The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld Read Free Book Online Page A

against the testicles, constricted the neck to increase Vecher's sense of suffocation, if that were possible. And worst of all, it entered his helmet through two valves at the back of his head, wrapping around Vecher's face like some cold wraith, sealing his ears and gripping closed eyelids.
    There was no longer any part of Vecher that could move. Even swallowing was impossible, the green goo having completely suppressed the gag reflex. The tendons of his hands could be flexed slightly, but the armored gloves held the fingers as still as a statue's.
    Vecher stopped trying, let the terrible, omnipresent weight press him into inactivity. Time seemed to stretch, plodding without any change or frame of reference. With his breathing utterly stilled, he only had his heartbeat to mark the passing seconds. And with sealed ears, even that rhythm was a dulled, barely felt through the heavy injections that reinforced his rib cage.
    Dr. Vecher waited for the launch, wanting something, anything to happen, dreading that something would.

     COMPOUND MIND

    Alexander had found something very interesting.
    By now, the tendrils of its spreading consciousness reached every networked device on the planet. Datebooks and traffic monitors, power stations and weather satellites, the theft-control threads in clothing awaiting purchase. The compound mind had even conquered the earplugs through which aides prompted politicians as they debated this crisis on the local diet's floor. Only the equipment carried by the Rix troopers, which was incompatible with imperial datalinks, remained out of Alexander's grasp.
    But, somehow, the compound mind felt an absence in itself, as if one lone device had managed to escape its propagation. Alexander contemplated this vacuum, as subtle as the passing cold from a cloud's shadow. Was it some sort of Imperial countermeasure? Trojan data designed to stay in hiding until the hostage situation was resolved, and then attack?
    The mind searched itself, trying to pin down the feeling. In the shadow-time, there had been nothing like this, no ambiguities or ghosts. The missing something began to irritate Alexander. Like the itch in a phantom limb, it was both incorporeal and profoundly disturbing.
    The ghost device must have been shielded from normal communication channels, perhaps incorporated into some innocent appliance, woven into the complex structure of a narrowcast antenna or solar cell. Or perhaps the ghost was hidden within the newly emergent structure of the compound mind itself, half parasite and half primitive cousin of Alexander: a metapresence, invisible and supervalent.
    Alexander constructed a quick automodel, stepped outside itself and looked down into its own structure. Nothing there to suggest that some sort of superego had arisen atop its own mind. Alexander ransacked the data reservoirs of libraries, currency exchanges, stock markets, searching for an innocuous packet of data that might be ready to decompress and attack. Still nothing. Then it opened its ears, watching the flow of sensory data from surveillance cams and early warning radar and motion sensors.
    And suddenly, there it was, as obvious as a purloined letter.
    In the throne wing of the palace, in the council chamber itself: a clever little AI hidden in the hostage Child Empress's body (of all places). Alexander extended its awareness to the sensors built into the council chamber table. These devices were sophisticated enough to read the blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and eye movements of courtiers and supplicants, in search of duplicity and hidden motives. The Empress was very paranoid, it seemed. Alexander found that it could see very well in this particular room.
    The ghost presence was distributed throughout the Empress's body, woven into her nervous system and terminated in the audio portion of her brain. Obviously an invisible friend. The device was incompatible with standard Imperial networks, only passively connected to the