CHAPTER 35
BARBARIANS
Images of the wreckage at Eragassa hung on the display for all to see. Nine Cielcin worldships hung in the void, their surfaces cracked and burning, one shattered all to pieces where the great oceans of its antimatter reservoir had burst and blasted a crater big as half a continent.
The planet itself was doomed, wracked by paroxysms as those new moons crashed through orbits lower and lower still. It would not be long—a mere count of years—before the lowest ship of Teyanu’s bested fleet collided with the pale, white world. Apocalypse was certain, was only a matter of time, but the forces of Latarra had begun the evacuation process.
The people were saved.
Eragassa had been an Imperial territory, not five centuries before. The demesne of the dukes of House Haide. When Marinus had fallen, just before the Battle of Berenike, Eragassa had been one of many hundred worlds cut off from Imperial control. Alone in the dark, the Haides had been left to fend for themselves, had allied first with the Uhrans, then a succession of Norman Freeholds and border lords. They had petitioned the Magnarch on Nessus and the Emperor himself for reinforcements, but no aid had come.
Then plague had come to Eragassa, and Duke Alexander III had died without heir, as without the ability to reach the Empire, he and his wife had been unable to conceive a legitimate heir. The remnants of the Imperial government had had little choice but to reach out to the Monarch of Latarra, that champion of the border worlds, that lion of Norma, and he had gathered Eragassa to himself—for what little time had remained to it.
“Why Eragassa?” asked Rand Mahidol, peering down at Lorian from over the council table.
The intus slapped his cane against his leg in irritation. “Because Eragassa had twenty-five million people living on it, even after the plague. It was one of the most populous planets in the sector. The vayadan-general had been sent to cull the herd.”
“Cull the herd?” Heraklonas scowled. “Don’t be grotesque!”
Lorian snapped. “You have little concept here of how dire things are in the Expanse! Without your Legions to maintain order, ships would not sail. Trade collapsed. The populations of these planets were trapped there, without defense, without escape. To the Cielcin, they were little more than grain awaiting harvest.”
“How did your forces arrive in time?” The voice that spoke rained down from on high, and many of the Sollans in the congregation bowed their heads in deference. The Emperor’s image reasserted itself, banishing the images Lorian had conjured of the ruined world. Caesar gripped the arm of his throne with one hand, the rest of his body draped in robes like drifts of snow. “Eragassa is quite remote from Latarra, some two thousand light-years, as I recall.”
I glanced at the printout on the table before me, the report Lorian had made and distributed before this meeting.
Two thousand, three hundred and seventeen light-years, the report indicated.
“We had advance warning,” Lorian replied, straightening where he stood in the center of the council floor.
That revelation sent a tremor through the congregation as lords whispered to military men, military men to ministers. Lorian let them mutter, still tapping his cane against his leg. He was never still, had never been still, even if his motion was confined to the idle twirling of a finger. His energy—so it had ever seemed to me—always had to go somewhere.
“How?” The Emperor’s word fell like a stone.
“As you know, the Cielcin have long eschewed radio transmission, reserving them only to broadcast their demands to us,” he began. “In the early days of the war, we were uncertain how it was they communicated with one another. That was before we discovered their maser pulse beacons.” He held up his hands, spread them before himself. “Tight-beam, short-burst transmissions. Point-to-point. Nearly impossible to detect unless you happened to be in the path of their transmissions.”
Lord Rand Mahidol waved a dismissive hand, saying, “We know all this.”
“Of course,” Lorian said. “But what about faster-than-light? The pulse beacons form an effective means of ship-to-ship communication within a Cielcin fleet, a scianda. But they’re virtually useless at range. Beyond a few light-hours, the beams attenuate, become incoherent. My former patron, Lord Marlowe,”—he pointed with the head of his cane to where I sat—“believed the antagonistic relationships the Cielcin princes shared with one another precluded most need for interfleet communication. Lord Cassian Powers and the boys in Legion Intelligence believed the Cielcin fleets were effectively isolated from one another. Others have speculated they must have a network of deep-space satellites. Data caches. Comms buoys, like our own datanet—only without the telegraph relay—places where they could leave messages for one another. Check in, as it were. They live a very long time—we’re still not quite sure of their natural maximum lifespan. They’re not in near as much of a hurry as we are . . . or they weren’t.”
“We’ve never managed to find one of these Cielcin data caches,” interjected the Prince Chancellor from the dais, “they remain highly speculative.”
“Did you find one?” Prince Alexander asked, straightening in his seat below the Emperor’s on the projection.
I was leaning well forward by then. If Lorian and Harendotes’s men had indeed located a node of the Cielcin communications grid, it would be paradigm altering, a total change in the way we engaged with the enemy.
“No,” replied Lorian flatly. “If they exist, they remain as much a mystery as they always were.”
“Then why mention them, intus?” asked Lord Mahidol sharply.
Lorian’s head swung round to glare at the Prince of Ayuthay, but he did not answer the slur as I might have done. “Because interstellar communication was a problem the Cielcin had to solve. It was this deficit that the Cielcin sought to ameliorate by their partnership with the Extrasolarians.”
“So you admit it!” cried Synarch Heraklonas. “Your people have long been allies of the Pale!”
“My people?” Lorian blinked, shook his head. “Your people . . . certain agencies among the Extrasolarians have aligned themselves with the Pale, yes. My royal master is not one of them.”
“Is it not the case that Calen Harendotes traded with MINOS?” asked Prince Aurelian. “With the very sorcerers who designed the plague that is now set against our galaxy?”
Lorian looked down at his polished boots, slapped his cane against his calf once more. “That is so!” he said, drawing condemnatory whispers from the crowd. One or two men shouted denunciations. I clenched my jaw. “My royal master provided the Minoan scientists several thousand human test subjects, war prisoners taken during the conquest of Ashklam.”
I felt myself recoil. So that was what had been aboard the ship Legion Intelligence had intercepted sailing to Ganelon from Latarra.
“Villainy!” cried Heraklonas. “Holy Radiance, you cannot mean to bind yourself to such creatures!”
“The Latarra Commandant General confesses crimes against sacred humanity!” said one of the lesser clergy, garnering a chorus of assent.
Lord Rand Mahidol spoke up. “How many deaths have resulted from the release of the Minoan virus?”
“Estimated pandemic death totals stand at approximately thirty-seven billion across the Imperium,” said a scholiast from the Home Office.
The tip of Lorian’s cane rang against the checkered marble in imitation of the sergeant’s fasces. “Sacred humanity?” he said. “Is slavery not practiced in the Imperium? Do not our friends in Jadd breed their subhuman warriors by the million? Did members of this Council not themselves sanction the assassination of my royal master for the crime of restoring order to the Norman stars? Not a one of us in this room can pretend to clean hands! Not a one! Does not the Chantry itself maintain a monopoly on biological weapons development within the Imperium? Is it perhaps jealousy that motivates this outrage, Holy Wisdom?”
“Why . . . I!” Heraklonas stammered. I spied Samek’s white skull cap in the sea of Chantry white and black seated below and to the right of the council arena.
Lorian had scored a point, and all present knew it.
“This bickering is pointless,” came the atonal, sexless voice of Preceptor Prytanis. “The purpose of this Council cannot be the adjudication of all sin. We are not the Maker. We have neither the time nor the wisdom to exercise perfect justice.” One of the giant brain’s attendants adjusted a knob on its housing as it spoke, modulating the speaker’s volume.
Silence—brittle and unsteady—fell upon the court in segments.
Only slowly did I realize the Emperor had raised his hand. “I should like to hear how it is the Latarra Grand Army received advance warning of the attack on Eragassa,” he said. “Synarch Heraklonas. You will be silent.”
The Commandant General wrung his bony hands on the shaft of his cane as though it were the neck of some captured game fowl. “The Cielcin have long had dealings with certain factions among the Extrasolarians, namely the King of Vorgossos, as Lord Marlowe himself determined after the Battle of Emesh. They had an interest in human technology. Weapons, biomechanics, comms equipment.”
“Telegraphs,” said Captain Archambault, deep voice booming from his place to one side.
Lorian thrust at the Exalted with his cane. “Just so. Extrasolarian telegraphs gave the Cielcin access to instantaneous communication. For the first time in their history, their fleets were able to communicate with one another at speed across the galactic volume. Historically, telegraph communications have proved impervious to interception, but times have changed, and the Cielcin reliance on our technology has left them exposed.”
“Exposed?” the Emperor asked, leaning forward. “What are you saying?” For just a moment, the shadow of something like pain flickered across that familiar face.
“We have the means to trace the location of Cielcin telegraph nodes.” Lorian let the words fall like a shot.
“Impossible!” said a junior man from the War Office. He wore the collar tabs of Special Security. “You said it yourself, the telegraphs work off quantum entanglement. They’re point-to-point. There’s no transmission to detect.”
“No ordinary transmission,” said Captain Archambault. “No EM radiation. But the excitation of entangled particles perturbs the quantum foam of space itself. By measuring the scale of these perturbations, it is possible to know the distance between the scanner and the operating telegraph, and to chart a vector.”
“But entangled particles occur in nature,” objected one of the Norman delegates.
“All telegraph transmissions require patterned excitation of the entangled particle. By filtering for such patterns, one is able to distinguish artificial signals from random natural phenomena.”
One of the scholiasts in the first row turned her attention on the hulking machine-captain. “If what you’re saying is true . . . then how can you know the telegraphs you are detecting belong to the Cielcin?”
Lorian, Archambault . . . the entire Latarran embassy was silent. Lorian—who was never still—hardly moved himself, only wrung the neck of his cane with spidery hands.
“You can’t, can you?” the scholiast asked.
“You can detect every telegraph,” the Emperor said.
Hushed voices crashed like waves, rose in intensity as the implication of William’s words broke against the hard shore of reality. If what Lorian and Archambault were saying was true, then the Monarch of Latarra and his allies had devised a means by which they might not only detect the location of an active telegraph node, but discern the contents of its message. The private communiques of lords and kings, governments and criminals and corporations the galaxy over were laid bare to the Monarch’s new machine.
The little Commandant General confirmed this with a nod. “Within the sensor’s effective radius, yes.”
“What is the sensor’s effective radius?” His Radiance inquired.
“Several thousand light-years,” came Lorian’s reply.
The Emperor made to lift his right hand to his face from its place beneath his robe, but seemed to think better of it. “This is . . . disturbing news,” he said at last. Already I suspected wheels were turning in the Imperial mind, laying plans for ways to encrypt telegraph transmissions moving forward.
Lorian stabbed the floor with his cane, planting its tip square between the pointed toes of his boots. “It is hoped,” he said, “that our willingness to reveal this information constitutes sufficient show of good faith.”
“You are willing to share this technology?” asked Lord Rand.
“In exchange for the Sollan Empire’s total renunciation of all claim to the Norman Stars, and a formal recognition of the sovereignty of His Majesty, Calen, Son of Ausar of the House Harendotes, as Monarch of Latarra.”
This brought the Norman delegation to its feet, and shouting filled the high hall.
“What of us?” cried one of the princes of Ardistama, one of the greater Norman planet-states.
“Turan Achlae was right!” shouted another.
And a third, a consul from the pirate planet Sanora, barked, “Are we to bow to Latarra?”
“If you wish to survive!” Lorian rounded on them. “None of you has the strength to resist our armies, much less the Cielcin horde! You may each retain your offices, but you will pay tribute to the Monarch.”
“What of our own territories in Norma?” asked the voice Imperial.
“We offer the same deal,” came Lorian’s reply. “They may retain their worlds and titles, but then will kneel to Latarra, not the Solar Throne.”
On the projection, Prince Alexander stood, “With the stroke of a pen, you would take ten thousand worlds!”
“Far more than that,” Lorian said. “But these are worlds you have lost already. You lose nothing.”
“Nothing!” Alexander echoed the word. “Nothing? You would have us abandon our people? Thousands of worlds?”
“Tens of thousands,” Lorian countered. “Yes. You need us, prince. The telegraph tracker allowed us to intercept the Cielcin battle plans. With it, our combined fleets will be able to outmaneuver the Cielcin and their Lothrian slaves alike. We can end this war. You can end it—as you say—with the stroke of a pen.”
“Commandant General,”—the Emperor’s voice was strangely faint—“the great families of the Norman Expanse cannot survive cut off from the throne.”
Lorian stabbed the tile with his cane yet again. “Because their children will be born intus?” he asked, spitting the last word like poison.
“Quite.”
“We have the means to address that,” Lorian said, eliciting murmurs from the Imperial sectors of the council hall. “Not so effectively as in Jadd, perhaps, but as you see, I am quite well.” He extended one striated hand for examination. “There are worse fates than being misborn, Emperor.” Lorian turned, sweeping his gaze over all the great lords gathered there. The Normans were still mostly on their feet, their agitation plain. They had become pawns on a board where they had thought themselves at least knights or castles.
I sensed similar discomfiture among the lords of the Small Kingdoms, even among the princes of the Empire. Lorian—and through him, Harendotes—had a strong hand. Tipping it, he revealed his advantage, boasted of his power and offered to share it . . . and all he asked in return was Imperial humiliation. To cede the Norman territories to the Monarch without so much as a fight was to admit Imperial weakness. Surrendering all claim to the Arm of Norma was to halt Imperial expansion north toward the galactic core. About such decisions the arc of history bent. Men ten thousand years hence might look back and say that it was at this council that the Sollan Empire began to die, curbing forever that outward pressure that alone sustains a state against the slow decay of time. Would they say that it was when faced with the Cielcin menace that the greatest empire mankind had ever known lost its will to be, and chose instead dotage and the slow decay of time?
It is not power that builds empires, that asserts order on the stars.
It is vision. Vision and the heroic will to act.
Where there is that vision, all else follows.
Where it is not, there is decadence, desperation, and decay.
I understood all this then, in that moment, though it has taken me much time to order my thoughts on the matter, and perhaps it is only now—by the light of my murdered sun and the dark days that have followed it—that I see things clearly.
The old order, which balanced upon but one pillar—the Imperium—had passed away.
It had been dead a long time, but so tall was it that it had yet to crash to earth.
In its place, a new order was rising, an order founded not on one pillar, but many. On Forum still, but on Latarra, on Jadd, on Durannos and Vorgossos and perhaps on Padmurak, too. The gearworks of history, which had for so long been jammed by Imperial decree, had begun to turn again. The Cielcin had started them turning, and now nothing could stop them.
“We must think upon all this,” the Emperor said, head bent in his chair. “We shall adjourn for now.”