CAPTAIN

For the first twelve years of his life, Laurent Zai had been, embarrassingly, the tallest of his schoolmates. Not strongest, not quickest. Just a lofty, clumsy boy in a society that valued compact, graceful bodies. Since long before Laurent was born, Vada had elected and reelected as its governor a short, solid woman who stood with arms crossed and feet far apart, a symbol of stability. As young as seven standard, Laurent began to pray to the Risen Emperor that he would stop growing, but his journey toward the sky continued relentlessly. By age eleven it was too late merely to cease getting taller; he had already passed the average height for Vadan adults. He asked the Risen Deity to shrink him, but his biology mentor AI explained that growing shorter was scientifically unlikely, at least for the next sixty years or so. And on Vada one did not pray to the Risen Emperor to change the laws of nature, which were His laws after all. Ever logical, Laurent Zai implored the Emperor to effect the only remaining solution: increased height among his schoolmates, a burst of growth among his peers or a demographic shift that would rescue Laurent from his outcast status.

In the summer term that year, transfer students from low-gravity Krupp Reich flooded Laurent Zai's school. These were refugees displaced by the ravages of the New German Flu. The towering Reichers were gawky, easily fatigued, and thickly accented. These survivors were immune to the flu and had of course been decontaminated, fleeing the societal meltdown of population collapse rather than the virus itself, but the stench of contagion still clung to them, and they were so disgracefully tall.

Zai was their worst tormentor. He mastered the art of tripping the Reichers from behind as they walked, nudging a trailing foot so that it hooked the other ankle with their next step. He graffitied the margins of chapel prayer-books with clumsy stick figures as tall as a page.

Laurent was not alone in his misbehavior. The Reichers were so mistreated that a month after their arrival the entire student body was assembled around the soccer field airscreen. In the giant viewing area (over the field upon which Laurent had been so often humiliated by shorter, quicker footballers) images from the Krupp Reich Pandemic were shown. It was pure propaganda--an art for which Vadans were justly famous--a way to shame the native children into ceasing their torments of the newcomers. The victims were carefully aestheticized, shown dying under white gauze to hide the pulsing red sores of the New German Flu. Photos from preflu family reunions were altered to reflect the disease's progress, the victims fading into sepia one by one, until only a few smiling survivors remained, their arms around ghostly relatives. The final image in the presentation was the huge, monolithic Reich Square in Bonnburg, time-lapsed through successive Sunday afternoons over the last four years. The population of tourists, hawkers, merchants, and strollers on the square dwindled slowly, then seemed to stab ilize, then crashed relentlessly. Finally, a lone figure scuttled across the great sheet of copper. Although only a few picture elements tall, the figure seemed to be rushing fearfully, as if wary of some flying predator overhead.

Twelve-year-old Laurent Zai sat with his jaw slack amidst the overwhelming silence peculiar to shamed children, thinking the same words again and again.

"What have I done?"

When the airscreen faded, Zai bolted down the stairs, shaking off the restraining hand of an annoyed proctor. He fled to sanctuary under the bleachers and fell to his knees in the litter of spectator trash. His hands together in the clasp of prayer, he started to ask for forgiveness. He hadn't asked the Emperor for this. How could he have known that the Reich Pandemic would be the result of his request for taller classmates?

With his praying lips almost against the ground, the stench of cigarette butts and old honey wine bottles and rotten fruit under the bleachers struck him like a blow to the stomach. He vomited profusely into his prayer-locked hands, in an acid stream that burned like whiskey in his mouth and nose. His hands remained faintly sticky and smelled of vomit the rest of that day, no matter how furiously he washed them.

As if some switch deep within him had been permanently thrown, the position of prayer always brought back a glimmer of that intense moment of shame and nausea. The murmurs of morning chapel seemed to coalesce into an acid trickle down the back of his throat. The airscreen rallies in which the Risen Emperor's visage slowly turned over an ululating crowd filled his stomach with bile.

Laurent Zai had never prayed to the Risen Emperor again.

He never drank, for every toast on Vada asked the Risen Deity for luck and health. And even as Cadet Zai waited for word of admission into the Imperial Naval Academy, he lay silent in the endless minutes before sleep every night, recalling every mistep and victory in his six-week application trial. But not praying.

Thirty subjective years later, however, seated in the shipmaster's chair of His Majesty's frigate Lynx, Captain Laurent Zai took a moment to pair his hands over nose and mouth.

He still smelled the bile of that long-ago shame.

"Make this work," he demanded in a harsh whisper. "As for me, I want to return to my beloved. As for her, she's your damned sister."

The bitter prayer ended, Zai brought his hands down and opened his eyes.

"Launch," he commanded.

EXECUTIVE OFFICER

ExO Katherie Hobbes noted from her status board that the entry vehicle carrying the Apparatus Initiate Barris had not been fully gelled. The safety AI began to protest the dangers posed by an incompletely prepped insertion vehicle.

Hobbes smiled grimly, canceling the safety overrides, and the order went through. "Operation is launched, sir."

Almost simultaneously, four specially reconfigured turret blisters along the underside of the Lynx each fired one railgun and one plasma burst. A pair of each type of projectile headed toward four carefully plotted targets below.

The plasma bursts bolted ahead at twenty percent lightspeed, their 12,000-degree core temperatures burning a tunnel of vacuum through the atmosphere. Their burn length perfectly timed, they scattered into gouts of flame upon impact, leaving as their only marks four smooth, concave hemispheres burned into the palace's stone walls.

The railgun projectiles followed in their wake.

COMPOUND MIND

The attack was registered by the warning system erected by the Rix compound mind still propagating across the planet's data and communication systems. The plasma bolts left a long, bellicose streak behind them, clearly originating from the point Alexander had already predicted that an Imperial warship would station itself to attempt a rescue. The mind required less than two milliseconds to determine that such an attempt was underway, and to order that the hostages be killed. However, the Rix commandos were not datalinked to the still-propagating mind. Alexander was a composite of Imperial technology, after all, which was incompatible with Rix communications. Alexander was forced to relay its order through a transponder sitting in the center of the table in the council chamber. The transponder received the compound mind's signal and immediately let out a loud squawk, a dense static whose crenellations were coded like some ancient audio modem. The squawk began its journey from the transponder outward toward the Rix commandos at the speed of sound. The nearest commando was four meters away, and the sound would reach her in roughly eight milliseconds, a hundredth of a second after the attack had begun.

Racing against this warning were the four structured smartalloy slugs launched from the Lynx's railguns. These projectiles, massing less than a few centigrams, barreled at ten percent lightspeed through the near-vacuum cylinders burned for them by the plasma bolts, flying straight as lasers. They traversed the distance to the palace in far less time than it took for Legis's atmospheric pressure to slam closed their vacuum paths. They reached the plasma-smoothed hemispheres of their entry-points into the palace within seven milliseconds.

The slugs were cylinders no wider than a human hair follicle. They sliced through the ancient palace walls, releasing a carefully calculated fraction of their awesome kinetic energy. The stone around the entry points ribbed with sudden webs of cracks, like safety glass struck with a hammer. The impact altered the slugs, transforming them into their second programmed shape, a larger spheroid that flattened on impact, braking the projectiles as they slammed through the floors and walls of the palace. In the seconds after their passage, the old palace would boom and shake, whole walls exploding into dust. Localized but terrific wind storms would soon rise up as the air inside the palace was set in motion by the slugs' passage.

After the seventh such collision, a number calculated by the Lynx's AI using precise models of the palace's architecture, the slugs ballooned to their largest size. The smartalloy stretched into a mesh of hexagons, expanding outward like a child's paper snowflake, and attaining the surface area of a large coin.

These much-slowed slugs struck their targets, hitting the Rix commandos while the warning squawk from the transponder was just under a meter away, eight thousandths of a second after the attack had begun. The slugs tore through the commandos' chests, leaving tunnels that were momentarily as exact as holes drilled in metal. But then the wake of the slug's passage pulled a pulverized spray of blood, tissue, and biomechanical enhancements through the exit wounds, filling the council chamber with a maelstrom of ichor. The four commandos tumbled to the ground, their bones shattered and implants liquifacted by the blow.

For the moment, the hostages were safe.

DOCTOR

Above, the marines were on their way.

Twenty-five entry vehicles accelerated down launch tubes, riding electromagnetic rails at absurd velocities. Thirty-seven gees hit Dr. Vecher like a brain hemorrhage, shifting the color behind his closed eyes from red, to pink, to the white of the hottest flame. A roar filled his gel-sealed ears, and he felt his body malform, squashed down into the floor of his vehicle under a giant's foot. If not for his yolk of gel and the injected and inhaled smart-polymers that marbled his body tissue, he would have died in several instantaneous and exotic ways.

As it was, it hurt like hell.

The entry vehicles hit the dense air of the mesopause almost instantly, and spun a precise 180 degrees to orient their passengers feet-down, firing retrorockets to begin braking and targeting. They spread out, screaming meteors surging across the daylit sky of Legis XV. Only three were targeted near the council chamber: each vehicle that landed close to the hostages carried the risk of injuring the Child Empress. The marines would be spread out, deployed to sweep for the three remaining Rix commandos and secure the now twice-battered palace.

Dr. Vecher's entry vehicle was fractionally ahead of the others, and was aimed closest to the council chamber. It burst through the palace's three sets of outer walls, the impacts shaking Vecher as if he were trapped inside a ringing churchbell.

But the landing, in which the vehicle expended its last reaction mass to come to a cratering halt outside the chamber, seemed almost soft. There was a final bump, and then Dr. Vecher spilled from the vehicle, the gel that carried him out hissing as it hit the super-heated stone floor of the palace.

ADMIRAL

For the hostages, the transition from anxious fatigue and boredom to chaos was instantaneous. The smartalloy slugs reached their targets well before any sound or shock waves struck the council chamber. The roaring whirlwind seemed to come from nowhere. Blood and liquefied gristle exploded from the four captors. The hostages found themselves choking on the airborne ichor of the eviscerated Rix, mouths and eyes filled with the sudden spray. Moments later, the booms of the palace's shattered and collapsing outer walls came thundering in at the tardy speed of sound, overwhelming the vain shriek of the transponder on the table.

Admiral Fenton Pry, however, had been expecting something like this. He had written his War College graduate thesis on hostage rescue, and for the last four hours had been quietly stewing over the irony. After a seventy-subjective-year career, here he finally was in a hostage situation, but on the wrong end. The latest articles in the infrequent professional literature of hostage rescue even lay on his bedside, printed and handsomely bound by his adjutant, but unread. He hadn't been keeping up lately. But he knew roughly how the attack would unfold, and had palmed a silk handkerchief some hours ago. He placed it over his mouth and rose.

A horrifying cramp shot through one leg. The admiral had tried dutifully to perform escape-pod stretches, but he'd been in the chair for four hours. He limped toward where the Child Empress must be, blinking away blood from his eyes and breathing shallowly. The floor rolled as a heavy portion of the palace's ancient masonry collapsed nearby.

Marines coming in?

They're too close, the admiral thought. This was a natural stone building, for His Majesty's sake. Admiral Pry could have taught whoever was in charge up there a few things about insertions into pre-ferroplastic structures.

Vision cleared as the ichor began to settle in an even patina on the exposed surfaces of the room. The Empress was still seated. Admiral Pry spotted a Rix commando on the floor. She had landed on her side, doubled up as if put down by a punch to the stomach. The entry wound was invisible, but two pieces of the commando's spine thrust from the gaping exit wound at forty-five-degree angles.

Pry noted with professional pleasure that the slug had struck the commando's chest dead center. He nodded his head curtly, the same gesture he used to replace the words well done with his staff. Her blaster, extended toward Child Empress at arm's length, was untouched.

The admiral lifted her hand from it, careful not to let the rigid fingers pull the trigger, and turned to the Empress's still form.

"M'Lady?" he asked.

The Empress's face was twisted with pain. She clutched her left shoulder, gasping for air with ragged breaths.

Had the Reason been hit with a slug? The Empress was of course covered with Rix blood, but under that her robes seemed to be intact. She certainly hadn't been shot by anything as brutal as a blaster or an exsanguination round.

Admiral Pry had a few seconds to wonder what was wrong before the heavy ash doors burst open.

CORPORAL

Marine Corporal Mirame Lao was the first out of her dropship.

A veteran of twenty-six combat insertions, she had set her entry vehicle to the highest egress speed/lowest safety rating. At this setting, the dropship vomited open at the moment of impact, spilling Corporal Lao onto the floor in a cascade of suddenly liquidized gee-gel, through which she rolled like a parachutist hitting thick mud. She came up standing. The seal that protected her varigun's barrel from clogging with gel popped out like a champagne cork, and her helmet drained its entry insulation explosively on the floor around her. Inside her visor, blinking red diagnostics added up the price of her fast egress: her left leg was broken, the shoulder on that side dislocated. Not bad for a spill at highest setting.

The leg was already numbing from automatically injected anesthesia; her battle armor's servomotors took over its motion. Lao realized that the break must be severe; as the leg moved, she could feel that icy sensation of splintered bone tearing into nerve-dead tissue. She gritted her teeth and ignored the feeling. Once during a firefight on Dhantu, Lao had functioned for six hours with a broken pelvis. This mission--win, lose, or draw--wouldn't last more than six minutes. She confirmed a blinking yellow glyph with her eye-mouse, and braced herself. Her battle armor huffed as it contracted implosively, shoving her dislocated shoulder back into place. Now that hurt.

By now, some fourteen seconds after impact, the marine corporal was oriented to the wireframe map in her secondary vision. To her right, the marine doctor was rising gingerly up from the gel vomited by his own drop-ship, disoriented but intact. The vehicle that had brought the Apparatus initiate down hadn't spilled yet--it looked wrong, as if the door had buckled in transit.

Tough luck.

Corporal Lao loped toward the heavy doors that separated her from the council chamber, gaining speed even with her lopsided gait. She was right-handed, but she hit the ashwood doors with her already wounded left shoulder; no sense injuring the good arm. Another spike of pain shot through her as the doors burst open.

She tumbled into the council chamber with weapon raised, scanning the room for the Rix commandos.

They were easy to find. All four had fallen, and each was the origin of a long ellipse of thick red ejecta sprayed on walls and floor. A lighter, pink shroud of human blood coated everything in the room, from the ornate settings on the table to the stunned or shrieking hostages.

These four Rix were definitely dead. Lao clicked her tongue to transmit a preconfigured signal to the Lynx: Council chamber secured.

"Here!" a voice called.

The word came from an old man who wore what appeared--beneath its bloody patina--to be an admiral's uniform. He knelt over two figures, one writhing, one still.

The Child Empress, and a dead Rix.

Marine Corporal Lao ran to the pair, reaching for a large device on her back. This move caused her wounded shoulder to scream with pain, and her vision reddened at the edges. Lao overrode the suit's suggestion of anesthesia; she needed both arms working at top efficiency. There were three surviving Rix in the building; this might turn into a firefight yet.

The diagnostics on the generator blinked green. It had survived the jump in working order. She reached for its controls, but movement behind her--the helmet extended her peripheral vision to 360 degrees--demanded her attention. Lao spun with her weapon raised, shoulder flaring with pain again.

It was the marine doctor.

"Come!" she ordered, her helmet uttering one of the preprogrammed words she could access with a tongue click. Her lungs remained full of drop-goo, whose pseudo-alveoli continued to pump high-grade oxygen into her system. "Sir!" she added.

The man stumbled forward, disoriented as a recruit after his first high-acceleration test. The corporal grabbed the doctor's shoulder and pulled him into the generator's radius. There was no time to waste. The com signals from the rest of the drop were running through her secondary audio, terse battle chatter as her squadmates engaged the remaining Rix.

Corporal Lao activated the machine, and a level one stasis field jumped to life around the five of them: Empress, lifeless Rix commando, admiral, doctor, and marine corporal. The rest of the council chamber dimmed. From the outside, the field would appear as a smooth and reflective black sphere, invulnerable to simple blaster fire. The hiss of an oxygen recycler came from the machine; the field was airtight as well.

"Sir," Lao commanded, "heal."

The marine doctor looked up at her, an awful expression visible on his face through the thick, transparent ceramic of his helmet visor. He was trying to speak; a terribly, terribly bad idea.

Despite the howl of pain in her shoulder, the imminent danger of Rix attack, and the general need for her attention to be focused in all directions at once, Lao had to close her eyes when the doctor vomited, two lungfuls of green oxycompound splattering onto the inside of his faceplate.

She reached over to unseal the helmet. The doctor wouldn't drown in the stuff, naturally, but it was much nastier when you inhaled it the second time.

CAPTAIN

"Stasis field up in the council chamber, sir," Executive Officer Hobbes said softly.

The words snapped through the wash of visual and auditory reports streaming through the Lynx's infostructure. Captain Laurent Zai had to replay them in his mind before he would believe. For the first time in four hours, he allowed himself to feel a glimmer of hope.

Acoustics had finally analyzed the explosive sound in the council chamber, which had turned out not to be a firearm at all. Probably the glass in which the Intelligencer had secreted itself had been overturned, and the crash magnified by the small craft's sensitive ears. So Zai had launched the rescue needlessly, but thus far the rescue was working. Such were the fortunes of war.

"Rix number five dead. Four more marines lost," another report came.

Zai nodded with approval and peered down into the bridge airscreen. His marines were spread across the palace in a nested hexagonal search pattern, its symmetry only slightly distorted by the exigencies of crashing down from space, avoiding booby traps, and fighting the remaining two Rix commandos. His men were doing quite well. (Actually, seventeen of the two dozen marines were women, but Vadans preferred the old terms.)

If the Child Empress was still alive, Zai thought, he might yet survive this nightmare.

Then doubts flooded him again. The Empress could have been killed when the council chamber had been railgunned. Or when the marines had burst in to take control. The Rix might have murdered the Empress the moment they took her hostage, insurance against any rescue. And even if she was alive now, two more Rix commandos remained concealed somewhere in the tangled diagram of the battle.

"Phase two," Zai ordered.

The Lynx shuddered as its conventional landers launched, filled with the rest of the Lynx's marine complement. Soon the Imperial forces would have total superiority. Every minute in which disaster did not befall him took Laurent Zai closer to victory.

"Where's that damned Vecher?" the captain snapped.

"He's under the stasis field, sir," Hobbes answered.

Zai nodded. The doctor's battle armor couldn't broadcast through the field. But if the marines had bothered to put the stasis field up, that implied that the Empress was still alive.

"Rix fire!" the synthesized voice of a marine came from below; they were still breathing oxycompound, in case the enemy used gas. The bridge tactical AI triangulated the sound of blaster fire picked up by various marines' helmets; a cold blue trapezoid appeared on the wireframe, marking the area where the Rix commando should be.

Zai gritted his teeth. In urban cover, Rix soldiers were like quantum particles, charms or fetches that existed only as probabilities of location and intent, never as certainties--until they were dead. The nearest edge of the marked area was almost a hundred meters from the council chamber. Close enough to threaten the Empress, but far away enough to...

"Hit that area with another round of railgun slugs," Zai ordered.

"But, sir!" Second Gunner Thompson protested. "The integrity of the palace is already doubtful. It's not hypercarbon, it's stone. Another round--"

"I'm counting on a collapse, Gunner," Zai said. "Do you think we'll hit that Rixwoman with dumb luck?"

"The stasis field is only level one, sir, but it should hold," Hobbes offered quietly. At least his executive officer understood Zai's thinking. Falling stone wouldn't harm anyone inside a stasis field. Everyone else--the other hostages, the marines, the rest of the palace staff--was expendable. In fact, the Rix and the Imperials were in battle armor, and wouldn't be killed by a mere building falling down around them. They would simply be immobilized.

"Firing," came the first gunner, and straight bolts of green light leapt onto the airscreen, lancing the blue trapezoid like pins through a cushion. The thunk of the shots reached Zai's soles, adding to all the other sensations of movement and acceleration.

What a powerful weapon, he thought, to shake a starship with its recoil, though the shell weighed less than a gram.

After four shudders had run through the Lynx, the gunner reported, "First rounds fired, sir. The palace seems to be holding up."

"Then fire again," Zai said.

SENATOR

The other three senators stood a few meters away from the legislation, a bit daunted by its complexity, its intensity.

As Nara Oxham took them through it, however, with simple words and a soothingly cobalt-blue airmouse pointing out particulars, they drew gradually nearer. The legislation consumed most of the aircreen in the Secularist Party Caucus chamber. A galaxy of minor levies formed its center: nuisance taxes on arms contractors, sur-tariffs on the shipment of strategic metals, higher senatorial assessment for regions with a large military presence; all measures that would, directly and indirectly, cost the Imperial Navy hard cash. Surrounding this inner core were stalwart pickets of limited debate, which restricted ammendments and forestalled filibuster, and loopholes were ringed with glittering ranks of statutory barbed wire. More items in the omnibus floated in a disorganized cloud, cunningly indirect but obvious in their intent to the trained eye. Duties, imposts, levies, tithes, tariffs, canceled pork, promised spending temporarily withheld--a host of transfers of economic strength firmly away from the Spinward Reaches. All carefully balanced to undo what the Emperor and Loyalists intended.

Senator Oxham was proud that her staff had created so complex a measure in less than an hour. The silver proposal cup at the center of the airscreen was barely visible through the dense, glittering forest of iconographics.

The edicts flowing from the Diamond Palace were a sledgehammer, an unambiguous step toward war. This legislation, however complex its point-clouds of legislative heiroglyphics, was in its own way just as simple: a sledgehammer swung in return, carefully balanced in force and angle to stop its counterpart dead with a single collision. Some of the other Secularist Party senators looked unhappy, as if imagining themselves caught between the two.

"Are we sure that we need to approach this so ... confrontationally?" asked Senator Pimir Wat. He pointed timidly at the sparkling line that represented a transport impost, as if it were a downed power line he'd discovered on his front stoop, buzzing and deadly with high voltage. Senator Oxham had cut back on her dosage of apathy in the last hour, tuning her sensitivity for this meeting. She felt Wat's nerves filling the room like static electricity, coruscating with every sudden movement or sharp word. Oxham knew this particular species of anxiety well; it was the particular paranoia of professional politicians. The legislation before them was, in fact, intended to induce exactly such an emotion, an anxiety that made politicians fragile, malleable.

"Perhaps we could express our concerns in a more symbolic way," Senator Verin suggested. "Reveal all that Senator Oxham has so vigilantly uncovered, and open the subject to debate."

"And give the Risen Father a chance to respond," Senator Wat added.

Oxham turned to face Wat, fixing him with the uncanny blue of her Vasthold eyes. "The Risen Father didn't offer us a symbolic gesture," she said. "We haven't been informed, consulted, or even forewarned. Our Empire has simply been moved toward war, our constituents put in harm's way while His military engages in this adventure."

At these last words, she looked at the third parliamentarian in the room. Senator An Mare, whose stridently Secularist homeworld lay in the midst of the Spinward Reaches and at the high water mark of the Rix Incursion, had helped draft the measure. The most lucrative exports of Mare's world had, of course, been exempted from Oxham's legislation.

"Yes, the people have been put in harm's way," Senator Mare said, in her eyes the distant look of someone listening to secondary audio. "And in a fashion that seems deliberately clandestine on the Emperor's part." Mare cocked her head, and her eyes grew sharp. "So I must disagree with the Honorable Verin when he proposes a symbolic gesture, a mere statement of intent. An unnecessary step, I think. All legislation is symbolic--rhetoric and signifiers, subjunction and intention--until voted upon, at least." Oxham felt the tension go out of the room. This legislation can't really succeed, Wat and Verin were thinking with relief. It was a gauntlet thrown, a bluff, a signal flare for the rest of the Senate. The measure was sculpted precisely to mirror the Emperor's will, to reveal it in reverse, like a plaster cast. Oxham could have given a long speech listing the details that Niles had found, evidence of imperial intentions, but it would have gone unheard and unnoticed. Pending legislation with major party backing, however, was always carefully scrutinized. Oxham had long ago discovered that a truth cleverly hidden was quicker believed than one simply read into the record.

"True," said Wat. "This bill will send a signal."

Verin nodded his head. "A clarion call!"

Although she and Senator Mare had planned their exchange for exactly this effect, Oxham found herself a little annoyed at the other Senators' quick surrender. With a few modifications, she thought, the bill might pass. But Oxham was one of the youngest members of the Senate; and, of course, she was the Mad Senator. Her party's leaders sometimes underestimated her.

"So I have your backing?" she asked.

The three old solons glanced among themselves, possibly conversing on some private channel, or perhaps they merely knew each other very well. In any case, Oxham's heightened empathy registered the exact moment when agreement came, settling around her mind like a cool layer of mist onto the skin.

It was Senator Mare who nodded, reaching for the silver proposal cup and putting it to her lips. She passed it to Wat, her upper lip stained red by the nanos now greedily sequencing her DNA, mapping the shape of her teeth, listening to her voice before sending a verification code to the Senate's sergeant-at-arms AI. The machine was exquisitely paranoid. It was fast, though. Seconds after Verin had finished off the liquid in the cup, Oxham's legislation flickered for a moment and re-formed in the Secularist caucus airscreen.

Now the measure was rendered in the cooler, more dignified colors of pending law. It was a beautiful thing to behold.

Five minutes later, as Nara Oxham walked down one of the wide, senators-only corridors of the Secularist wing, enjoying the wash of politics and power in her ears and the chemicals of victory in her bloodstream, the summons came.

The Risen Emperor, Ruler of the Eighty Worlds, requested the presence of Senator Nara Oxham. With due respect, but without delay.