A House United Read online

  “The Elder Fragment,” the Chief Archivist interrupted in her richly accented voice, prompting every head in the room to turn to her in surprise. “You want our Elder Fragment,” she reiterated, clearly unfazed by the sudden attention, “and you hope to convince the Empire that you will use it to destroy MAN if they do not give you what you want. Incidentally, what is it that you want? A Sector Governorship perhaps? A second Senate seat for your House?”

  Silence hung in the room until, finally, Fisher broke it by cracking a grin and saying, “You misunderstand, Madame Librarian: this isn’t a threat, this is real. We are going to destroy MAN and, yes, we need your Elder Fragment to do it.” He turned to face the egghead, “But what we need from you is different: we need you to complete an algorithm for us—one that I think you’re familiar with.”

  The egghead steepled his fingers in front of his face and silently scowled for several seconds. “That explains it…” he mused before seemingly arriving at a conclusion. “Fine, I’ll help you open it. But can I at the very least assume you’ve mapped out this entire operation—from the Judge’s initial filing of the injunction to the desired conclusion—down to the last millisecond?”

  “We have,” Fisher nodded firmly. “We’ve been planning this for a century.” He drew a short stack of data slates from a drawer beneath the table and waved them emphatically, “These are legally binding contracts, individually crafted by House Raubach’s legal team, which—once agreed to—will inextricably intertwine our fates. Nobody sees the plan’s details until we are in complete, unanimous agreement. But if anyone wants to back out now, we’ve got your cryo-stasis pod all cooled down and waiting for you. In accordance with Imperial law, we’d drop you off—along with affirmation of your objection to the plan we’ve discussed—as soon as we could do so without jeopardizing the operation. Of course,” he flashed a lopsided grin, “if we succeed without you, you’d miss out on your payday…”

  “I’m in,” the egghead offered an empty, outstretched hand.

  “As am I,” the Governor grunted. “The AI fanatics are destroying my star system from the inside-out. If I don’t do something about it, I’ll preside over a regression of historic proportions in Cydonia’s history.”

  The Senator made a sour, chuffing sound, “As if we have any choice at this point. Give me one of those.”

  The Judge seemed skeptical, but eventually nodded, “Cornwallis needs to be stopped—as do the rest of his wild-eyed cohorts.”

  All eyes turned to Cydonia’s Chief Archivist, who drummed her fingers lightly on the table in the growing silence. Even Lu Bu found herself leaning forward in anticipation of the woman’s eventual reply which, when it came, filled Lu with a sense of relief, “The Fragment is only available via loan—it must be returned afterward, and I must remain with it at all times.”

  “Done,” Fisher nodded without hesitation.

  “And my House must be returned to my control before I help you,” the egghead insisted.

  “Agreed,” Fisher confirmed.

  “Raubach will step down from the Cultural Ethics committee chair?” the Senator asked hungrily.

  “After we’ve used the Elder Fragment, yes,” Fisher agreed.

  “Will you derail Cornwallis?” the burly Governor asked in a low, growling voice.

  Fisher’s infectious smile broadened, “We’ll do better than that, Governor. With your help,” he stood to his full, impressive height, “we’ll cut off his military support right when he needs it the most. If we know our friends back in the Spine as well as we think we do, you can rest assured that they’ll waste no time pouncing on him once we’ve eroded his support on this end.”

  “You can guarantee his death?” the Chief Archivist asked casually.

  “No,” Fisher shook his head firmly, “but I can guarantee that, even if he survives, the best he could hope for is to crawl home to a ruined House surrounded by the many enemies he’s made throughout his sordid career.” He tossed the data slates to each of the attendees before finishing, “Enemies like the people in this room—who will know when and where to strike the hardest after the dominoes start to fall against him.”

  “This still doesn’t explain your part in this,” the obese Senator shook her head pointedly after reviewing her slate’s contents. “Merely the financial compensation listed here, which you pledge to provide,” she waved the data slate, “will break House Raubach irrevocably. Yours will be a sundered House—even a mortally wounded Cornwallis will have no trouble exacting his revenge upon whatever remains of your House after the dust settles.”

  Fisher’s grin tightened, and for the first time since the meeting commenced Lu Bu could see the barest hint of anxiety playing at the corners of his eyes. “You worry about your end—let me worry about mine. As the leader of this little conspiracy, it’s my prerogative to keep my motives as hidden as I think necessary. You should know that better than anyone here, Senator,” he finished pointedly.

  Lu Bu felt a sudden chill run down her spine at Fisher’s inference. The Senator had come to head her own Imperial House by enacting a clever, complicated, and flawless coup against her own mother—who had unwittingly participated in the coup by, in her mind, temporarily handing power over to her daughter. That the deposed matron was allowed to live did little to discourage Lu Bu from thinking of the people in this room as well and truly beyond redemption—at least in her eyes.

  “Fair enough,” the Senator allowed before affixing her signature to the document. She was soon followed by the meeting’s other participants—or, Lu Bu supposed, they were now officially ‘co-conspirators.’ Imperial law held several bizarre vagaries, one of which was that such conspiracies were in many respects more legally binding than any other agreement into which a noble could enter.

  “Good,” Fisher nodded after collecting the slates, “now let’s go over the details of your individual compensation packages so we can get to work. Governor, you’re up first. The rest of you can wait in your quarters until I’m ready to receive you.”

  And just like that, the conspiracy to kill MAN—the most powerful ‘god’ humanity had ever revered—was officially underway. It was a potentially historic moment which, if all went according to plan, would reshape the galaxy more significantly—and more clandestinely—than any event since the conclusion of the AI Wars. Seven people had been in the room when the bargain was struck, and Fengxian had been among them.

  But in spite of all that, all Lu Bu could think about was getting back to her children.

  Chapter XIII: A Crown of Horns

  To Traian, the dream felt familiar—but somewhere in what remained of his human consciousness he knew he had not previously experienced it.

  The field of stars stretched out before him in all directions. In the dream he had no eyes, but could nonetheless see—in fact, he could ‘see’ in every direction at once. Part of his mind told him that was how it should be, but his human psyche felt fascination and horror as the stars seemed to swirl around each other erratically. His perspective shifted with equal unpredictability, sliding from one place to another until he eventually realized that he—or whatever was controlling his perspective in the dream—was actively searching for something.

  What began as an almost casual journey from star to star slowly came to feel intent, and that intensity quickly gave way to panic as the jumps from star to star increased in both distance and frequency. The strain on his human mind grew well past that of the worst fever dream, and his hold on reality began to slip as the magnitude of the experience overwhelmed his pitiful faculties.

  Just when he thought his sanity would fail and he would be condemned to an eternity of helpless gibbering, a sound—or, if not a sound precisely, an unmistakable sense of attraction—drew his attention. It was faint at first, but with each leap that followed he felt it tug at his consciousness with increasing strength until, finally, his mind was able to focus on something it—and he—recognized: a battle.

  Lances of e
nergy stabbed through metal and crystal alike as the dueling forces feinted, pursued, and circled each other like opposing packs of wolves seeking weakness in their counterparts. Ships invariably died, some slowly and others in a sudden flash, but as the fires of conflict were stoked by the engaged enemies Traian felt a mixture of delight and horror—delight at the naked display of conflict, and horror at himself for reveling in the sight of so much death.

  He tried to focus on the specific ships so that he might catch sight of a hull marking, or other identifying feature, but he was unable to do so. It was as though the harder he focused on a given detail, the blurrier each object or event became to his peculiar senses.

  As he tried to focus, however, something peculiar happened: he began to see not ships, but collections and streams of images. The images seemed to be anchored on the ships, and each ship harbored a handful of distinct—and often contradictory—images which flitted by at seemingly random speeds like a holo-vid on fast-scan mode. Some of these images accurately predicted what would happen to the ships on which they were anchored, but the majority did not, and for a moment he thought he could finally—after a life of soul-crushingly limited perspective—understand everything.

  His epiphany was cut short when he saw something in one of the streams that he recognized. It was not an object or a person, but rather it was a maneuver. Something about it was hauntingly familiar, but before he could focus his mind on it he was wrenched from the sight of the battle.

  ‘Go back!’ he tried to scream, but his protest was in vain. Seemingly strengthened by the sight of the battle, whatever it was that controlled his ‘movement’ throughout the stars was clearly invigorated as it leapt easily from star to star. He drew steadily nearer the Galactic Rim as he soared through creation—his ‘location’ was somehow a certainty to him, though he had no way to verify whether or not it was true—but, just as with the battle, his mind snagged on something as he sped from one point to another.

  This time, it was not a sound but a whirling ball of light which caught his attention—and when his consciousness came before it, he wept like a child at seeing its terrible beauty.

  Swirling before him was what could only be described as a writhing, pulsing sphere comprised of threads—and just as with the ships in the battle, each thread contained images of the future or, at least, of possible futures.

  The sheer number of the threads enmeshed in this swirling vortex of possibilities was incalculable. It seemed more than obvious—even more than inevitable—that this was where the future of the entire galaxy would be decided.

  It seemed right that all possible futures hinged on this pulsing, swirling convergence of possibilities.

  He somehow knew that an incomprehensible amount of work had gone into breathing life into that vortex. So many years had elapsed, so many lives spent, and so many worlds had been turned to ash just for the chance to coax the vortex into being. It was the absolute pinnacle of creation, a singularity of possible conflict, and with it life itself would be forever reshaped into something stronger than it could have ever been without his help. With thoughts such as these in his mind he very nearly lost himself in the divinity of the moment.

  But before that could happen, he saw a figure clarify in the center of the swirling, writhing mass of probabilities. It was both human and not, both self-aware and not, but above all it was alive. It, more than most of creation, was at least dimly aware of its role in the universe and, for a terrifying moment, its horned head turned toward Traian and fixed him with red, smoldering eyes which he knew—no, which he hoped—would directly witness the end of the so-called ‘Masters’ legacy.’

  And though his consciousness instinctively retreated from the swirling vortex—sliding past a peculiar trinary star system, the image of which burned itself in his mind—Traian somehow knew the King with the Crown of Horns had seen him.

  Traian’s pulse was sixty two when he awoke. Not a drop of sweat was on his skin, and his breathing was as regular as that of a blissful child awakening from a nap in his mother’s arms.

  That calm—that sense of serenity—unnerved him more than anything he had seen in the dream of the horned figure. With every other ‘dream’ he had experienced since the foreign tissue had begun to re-shape his body, he had awoken in a state of near-terror—or outright terror, in a handful of cases. But this time he felt something entirely different.

  This time he felt purpose, and nothing could have been more unnerving to him than that.

  He swung his legs over the edge of his cot, looking around the pitch black room with eyes that should have been blinded from the lack of light. But instead he saw with greater clarity than he had ever seen with his unmodified eyes. He hated that he was changing into something decidedly inhuman, but he would have been lying if he’d said he was not at least curious to see what other strange ‘gifts’ might come his way from the continued spread of the Ancient neural tissue throughout his body.

  Standing from the cot, he made his way over to the door and activated the intercom.

  “Yes?” came the deep baritone of a Tracto-an guard on the other side of the door.

  “I need to speak with the Captain,” Traian said grimly, “immediately. And have her bring a set of star charts.”

  Chapter XIV: The Second Greatest

  “I thought you’d forgotten about me,” the enigmatic ‘Number 80’ said after Lu Bu came into the room carrying a platter of food for him. “Thank you—I’m famished,” he said graciously as he accepted the platter and placed it across his lap, gesturing for her to sit down on the cot opposite his own.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, having failed to answer that question even with Shiyuan’s help and a comprehensive sample of tissue specimens which the mysterious warrior had gladly provided.

  “Couldn’t find me in any of the gene-banks, could you?” he asked with a wry grin as he stabbed his fork into the grey meat-ish substance that made up nearly half of the calories Lu Bu had consumed aboard the Mode during this deployment. “Don’t feel bad,” he said in a conciliatory tone, “I’m good at what I do—that’s why I was hired to help you.”

  “Help us?” Lu Bu repeated incredulously.

  “Oh, come now,” he clucked his tongue before washing down the meat-ish substance with a mouthful of brown sugar water. “You’re good—great, really—but you would have been hung out to dry twice by now if not for me.” He fixed her with his piercing blue eyes and flashed a lopsided grin, “Don’t worry about it; I’ve been there.”

  “Somehow I doubt you would admit that if it was true,” Lu Bu said witheringly, already tiring of the egomaniac.

  “You’re right,” he shrugged dismissively, “I’ve never been caught with my pants down like that, let alone twice in as many weeks. You should get yourself a new Operator—you’ll live longer.”

  “Do you have a recommendation?” she fired back, bristling at the insinuation that her team was somehow less than capable.

  “You couldn’t afford my guy,” 80 shook his head with conviction before jamming the small clump of noodles—which could only charitably be referred to as such—in his mouth in the most disgusting display of table manners, or a lack thereof, she had ever seen. “Besides,” he continued after swallowing the mess of carbohydrates, “he doesn’t play well with others. He’s more what you’d call the ‘lone wolf’ type—anyway, if he's not working for me he’ll only farm out to the best. And I happen to be the second best freelancer in the Empire.”

  “Who is the best?” she asked, genuinely curious to know the answer.

  “Never heard of anyone better than me,” he shrugged casually, “though, to be clear, if there actually was someone better than me then I wouldn’t exactly know about him, now would I? Still, in the interests of maintaining a competitive edge, I like to imagine that maybe—somewhere—he might exist,” he said, cocking his head and plastering an infuriating grin on his face which somehow managed to convey a false sense of humility. “Keeps me o
n my toes.”

  She shook her head in disgust as he noisily slurped up the gelatinous mess of sugar and vitamins which had been billed as ‘yogurt,’ but had more in common with seaweed paste than any genuine dairy product. “Your genes are strange,” she said, driving straight to the heart of the matter which she had come to address.

  “No stranger than yours, from the look of things,” he said, tossing the now-empty platter onto the cot beside him and miming the dusting of his hands. “Again, thanks for the grub.”

  “You are unnatural,” she pressed.

  “Whoa there,” he held up his hands in mock surrender, “you’re gonna have to give me a little warning before you crank the old charm up to eleven on the dial—you could knock someone’s head off with that thing!”

  Pursing her lips in annoyance, she ignored his banter and continued, “Your genes show signs of severe tampering—like mine,” she hastily added before silently cursing herself for being unnerved in his presence. She drew a steadying breath as she tried to calm her nerves.

  “Take your time there, thunder thighs,” he said in what had to be the most annoying, patronizing tone she had ever heard. “Just let the words come to you…” he mimed an inviting gesture which made her set her jaw in annoyance, “just let ‘em all out—that’s it, let ‘em out. Set ‘em free, like birds caged in the midday sun—”

  “You are insufferable!” she snarled as she leapt to her feet.

  “Well you ain’t exactly Miss Congeniality yourself there, Riverwind.”

  “What?!” she blurted in mixed confusion and mounting rage.

  “It was a compliment!” he said, throwing his hands up in patently mock frustration. “You throw a mean spear, evidenced by your timely takedown of that pounder back on Paradise, and spear-chucking is a highly valuable skill among plains-people—hence, ‘Riverwind.’ Oh, come on,” he drawled with seemingly genuine incredulity when she failed to register the meaning of his bizarre diatribe, “does nobody read the classics any more?!”