PROLOGUE
The funny thing was, Ghreni Nohamapetan, the acting Duke of End, actually saw the surface-to-air missile that slammed into his aircar a second before it hit.
He had been talking to Blaine Turnin, his now-in-retrospect-clearly-not-very-good-at-his-job minister of defense, about the clandestine meeting they were about to have with a rebel faction who had promised to come to the duke’s side in the current civil war. As Ghreni had turned to say something to Turnin, his peripheral vision caught a flash of light, drawing his glance toward the thick port glass of the aircar, where the aforementioned surface-to-air missile was suddenly very prominent in the view.
I think that’s a missile, is what Ghreni intended to say at that point, but he only got as far as saying “I,” and really only the very first phoneme of that very short word, before the missile slammed into the aircar and everything, frankly, went completely to shit.
In the fraction of a second that followed, and as the aircar suddenly changed its orientation on several axes, turning the untethered Blaine Turnin into a surprised and fleshy pinball careening around the surfaces of the aircar’s passenger cabin, Ghreni Nohamapetan, acting Duke of End, formulated several simultaneous thoughts that did not so much proceed through his brain as appear, fully formed and overlapping, as if Ghreni’s higher cognitive functions decided to release all the ballast at once and let Ghreni sort it out later, if there was a later, which, given that Blaine Turnin’s neck had just turned a disturbing shade of floppy, seemed increasingly unlikely.
Perhaps it might be easier to describe these thoughts in percentage form, in terms of their presence in Ghreni’s theater of attention.
To begin, there was Shit fuck fuck shit fuck shit fuck the fucking fuck shit fucking shit fuck hell, which was taking up roughly 89 percent of Ghreni’s attention, and, as his aircar was beginning to both spin and lose altitude, understandably so.
A distant second to this, at maybe 5 percent, was How did the rebels know, we didn’t set this meeting until an hour ago, even I didn’t know I was going to be in this car, and also where the fuck are the antimissile countermeasures I am the chief executive of an entire planet and there’s a civil war going on you would think my security people would be a little more on the ball here. This was honestly a lot to process at the moment, so Ghreni’s brain decided to let this one sit unanswered.
Coming in third, at maybe 4.5 percent of Ghreni’s cognitive attention, was I think I need a new minister of defense. Inasmuch as Blaine Turnin’s body was now presenting a shape that could only be described as “deeply pretzeled,” this was probably correct and therefore did not warrant any further contemplation.
Which left the fourth thought, which, while claiming only the meager remainder of Ghreni’s attention and cognitive power, was nevertheless a thought that Ghreni had thought before, and had thought often—indeed had thought often enough that one could argue that in many ways it defined Ghreni Nohamapetan and made him the man he was today, which was, specifically, a man violently captive to forces both gravitational and centrifugal. This thought was:
Why me?
And indeed, why Ghreni Nohamapetan? What were the circumstances of fate that led him to this moment of his life, spinning wildly out of control, literally and existentially, trying to keep from vomiting on the almost-certain corpse of his now-very-probably-erstwhile minister of defense?
This was a multidimensional question with several relevant answers.
a) He was born;
b) Into a noble family with ambitions to rule the Interdependency, an empire of star systems that had existed for a millennium;
c) And which was connected by the Flow, a phenomenon Ghreni didn’t understand but which acted as a super-fast conduit between the star systems of the Interdependency;
d) All of which were taxed and controlled by the emperox, who ruled from Hub, the system through which nearly every Flow stream eventually routed;
e) That was, until a great shift in the Flow happened at some point in the near future, and then nearly every route would go through End, which was currently the least accessible system in the Interdependency;
f) Which is why Ghreni’s sister Nadashe wanted a Nohamapetan on End to usurp the ruling duke, but she couldn’t do it because she was busy trying to marry Rennered Wu, next in line for the imperial throne, and Ghreni’s brother Amit was running the House of Nohamapetan’s businesses;
g) So fine, whatever, it had to be Ghreni;
h) Who went to End, and secretly fomented a civil war even as he publicly allied himself with the previous duke;
i) Who he then assassinated, pinning the assassination on the Count Claremont, who Ghreni assumed was just the imperial tax assessor;
j) And became acting duke by promising to end the civil war, which he could totally do because after all he was the one who was funding the rebels;
k) But it turned out the Count Claremont was also a Flow physicist whose research determined that the Flow streams were collapsing, not shifting;
l) Which turned out to be correct when the Flow stream between End and Hub, the only Flow stream out of the End system, collapsed;
m) The count then offered, in the spirit of pragmaticism, to join forces with Ghreni to prepare End for the imminent isolation caused by the collapse of both the Flow and also the Interdependency, which relied on the Flow for its existence;
n) Ghreni didn’t take the count up on this offer for, uuuuuhhhhh, reasons, and instead disappeared the count;
o) This pissed off Vrenna Claremont, the count’s daughter and heir, who rather inconveniently was also a former Imperial Marine officer with lots of allies and who knew the details of her father’s Flow research;
p) Which she then told everyone about;
q) Who were pissed that the new acting duke had kept them in the dark concerning this whole “Flow collapse” thing;
r) And thus this new civil war;
s) Against him;
t) Which featured new rebels;
u) Shooting missiles at his goddamned aircar.
In Ghreni’s defense, he had never asked to be born.
But this was cold comfort as Ghreni’s aircar slammed into the surface streets of Endfall, End’s capital city, rolling several times before coming to a full and complete stop.
Ghreni, whose eyes had been closed during the entire ground crash, opened them to find his aircar upright. Blaine Turnin’s body was in the seat opposite him, quiet, composed and restful, looking for all the world like he had not been a human maraca bean for the last half minute. Only Turnin’s head, tilted at an angle that suggested the bones in his neck had been replaced by overcooked pasta, suggested that he might not, in fact, be taking a small and entirely refreshing nap.
Ten seconds later the doors of Ghreni’s shattered aircar were wrenched open and the members of his security detail—none of whose aircars were apparently even targeted what the actual hell, Ghreni’s mind screamed at him—unclasped him from his seat belts and roughly dragged him out of the car, hustling him into a second car that would make a direct beeline back to the ducal palace. Ghreni’s final view into his ruined vehicle was of Turnin’s body slumping to the floor of the cab and making itself into a human area rug.
“Don’t you think it’s suspicious that none of the other aircars were targeted?” Ghreni said, later, as he paced back and forth in a secured room of his palace that lay far underground, in a subterranean wing designed to withstand attacks for weeks and possibly months. “All the aircars were identical. We didn’t file a flight plan. No one knew we were going to be in the sky. And yet, bam, the missile hit one car, and it was mine. I have to assume that my security detail is compromised. I have to assume there are traitors in my midst.”