Scott Westerfeld - The Risen Empire

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THE RISEN EMPIRE

From the acclaimed author of Fine Prey, Polytnorph, and Evolution's Darling (Philip K.

Dick Award special citation and a New York Times Notable Book) comes a sweeping epic,

The Risen Empire, Scott Wesferfeld's dazzling hardcover debut.

The undead Emperor has ruled his mighty interstellar empire of eighty human

worlds for sixteen hundred years. Because he can grant a form of eternal life, creating an

elite known as the Risen, his power has been absolute. He and his sister, the Child

Empress, who is eternally a little girl, are worshiped as living gods. No one can touch

them.

Not until the Rix, machine-augmented humans who worship very different gods: AI

compound minds of planetary extent. The Rix ore cool, relentless fanatics, and their only

goal is to propagate such AIs throughout the galaxy. They seek to end, by any means

necessary, the Emperor's prolonged tyranny of one and supplant it with an eternal

cybernetic dynasty of their own. They begin by taking the Child Empress hostage.

Captain Laurent Zai of the Imperial Frigate Lynx is tasked with her rescue.

Separated by light-years, bound by an unlikely love, Zai and pacifist senator Nara

Oxham must each, in their own way, face the challenge of the Rix, as they hold the fate of

the empire in their hands. The Risen Empire is the first great space opera of the

twenty-first century.

SCOTT WESTERFELD is a software designer, a composer of musk for modern dance

whose works heave been performed both here and abroad, and the author of three

previous novels. He lives in New York City and Sydney, Australia.

THE RISEN EMPIRE

BOOK ONE OF SUCCESSION

SCOTT WESTERFELD

TOR

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are

either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THE RISEN EMPIRE

Edited by David G. Hartwell.

any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

A Tor Book.

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue.

New York, NY 10010 www.tor.com.

Tor is a registered trademark of.

Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 0-765-30555-0.

First Edition: March 2003.

Printed in the United States of America.

0987654321

TO SLK

for years of summer--

A Note on Imperial Measures--

One of the many advantages of life under the Imperial Apparatus is the easy

imposition of consistent standards of infrastructure, 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.

HOSTAGE SITUATION

There is no greater tactical disadvantage than the presence of precious

noncombatants. Civilians, historical treasures, hostages: treat them as already lost.

—ANONYMOUS 167

PILOT

The five small craft passed from shadow, emerging with the suddenness of coins

thrown into sunlight. The disks of their rotary wings shimmered in the air like heat,

momentary rainbows flexing across prisms of motion. Master Pilot Jocim Marx noted

with pleasure the precision of his squadron's formation. The other pilots' Intelligencer

craft perfectly formed a square centered upon his own.

"Don't we look pretty?" Marx said.

"Pretty obvious, sir," Hendrik answered. She was the squadron's second pilot, and it

was her job to worry.

"A little light won't hurt us," Marx said flatly. "The Rix haven't had time to build

anything with eyes."

He said it not to remind Hendrik, who knew damn well, but to reassure their

squadron-mates. The other three pilots were nervous; Marx could hear it in their silence.

None of them had ever flown a mission of this importance before.

But then, who had?

Marx's own nerves were beginning to play on him. His squadron of Intelligencers had

covered half the distance from dropsite to objective without meeting any resistance. The

Rix were obviously ill-equipped, improvising against far greater force, relying on their

single advantage: the hostages. But surely they had made preparations for small craft.

After a few moments in the sun, the waiting was over.

"I'm getting echolocation from dead ahead, sir," Pilot Oczar announced.

"I can see them," Hendrik added. "Lots of them."

The enemy interceptors resolved before Marx's eyes as his craft responded to the

threat, enhancing vision with its other senses, incorporating data from the squadron's

other craft into his layers of synesthesia. As Marx had predicted, the interceptors were

small, unpiloted drones. Their only weapon was a long, sinuous grappling arm that

hung from the rotary lifting surface, which was more screw than blade. The devices

looked rather like something da Vinci might have designed four millennia ago, a

contraption powered by the toil of tiny men.

The interceptors dangled before Marx. There were a lot of them, and in their host they

impelled the same vaguely obscene fascination as creatures from the deepest ocean. One

moved toward his craft, arms flailing with a blind and angry abandon.

Master Pilot Marx tilted his Intelligencer's rotary wing forward and increased its

power. His ship rose above the interceptor, barely missing collision with the enemy's

lifting screw. Marx grimaced at the near miss. Another interceptor came into focus before

him, this one a little higher, and he reversed his wing's rotation, pushing the ship down,

dropping below its grasp.

Around him, the other pilots cursed as they pitched their craft through the swarm of

interceptors. Their voices came at him from all sides of his cockpit, directionally biased

to reflect their position relative to his.

From above, Hendrik spoke, the tension of a hard turn in her voice. "You've seen

these before, sir?"

"Negative," he replied. He'd fought the Rix Cult many times, but their small craft

were evolutionary. Small, random differences in design were scattered throughout every

generation. Characteristics that succeeded were incorporated into the next production

round. You never knew what new shapes and strategics Rix craft might assume. "The

arms are longer than I've soon, and the behavior's more ... volatile."

"They sure look pissed off," Hendrik agreed.

Her choice of words was apt. Two interceptors ahead of Marx sensed his craft, and

their arms began to flail with the sudden intensity of alligators when prey has stepped

into reach. He rolled his Intelligencer sideways, narrowing his vulnerable area as he

slipped between them.

But there were more and more of the interceptors, and his Intelligencer's profile was

still too large. Marx retracted his craft's sensory array, trading away vision for compact

size. At this range, however, the closest interceptors resolved to terrible clarity, the data

layers provided by first-, second-, and third-level sight almost choking his mind. Marx

could see (hear, smell) the individual segments of a grasping arm flexing like a snake's

spine, the cilia of an earspot casting jagged shadows in the hard sunlight. Marx squinted

at the cilia, gesturing for a zoom until the little hairs towered around him like a forest.

"They're using sound to track us," he announced. "Silence your echolocators now."

The view before him blurred as sonar data was lost. If Marx was right, and the

interceptors were audio-only, his squadron would be undetectable to them now.

"I'm tangled!" Pilot Oczar shouted from below him. "One's got a sensor post!"

"Don't fight!" Marx ordered. "Just lizard."

"Ejecting post," Oczar said, releasing his ship's captured limb.

Marx hazarded a glance downward. A flailing interceptor tumbled slowly away from

Oczar's ship, clinging to the ejected sensor post with blind determination. The

Intelligencer tilted crazily as its pilot tried to compensate for broken symmetry.

"They're getting heavy, sir," Hendrik warned. Marx switched his view to Hendrik's

perspective for a moment. From her high vantage, a thickening swarm of interceptors

was clearly visible ahead. The bright lines of their long grapples sparkled like a

shattered, drifting spiderweb in the sun.

There were too many.

Of course, there were backups already advancing from the dropsite. If this first wave

of Intelligencers was destroyed, another squadron would be ready, and eventually a

craft or two would get through. But there wasn't time. The rescue mission required

onsite intelligence, and soon. Failure to provide it would certainly end careers, might

even constitute an Error of Blood.

One of these five craft had to make it.

"Tighten up the formation and increase lift," Marx ordered. "Oczar, you stay down."

"Yes, sir," the man answered quietly. Oczar knew what Marx intended for his craft.

The rest of the squadron swept in close to Marx. The four Intelligencers rose together,

jostling through the writhing defenders.

"Time for you to make some noise, Oczar," Marx said. "Extend your sensor posts to

full length and activity."

"Up to a hundred, sir."

Marx looked down as Oczar's craft grew, a spider with twenty splayed legs emerging

suddenly from a seed, a time-lapse of a flower relishing sunlight. The interceptors

around Oczar grew more detailed as his craft became fully active, bathing their shapes

with ultrasonic pulses, microlaser distancing, and millimeter radar.

Already, the dense cloud of interceptors was beginning to react. Like a burst of pollen

caught by a sudden wind, they shifted toward Oczar's craft.

"We're going through blind and silent," Marx said to the other pilots. "Find a gap and

push toward it hard. We'll be cutting main power."

"One tangle, sir," Oczar said. "Two."

"Feel free to defend yourself."

"Yes, sir!"

On Marx's status board, the counterdrones in Oczar's magazine counted down

quickly. The man launched a pair as he confirmed the order, then another a few seconds

later. The interceptors must be all over him. Marx glanced down at Oczar's craft. The

bilateral geometries of its deployed sensor array were starting to twist, burdened by the

thrashing defenders. Through the speakers, Oczar grunted with the effort of keeping his

craft intact.

Marx raised his eyes from the battle and peered forward. The remainder of the

squadron was reaching the densest rank of the interceptor cloud. Oczar's diversion had

thinned it somewhat, but there was still scant space to fit through.

"Pick your hole carefully," Marx said. "Get some speed up. Retraction on my mark.

Five ... four ... three..."

He let the count fade, concentrating on flying his own craft. He had aimed his

Intelligencer toward a gap in the interceptors, but one had drifted into the center of his

path. Marx reversed his rotor and boosted power, driving his craft downward.

The drone loomed closer, lured by the whine of his surging main rotor. He hoped the

extra burst would be enough.

"Retract now!" he ordered. The view blurred and faded as the sensor posts on the ship

furled. In seconds, Marx's vision went dark.

"Cut your main rotors," he commanded.

The small craft would be almost silent now, impelled only by the small,

flywheel-powered stabilizer wing at their rear. It would push them forward until it ran

down. But the four surviving craft were already beginning to fall.

Marx checked the altimeter's last reading: 174 centimeters. At that height, the craft

would take at least a minute before they hit the ground. Even with its sensor array

furled and main rotor stalled, in a normal-density atmosphere an intelligence craft fell

no faster than a speck of dust.

Indeed, the Intelligencers were not much larger than specks of dust, and were

somewhat lighter. With a wingspan of a single millimeter, they were very small craft

indeed.

Master Pilot Jocim Marx, Imperial Naval Intelligence, had flown microships for

eleven years. He was the best.

He had scouted for light infantry in the Coreward Bands Revolt. His machine then

had been the size and shape of two hands cupping water, the hemispherical surface

holed with dozens of carbon whisker fans, each of which could run at its own speed. He

was deployed on the battlefield in those days, flying his craft through a VR helmet. He

stayed with the platoon staff under their portable forcefield, wandering about blind to

his surroundings. That had never set easy with him; he constantly imagined a slug

finding him, the real world intruding explosively on the synesthetic realm inside his

helmet. Marx was very good, though, at keeping his craft steady in the unpredictable

Bandian winds. His craft would paint enemy snipers with an undetectable x-ray laser,

which swarms of smart needle-bullets followed to unerring kills. Mark's steady hand

could guide a projectile into a centimeter-wide seam in personal armor, or through the

eye-slit of a sniper's camopolymer blind.

Later, he flew penetrators against Rix hovertanks in the Incursion. These projectiles

were hollow cylinders, about the size of a child's finger. They were launched by

infantryman, encased in a rocket-propelled shell for the first half of their short flight.

When the penetrator deployed, breaking free the instant it spotted a target, it flew

purely on momentum. Ranks of tiny control surfaces lined the inside of the cylinder,

like the baleen plates of some plankton-feeder. The weapon's supersonic flight was an

exercise in extreme delicacy. Too hard a nudge and a penetrator would tumble

uselessly. But when it hit a Rix tank just right, its maw precisely aligned to the

hexagonal weave of the armor, it cut through metal and ceramic like a rip propagating

down a cloth seam. Inside, the projectile disintegrated into countless molecular viruses,

breaking down the machine in minutes. Marx flew dozens of ten-second missions each

day, and was plagued at night with fitful microdreams of launch and collision.

Eventually, backpack AI proved better for the job than human pilots, but Marx's old

flight recordings were still studied by nascent intelligences for their elegance and flair.

The last few decades, Marx had worked with the Navy. Small craft were now truly

small, fullerene constructions no bigger than a few millimeters across when furled, built

by even smaller machines and powered by exotic transuranium batteries. They were

largely for intelligence gathering, although they had offensive uses. Marx had flown a

specially fitted Intelligencer into a fiberoptic AI hub during the Dhantu Liberation,

carrying a load of glass-eating nanos that had dismantled the rebel's communication

system planetwide within minutes.

Master Pilot Marx preferred the safety of the Navy. At his age, being on the battlefield

had lost its thrill. Now Marx controlled his craft from shipside, hundreds of kilometers

away from the action. He reclined in the comfort of a smartgel seat like some fighter

pilot of yore, bathed in synesthetic images that allowed him three levels of sight, the

parts of his brain normally dedicated to hearing, smell, and tactile sensations all given

over to vision. Marx experienced his ship's environment as a true pilot should, as if he

himself had been shrunk to the size of a human cell.

He loved the microscopic scale of his new assignment. In his darkened cabin on

sleepless nights, Marx burned incense and watched the smoke rise through the bright,

pencil-width shaft of an emergency flashlight. He noted how air currents curled, how

ghostly snakes could be spun with the movement of a finger, a puff of breath. With an

inhumanly steady hand he moved a remote microscope carefully through the air,

projecting its images onto the cabin wall, watching and learning the behavior of

microscopic particles aloft.

Sometimes during these dark and silent vigils, Jocim Marx allowed himself to think

that he was the best microcraft pilot in the fleet.

He was right.

CAPTAIN

Captain Laurent Zai stared down into the central airscreen of his battle bridge,

searching for a solution in its tangle of crisp, needle-thin lines. The airscreen was filled

with a wireframe of the imperial palace on Legis XV, a structure that stretched across ten

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THERISENEMPIREFromtheacclaimedauthorofFinePrey,Polytnorph,andEvolution'sDarling(PhilipK.DickAwardspecialcitationandaNewYorkTimesNotableBook)comesasweepingepic,TheRisenEmpire,ScottWesferfeld'sdazzlinghardcoverdebut.TheundeadEmperorhasruledhismightyinterstellarempireofeightyhumanworldsforsixteenhundre...

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Scott Westerfeld - The Risen Empire

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