Page 2 (1/2)

Part 1

SPACE BATTLE

The initial conditions of a battle are the only factors that a general can truly affect Once blood is drawn, command is merely an illusion

--ANONYMOUS 167

Militia Worker

The contrail of a supersonic aircraft blosso the sky

Rana Harter i in sculpted crash-safe chairs, the air they breathed scented with soht snack now, midway to their destination Froh s of transparent hypercarbon Most long-haul air routes on Legis passed over the pole The continents were clustered in the northern he equatorial sea and the vast, silent ocean of the south Air transit routes converged here at the pole like the lines on a dribble-hoop ball, this tundral waste an empty junction, overflown but never visited Rana had never traveled on an aircraft before Herd had brought her here She could only blurrily iaps in her vision filled with the sound of wealthy people&039;sthe same slow phrase

She watched the wind move driftsnow across the plain, and noted the direction and speed of the few scudding clouds Her brainbug made a prediction The contrail reached a certain point and Rana said, "Now"

At thatits slow curve A few pieces of detritus caught the sun, flickering with their spin, falling froreat distance

The plane quickly recovered, righting its course

Rana i lurch inside the cabin Glasses of chae upset, every object leaping toward the ceiling as the plane lost a thousandof the cargo hold would instantly double the plane&039;s drag profile, sending a shock through the entire craft Hopefully, the sers in A few bloodied noses and wrenched shoulders, perhaps a concussion for sohted itself, autoo door

Rana Harter had discovered that her brainbug worked better if she indulged these fancies As she i fall of luggage and supplies, and she felt the whirring of her mind as it calculated the location and shape of the debris field The sharp, determinatein her ears with vibrato-free, pointillistic notes on a handful of flutes, one for each variable

The answers came

She turned to Herd, already dressed in her hooded fur coat The sable had coed by Alexander The stain that had once disguised Herd&039;s Rix eyes was faded now, and they shone in their true violet, beautiful in the frame of black fur The hairs of the coat ruffled in the bitter wind, a flutteringbells worn by wedding dancers on their feet

Herd awaited her instructions, always respectfully silent when Rana&039;s ability was in use (though the commando had squeezed her hand as her word now seemed to yank the airplane from its path)

"Seventy-four klicks that way," Rana said, pointing carefully Herd&039;s violet eyes followed the line of the gesture, checking for landood-bye

The Rixwoman&039;s lips were always cold now, her body teuely of rust, like the iron tang of blood, but sweeter Her sweat contained no salt, itsit taste like water from a quarry town As Herd dashed toward the flyer, the oversized coat lifting into sable wings, the synesthetic sled with the flavor left in Rana&039;sHerd never lessened

Rana turned back toward the cave entrance before the recon flyer whined to life, however Every second here in the cold was taking so

Rana Harter wore two layers of real silk, a hat of red fox, and her own fur coat, vat-grown chinchilla lined with blue whale from the ubiquitous herds of the southern ocean But she was still cold

The walls of the cave were hung with centuries-old tapestries earmarked for the Museum of Antiquities in Pollax A vast collection of toiletries and clothing, the bounty of fallen personal luggage, lined the icy shelves Herd had carved into the walls Rana and Herd slept n the pelt of a large ursoid creature that neither of theins The floors were covered with soft linings ripped fro layer underneath

The small, efficient machines of travel were everywhere Handheld 8arnes and coffee pots, flashlights and sex toys, all for Herd to dissect and rebuild into new devices For sustenance, they had only prestige foods Richanimals, fruits scandalously out of season, caviar and exotic nuts, candied insects and edible flowers It all came in morsel sizes, suitable for luxury airplane ed and coldboxed, to be washed doith liquor in plastic bottles dwarfish enough to have survived the long fall They drank froh to pack in thirty centilasses had been labeled as coffee beans on their packaging A led antiques

All this bounty from only three aircraft holds, Rana wondered She had never seen such wealth before She lifted a ss it suspended, and wondered at the instrue "accident" would be their last haul The background rate of such events had already been wildly exceeded, and Alexander&039;s false clues explaining the cargo-door defect had begun to wear thin But she and Herd had all they needed until the compound mind called them to action

Until then, they would live in luxury And they had each other

Rana Harter sat and rested fro minutes outside She lifted up a travel handheld to read, and that si lucidly but abstractly in the strange syh The dopaulators saw to that

The infection in Rana&039;s wound was gone, disappearing in a single fevered night after an aht in Rana&039;s chest was still there, building and building Her breath grew shorter by the day

She activated the travel handheld; its screen lit up, bookain She had read this section enough ti Fluids were slowly building up in the wall between ribcage and lung, squeezing the breath fro fist Only an operation could save her However resourceful her Rix lover ery was beyond their means here in this icy cave

Rana Harter&039;s mind had never possessed a sharp sense of irony The mean circumstances of her life had never required one But she saw the joke here: She was surrounded by everything she had ever desired Every petty luxury and od that she positively knew to exist Free use of her brainbug in a safe retreat at the literal end of the earth And a lover of alien beauty, a fierce and lethal protector, whose physical grace, novel mind, and violet eyes offered whole neorlds of fascination

And the punch line: Rana, in the next few days, would alhts the way a child ignores a light rain They did nothing to reduce her joy Whatever occurred, she-- one of the few a humanity&039;s trillions--had chanced blindly into happiness

Death must have found me, Rana Harter decided

She was already in heaven

Senator Nara Oxha froht wind, itsinside the wooden deck beneath her bare feet A set of finger-width polyfila orna propaganda bragged) to hold an African elephant, even during one of the Coriolis squalls that sometimes reached the capital in late summer If Senator Oxhaled in the invisible suicide , and be delivered back to the nearest observation deck five floors below And in case of the unthinkable, the balcony carried a small vacuum blimp compressed under the breakfast table When fully deployed, it would provide enough lift to bring the senator and approxi

But the ani in huet, and o of a two-kilo left her

The apathy braceletfiltration nanos into her bloodstrealimmers of empathy arose from the city Mindnoise rumbled from the residential towers north of the Dialy, densely populated Each tower held over a hundred thousand of the capital&039;s most numerous class: the petty bureaucrats who monitored taxable production claihty Worlds had a double here on Ho every transaction to ensure that the Senate and Emperor received their cut Back on Vasthold, Nara had known of this arhty planets&039; worth of theht hohters left daily from the capital&039;s spaceport to resupply the possessions with entangled quanta, no expense spared to keep communications broadband and instantaneous, the Emperor&039;s omniscience a rew, Nara could feel the dyna hoht-years away, other thousands waking up to spread out across the loless adacity on another of the Eighty Worlds War fever still animated the capital as a whole, but the minds of these countless ery, the cogs of the E now that the planet had been cut off from the Imperial network The whole world, except for a few military installations and the Lynx, had been intentionally made a dark spot since the coiven up direct control of an entire planet simply to isolate the Rix abohts of the capital all but obliterated stars froht sky, 27 and Nara felt her distance from Laurent, her helplessness If the Lynx was destroyed too suddenly to ht hours before the lazy speed of the constant brought the event to telescopes on Legis Al

The War Council had voted hours ago; the battle ht already be dead

Eained another measure of intensity, and Senator Oxhahts down in the fla cults had erected effigies of Rix-woures with hollow eyes, filled with fanciful artificial organs that gave off a plastic smell when they burned The derown every day since the murder of the Emperor&039;s sister

Even Nara, a hardened Secularist, could still feel the shock of that moment The Child Empress Anastasia was the Reason, after all, a central character of childhood fables and rhymes However much Nara Oxhao disease, the Child Empress and her brother had made the world Nara lived in And no matter that she was sixteen centuries old, Anastasia had still looked twelve on the day of her death

In any sane world, she would have died a long ti that she had died at all

This late most of the capital was asleep The wild creature of the huroup-psyche was unusually quiescent, and Senator Oxha minutes She tried to feel the Diamond Palace, but the cold hts of elite guardsrasp hold of

"Why?" she wondered softly, thinking of the E to swirl below her, the war aniined a nuclear airburst overhead, a sudden, bright star blossonetic pulse would strike, and all the lights go out, the whole spectacle of the capital reduced to black silhouettes, lit only by the airburst and a few burning effigies in the park Seconds later, however clean the warheadss, no doubt testing even the balcony&039;s safeguards, and casting a rain of glass onto the streets below

That was the plan for distant Legis, if Laurent Zai failed

The nuclear attack is into a dark age After the falling aircars and failing medical endoframes, and all the disease, unrest, and simple starvation that accompanied a devastated infostructure, there would be a hundred million lives lost planetwide, so the Apparatus estimated

On a planet of two billion, that was not as bad as decimation, in the old sense of one in ten But still the Old Enemy death on a vast scale

She looked at the Dia a hundred ry chorus as her mind lost its defenses In the sleepless free- nervously, titles and pardons being fought over like carrion, the anxious cycles of a war econo, and again the old vision ca around the bloated, dying thing that was the E fatal and hidden in theseleft her empathy open to the assembledwas utterly rotten, she knew, a corruption tearing at the bonds that held the Eighty Worlds together And she also knew that however hard she&039;d fought against the Emperor&039;s rule, the shabby truth of how broken it all ould terrify her

A dark shape rose up before Oxhahts of the city The senator tried to blink the apparition away, but its silent and winged form remained She backed up a few steps, for a moment convinced that the empathic vision had somehow come to life and would consued at her second hearing, insistent through the howl of the city She closed her eyes and sonized it: the War Council suers went to her bracelet, reflexively adain, the shape was still there An I extended to e

A ht

The battle is joined The sovereign requests that his War Council attend hiain suppressed her e the capital to silence She would not even be allowed to wait alone for news of Laurent and Legis The Emperor and his War Council, those who kneas at stake, wanted company as they watched theirto the waiting aircar, not bothering to change On Vasthold, one went plainly dressed and barefoot to funerals

In the next few hours, Laurent Zai would either save a hundred

Captain Laurent Zai exulted in the colors and sounds of the bridge