“Not every Domitrian is skilled with this,” Tyrus said. “My great-grandmother, Acindra, could give orders to the machines about her with a thought, but my uncle . . . he was clumsy. He needed to make hand gestures. Vocalize his command. I was certain I’d do better than that.”
I hadn’t seen him use it yet. “And how are you with it?”
Tyrus looked at me. “Nemesis,” he said very quietly, “I can’t get it to do anything at all.”
I stared at him.
Then, “What?”
He shrugged, and spoke to the air: “I need a security bot here now.”
We waited.
Nothing.
“Oh,” I said.
“I’ve tried to avoid showing this in public until I figured it out,” he told me. “This is a big problem, Nemesis. This scepter isn’t just the way I control the machines. It unifies the Chrysanthemum. This is why two thousand individual ships form one large superstructure.” He tightened his fist about the scepter. “This is why a tiny structural instability can lead to a catastrophe in the Great Heliosphere. The only repair bots that mobilized to fix the breach were the ones already on board the vessel, not the ones on other vessels nearby. That breach needed a hundred repair bots, not a handful.”
“That’s what happened today,” I surmised. “And that’s why the med bots only came after you called for them.”
He nodded. “I can’t control any of these machines, and right now we are sitting on one ship amid two thousand individual ships with nothing linking them. There’s no network sensing potential problems in need of repair, and triaging the repair bots for the most important places. That heliosphere would have been tended long before it breached, especially this close to a hypergiant star. This shouldn’t have happened. Repair bots aren’t doing their job, and external security bots are offline. . . . This is a very serious problem.”
The other safety implications hit me.
“Tyrus, do you think others realize you don’t have control of it?”
“I think after today, it will be glaringly obvious.”
If Tyrus didn’t have security bots at his command, if he didn’t have control over every ship in the same star system, why . . . he was as vulnerable to attack as he’d been before he’d become Emperor.
More vulnerable, in fact, because there was a target on his back.
“If any enemy means to move on you,” I realized, “or . . . or on us, they’ll do it now. That’s what you’re saying.”
Tyrus nodded.
There were many threats to us, but one man posed the greatest threat of all.
He wasn’t merely the most powerful Senator in the Empire and the leader of the Helionic opposition to everything Tyrus meant to do—he was also father to a girl I’d recently killed.
“How long before Senator von Pasus hears about this?” I said to Tyrus.
He opened his mouth to answer me—and that was when his palladium glove began to vibrate with an incoming transmission. He turned his hand over to see the sender’s name, and I knew it without looking.
“Not long at all,” Tyrus said with a sardonic smile. Then he answered Senator von Pasus.
3
WHEN I’D LAST SEEN Senator von Pasus, he’d adopted the look of a dignified elder, perhaps in deliberate contrast to his daughter, Elantra, whom he wished to wed to Tyrus. Most Grandiloquy used false-youth, but sometimes they selectively adopted signs of aging, whether to give themselves a different look, or more likely, to deal with the Excess in their territories. Planet dwellers had no access to beauty bots, so they associated visible age with experience. So Pasus had not seemed too odd, with that gray hair, that short beard.
Now he appeared before us in holographic form, lacking those former ravages of age. His hair had become a stark coal black that seemed to devour the light, his eyes an icy blue, his now-unlined features even and seemingly cut with the precision of a beauty bot that aimed to lend him not handsomeness so much as grandeur.
He dipped to his knees with a perfunctory grace before rising just as swiftly. “Your Supreme Reverence.”
I’d retreated so I wouldn’t appear in the holographic image on Pasus’s end.
“Senator,” Tyrus said icily, “your alteration is most surprising.”
“Your Supremacy inspired me,” Pasus said. “I felt as though I would be truly meeting my new Emperor for the first time, so I should follow suit and present myself anew.”
Yes. He was one of the many Grandiloquy who’d known Tyrus only as his assumed persona—the mad heir to the throne. Not the clever young man he actually was. Tyrus turned his head and offered me his hand.
So he wanted me in the transmission. Though I’d be inflammatory, he wished Pasus to see me.
I moved to Tyrus’s side and appeared on Pasus’s end.
“Your call is most unexpected,” Tyrus said, taking my hand. A message. Very deliberate.
Pasus stared downward a moment, and I knew his cold gaze was fixed on the image of those linked hands.
“You must forgive me for abstaining from attendance at your Convocation speech, and your coronation before that. I was most distraught over the recent death of my daughter, as well Your Supremacy knows.”
“Everything about that situation was most regrettable,” Tyrus returned with the same remote courtesy, “including the circumstances that directly led to the tragedy.”
Pasus had to know what Tyrus was pointing out: Elantra had killed Sidonia, and that was what led to me killing her. His jaw ticked, but then he smiled—or rather, bared his teeth like an angry animal. “I have just heard word of the unfortunate death of your brother-in-law.”
Tyrus was granite-faced. “Have you.”
“I offer my condolences. What a terrible tragedy that is. And your cousin, left without a husband . . .”
“As she will be for a very long time,” Tyrus said.
Something in me grew cold, for I didn’t like the way Pasus was smiling—as though he’d just spotted something he meant to have, and he would allow nothing to get in his way.
“You must be very uneasy. How could your security bots have permitted a toxin so close to Your Supreme Reverence? And the heliosphere—why, repair bots are not what they once were, it seems. So coincidental, two separate systems failing on the same day.”
Tyrus’s eyes narrowed a fraction. I realized it too: Pasus knew. He knew why Tyrus’s scepter was not working.
“Then again, things happen.” Pasus’s smile was knowing. “Perhaps it was a one-off.”
“Perhaps.”
“But in the case it is not so temporary, Your Supreme Reverence is in a most awkward situation, are you not? You will require very powerful friends about you. And yet, your allies all appear to be new Senators, replacements for those killed along with Senator von Impyrean during your uncle’s reign. Novices.”
I could feel Tyrus’s heart racing in his palm. His voice, though, came out perfectly controlled: “I am ever so grateful for your concern. I assure you, all is in hand.”
“Hmm. Yes. Though if I were in your position, and forgive me for offering unsolicited advice, but I have known you since you were a young boy, dear Tyrus, so I feel compelled to suggest . . . I would look into restoring my favor with our Living Cosmos. And such favor cannot be won with the help of those you’ve gathered about you.” His eyes moved to my image. I knew that for sure, because raw hatred blazed over his face, though he had the same perfect mastery of voice Tyrus did. “I would look to longtime friends of your family. And the means by which you might win back what you’ve lost.”