Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Four

Fleet Admiral the Lady Adrienne Robbins, Baroness Nergal and Companion of the Golden Nova, dodged with a haste which ill accorded with her exalted rank. She flattened herself against the wall of the Palace corridor and shrank into the smallest possible space as four human children, a half-grown Narhani, and a pack of four leaping rottweilers thundered down upon her.

Fortunately for the admiral, the long-haired girl leading the charge saw her, and they hit the brakes as only children can, skittering to a halt in a tangled confusion of arms, legs, feet, hooves, and paws.

"Hi, Aunt Adrienne!" Princess Isis Harriet MacIntyre shouted, and Admiral Robbins stepped away from the wall. Sean and Harriet seemed unaffected by her glare, but Sandy MacMahan looked a bit abashed and Tamman studied his toes. Brashan, Brashieel's clone-child, looked dreadfully embarrassed, for if he was younger than any of the others, he was already a near-adult, given the speed with which his species matured. For their part, the various dogs flopped down and panted at her, but their canine insouciance didn't fool Adrienne, for she was one of the handful of people who knew the truth about them.

"I wonder," the admiral said darkly, "how Their Imperial Majesties would react to the way you young hellions came tearing down on me?"

"Oh, Dad wouldn't mind." Sean grinned.

"I was thinking more of Her Imperial Majesty," Adrienne said, and Sean suddenly looked more thoughtful. "That's what I thought, too. Can you give me one good reason I shouldn't tell her?"

"Because you wouldn't want us on your conscience?" he suggested, and she swallowed a laugh and frowned.

"My conscience is pretty resilient, Your Highness."

"Uh, do you have to mention this to Mom and Dad?" Harriet asked, and Adrienne considered her for a long, dreadful moment. Tamman wiggled, clearly picturing his parents' reaction, and Adrienne relented.

"Not this time, I suppose. But—" she held up an admonishing finger as relieved smiles blossomed "—I won't be so gooey-centered next time!"

An earnest chorus of thanks answered her, and she made shooing motions with her hands.

"Then get, you horrible brats!" she commanded, and the cavalcade leapt back into motion (albeit less impetuously than before) down the hall.

Adrienne smiled after them, then resumed her interrupted journey. Sean, she reflected, was a dark-haired version of his father, with the same beaky nose and jug ears no one would ever call handsome, but he was already bidding fair to be quite a bit taller than either of his parents.

Harriet, on the other hand, was a junior edition of her mother—a pretty child who was going to be an astoundingly beautiful woman. Both twins had Jiltanith's eyes, but Harriet's were softer. No less lively, but gentler. Actually, Adrienne reflected, she took more after Colin personality-wise, while Sean mingled his mother's absolute fearlessness and his father's humor into an amalgam all his own. One of these days, that boy was going to be a real heart-breaker.

She emerged from her reverie as she reached her destination, and the door slid open to admit her to Colin's office. The Emperor looked up from his paperwork and waved at a chair.

"Have a seat, Adrienne. I'll be with you a minute."

Admiral Robbins sat, smoothing her uniform sleeve fastidiously, and waited patiently for Colin to finish the current installment of his unending paper chase. He dumped the data—and his decision—back into the computer, then leaned back and crossed his legs.

"I see you evaded the thundering herd," he observed, and she glanced at him in surprise. "I've got surveillance systems in the public corridors, remember? 'Young hellions' is exactly right!"

"Oh, they're not that bad. Lively, mind you, but I don't mind."

"Nobody does. Well, nobody but 'Tanni, maybe. The little devils are cute as a crop of buttons, and they know it." He shook his head and sighed. "Oh, well. On to business. Thanks for coming so promptly, by the way."

"That's the way empires are run, Your Majesty. 'I say unto one go, and he goeth' and all that. But I have to admit you piqued my curiosity. What's so sensitive we couldn't discuss it over the com?"

"I'm probably just being paranoid," Colin said more seriously, "but those anti-Narhani demonstrations are getting worse, not better, so I didn't want to take any chance on this leaking. What I've got in mind is either going to make them a lot better... or a hell of a lot worse."

"I hate it when you get enigmatic, Colin," Adrienne sighed.

"Sorry. It's just that I beat my head against this for months before I made up my mind, and I'm pissed at myself for taking so long to do what I should've done in the first place. I'm opening the Academy to Narhani."

"Oh, Lord!" Adrienne clutched at her gun-metal hair and moaned. "Why is it always me? Do you have any idea how the newsies are going to react? They'll be all over my campus, stomping the shrubbery flat!"

"Oh, come on!" Colin chuckled. "The first-generation clones won't be ready until Sean and Harry are—you've got time for the spade work."

" 'Spade work,' he says! Bulldozer work, you mean! Fortunately," she smiled rather smugly, "I figured out this was coming over a year ago. We've been working on syllabus modification ever since."

"You have?"

"Of course we have. Lordy, Colin, don't you think I've been around long enough to realize how you think? It takes you a while, sometimes, but you usually get to the right decision sooner or later."

"You," Colin observed dryly, "don't have the most respectful demeanor of any naval officer in the galaxy."

"I do on duty. Want to see my 'official commandant's' face?" Her smile vanished instantly into a stern expression and cold, measuring eyes that impaled him for a ten-count before she relaxed with a grin. "I keep it in a box on my dresser till I need it."

"God, no wonder the middies are all scared spitless of you!"

"Better me than the bad guys."

"True. Actually, though, I want a bit more from you than adjustments to your curriculum. I want you to endorse the suggestion."

"Well, of course," she said with some surprise. "Why shouldn't I?"

"I mean I want you to go public and talk to the media," he explained, and she grimaced. One of the things she liked best about the Imperial Charter was that while it guaranteed freedom of speech it didn't regard reporters as tin gods. Imperial privacy laws and—even better—libel laws had come as a shock to Terran journalists, and if there was one life form Adrienne Robbins truly despised, it was newsies. They'd made her life hell after the Siege of Earth and the Zeta Trianguli campaign.

"Oh, shit, Colin. Do I have to?"

" 'Fraid so," he said with a twinge of guilt, for a large chunk of the Palace staff was devoted to keeping the press as far away from him as possible, helped by the fact that Jiltanith was not only far more photogenic but surprisingly comfortable with the public. Colin knew his subjects respected him, but they loved 'Tanni.

Which, he mused, indicated the public had a higher IQ than he'd once believed possible.

"Look," he went on persuasively, "you know my policy on Narhani civil rights. They're citizens, just like anyone else. Giving them their own planet may have defused the potential for direct unpleasantness, but we've got to integrate them into the government and military or that very isolation's only going to make things worse. I've got quite a few in civil service positions here on Birhat already, but I need to get them into the Fleet, too.

"I don't expect trouble from the military, but the civilians may be something else. I need all the help I can get selling the idea, and after 'Tanni, you're the best salesman I've got."

Adrienne made a face, but she knew it was true. She was the only living officer to have commanded a capital ship throughout both the Siege and the Zeta Trianguli campaign. More than that, she'd led the task force that died in Earth's last, hopeless counterattack, and hers had been the only ship to survive it. She was Battle Fleet's most decorated officer, belonged to more Terran orders of chivalry than she could count, and was the only person in history to have received the highest award for valor of every Terran nation, as well as the Golden Nova. It embarrassed her horribly, but it was true.

All of which meant Colin was right. If he was trotting out the big guns, she was going to have to come to battery.

"All right," she sighed finally, "I'll do it."

Francine Hilgemann took her time locking the car doors while she scanned her surroundings. She'd seen no sign of surveillance on the drive here, but paranoia was a survival tool which had served her well over the years.

She ambled across the parking lot to the pedestrian belt serving the enormous, brightly-lit Memorial complex. She was uneasy at the thought of meeting in the very heart of Shepard Center, but she supposed it made sense. Who in his right mind would expect a pair of traitors to make contact here?

She stepped off the belt into the people flowing past the fifty-meter obsidian needle of the Cenotaph and the endless rows of names etched into its unadorned battle steel plinth. Those names listed every individual known to have fallen in the millennia-long battle against Anu, and even Hilgemann wasn't quite immune to the hush about her. But time was short, and she worked her way briskly through the fringes of the throng.

Another, even quieter crowd surrounded the broken eighty-thousand-ton hull that shared the Memorial with the Cenotaph. The sublight battleship Nergal remained where Fleet Captain Robbins had landed her, resting on her belly and ruined landing legs, preserved exactly as her final battle had left her. She'd been decontaminated; that was all, and crippled missile launchers and energy weapons hung like broken teeth from her twisted flanks. How she'd survived was more than Hilgemann could guess, and she couldn't even begin to imagine what it had taken to bring that wreck home and land her under her own power.

She turned away after a moment, walking to the service exit she'd been told to use. It was unlocked as promised, and she slipped through it into the equipment storage room and closed the door behind her.

"Well," she said a bit tartly, looking around at the deserted machinery, "I must say this has all the proper conspiratorial ambience!"

"Perhaps." The man who'd summoned her stepped out of the shadows with a thin smile. "On the other hand, we can't risk meeting very often... and we certainly can't do it in public, now can we?"

"I feel like an idiot." She touched the brunette wig which hid her golden hair, then looked down at her plain, cheap clothing and shuddered.

"Better a live idiot than a dead traitor," he replied, and she snorted.

"All right. I'm here. What's so important?"

"Several things. First, I've confirmed that they know they didn't get all of Anu's people." Francine looked up sharply and received another thin smile. "Obviously they don't know who they didn't get, or we wouldn't be having this melodramatic conversation."

"No, I suppose we wouldn't. What else?"

"This." A data chip was handed over. "That little item is too important to trust to our usual pipeline."

"Oh?" She looked down at it curiously.

"Indeed. It's a copy of the plans for Marshal Tsien's newest toy: a gravitonic warhead powerful enough to take out an entire planet."

Francine's hand clenched on the chip, and her eyes widened.

"His Majesty," the man said with a soft chuckle, "has decided against building it, but I'm more progressive."

"Why? To threaten to blow ourselves up if they ID us?"

"I doubt that bluff would fly, but there are other ways it might be useful. For now, I just want the hardware handy if we need it."

"All right." She shrugged. "I assume you can get us any military components we need?"

"Perhaps. If so, we'll handle that through the regular channels. In the meantime, how are your action groups coming along?"

"Quite nicely, actually." Hilgemann's smile was unpleasant. "In fact, their training's developing their paranoia even further, and keeping them on a leash isn't the easiest thing in the world. It may be necessary to give them the odd mission to work off some of their... enthusiasm. Is that a problem?"

"No, I can pick a few targets. You're certain they don't know about you?"

"They're too well compartmented for that," she said confidently.

"Good. I'll select a few operations that'll cost them some casualties, then. Nothing like providing a few martyrs for the cause."

"Don't get too fancy," she cautioned. "If they lose too many they're likely to get a bit hard to control."

"Understood. Then I suppose that's about it... except that you'll want to get your next pastoral letter ready."

"Oh?"

"Yes. His Majesty's decided to bite the bullet and begin enlisting Narhani in the military." Hilgemann nodded, eyes suddenly thoughtful, and he smiled. "Exactly. We'll want something restrained for open distribution—an injunction to pray that His Majesty hasn't made a mistake, perhaps—but a little furnace-fanning among the more hardcore is in order, I believe."

"No problem," the bishop said with an equally thin smile.

"I'll be going, then. Wait fifteen minutes before you leave."

"Of course." She was a bit nettled, though she didn't let it show. Did he think she'd lasted this long without learning her trade?

The door closed behind him, and she sat on a floor cleaner, lips pursed, considering how best to fill her pen with properly diffident vitriol, while the hand in her pocket squeezed the data chip that could kill a world.