45
FOR AN INSTANT of transfixed horror, the wound in the universe glowed in my vision, and it seemed almost sated . . . hanging in the void with an odd stillness. . . . The smallest pinpricks of white bled from it in all directions. The intact peripheral vessels tried to change course, but their momentum carried them to their doom. They disappeared into the tendrils of devouring brightness. Abruptly in a spasm, it resumed hemorrhaging with an urgency to consume more. . . .
“This can’t be. This isn’t real,” Pasus said at last, his voice empty, toneless.
The denial settled tonelessly on the air scented with Resolvent Mist. So close to us, the very fabric of the universe itself was a mutilated wound rupturing itself wider with every passing second to spill a lethal band of light that destroyed all it touched. I found myself at a curious distance from what I was seeing, for surely this was not real, as Pasus had said—this was not malignant space spreading in the six-star home system of the Domitrians.
“You can trust your eyes, Alectar,” Tyrus said, tracing his palm over the window. “Turns out, it’s very easy to create malignant space. Just a few conditions going awry when a ship tries to leap into hyperspace . . . And there it goes. It would be a shockingly cost-effective light show for future imperial spectacles . . .”—he looked back at us with a jaded twist of his lips—“. . . if I knew how to stop it.”
He had no way to fix it. The realization shocked me.
He’d created something he couldn’t destroy.
I stepped back from Tyrus, because the wrongness of this blared at me. Tyrus was illuminated by the brilliant, garish glow of this malignancy he’d vowed to fight, as he mused: “How many people on those starships laughed off the threat of this? What do you suppose they are thinking right now?” He let that sit there. “Well, I imagine they’re not thinking. They’re probably screaming.”
The malignancy had ensnared the nearest star—and that’s when I realized the six-star system was now doomed. More of the ships were plunging in, vanishing into the brilliant depths of the light, and Tyrus had made this happen. He’d created this. He had to be using the scepter even now because the distance between the Chrysanthemum and that rippling white death mounted even as the destruction grew. Yet nothing changed what he’d done. He had knowingly created malignant space in his home system with no means of ending it.
It was unfathomable to me that Tyrus had deliberately done this. My whole being rejected the idea that this was truly reality. Surely I would awaken soon. Pasus abruptly bolted toward the door. That snapped me out of my daze. I surged after him—and Tyrus said, “Don’t bother.”
“Tyrus . . . ,” I protested, whipping around.
Tyrus just looked at me. Pointed to his own eyes. “There’s nowhere he can escape me now.”
The words were meant to reassure me.
They chilled me.
He calmly closed the distance to me, took my hand, and drew me toward the door. I accompanied him in a daze out of the Great Heliosphere . . . and into the Valor Novus, its floor strewn with bodies.
The great windows showed the Chrysanthemum, reflecting the eerie light we cold not see from this angle. These docked vessels, afflicted by Resolvent Mist and not malignant space, appeared like loosely hewn limbs jostling back and forth against the background of light and emptiness where there had been so many lives just minutes ago.
On the floor—bodies. So many dead. And kneeling amid them, a subdued and silent Alectar von Pasus.
“You didn’t get far,” Tyrus remarked. “Did it dawn on you at last that you did exactly this on Lumina to billions of people? Far more than my number today.”
“What do you mean to do to me?” said Pasus hoarsely. “Torture me? Cast me into a black hole? Oh, I am sure that’s your intent. You must’ve been anticipating this for ages.”
“Once, imagining this was my foremost pleasure,” Tyrus admitted. “I fantasized about repaying degradation for degradation, and making you wish for death before I gave it to you. . . . But we are long past that, are we not? Dear Alectar, in the grand scheme of things, you’ve done me more good than harm. I have enjoyed years of total impunity. The Venalox ensured I could pin all my misdeeds on you. Even this day’s calamity, I’ll conceal behind my trusty human shield. The surviving Grandiloquy will be told this was you. All the data will show you financed it. And I will escape unscathed from a day when I’ve obliterated the entirety of my political opposition. This is our hour of victory! Look to the window. I wish to reward you.”
The proud Senator von Pasus seemed a broken and defeated man. He obeyed—and looked.
There was an event called the Awakening, spoken of in hushed voices. It was the moment the Chrysanthemum responded to its new master, and now I saw it. All those loosely joined starships began to contract like a muscle. Lights long gone dim flared to brilliant vibrancy again. Machines that had been drifting languidly through the void for several years abruptly snapped to alertness, powering up, aiming gun barrels in tandem. Flashes of metal and light swarmed our view, and the configuration of starships—so jumbled—began to take form into that organized Chrysanthemum shape once more.
“You saw my uncle do this and it altered the course of your life,” Tyrus said. “It’s only fitting you die with it fresh in your mind.”
Pasus looked at his Emperor’s back, a presentiment of doom twisting his features, and a moment later a security bot whipped down from the wall and fired a single, perfunctory slash of light at him.
A disgraceful, unceremonious end to a man who wished to be a legend.
And Tyrus, his executioner, did not bother to watch.
Instead he gazed at me with a warm, dancing anticipation. “I have something for you, Nemesis. I’ve longed to give this to you for years—and now it is yours. Look there.” He nodded . . . at one of the bodies.
When I didn’t move, he stepped over to the young boy, moved his head with his boot. “See?” At my blank face, “A Servitor.”
“You’re giving me a dead Servitor?” I managed.
“All the dead Servitors.” He smiled broadly. “Look about us, my love. You will not find a single living, breathing Servitor in the Chrysanthemum, and the vast majority in the Empire were here—or on those ships. Consider them banned.” He tapped his finger to his temple. “I remembered.”
It was the most ghastly offering I could have received.
“Oh, Tyrus” was all that escaped me.
Swept up in the moment, he missed my expression, my tone. Instead, he gave a flick of his hand, and the humming of the neural suppressor snapped off. The resurgence of strength to my body did not reassure me. . . . It merely emphasized the total power he’d just gained over me.
Over everyone.
He stepped over the bodies of his victims and approached the window so he could gaze out upon his work. The superstructure about us began to retreat more swiftly from the terrible threat of malignant space as it devoured its way through the six-star system, tearing at a second star now.
The hypergiant Hephaestus. The very star that burned through the Great Heliosphere and propelled us into the hardships that followed.
And soon it would be destroyed as well.