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

infostructure. It was clearly meant to be undetectable, a secret confidant.
    But there could be no secrets here on Legis XV. Not from Alexander, whose mind now stretched to every retina-locked diary, every digital will and testament, every electronic pal or pleasuremate on this world. The secret device belonged, by rights, to Alexander. The mind wanted it. And how perfect, to strike at something so intimately close to the Risen Emperor.
    The compound mind moved suddenly and with the force of an entire living planet against the Empress's confidant.

    CHILD EMPRESS

    The Child Empress heard something, just for a moment.
    A kind of distant buzzing, like the interference that consumes a personal phone too near a broadcast array, the sort of brief static that contains a phantom voice or voices. It had an echo to it, a phase-shifted whoosh like a passing aircar. There was just a hint of a shriek deep inside it, something giving up the ghost.
    The Child Empress looked about the room, and saw that no one else had heard it. The sound had come from her confidant.
    "What was that?" she subvocalized to the machine.
    For the first time in fifty years, there was no answer.
    "Where are you?" the Empress whispered, almost out loud. The Rix commando peered at her quizzically again, but there was no answer from the confidant.
    The Empress repeated the question, this time dutifully subvocalizing. Still nothing. She pressed her thumbs to her ring fingers and blinked, a gesture which called up the confidant's utility menus in synesthesia. The confidant's voice volume was set at normal, its cutout was inactive, everything functioned. The device's internal diagnostics detected no problems—except for the Empress's own heartbeat, which it constantly monitored, and whose rate was crawling upward even as the Empress sat open-mouthed. The rate incremented past 160, where the letters grew red and the confidant always made her take a pill or stick on a patch.
    But the confidant didn't breathe a word.
    "Where the hell are you?" the Child Empress said aloud.
    Through the eyescreen debris overlaying her vision, the Empress saw the other hostages and their captors turn to look at her. A heat grew in her face, and her heart was pounding like a trapped animal in her chest. She tried to will away the eyescreen, but her hands were shaking too hard to work the gestural codes.
    The Empress tried to smile. She was very good at reassuring everyone that she was healthy and comfortable, regardless of what the last fifty years had brought. She was after all, the sister of the Risen Emperor, whose symbiant kept her in perfect health. Who was immortal. But the smile felt wrong even to her. There was a metal taste in the Empress's mouth, as if she'd bitten her tongue.
    More out of force of habit than anything else, the Empress reached for the glass of water by her side. That's what the confidant would have suggested.
    She was still smiling when her shaking hand knocked it over.

    EXECUTIVE OFFICER

    A sudden noise rang out in Katherie Hobbes's head.
    She raised a combination of fingers, separating into source categories the audio channels she was monitoring. When on duty, her mind's ear was spread like a driftnet across the ship's activities. The clutter of thirty-two decks of activity was routed to the various audio channels in her head; she surfed among them, darting like a spirit among the ship's operational centers. Over the past few seconds, she had listened to the banter of jump marines as they prepped, the snapped orders of rail gunners targeting the Rix below, the curses of Intelligencer pilots as they fought to fly backup small craft toward the council chamber. On board the Lynx she was as famed for her omniscience as for her exotic Utopian appearance; no conversation was safe from Katherie Hobbes. Eavesdropping was the only real way to take the manifold pulse of a starship at its highest state of alert.
    At her gesture, the audio events of the last few seconds