The Killing of Worlds Read Free Page B

have found me, Rana Harter decided.
    She was already in heaven.
Senator
    Nara Oxham took firm hold of the handrail before purging the drug from her system.
    The balcony barely swung in the cool, late-night wind, its motion held in check by counterweights rolling inside the wooden deck beneath her bare feet. A set of finger-width polyfilaments reinforced the softly creaking ornamental chains, with enough tensile strength (the building propaganda bragged) to hold an African elephant, even during one of the Coriolis squalls that sometimes reached the capital in late summer. If Senator Oxham were to slip and fall, she would only become entangled in the invisible suicide mesh that cocooned the entire building, and be delivered back to the nearest observation deck five floors below. And in case of the unthinkable, the balcony carried a small vacuum blimp compressed under the breakfast table. When fully deployed, it would provide enough lift to bring the senator and approximately twenty guests down to a soft landing.
    But the animal mind was strong in humans, as Nara’s empathy never let her forget, and mere safety precautions were not enough to overcome the vertigo of a two-kilometer drop. Her knuckles turned white as the drug left her.
    The apathy bracelet made its usual hissing noise, injecting filtration nanos into her bloodstream. In a few minutes, the first glimmers of empathy arose from the city. Mindnoise rumbled from the residential towers north of the Diamond Palace, squat and ugly, densely populated. Each tower held over a hundred thousand of the capital’s most numerous class: the petty bureaucrats who monitored taxable production claims. Every Imperial administrator in the Eighty Worlds had a double here on Home, another set of eyes following every transaction to ensure that the Senate and Emperor received their cut. Back on Vasthold, Nara had known of this army of distant and invisible overseers in the abstract, but eighty planets’ worth of them concentrated in this one city brought home the fantastic extent of the Empire. Huge data freighters left daily from the capital’s spaceport to resupply the possessions with entangled quanta, no expense spared to keep communications broadband and instantaneous, the Emperor’s omniscience a matter of fact as well as scripture.
    As her empathy grew, Nara could feel the dynamics of slow shift changes, thousands of bureaucrats returning home as night fell over populous continents light-years away, other thousands waking up to spread out across the low, windowless administration buildings as the day began in some megacity on another of the Eighty Worlds. War fever still animated the capital as a whole, but the minds of these countless minions never raised a cry above the rumble of drudgery, the cogs of the Empire.
    Nara wondered what the overseers for Legis were doing now that the planet had been cut off from the Imperial network. The whole world, except for a few military installations and the
Lynx
, had been intentionally made a dark spot since the compound mind had taken over. The Emperor had given up direct control of an entire planet simply to isolate the Rix abomination.
    What an insult to Imperial privilege.
    The lights of the capital all but obliterated stars from the night sky, and Nara felt her distance from Laurent, her helplessness. If the
Lynx
was destroyed too suddenly to manage a last transmission, it would be eight hours before the lazy speed of the constant brought the event to telescopes on Legis. Almost a day of not knowing.
    The War Council had voted hours ago; the battle must be engaged by now.
    Her lover might already be dead.
    Empathy gained another measure of intensity, and Senator Oxham could feel frantic thoughts down in the flame-dotted shape of the Martyrs’ Park. Ancestor-worshiping cults had erected effigies of Rix-women down there, tall figures with hollow eyes, filled with fanciful artificial organs that gave off a plastic smell when they