of spectator trash. His hands together in the clasp of prayer, he started to ask for forgiveness. He hadn't asked the Emperor for this. How could he have known that the Reich Pandemic would be the result of his request for taller classmates?
With his praying lips almost against the ground, the stench of cigarette butts and old honey wine bottles and rotten fruit under the bleachers struck him like a blow to the stomach. He vomited profusely into his prayer-locked hands, in an acid stream that burned like whiskey in his mouth and nose. His hands remained faintly sticky and smelled of vomit the rest of that day, no matter how furiously he washed them.
As if some switch deep within him had been permanently thrown, the position of prayer always brought back a glimmer of that intense moment of shame and nausea. The murmurs of morning chapel seemed to coalesce into an acid trickle down the back of his throat. The airscreen rallies in which the Risen Emperor's visage slowly turned over an ululating crowd filled his stomach with bile.
Laurent Zai had never prayed to the Risen Emperor again.
He never drank, for every toast on Vada asked the Risen Deity for luck and health. And even as Cadet Zai waited for word of admission into the Imperial Naval Academy, he lay silent in the endless minutes before sleep every night, recalling every mistep and victory in his six-week application trial. But not praying.
Thirty subjective years later, however, seated in the shipmaster's chair of His Majesty's frigate Lynx, Captain Laurent Zai took a moment to pair his hands over nose and mouth.
He still smelled the bile of that long-ago shame.
"Make this work," he demanded in a harsh whisper. "As for me, I want to return to my beloved. As for her, she's your damned sister."
The bitter prayer ended, Zai brought his hands down and opened his eyes.
"Launch," he commanded.
EXECUTIVE OFFICER
ExO Katherie Hobbes noted from her status board that the entry vehicle carrying the Apparatus Initiate Barris had not been fully gelled. The safety AI began to protest the dangers posed by an incompletely prepped insertion vehicle.
Hobbes smiled grimly, canceling the safety overrides, and the order went through.
"Operation is launched, sir."
Almost simultaneously, four specially reconfigured turret blisters along the underside of the Lynx each fired one railgun and one plasma burst. A pair of each type of projectile headed toward four carefully plotted targets below.
The plasma bursts bolted ahead at twenty percent lightspeed, their 12,000-degree core temperatures burning a tunnel of vacuum through the atmosphere. Their burn length perfectly timed, they scattered into gouts of flame upon impact, leaving as their only marks four smooth, concave hemispheres burned into the palace's stone walls.
The railgun projectiles followed in their wake.
COMPOUND MIND
The attack was registered by the warning system erected by the Rix compound mind still propagating across the planet's data and communication systems. The plasma bolts left a long, bellicose streak behind them, clearly originating from the point Alexander had already predicted that an Imperial warship would station itself to attempt a rescue. The mind required less than two milliseconds to determine that such an attempt was underway, and to order that the hostages be killed. However, the Rix commandos were not datalinked to the still-propagating mind. Alexander was a composite of Imperial technology, after all, which was incompatible with Rix communications. Alexander was forced to relay its order through a transponder sitting in the center of the table in the council chamber. The transponder received the compound mind's signal and immediately let out a loud squawk, a dense static whose crenellations were coded like some ancient audio modem. The squawk began its journey from the transponder outward toward the Rix commandos at the speed of sound. The nearest commando was four meters away, and the sound
With his praying lips almost against the ground, the stench of cigarette butts and old honey wine bottles and rotten fruit under the bleachers struck him like a blow to the stomach. He vomited profusely into his prayer-locked hands, in an acid stream that burned like whiskey in his mouth and nose. His hands remained faintly sticky and smelled of vomit the rest of that day, no matter how furiously he washed them.
As if some switch deep within him had been permanently thrown, the position of prayer always brought back a glimmer of that intense moment of shame and nausea. The murmurs of morning chapel seemed to coalesce into an acid trickle down the back of his throat. The airscreen rallies in which the Risen Emperor's visage slowly turned over an ululating crowd filled his stomach with bile.
Laurent Zai had never prayed to the Risen Emperor again.
He never drank, for every toast on Vada asked the Risen Deity for luck and health. And even as Cadet Zai waited for word of admission into the Imperial Naval Academy, he lay silent in the endless minutes before sleep every night, recalling every mistep and victory in his six-week application trial. But not praying.
Thirty subjective years later, however, seated in the shipmaster's chair of His Majesty's frigate Lynx, Captain Laurent Zai took a moment to pair his hands over nose and mouth.
He still smelled the bile of that long-ago shame.
"Make this work," he demanded in a harsh whisper. "As for me, I want to return to my beloved. As for her, she's your damned sister."
The bitter prayer ended, Zai brought his hands down and opened his eyes.
"Launch," he commanded.
EXECUTIVE OFFICER
ExO Katherie Hobbes noted from her status board that the entry vehicle carrying the Apparatus Initiate Barris had not been fully gelled. The safety AI began to protest the dangers posed by an incompletely prepped insertion vehicle.
Hobbes smiled grimly, canceling the safety overrides, and the order went through.
"Operation is launched, sir."
Almost simultaneously, four specially reconfigured turret blisters along the underside of the Lynx each fired one railgun and one plasma burst. A pair of each type of projectile headed toward four carefully plotted targets below.
The plasma bursts bolted ahead at twenty percent lightspeed, their 12,000-degree core temperatures burning a tunnel of vacuum through the atmosphere. Their burn length perfectly timed, they scattered into gouts of flame upon impact, leaving as their only marks four smooth, concave hemispheres burned into the palace's stone walls.
The railgun projectiles followed in their wake.
COMPOUND MIND
The attack was registered by the warning system erected by the Rix compound mind still propagating across the planet's data and communication systems. The plasma bolts left a long, bellicose streak behind them, clearly originating from the point Alexander had already predicted that an Imperial warship would station itself to attempt a rescue. The mind required less than two milliseconds to determine that such an attempt was underway, and to order that the hostages be killed. However, the Rix commandos were not datalinked to the still-propagating mind. Alexander was a composite of Imperial technology, after all, which was incompatible with Rix communications. Alexander was forced to relay its order through a transponder sitting in the center of the table in the council chamber. The transponder received the compound mind's signal and immediately let out a loud squawk, a dense static whose crenellations were coded like some ancient audio modem. The squawk began its journey from the transponder outward toward the Rix commandos at the speed of sound. The nearest commando was four meters away, and the sound
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