Scott Westerfeld - Succession 2 - Killing Of Worlds

V1.0 Notes

There ARE only 3 chapters in the book. All the remaining sections are split up with

the various titles of the characters in the novel (e.g. Captain, Executive Officer,

Senator, Pilot, compound mine, etc.)

The "Commando's" name really is H_rd ("h" underscore "rd")

No spellcheck was performed (the scans were pretty clean and I hate spellchecking

sci-fi)

Hope you enjoy

The Killing of Worlds

BOOK TWO OF SUCCESSION

SCOTT WESTERFELD

ISBN 0-765-30850-9

Acknowledgments

This novel is indebted to Wil McCarthy's research on programmable matter, from

his Nature article on the subject, to a paper I heard him give at Read-ercon 2001, to

his kind vetting of this manuscript.

Another debt is owed to Samuel R. Delany, whose views on the typography of

Swords and Sorcery, expressed in 1984: Selected Letters, gave me the courage to

capitalize "Emperor."

To Justine, with whom I have a genuine and continuing relationship.

A Note on Imperial Measures One of the many advantages of life under the

Imperial Apparatus is the easy imposition of consistent standards of infostructure,

communication, and law. For fifteen hundred years, the measures of the Eighty Worlds

have followed an enviably straightforward scheme.

• There are 100 seconds in each minute, 100 minutes in an hour, and ten hours in a

day.

• One second is defined as 1/100,000 of a solar day on Home.

• One meter is defined as 1/300,000,000 of a light-second.

• One gravity is defined as 10 meters per second squared acceleration.

The Emperor has decreed that the speed of light shall remain as nature has

provided.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO

The Imperial Civil War —compiled by the Academy of Material Detail

Two thousand years ago, it is believed, the population of diasporic humanity

surpassed one hundred trillion, including various more-or-less human types in addition

to the main germlines. This was a very rough count, and given the scale of the galaxy

and the unattainability of translight travel, informed estimates can no longer be made.

Certainly, no census is possible. But it is obvious that humanity is a vast object of

study, even when matters of merely local concern are engaged.

The Risen Empire, with its eighty worlds, its trillions, and its core-ward

position—dense with neighbors such as the Rix, the Feshtun, and Laxu—is huge enough

to seem unaffected by the actions of individuals. Historians speak of social pressures

as if they were physical laws, of "unstoppable" forces of change, of destiny. But for

the men and women who walked the historical stage, these forces were often invisible,

hidden by their sheer scale and the rank propaganda of the times. Social pressures

built invisibly over lifetimes, not across the pages of a history text. And destiny only

became apparent after the dice had been thrown. For those who experienced them

directly, historical events were ruled by the fortunes of war, the whims of lovers, and

dumb luck. Fate arises out of such humble parts as these.

In the current era, when the inevitability of the Imperial Civil War is received

wisdom, we must work to remember that it was the product of specific events.

Collapse would have come in any case, true, but it might have come centuries earlier, or

(more likely) centuries later than it did. For the generations who lived under the

cultural and military tyranny of the Risen Emperor, the difference was not trivial.

The origins of the Civil War are now learned by rote. The Risen Empire was riven

into two parts. The limited democracy of the Senate contested the iron rule of the

Emperor in an uneasy dance of powersharing. Representative government provided an

outlet for popular will, while the Imperial cult of personality supplied a patriarch to

bind together eighty worlds, the living populace and the risen dead each playing their

part in the machinery of the Empire. The great majority of Imperial citizens were

alive, and constituted the collective engine of change and economic productivity. As

inventors, capitalists, and workers, they were the functional, instrumental members of

society. The risen dead, on the other hand, represented continuity with the past. They

controlled the established wealth, owning the land, the shipping charters, the ancient

copyrights, dominating religion and high culture, an undead aristocracy of sorts. These

tensions, fundamentally a class conflict, had to find release eventually. The immortal

Emperor and his fanatical Apparatus had held onto power at any cost for centuries,

making it almost certain that any resolution would be a bloody one. Adding to this

instability, the small gene pool of its founder population made the Empire particularly

susceptible to mass manias, cults of personality, pandemics, and other forms of radical

upheaval.

Still, specific events brought about the Civil War in a specific way, and are worth

historical study. There was a Second Rix Incursion, a Senator Nara Oxham, a Captain

Laurent Zai.

The Second Rix Incursion began on Legis XV. It was at root a religious war. The

Rix Cult worshiped planetary-scale Al, which the Emperor's Apparatus jealously

stamped out of existence wherever it arose. The Rix viewed this as deicide, and

planned a deicide of their own, perhaps from the moment the Child Empress retired to

Legis. Sister to the Emperor, Anastasia was his only equal as an object of worship.

Sixteen hundred years earlier, the Emperor had worked to save Anastasia's life

from a juvenile disease, inventing immortality in the process, and forming the basis of

the Risen Empire. Thus, she was known as the Reason, the child for whom the Old

Enemy death had been defeated. When a small Rix warship penetrated Legis's

defenses and took her hostage, the Risen Empire had suffered a devastating blow.

Captain Laurent Zai found himself in the unenviable position of being in command of

the only Imperial warship in the Legis system. The Lynx was a capable ship, a small,

powerful frigate prototype, but any attempt to rescue Anastasia from a squad of Rix

commandos could only be a desperate gamble. Under the military conventions of the

day, failure would constitute a so-called "Error of Blood," demanding ritual suicide

from the commanding officer.

There was little time to weigh the issue. Once the Rix had taken the Child Empress,

they set loose a compound mind within the Legis infos-tructure. Over a few hours,

every networked machine on the planet— diaries, market mainframes, pocket phones,

traffic computers—was amalgamating into a single emergent consciousness: Alexander.

Captain Zai had to act quickly.

Given the chaos of the rescue attempt, it will never be clear if the Child Empress

was killed by her Rix captors or by the Imperial Apparatus; theories of the

Emperor's involvement have never been decisively proven. Easier to confirm is why

Laurent Zai refused the Blade of Error, flying in the face of tradition. Although he

was from an ancient and gray military family, sworn to the Emperor's service, he had

recently sworn a different sort of loyalty to Nara Oxham, a Senator from the

anti-Imperial Secularist party. The two were in secret contact, he at the Rix frontier

and she at the capital, throughout the beginning of the Rix War. When she asked Zai

not to kill himself, he assented. Love, in this case, was a stronger force than honor.

The rescue attempt had come too late for Legis. The Rix compound mind emerged

within the planet's infostructure, an alien intelligence in possession of a hostage world.

But Alexander was cut off. The polar facility that maintained Legis's interstellar

communications remained in Imperial hands. Alexander was alone, save for a single Rix

commando who had survived the rescue attempt. With the help of omnipresent

Alexander and her hostage/lover Rana Harter, this Rixwoman disappeared to the far

north to await the compound mind's next move.

On board the Lynx, Captain Laurent Zai faced a mutiny, an attempt by gray

members of his crew to enforce the Error of Blood. Though he and his able first

officer, Katherie Hobbes, easily thwarted the mutineers, a farmore dangerous threat

approached. Another Rix ship, a battlecruiser of far greater firepower than Zai's

frigate, had entered the Legis system. Although officially pardoned by the Emperor

for his Error of Blood, Zai was ordered to engage the battlecruiser to prevent it from

making contact with the compound mind, a suicide mission, the Emperor no doubt

assumed.

Of course, Laurent Zai could not have imagined the fate that awaited Legis XV if

the Lynx should fail.

The Emperor probably planned a nuclear attack from the moment the Rix mind came

into existence. Total annihilation of the Legis infostructure offered three advantages

to the sovereign. He could destroy the compound mind, rally the Empire behind another

costly war with the Rix, and, most importantly, maintain the secret that had underlain

his rule for sixteen centuries, a secret grasped by Alexander in its first hours of

consciousness. Against the objections of Senator Oxham and the anti-Imperial parties,

the Emperor's hand-picked War Council approved the attack by a narrow margin,

providing political cover for this desperate act.

But Laurent Zai and the Lynx proved far more resourceful, and luckier, than anyone

might have expected.

Prologue

Captain

The Lynx exploded, expanded.

The frigate's energy-sink manifold spread out, stretching luxuriant across eighty

square kilometers. The manifold was part hardware and part field effect, staggered

ranks of tiny machines held in their hexagonal pattern by a lacework of easy gravity.

It shimmered in the Legis sun, refracting a mad god's spectrum, unfurling like the

feathers of some ghostly, translucent peacock seeking to rut. In battle, it could

disperse ten thousand gigawatts per second, a giant lace fan burning hot enough to

blind naked human eyes at two thousand klicks.

The satellite-turrets of the ship's four photon cannon eased away from the primary

hull, extending on hypercarbon scaffolds that always recalled to Captain Laurent Zai

the iron bones of ancient cantilever bridges. They were removed on their spindly arms

four kilometers from the vessel proper, and the Lynx was shielded from the cannon's

collateral radiation by twenty centimeters of hullalloy; using the cannon would afflict

the Lynx's crew with only the most treatable of cancers. The four satellite-turrets

carried sufficient reaction mass and intelligence to operate independently if released

in battle. And from the safety of a few thousand kilometers distance, their fusion

magazines could be ordered to crashfire, consuming themselves in a chain reaction,

delivering one final, lethal needle toward the enemy. Of course, the cannon could also

be crashfired from their close-in position, destroying their mothership in a blaze of

deadly glory.

That was one of the frigate's five standard methods of self-destruction.

The magnetic rail that launched the Lynx's drone complement descended from her

belly, and telescoped to its full nineteen-hundred-meter length. A few large scout

drones, a squadron of ram-scatters, and a host of sandcasters deployed themselves

around the rail. The ramscatters bristled like nervous porcupines with their host of

tiny flechettes, each of which carried sufficient fuel to accelerate at two thousand

gees for almost a second. The sandcasters were bloated with dozens of self-propelled

canisters, whose ceramic skins were crosshatched with fragmentation patterns. At the

high relative velocity of this battle, sand would be Zai's most effective weapon

against the Rix receiver array.

Inside the rail bay, great magazines of other drone types were loaded in a

carefully calculated order of battle. Stealth penetrators, broadcast decoys,

minesweepers, remotely piloted fighter craft, close-in-defense pickets all awaited

their moment in battle. Finally, a single deadman drone waited. This drone could be

launched even if the frigate lost all power, accelerated by highly directional

explosives inside its dedicated backup rail. The deadman was already active,

continuously updating its copy of the last two hours' logfiles, which it would attempt

to deliver to Imperial forces if the Lynx was destroyed.

When we are destroyed, Captain Laurent Zai corrected himself. His ship was not

likely to survive this encounter; it was best to accept that. The Rix vessel outpowered

and outgunned them. Its crew was auicker and more adept, so intimately linked into the

battlecruiser's ware was a subject more for philosophical debate than military

consideration. And Rix boarding commandos were deadly: faster, hardier, more

proficient in compromised gravity. And, of course, they were unafraid of death; to the

Rix, lives lost in battle were no more remarkable than a few brain cells sacrificed to a

glass of wine.

Zai watched his bridge crew work, preparing the newly configured Lynx to resume

acceleration. They were in zero-gee now, waiting for the restructuring to firm up

before subjecting the expanded frigate to the stresses of acceleration. It was a relief

to be out of high-gee, if only for a few hours. When the engagement started in

earnest, the ship would go into evasive mode, the direction and strength of

acceleration varying continuously. Next to that chaos, the last two weeks of steady

high acceleration would seem like a pleasure cruise.

Captain Zai wondered if there was any mutiny left in his crew. At least two of the

conspirators had escaped Hobbes's trap. Were there more? The senior officers must

realize that this battle was unwinnable. They understood what a Rix battlecruiser was

capable of, and would recognize that the Lynx's battle configuration had been

designed to damage its opponent, not preserve itself. Zai and ExO Hobbes had

optimized the ship's offensive weaponry at the expense of its defenses, orienting its

entire arsenal on the task of destroying the Rix receiver array.

Now that the Lynx was at battle stations, even the junior officers would be able to

spot the ill portents that surrounded them.

The boarding skiffs remained in their storage cells. It was unlikely that Zai's

marines would be crossing the gulf to capture the Rix battlecruiser. Boarding actions

were the privilege of the winning vessel. Instead, Imperial marines were taking up

positions throughout the Lynx, ready to defend it from capture should the Rix board

the vessel after pounding it into helplessness. Normally under these conditions, Zai

would have issued sidearms to the crew to help repel boarders. But after the mutiny

this seemed a risky show of faith. Most ominously for any crewman who chose to

notice, the singularity generator, the most dramatic of Zai's self-destruct options,

was already charged to maximum. If the Lynx could draw close enough to the enemy

battlecruiser, the two craft would share a dramatic death.

In short, the Lynx was primed like an angry, blind drunk hurtling into a bar fight

with gritted teeth, ferally anxious to inflict damage, unconscious of any pain she might

feel herself.

Perhaps that was their one advantage in this fight, Zai thought: desperation. Would

the Rix try to protect the vulnerable receiver array? Their mission was obviously to

communicate with the compound mind on Legis. But would the dictates of saving the

array force the Rix commander to make a bad move? If so, there might be some slim

hope of surviving this battle.

Zai sighed and grimly pushed this line of thought aside. Hope was not his ally, he had

learned over the last ten days.

He turned his mind back to the bridge airscreen and its detailed schematic of the

Lynx's internal structure.

The wireframe lines shifted like a puzzle box, as walls and bulkheads inside the

frigate slid into battle configuration. Common rooms and mess halls disappeared to

make space for expanded gunnery stations, passageways widened for easier movement

of emergency repair teams. Crew bunks transformed into burn beds. The sickbay

irised open, consuming the zero-gee courts and running tracks that usually surrounded

it. Walls sprouted handholds in case of gravity loss, and everything that might come

loose in sudden acceleration was stowed, velcroed, bolted down, or simply recycled.

Finally, the coiling, shifting, expanding, and extruding all came to a halt, and the

schematic eased into a stable shape. Like a well-crafted mechanical bolt smoothly

locking into place, the vessel became battle ready.

A single klaxon sounded. A few of his bridge crew half-turned toward Zai. Their

faces were expectant and excited, ready to begin this fight regardless of the ship's

chances. He saw it most in Katherie Hobbes's expression. They'd been beaten back on

Legis XV, all of them, and this was their chance to get revenge. The mutiny, however

small and aborted, had shamed them as well. They were ready to fight, and their

bloodlust, however desperate, was good to see.

It was just possible, Laurent Zai allowed himself to think, that they would eet home.

The captain nodded to the first pilot, and weight gradually returned, pressing him

into the shipmaster's chair as the frigate accelerated.

The Lynx moved toward battle.

Chapter 1

SPACE BATTLE

The initial conditions of a battle are the only factors that a general can truly

affect. Once blood is drawn, command is merely an illusion.

—ANONYMOUS 167

Militia Worker

The contrail of a supersonic aircraft blossomed weakly in the thin, dry air, barely

marking the sky.

Rana Harter imagined the passengers far above: reclining in sculpted crash-safe

chairs, the air they breathed scented with some perfumed disinfectant, perhaps being

served some light snack now, midway to their destination. From up there, other

contrails would be visible through windows of transparent hypercarbon. Most

long-haul air routes on Legis passed over the pole. The continents were clustered in

the northern hemisphere, far from the raging equatorial sea and the vast, silent ocean

of the south. Air transit routes converged here at the pole like the lines on a

dribble-hoop ball, this tundral waste an empty junction, overflown but never visited.

Rana had never traveled on an aircraft before Herd had brought her here. She

could only blurrily imagine airborne luxury, the gaps in her vision filled with the sound

of wealthy people's music: soft strings repeating the same slow phrase.

She watched the wind move driftsnow across the plain, and noted the direction and

speed of the few scudding clouds. Her brainbug made a prediction. The contrail

reached a certain point and Rana said, "Now."

At that moment, the contrail jagged suddenly, a sharp angle marring its slow curve.

A few pieces of detritus caught the sun, flickering with their spin, falling from the

supersonic craft with the apparent slow motion of great distance.

The plane quickly recovered, righting its course.

Rana imagined the sudden, sickening lurch inside the cabin. Glasses of champagne

flying, trays and hand luggage upset, every object leaping toward the ceiling as the

plane lost a thousand meters of altitude in a few seconds. The unexpected opening of

the cargo hold would instantly double the plane's drag profile, sending a shock through

the entire craft. Hopefully, the smart seats would hold their passengers in. A few

bloodied noses and wrenched shoulders, perhaps a concussion for some unlucky soul on

her feet. But by now the plane had righted itself, automatically closing the offending

cargo door.

Rana Harter had discovered that her brainbug worked better if she indulged these

fancies. As she imagined the sudden jolt above, her eyes tracked the flickering fall of

luggage and supplies, and she felt the whirring of her mind as it calculated the location

and shape of the debris field. The sharp, determinate math of trajectories and wind

smelled like camphor, rang in her ears with vibrato-free, pointillistic notes on a

handful of flutes, one for each variable.

The answers came.

She turned to Herd, already dressed in her hooded fur coat. The sable had come

from the first luggage drop arranged by Alexander. The stain that had once disguised

Herd's Rix eyes was faded now, and they shone in their true violet, beautiful in the

frame of black fur. The hairs of the coat ruffled in the bitter wind, a fluttering

motion that made Rana hear the small, shimmering bells worn by wedding dancers on

their feet.

Herd awaited her instructions, always respectfully silent when Rana's ability was in

use (though the commando had squeezed her hand as her word now seemed to yank the

airplane from its path).

"Seventy-four klicks that way," Rana said, pointing carefully. Herd's violet eyes

followed the line of the gesture, checking for landmarks. Then she nodded and turned

to Rana to kiss her good-bye.

The Rixwoman's lips were always cold now, her body temperature adapted to its

environment. Her saliva tasted vaguely of rust, like the iron tang of blood, but

sweeter. Her sweat contained no salt, its mineral content making it taste like water

from a quarry town. As Herd dashed toward the flyer, the oversized coat lifting into

sable wings, the synesthetic smell of the commando's avian/lemongrass movements

mingled with the flavor left in Rana's mouth. The joy of watching Herd never lessened.

Rana turned back toward the cave entrance before the recon flyer whined to life,

however. Every second here in the cold was taking something out of her.

Inside, it was above freezing.

Rana Harter wore two layers of real silk, a hat of red fox, and her own fur coat,

vat-grown chinchilla lined with blue whale from the ubiquitous herds of the southern

ocean. But she was still cold.

The walls of the cave were hung with centuries-old tapestries earmarked for the

Museum of Antiquities in Pollax. A vast collection of toiletries and clothing, the

bounty of fallen personal luggage, lined the icy shelves Herd had carved into the walls.

Rana and Herd slept °n the pelt of a large ursoid creature that neither of them

recognized—a customs stamp confirmed its off-world origins. The floors were covered

with soft linings ripped from luggage, a pile of undergarments forming an insulating

layer underneath.

The small, efficient machines of travel were everywhere. Handheld 8arnes and

coffee pots, flashlights and sex toys, all for Herd to dissect and rebuild into new

devices. For sustenance, they had only prestige foods. Rich meats from young animals,

fruits scandalously out of season, caviar and exotic nuts, candied insects and edible

flowers. It all came in morsel sizes, suitable for luxury airplane meals: canned,

self-heating and freeze-dired, bagged and coldboxed, to be washed down with liquor in

plastic bottles dwarfish enough to have survived the long fall. They drank from two

crystal glasses that someone thought valuable enough to pack in thirty centimeters of

smartfoam. Oddly, the glasses had been labeled as coffee beans on their packaging. A

mistake, or perhaps they were smuggled antiques.

All this bounty from only three aircraft holds, Rana wondered. She had never seen

such wealth before. She lifted a smartplastic tennis racket, its rim no wider than the

strings it suspended, and wondered at the instrument's elegant, almost Rixian lines.

This fourth luggage "accident" would be their last haul. The background rate of

Scott Westerfeld - Succession 2 - Killing Of Worlds

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