Bonju held his lip until she signaled for him to speak.

  “Empress, I would never come this far at the risk of my life and my family unless I was convinced. If I may plead for your indulgence, I wish to tell you of my experiment with a different Hokkaido.”

  “I don’t indulge. I tolerate. If I hear one word of blasphemy, they will find your tongue in the museum of damned fools who didn’t know when to shut the fuck up.”

  “Thank you, Empress. I’ll be concise.”

  Chastain ate cheese while Bonju explained his manipulation of his counterpart in a different Pinchon. He spoke of his experiment with the Talons who crossed the divide. Hoija added her role as an eyewitness. Chin resting on bony hand, Chastain glared at the Hokkis like she planned to escort both to an airlock.

  “I’m a simple old bitch,” she said. “I ask for three things. Conquest, conversion, and cheese. I haven’t had a good fuck in forty years. I outlived my children, and they died hating me for it. I’m surrounded by a sorry cast of sycophants waiting for me to die and hoping they survive the transition. What they don’t know is, my granddaughter is the cunt from hell. Even I watch my manners when she’s about.

  “I can accept other universes. Maybe even crossing over. But I also know every word of Scripture. And I know God.” She pointed to the Imfeeli Nebula. “That is here to stay. Magic cubes will not destroy Creation. There. Are we finished now?”

  Bonju had two cards left to play, the philosophical and the practical. Chastain didn’t seem impressed with the latter.

  “Empress, I know this is difficult to consider. What if the Splinters are God’s tools for holding together His Creation?”

  “Going straight for the blasphemy? Stupid fucking child.”

  “No, Empress. Not at all. I’m merely suggesting an intersection between the Divine and His ability to create such wonders. Even the most devout would surely say God did not create complex life through sheer imagination, for that would imply magic.”

  “You’re tempting me to give the order, Taron.”

  “If magic is elevated science misperceived, does it not stand to reason God used tools based upon sound scientific principles, but His mind conceived them at a level beyond our own?”

  “I hate scientists who play low-rent theologians. You claim loyalty to the Church, but you use every opportunity to undermine it.”

  “No, Empress. Not at all.”

  “I’m tired of you, child. We must move on.”

  “I had many more witnesses and evidence to present, Empress, but they did not arrive. Their stories are powerful.”

  She glimpsed the two empty seats.

  “Apparently, they disagree. What are their names?”

  “Maj. Brin Otolski and Lt. Eliza Doshenko of Division LM. They helped a colleague of mine, Dr. Harrod Noor, in experiments that will build our case. I don’t know why they failed to appear, but I ask humbly for a continuance until my complete case can be heard.”

  Bonju detected a modicum of interest in her sunken eyes. At the very least, her simmering rage appeared to fade a bit.

  “Clarion of the Guard.” She shouted past the Circle. “To me.”

  A white-armored soldier raced from his position among the phalanx and bowed on one knee before Chastain.

  “Empress.”

  “Who did not attend today’s Circle?”

  He confirmed Otolski and Doshenko.

  “Do we know why these fools would skip an audience with me?”

  “No, Empress.”

  “Away.”

  She sipped wine and cleared her throat. The Circle waited in silence.

  “Hamilton,” she said. “Stay. General Taron. Don’t move.” She pivoted to Bonju. “Stay in your fucking chair. The rest of you? Leave. The Circle is closed.”

  The large majority who never had a chance to speak shaded their eyes in obvious disappointment, but no one dared object. When the Circle cleared, Chastain ordered the remaining three to take the seats closest to her.

  “Do you know the difference between this cheese and the synthetic crap most people eat? A cow. Do you care? Of course not. You’ve never seen a cow.” She held up a yellow cube. “If you tasted this, you’d hate it. Why? The fucking cow. You’re not wired to handle cow’s milk. One difference you can’t see is enough to make you sick to the stomach. You see my point?”

  “I do, Empress,” Bonju said. “Something has happened to change your perspective on my proposal.”

  “I ran late today for a reason. I wanted to spend some time with my great nephew Emil. He’s one of the few in my line who doesn’t ask me for a goddamn thing. He’s a navigator. He left Swarm headquarters at Mont-Nam this morning on an ATB-5. His ship crashed in Sai-Por City with two hundred onboard. A fourth of the crew were planning to attend Convocation. The Admiralty came to me straightaway because they knew Emil was my favorite.

  “Emil is dead. Everyone onboard is dead. They tell me a terrorist infiltrated the ship. I am also told the ship was scheduled to collect additional passengers at an old Shaoist temple in the outlands. A second transport was dispatched to the temple, but they found thirteen bodies hit by Force Drums. I saw the manifest. Maj. Otolski and Lt. Doshenko were onboard that ATB-5. Your Dr. Noor was killed at the temple.”

  Bonju felt as if he were taking blow after blow.

  “Why would someone do this?”

  Admiral Hamilton interjected.

  “I’m sure the investigation will yield fast results.”

  “Not fast enough for Emil,” Chastain said. “I don’t need the mind of an investigator to see the connection between your mad proposal and this disaster,” she told Bonju. “Either somebody wanted your people to shut their mouths, or you arranged it to create panic. It would be a clever bit of misdirection, but I don’t think either of you Hokkis have the fucking spine for it.”

  “I assure you, Empress,” Hoija said. “We only seek to serve the best interests of the Risen Church.”

  “That will be put to the test, General. If this ship went down without Emil onboard, I wouldn’t have paid it a concern. I have an Admiralty to render judgment in such matters. But I intend to know if my great nephew died because of you Hokki cunts.”

  “What more can I do, Empress?” Bonju said.

  “Prove your case. Anything short of it, and I’ll kill you and your eight children. It won’t make up for Emil, but I can live with it.”

  A cold shudder ran through his body.

  “To be clear, Empress. If I prove our universe is living on borrowed time, you will allow my family to live?”

  “I just said that in less words, you fool. If you’re correct, they’d probably be better off dead.”

  “Not necessarily. Would you accept my recommendations for saving our people?”

  “You have a rescue plan?”

  “Yes, but it will require hard choices.”

  “Such as?”

  “Peace with the Orzed Confederation.”

  She laughed.

  “Why the fuck would I care what happens to that lot?”

  “We’ll need their ships combined with our own. Even then, we’ll only be able to save a tiny percentage. Two percent, if we’re lucky.”

  She glared at the threesome like they were playing her for a fool.

  “Twenty days. Bring me proof, and I won’t kill your family. Otherwise, we finish our business on Hokkaido and move on to the next system. Go away.”

  She asked for the impossible, something Bonju traded in for years. At the moment, a path toward a solution eluded him, but he dared not haggle for more time. The intransigence in Chastain’s eyes warned him to accept the terms or die today.

  “It was more than you could have hoped for,” Hoija said after they departed the Circle. “We were insane to think this might work.”

  “I don’t understand. Who could have done this? No one knew about Noor’s project except me, Otolski, and Doshenko. I didn’t intend to tell you until I knew the results.”

  “For all we know, he didn’t succeed. What’s your next move?”

  “Protect my family.”

  “From the Empress? That won’t last long.”

  “I’ll pray.”

  “You’re not a religious man.”

  “No, but I am in the market for a miracle. According to Scripture, miracles require prayer.”

  12

  Sai-Por City

  W HEN ROYAL REGENERATED, he discovered how his latest death might have been the worst of the lot. He lay amid a garden of shattered glass, having taken out a hothouse roof when he crashed. He sat up when his spine felt flexible again but cut his hands on shards. The pain and blood? Neither should have been an issue, but Royal’s golden armor had fully retracted. Apparently, its durability had limits – in this case, falling from an ATB-5 in mid-flight.

  The raw armor formed a molten glob little bigger than his palm, lying useless at his side. Royal knew he was in trouble when it didn’t react to his touch. He slapped it against his chest to trigger a full wrap, but the glob did not respond.

  Give it time. It’s repairing itself.

  Or so he hoped.

  He wasn’t carrying much else of use, either. He had one knife, one pistol, and a rifle with a shattered acceleration chamber. Royal stumbled around through the hothouse, assuming he’d find the rest, which must have been thrown on impact. Yet he came up empty. None of it would have mattered if he still had the Splinter.

  When did it slip from his grasp? How far away could it have landed?

  OK, asshole. You got no one to blame but yourself. No armor, no tether, no Talons. Yeah, this won’t be hard at all.

  Royal stuffed the golden globule into his back pocket and relied on six years as a soldier to scout the perimeter. The hothouse was one of twelve in a grid pattern. The closest appeared in disrepair, but he saw heavy green growth inside others. He heard no voices or machinery. On the north end, the grid butted up against a collection of residential buildings a few stories high. The nearest were burned-out shells, but the streets were free of debris. To the south end, an open field pocked with rubble – much of it stacked ready for cleanup – stretched for at least a kilometer, ending at a tree line. Drone loaders stood silent in the field, as if waiting for orders.

  If the Splinter landed out there, he’d have no competition to finding it so long as the loaders remained inactive, but he’d be an easy target from the air. If it landed in the city, how long before someone else stumbled upon it? He assumed the city was Sai-Por, which lined up with the future subset that drove him here, but Royal knew nothing about it. His Talons never fought this deep into the continent. A few plumes of black smoke rose far to the north, and distant shadows of Swarm ships graced the sky. If the city was still an engagement zone, combat must be raging in distant neighborhoods.

  He had yet to make a choice about his next move when the low roar of a heavy tumbler grew. He took a defensive posture at the western edge of the hothouse grid and watched the tri-cabin tumbler unload its passengers. Not Swarm. Not Talons. In some ways, Royal thought, the worst of all:

  Converted Hokkis.

  These men, women, and children – their heads shaven – carried the scorpion brand beneath their right ear and wore a red neck scarf. They represented the final stage of the Swarm’s conquest: Natives who vowed fealty to the Scripture of the Risen Church and intended to defend their city for the Swarm Empire. They weren’t soldiers, and few received minimal training from proper Swarm officers, but they knew how to press the trigger button on the lightweight Hornet Mark B rifles they carried. Anyone not of the Swarm or wearing a scarf was an acceptable target.

  In the final three months of his service with the Talons, Royal ran across a few such roaming bands. He took pleasure in gunning them down. Whatever they might have been before the war dissolved when they took the scorpion. They didn’t care about family or Hokki identity. They chose to cleanse the remaining civilian resistance to the Church and build a new World of the Converted when the Swarm advanced to the next star system. A fully Converted world meant the Swarm did not have to fight any rear-guard actions. Seeing these scarves in great numbers meant a city had fallen, or defeat was near. If this was a common tide across the population centers, then the mop-up stages of the invasion had begun. Soon, even the Talons would fall back and prepare to defend the next system.

  Royal didn’t know how many months had passed since he crossed the divide, given the time disparity between universes. But the war had raged seven years before he left, and the Hokkis put up a stubborn but doomed fight alongside the Talon units. He shouldn’t have been surprised to encounter the Converted so quickly.

  They spread out among the hothouse grid with clear intent to hunt down a target. It made sense. His fall must not have gone unnoticed. Lying dead on his back for ten or twelve minutes set him at a disadvantage. And the ship he took down? No doubt a citywide response must be ramping up. Swarm counterterrorism tactics were heavy-handed on a good day.

  Royal took position inside a hothouse where all manner of ferns, banana plants, and herbal vines grew unchecked, perhaps for months. He crouched beneath a shelf, surrounded by empty pots, next to a dead solar pump. He waited for the right moment. He wanted them to enter, just not too many. If he was right, their squad leader would send out the weakest links at point. A way to prove they deserved they scarves.

  I hate these assholes.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Two Hokkis entered, staying close to the door. One said the coast was clear, but the other insisted they’d live in shame if they allowed a terrorist to escape.

  “Take this side,” the second female told the first. “I’ll cover this one.”

  Royal thought their voices carried the vacuous but arrogant accent of the privileged. He heard it before through his adopted sister, who gave him the evil eye from the day he arrived in the Jee household.

  He couldn’t see their faces, but their footwork was halting, and the butt of their rifles dipped into view. They had no understanding of how to hunt and defend themselves.

  The girl on Royal’s side took a slight lead. She bent down to look through openings beneath the shelves. Innocent blue eyes radiated beneath her bald scalp. He guessed she was fifteen or sixteen; no fighter, just a believer. Not the first child he’d seen with a rifle in her hands. The girl with a slower gait made a comment about bananas, to which blue eyes told her to shush. They sounded like sisters.

  Neither age nor innocence mattered to Royal. The decision was simple, the move drawn from his repertoire.

  When blue eyes bent down a second time, now in position to see an outline of a human clothed in red and white fabric, Royal caught her between the eyes. The pistol sizzled as it released the laser pellet, but not enough to distract anyone outside.

  He pushed off on his feet and leaped into the corridor. The second girl, fumbling with her rifle upon seeing blue eyes fall, might have been half a second from a scream before she took a blast in her trachea and a second through her left eye. She fell like a drunk teenager.

  Royal moved on instinct. He grabbed both rifles, took a hand-comm off blue eyes, destroyed the second comm, and dragged the bodies to openings beneath the shelves. At the last, he had an idea. He stripped blue eyes of her scarf.

  The Hornets would do the trick but only for a limited time, as Royal discovered when he inspected the energy bolts. Each came with a minimal discharge capacity. He wasn’t shocked. The Swarm didn’t want to risk weaponizing a potential insurgency, and they weren’t handing over high-end weapons to civilians they didn’t yet fully trust. Between the two rifles, he had perhaps forty laser pellets. His pistol was good for another twenty.

  What he would have given for a Force Drum ….

  He crouched close to the hothouse door and prepared for his next move. He surveyed the hand-comm and had to scroll through a page of excerpts from Scripture. He pushed through images of friends and family. He dug down into comm security settings and smiled for the first time since he crashed: The device had not been locked into a Swarm geolocator. This band of Converted Hokkis – or perhaps just this one girl – must have been new. They’d never be allowed to move forward without constant monitoring. It was yet another technique to keep the Worlds of the Converted in line.

  These girls were better off dead.

  He tapped into a map of Sai-Por, which now existed as three zones. The northernmost red zone – in effect, the city center – remained prone to combat. Talons and their local allies continued to fight. Swarm forces held firm to the central zone, colored in yellow and designated TR for Transitional Reset. Conversion units hunted down civilians without the scorpion. Those who surrendered were taken to INDOC centers then brainwashed in Swarm doctrine and Scripture; all others were executed in the streets.

  Unattached children ten and under prepared for a new reality in Swarm education farms far from the cities. Royal learned a hard truth about killing children the first time his unit joined with another to liberate one of those classified farms. It was one of the few noble efforts he ever saw during the war. It was also a disaster. Talon casualties exceeded thirty percent, and none of the children – not even the tiny ones – accepted help. They were deadly creatures; some versed in small-arms and knives, with others perfectly willing to kill themselves rather than be rescued.

  Any further talk about the farms involved aerial bombardment, not ground assault. They confirmed the stories he heard about the first worlds conquered by the Swarm, where children of the invasion decades ago now led their governments and armed forces, ensuring their place in the Swarm Empire.

  Royal found himself in the middle of the green zone, which was considered under civilian control. Swarm shuttles and drones were known to keep a steady eye on neighborhoods such as this, but the Admiralty demanded the Converted defend the territory and prove their mettle. Royal thought of it as entertainment for the Swarm: They got a free peek at Hokki-on-Hokki savagery.

  Still, if those dead girls represented a healthy portion of what protected the green zone, Royal felt better about his chances. Not likely he’d escape the city without being killed at least once, but if he could reduce his trips to the abyss and keep hope alive of finding the Splinter, he had something to cling onto.