“She’ll be fine,” Heuvelt said. “She just had a shock. She’ll come out of it.”

  “She was linked to this place, in some way beyond our understanding,” Clec said. “Now that this place has stopped functioning–”

  “She. Will. Be. Fine. Help me get her out.”

  “You don’t want to look around quickly, to see if there’s anything worth pillaging?” Ashont asked.

  “I’d be afraid anything we took from this place would sprout needles or teeth or stingers and kill us in our beds,” Heuvelt said. “Besides, I didn’t get into treasure hunting for the treasure. I was born with treasures aplenty, and they never fulfilled me. One needs money to live, of course, but what does one live for? Adventure! Excitement! To challenge oneself and test one’s limits!”

  “I’m fine with just the money,” Ashont said.

  “Me too,” Clec said.

  “So I’m just going to grab up some of these jewels and figurines,” Ashont said. “In deference to your pure love of the work for its own sake, though, Clec and I will gladly keep your share of any profits.”

  He looked down at Bianca. She seemed stable enough. “Now that you mention it,” Heuvelt said, “I do have room in my pack for a bauble or two. Why don’t you hand me a couple of those crowns?”

  They hooked an anti-grav harness onto Bianca and made their way out. They paused in the chamber where they’d left Severyne. “Do you think she made it out of here?” Ashont asked.

  “I think that woman could survive anything short of a direct railgun strike,” Heuvelt said. “I just hope she isn’t crouched in a corner with a knife, waiting to gut us.”

  She was not. They made it to the top of the long shaft and emerged onto the planet’s surface, where the air was noticeably thinner, and the wind furious. This must be what it feels like when an atmosphere starts to shred away, Heuvelt thought.

  There was no sign of the Grim Countenance, or any Letnev at all. Severyne must have given up the whole expedition as a bad job. Heuvelt wondered what his legal status with the Barony was now. Probably, not good. Ah, well. He was used to it, really, by now.

  “I hope Sev didn’t bomb our ship on the way out,” Clec said.

  “Thank you for that cheerful thought,” Heuvelt said.

  Their ship was unmolested, though the ground beneath it was beginning to tilt. It seemed the structural integrity of the false planet was beginning to fail, chambers and tunnels collapsing now that load-bearing forcefields had flickered off.

  They got Bianca on board and hooked into their rudimentary medical suite. While Clec and Ashont took the shuttle up and headed toward the wormhole – mercifully still open – Heuvelt looked at the suite’s readings.

  He’d feared – expected, really – to see no brain activity at all, but instead he saw quite the opposite: Bianca’s brain was incredibly active, but in a disordered and erratic way. The medical suite recommended immediate medication to stop the life-threatening seizures Bianca was having. Except she wasn’t having seizures. She wasn’t moving at all, apart from the occasional flutter of her eyelids.

  They passed through the gate. There were two Titans hovering on the other side, including one with a large, rough, circular hole through its center mass.

  The Gatekeeper’s voice spoke over the ship’s public address system. “Honored heir. You have returned. What did you find? Do you have new orders for us?”

  “Clec, transmit on the open channel,” Heuvelt said. He cleared his throat. “Gatekeeper, the heir was hurt on the other side of the wormhole. She is unconscious. We’re… quite worried about her.”

  A moment’s silence, and then, “I see. Our remit is to protect the heir. Bring her here.”

  They piloted the Show and Tell toward the World of Stone. “I don’t suppose you destroyed a passing Barony warship a little while ago?” Ashont asked the Gatekeeper.

  “Their vessel emerged not long ago, and departed at great speed. We saw no reason to interfere with their exit.”

  “I can think of a few reasons,” Ashont said.

  They made a rather rougher landing than Bianca had managed, and once they settled down the surface of the planet began to shift, the ground rising up around them, curving above them, and enclosing them in a dome like a vast hangar. “They’re pumping breathable atmosphere into this space,” Clec said.

  “Bring her outside,” the Gatekeeper said.

  Ashont and Heuvelt got Bianca onto a floating stretcher and carried her down the boarding ramp. The domed hangar was brightly lit, like an operating theater. A small Titan, only a meter or so taller than Heuvelt, and glittering like onyx, waited for them. The Titan gestured toward a stone plinth rising out of the floor. “Place her there,” it said.

  They put Bianca down, and the Titan gazed at her, then touched her temples with its fingertips. Those hands could have crushed her skull easily, but they moved with impossible gentleness. “Ah. There is a battle within her. Another mind is attempting to take over her body.”

  “What?” Heuvelt said.

  The Gatekeeper’s voice rumbled in the air. “It seems Kor Noq Weer did not intend his heir to receive his estate, but instead, to provide a vessel for his mind.”

  Heuvelt frowned. “He wanted to steal her body?”

  “He created her body, human. He merely wanted to take ownership of what he made.”

  “How do you feel about that?” Heuvelt said.

  “I believe it is monstrous,” the Gatekeeper said. “If I could prevent such a possession, I would – and since I was tasked to protect the heir and aid her in her journey, there would be no conflict with my orders if I did. But, there is nothing I can do to stop this. She must fight on her own. The psyche of a young woman, pitted against the mind of one of the most powerful Mahact to ever live. I do not know who will prevail.”

  “I believe in Bee,” Heuvelt said. “She’ll open her eyes again.”

  “She may,” the Gatekeeper said. “The question is, who will be looking out of them?”

  They stood. They watched. They waited.

  •••

  Bianca was back on Darit, but something terrible had happened. The Halemeeting hall was a burned shell, the ruins still smoking. The burgher’s house had collapsed in on itself, the walls covered with strange mold. The trailrunner was overturned in the street, legs kicking randomly, sparks shooting from the joints.

  She blinked, and she was somehow back at her family farm, only where the house should have been there was a black obelisk instead, solid and sealed. The caprids were all dead in a heap and covered in flies. A stench of burning metal came from the direction of Old Torvald’s junkyard, and a black cloud covered that whole quarter of the sky.

  Also, the sun was the color of blood, and all three moons were on fire. “That’s a bit much,” Bianca said. “Where are you, maker?”

  The obelisk split open, and Kor Noq Weer emerged. He was wearing the armor she’d seen in his chamber, flickering with blue light, resplendent and mighty. But he stumbled when he approached, and wove an unsteady path toward her. The obelisk vanished behind him, replaced by her family home, cozy and undamaged, smoke rising from the chimney.

  “You’re barely even here,” Bianca said. “Look at you. You didn’t get your whole mind into me. You’re like… we have these insects, bees, they’re fat and yellow and black, good little pollinators. They have stingers, but they’re really meant for killing other insects, not hurting people or animals. When the bees sting a person, the barbs get caught, and the poor little creatures end up disemboweling themselves when they pull away, leaving the stinger behind. That’s you. You’re just a broken-off piece of poison.”

  Those stingers can get infected if they aren’t removed, though, can’t they? He spoke in her mind, even though, in the truest sense, they were already in her mind. You stopped the transfer, it’s true, but there’s enough of me here to make sure you never wake up again.

  “What’s the point of that?”

  Kor Noq Weer’s face was hidden – she’d never seen it, she realized – but even so, she knew he was looking at her with contempt. The point is revenge, of course!

  “You tried to take my body, but you couldn’t. In a way, you should be proud. You made me. You made me so well even you couldn’t defeat me.”

  You are a tool that turned in my hand. An experiment gone wrong.

  “Perhaps we can reach some mutually agreeable accommodation,” Bianca said, echoing something Sev had said to her. The woman had broken her heart, but still, her approach was worth a try. “You can guide me, advise me, and we can work together to fulfill our mutual–”

  I would sooner die than negotiate with a lesser being.

  “Would you rather spend a subjective eternity bickering here in my mindscape?”

  I will grind you down. I am eternal. I am implacable. I am stone.

  “And I’m flexible,” Bianca said. “You made me that way. I’m far more adaptable than you are, Kor. I can change myself to solve whatever problem faces me – I can change my body. I can change my brain. I can change my mind. And in here, that means…” She glanced up at the sky, and the flames wreathing the moons snuffed. The clouds rolled back, and the smoke blew away over the sea. “I can change the world.”

  Kor Noq Weer ran toward her, but she made the ground split open with a glance. Mechanical arms reached out of cracks in the earth, grabbing his limbs, pulling him down, and he shrieked in outrage. She cocked her head, remembering what the Gatekeeper had said about his illness, and his hood fell away, revealing flesh that melted and bubbled, necrotized and sloughing off. More mechanical limbs – the hidden treasures beneath Darit’s surface – grabbed at him, pulling him down, tearing off pieces of his rotting body in the process.

  Bianca understood that this was all analogy. She was altering the landscape of her own mind, capturing and isolating the rogue psyche that was trying to take control. He’d made her too well. Maybe at his height she would have been unable to resist him, but he’d overestimated his own strength. Even so, she wasn’t sure if she could fully eradicate him, but she could bury him deep.

  You cannot destroy me. His whole body had been pulled underground now, and only the sockets where his eyes had been held guttering lights. I am too vast, too full of knowing, my stratagems span eons, my wisdom is eternal–

  “I’ll hold onto whatever bits of you are useful, don’t worry.” She snapped her fingers. The chasm snapped shut, crushing his skull, scattering fragments across the newly solid soil.

  Eternallllllll, his voice whispered on the wind, but the words trailed off, and faded.

  Bianca sat down cross-legged on the solid ground of her own mind, and looked for a while at the moons in the sky. She felt a yearning now, too, but it was different than the one Kor Noq Weer had planted inside her.

  Now what she yearned for was home.

  •••

  A little while later, back on the World of Stone, Bianca opened her eyes.

  Chapter 36

  Torvald looked at the components scattered on his workbench and whistled. It was the damnedest thing: that morning, a whole bunch of pieces of inert technology in his scrapyard just all of a sudden woke up. Mysterious boxes started beeping. Inscrutable cylinders began to hum. Fans turned, and solenoids clicked, and indicators lit up. As best he could figure, some kind of remote power station had come online, and dormant systems were sending messages across the planet again. He wondered if the Letnev surveyors had stumbled on some ancient control center deep in a dead mine and gotten it up and running again. I wish Bianca was here, he thought. She’d have a good old time figuring out what all this junk does.

  His alert system beeped. Someone was at the gates – he’d disabled the automatic opening system, because not all his visitors were welcome anymore. He sure hoped it wasn’t another tax collector. He’d already given them pretty much all his best aluminum. The Barony had an endless hunger for resources, and Torvald had yet to see what they offered in return.

  He went out into the scrapyard and pressed the remote that made the small door in the gate swing open.

  “Open the big doors!” a voice called. “I’m bringing something in!”

  Torvald frowned. That voice sounded familiar, but… He made the larger gates swing wide.

  There was a spaceship parked beyond the gates, one that looked a little like a bug wearing saddlebags, but that wasn’t what drew his eye. There was some kind of three-meter-high robot standing there, only it was made of black stone that glittered–

  A woman ran toward him. She wore a red dress with a skirt that fluttered, and there was some sort of tiara glittering on her head.

  She was just a few steps away before he recognized her, and shouted, “Bee!”

  She flung herself into his arms, squeezing him and laughing in his ear. “Torvald! That’s ‘Queen Bee’ to you, old man.”

  He took a step back, but kept his hands on her shoulders as he looked her up and down. “You look different, your local majesty, but I can’t quite say how.”

  “A lot of things have changed,” she said. “I’ll tell you all about it.” The immense stone figure stepped forward, and Torvald craned his neck. “What’s this?”

  “This is my friend, Natrion the Vigilant. He looks out for me. Doesn’t like to be far from my side.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” Torvald said. The immense figure nodded. Maybe more than just a robot, then.

  Torvald touched Bianca’s tiara, straightening it a little from where it went askew during their hug. “Did you turn out to be a space princess after all?”

  “More sort of a king,” she said. “But I abdicated the throne. The world they offered wasn’t much to my liking. Too big. Too ugly. Too dangerous. I closed it up behind a broken wormhole, where it can’t do any harm.” She cocked her head, and her eyes got a little faraway, like she was listening to words Torvald couldn’t hear. “But there’s another world that does interest me. Darit.”

  “Since when? You couldn’t wait to get away from here.”

  “I just never appreciated it properly before.” She gazed around the scrapyard. “Sometimes you have to go away from a place so you can come back and see it with fresh eyes, I guess.” She linked arms with Torvald and began to lead him toward the ship, the tall fella following at their heels. “Tell me,” she said. “Have the Letnev been bothering you much?”

  “More than I’d like.”

  “I have some ideas about how to encourage them to move along. Undo their annexation. Bother someone else for a while.”

  “Bee, are you talking about fighting the Barony? That seems like a tall order, even with your big friend’s help.”

  “Oh, a couple of his siblings came with me too,” Bianca said. “They’re in space, hanging out beyond the orbit of the moons. They’re a little bigger than Natrion here, and they’d draw too much attention if they came down to say hello. We have other resources as well. Darit has all kinds of fascinating things buried under the surface. It was a valuable colony world, once upon a time, with rich mines, and it has planetary defenses to suit. Most of them still work, I think. I can see all the connections now, all the lines of energy and force. It’s just a question of altering the flow. I think I can even increase the radii of the habitable zones, connect the settlements better, so you don’t have to bundle up in tundra gear to get from place to place.”

  Torvald whistled. “Did you have something to do with all this machinery waking up again, Bee?”

  She looked over at him, and her eyes twinkled. “I always did have something of a knack for tech, didn’t I? That’s gotten a lot stronger lately. Just like the rest of me.”

  “Even so… the Barony…”

  “It won’t be easy,” Bee said. “But it turns out my original destiny was to conquer the whole galaxy. I figure it shouldn’t be that hard to liberate and protect one little world.”

  Return to

  the void in…

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks again to Marc Gascoigne and the whole Aconyte team, especially Lottie Llewelyn-Wells and my editor Paul Simpson, and to the Twilight Imperium creative team too. And look at that cover by Scott Schomburg! Thanks to my agent Ginger Clark and the whole Curtis Brown team too.

  In my personal life, especially in these pandemic days, my wife Heather Shaw and son River help keep me steady. I also rely on Ais, Amanda, Emily, Katrina, and Sarah – I hope I get to see them all in person a lot more soon. My fellow writers are always there for me, and Molly Tanzer especially offered great insight and support on this project.

  And thank you, readers, for joining Bianca on her journey. I’ll see you next time. (You may not have seen the last of Severyne, either.)

  About the Author

  TIM PRATT is a Hugo Award-winning SF and fantasy author, and finalist for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. He is the author of over twenty novels, and scores of short stories. Since 2001 he has worked for Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, where he currently serves as senior editor.

  timpratt.org // twitter.com/timpratt

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Twilight Imperium

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13