Ilugia followed suit, noting that the floor was warm and continued to defy analysis. It did not even feel like any material she knew. It was smooth when she laid her palm upon it, but became rough when she slid her hand sideways, though there was no visible change to the surface.

“We should shortly emerge at our destination,” said the Emperor. “There may be some conceptual dissonance.”

“What is our destination?” asked Ilugia.

“A great secret,” replied the Emperor. “The greatest secret of the Empire.”

“The Punctuality Drive,” said Ilugia, and dampened the sudden elevation of her blood pressure and heart rate.

“Indeed,” said the Emperor. “Tell me, what theory of the many that circulate has most appeal to you? Or
had
the most appeal, up until this recent voyage?”

“None entirely match the known facts,” said Ilugia carefully. As she spoke, she sorted the theories she knew, ordering them by rational, political, and psychological appeal. Was this a test of some kind?

“One fact is certain,” she hazarded. “The Punctuality Drive was invented by the First Empress, Uejinian, and operated by her in the first carrier,
Alphane
, that took the colonization fleet from Earthhome to Khankri and thence to Khasepea and back around again.”

“That is the historical record,” said the Emperor. “But it is incorrect. Uejinian did not invent the Punctuality Drive. Nor is it precisely a drive, though it has suited our purposes to call it thus, and to promulgate the mysteries of the forbidden bridges and engine rooms of our carriers. Prepare yourself.”

Ilugia dampened her sensory apparatus a moment before the world changed. She was now in zero-gravity, suspended in deep extrasolar space or some facsimile of it. Above her, thirty-three kilometers distant, was the sole light source, a bright blue cube, exactly four kilometers square. Its surface was shot with a multitude of pulsations, which were apparent to Ilugia across a very broad spectra, as she gradually moved her perceptive capacity back up to its normal baseline. Though the pulsations had the effect of reducing visual acuity, on maximum zoom Ilugia could also make out that in the middle of the closer surface of the cube, there were one hundred and forty-six human or humanoid figures, standing in a series of concentric circles around one central person.

The Emperor pointed near this circle, oriented himself, and exhaled a jet of oxygen and water equivalent to 12 percent of the reserve taken on in the slivership, the reaction propelling him toward the cube. Ilugia did likewise, and accepted the Emperor's proffered hand as they moved toward the blue artifact.

The Emperor continued his conversation without speaking, using the private connection of their fingers.

The red dust world is in the original system of Earthhome, and was the objective of an exploratory mission led by Uejinian and her twin sister, Aellia. In the course of that mission, they alerted or awoke the guardian disk that transported them to our own destination, the cube that lies ahead. As you will soon be aware, the cube is a processing potentiality of incomprehensible power. You will feel a strong desire to integrate with it, but you must not do so. At least, not yet.

They landed close to the outer circle of human figures. As their feet touched, Ilugia felt both the slight gravity and the shock of an information system attempting to flood in via all possible synaptic portals. It did not feel hostile, but rather the reverse, something familiar and friendly, like an imperial carrier, and as the Emperor had warned, she had to actively fight against the desire to immediately integrate with the potentiality.

A closer view of the humans arrayed in the circles was also a shock. The outer circle, though not complete, had forty-seven people in it. Each one was shrouded in a semiopaque membrane of a blue tinge similar to that of the cube itself. As Ilugia watched the closest person, she saw several internal layers within the membrane shift and move, allowing her glimpses of the person within its embrace.

They are alive
, she sent to the Emperor.

Yes
, came the reply. The Emperor led her to an empty place in the outer ring.
Stand here, and look toward the center. To Aellia
.

Ilugia did as she was instructed, but for the first time, she was afraid. She had begun to think she might be made the Imperial Heir, to ultimately ascend the Star Sapphire Throne. Now, as she looked at the silent, shrouded people around her, she wondered if another fate awaited her. Deep in the secured parts of her mind, she began to formulate plans for escape and evasion, though none seemed likely to succeed. None could succeed if the Emperor opposed her, such was her conditioning.

Aellia was the one who made contact, and who discerned something of the nature of the artifact
, the Emperor informed her.
She gave Uejinian the schedule for
Alpha.
Uejinian returned to Earthhome and had the carrier constructed, ready to launch at the specified time. Twenty-two years later, when the need for another carrier was realized, Uejinian returned here, and Aellia took over a further six schedules for which carriers were eventually made. So it continued, until Schedule 1207, when we were expanding to Hatturat, and Aellia indicated she could not integrate any further schedules. There were a number of experiments at that time, some with very unfortunate results. However, in time, it became clear that adding further schedules required more humans to be integrated with the cube. Later still, after more experiments, came the realization that the cube would only accept humans with a genetic profile narrowly matched to Aellia
.

Such as myself
, sent Ilugia.

Indeed
, replied the Emperor.
You have the new Master Schedule?

Yes
.

Ilugia had integrated the Master Schedule several days before, again thinking it a mark of signal favor. The Master Schedule contained the departure and arrival dates and times of every carrier in the Empire, and though portions of it were known to various commanders and functionaries, the complete schedule was closely held among the imperial family.

Ilugia had not wondered why there was such a rigid schedule, beyond strategic convenience. Like everyone else in the Empire, she had presumed the Punctuality Drive worked under the command of each carrier's secret,
sealed AI. Carriers always arrived exactly on time at their destination. She had not thought that the destination was fixed and immutable, and could not change unless the schedule changed.

There are seventy-eight new routes in the latest schedule, with carriers almost ready to launch,
said the Emperor.
That number requires an additional integrator here. One of our family.

Yes,
said Ilugia. A thousand last-second plans and protests rose in her mind and were abandoned as quickly.
May I ask why it is to be me?

You? It may be either of us,
replied the Emperor.
Open all and integrate.

Ilugia opened all her synaptic portals and the universe rushed in. She saw and heard and felt every carrier, and perceived everything the carriers' systems perceived, and she shared the thoughts and secrets of everyone around her, all the integrators who stood upon the cube. Including the Emperor, and with that came all the current codes and cryptologic secrets of the Empire, and every tiny shred of data that could be used to rule and govern and coerce the billions of sentients who thrived upon the almost one hundred thousand worlds that were connected by the punctual carriers driven by this mysterious cube.

Then, as quickly as it had rushed into her head, most of it was gone, save the Emperor's data. The carriers receded. The minds of Ilugia's relatives went with them, once again divided among all the carriers they piloted, back to an experience that Ilugia already wished to share again.

Hail, Ilugia, One Hundred and Forty-Fourth Emperor of All Known Space,
said an internal voice she now knew as Aellia.
We will see you again.

Yes
, Ilugia sent back. She examined her internal clock and the Master Schedule and added:
In thirteen years, six months, three days, and five hours
.

Don't be late
, said Aellia, and Ilugia felt laughter gradually recede as Aellia returned to her carriers and the galaxy beyond.