To Crush the Moon

Chapter Zero in which a city’s gates are breached

The skirmish at Timoch’s gate is little recorded by conventional history—a minor engagement of Silver and Yellow and Stealth Gray, lost in the shuffle of much larger events. But a great deal of subsequent chaos turns on it, as an avalanche is said to turn on a single pebble. Regard it, then, as a moment of critical change which makes all the rest of it possible. It begins like this:

In the two hundred and first decade of the death of the Queendom of Sol, an ancient man finds himself trudging across the plains of a strange world. His escort—half a dozen armed men nearly as ancient as he—have already led him from the base of a bluff called Aden very nearly to the walls of a city called Timoch. And although the man has been to this world before—has lived here, wept here, bled and sweated here—he’s never seen either of these places. Indeed, he’s not even sure they existed when last his bootheels trod this gray, powdery soil, for he has spent a great many years… away. Asleep. Ensorcelled.

The world’s name is Lune, although it was once called Luna. The man’s name is Bruno de Towaji; he was once called “King.” See him now in your mind’s eye: a body incapable of frailty, wrapped round an ancient soul. His frayed, yellow-white hair extends to his shoulders in a kind of fan shape—very thin on top. His teeth are chalky nubs in a jaw as sturdy as ever. His skin—liver-spotted and yet still flushed with youth—is not so much wrinkled as creased. As if he’s been folded up in a drawer somewhere.

Which is not far from the truth. Not nearly as far as Bruno would like.

“In decades past, the oldest towers were still enlivened. Programmable—faced with wellstone,” says Bruno’s primary companion, Conrad Mursk, pointing at the city with young-old fingers as the group crests a hill and looks down upon it. “They had diamond cores and deep foundations. Survivors of the Shattering, yes, very old and very grand. But twenty years ago there were some strange malfunctions, and Imbrians can be painfully superstitious about things like that. So, in the Year of the Lamb the buildings were torn down at great cost. The high towers which remain are of poured concrete over an iron lattice—a technique dating back to the Old Moderns of pre-Queendom Earth.”

And that seems a strange thing to say, for Mursk is no architect. Hasn’t been for a long, long time. Instead, he has passed himself down through the ages as a kind of soldier. Indeed, the guards accompanying the two—five men-at-arms as frizzed and ancient as Mursk and Bruno themselves—call him “General Radmer” when they call him anything at all.

“Let’s not tarry here, shall we?” says one of them.

The men are angry, for this old leader of theirs—whom they clearly adore—has dragged them through one battle already, and is urging them now to Timoch, where they were once—and perhaps still are—considered criminals.

“Too much metal down there,” says Sidney Lyman, the nominal leader of this ancient band. His tone is disapproving as he glowers down at the city. “How can the glints resist? There aren’t soldiers enough—nor walls, nor glue—to hold them at bay forever.”

Ah, and that’s the other problem: this war of theirs. Not of these men—these Olders—in particular, but a war belonging to the entire world of Lune. And it’s going badly, and as near as Bruno can determine, this places the entire human race at risk.

He glances up at the Murdered Earth, visible as a puckered distortion in the evening sky. The sun has set behind the mountains here, but the sky is still bright, alive with clouds of fierce orange and yellow. And behind them, the tortured rainbow of sunlight refracting around the centimeter-wide fleck of hypercondensed matter that was once the world—the one and only world—of human beings. It is, in truth, a tragically beautiful sight.

There is a Murdered Venus as well, and a Murdered Mars—crushed into black holes virtually indistinguishable from Earth’s—and Bruno has no reason to suspect the other planets, especially the gas giants, have been spared in the years of his exile. That leaves only the moons and asteroids and planettes, many of which had still been thriving in the Iridium Days—the last days Bruno can still remember. But given the tendency of economic depressions to isolate vacuum habitats, slowly choking off the energies and machineries of their air supply, it’s doubtful any could have survived this long. That leaves only the planettes, which of course have problems of their own, and cannot retain atmosphere indefinitely without maintenance. Surely a great many of them have failed already.

And that leaves only Lune, that greatest of planettes, that living world squozen from the lifeless mass of Earth’s primordial moon. Squozen by Conrad Mursk, in fact, at the command of Bruno de Towaji.

“Well, it’s really no problem of ours,” adds Sidney Lyman. He points an elbow in Bruno’s direction, forcefully enough that Bruno half expects a Palace Guard to materialize from the ether to restrain him. But the Guards are dust now, like the Queendom of Sol itself, and Lyman goes on. “We’ll get this Ako’i fellow back inside yonder walls, then scurry like hell to reach the veils of Echo Valley in time for sunset.”

Which isn’t saying much, Bruno muses, considering that sunset—judging from the angle of the sun and the shadows of the trees—is still a good thirty-five hours away. The days are long here.

“He’s not going ‘back’ to Timoch,” says Conrad Mursk. General Radmer, Bruno reminds himself. Not Mursk. They call him General Emeritus Radmer. And I am Ako’i. “He’s going to it.”

“Ah! A first-timer. A virgin in the hallowed ancient halls of that mausoleum of a city. Come now, Ako’i, one cannot dwell this long on Lune—” A thought seemed to strike him, then. “Oh, but you’ve been on Varna! Marooned, cast away. For that long? Since before there was a Timoch? Since the Shattering itself?”

“Possibly,” Bruno grumbles, hoping to leave it at that. Tellingly, Lyman and his men have not recognized the husk of their old king. They don’t know his name, his crimes, his many failures, and he prefers it that way. “Ako’i” isn’t a name at all, but a Tongan epithet, something like calling a man “perfesser” or “genius” or… or “de Towaji,” yes. Perhaps they would forgive him if they knew, but what matter? Perhaps Bruno might have forgiven himself, had he been himself these many, many centuries. But that doesn’t matter, either. He is here as a figure out of history, to correct a historical mistake. Or to try, anyway.

They pass through a field of grazing, bleating sheep with gold-colored wool and curiously oversized heads. Then there are rock walls topped by wooden fences, leading down into a broad expanse of fresh-mown corn stubble. Soon, they find themselves on an actual road, paved with a smooth, continuous sheet of what looks like diamond or zirconium or some allotrope of silicon carbide. The surface is flawless, but to Bruno’s eye something about it conveys a sense of tremendous age. On one particularly sharp curve, a mound of dirt has spread from the roadside to cover part of the road itself.

Bruno first mistakes the pile for a construction project, and then a termite mound of the sort that had once been common on the savannahs of Africa. But on closer inspection there is something almost crystalline about it: straight lines and flat surfaces. And the “termites” themselves are large and of curious design, with angular body parts of clear and superabsorber black and translucent, glassine blue.

“What are these?” he asks, pointing.

“Termites,” Lyman answers, with no detectable irony.

“They’re a bit… modified, yes?”

“No more than anything else around here. It ain’t a natural world.”

As the city draws near, Bruno can see that the walls surrounding it are at least as recent as the termite mounds out on the plains. They’re flawless—not in the manner of wellstone or diamond but in the manner of freshly poured concrete which hasn’t had a chance to weather. For all he can tell, they might have been poured yesterday.

“Those damned walls,” Radmer is saying. “My goodness. They may indeed protect the city for a time, though not in the intended manner. The iron over which the cement was poured will be… tempting. The enemy may find it easier to dismantle the wall than to breach it and sally through. Every gram of it makes them stronger, while the people inside grow hungry. Not exactly the delay the City Mothers might wish for, but they’re hardly in a position to choose.”

Radmer’s manner of speech does not much resemble Conrad Mursk’s. Nor, really, does his face. A lot of time has passed here.

“Bloody valets,” one of the soldiers says, making a heartfelt curse of it. “Bloody glints.”

And Bruno doesn’t know whether to laugh or weep at this, for the armies of doom are quite ridiculous, and the swelling of their ranks can probably, if indirectly, be blamed on himself. Who set this stage, if not the king of all that preceded it?

Damn and blast. If dying were easy he’d’ve done it long ago. He had tried. But there had been nothing on the planette Varna capable of extinguishing this robust carriage of his, and to die of hunger or thirst required more concentration than he’d been able to muster. Every time his attention wandered, he would find his belly full of turnips and spring water. And in the aching solitude there, his attention did nothing but wander.

Finally, they arrive at the gates of the city, and Bruno sees the gate and wall are much smaller than they’d looked from a distance. Not more than four meters high, possibly as little as three. The men upon the walls, with their burnished iron helmets, their rifles and bayonets, are quite a bit shorter than the grizzled old men who’ve escorted him here.

“Ho there,” Radmer calls up to them. “We require an audience with the Furies.”

“Oh wonder! It’s a band ’f Olders,” one of the guards calls down contemptuously. “We’n’t seen y’r like here since th’ troubles begun.”

“There ha’e al’ys been troubles,” Radmer calls back, with a rising contempt of his own. “My name is Radmer, and you will open this gate.”

“Y’all c’n have audience with my arse, Mr. Radmer.”

“E’en if your arse were a magistrate, m’boy, I would have to decline. I will see no guard, no City Mother, not even a senator. I’m here to speak with the Furies.”

Bruno finds it difficult to follow this exchange, for accent and inflection so clot the guard’s voice that his might almost be another language entirely. This “Radmer” has spoken Queendom-standard, Tongan-inflected English up to this point, but with the city guard he speaks in the city dialect. Flawlessly, as near as Bruno can detect.

“He doesn’t know you,” Lyman says to Radmer, in Queendom-standard tones of quiet indignation. Then, to the man on the wall, “Groveling in the dust is where you should be, maggot. This is General Emeritus Radmer, who turned back the armies of Red Antonio and saved this pathetic city of yours, when your grandparents’ grandparents could not. More than that, you glob of phlegm, he carved the very world upon which you now stand, whose air you now stink up with your putrid excuses.”

The man is not impressed. “Y’all Olders ’re all Gross High Mucky-Muck of someorother, close as I can figure. And ’f this man built the world, then he be a god, and should need no ’sistance o’ mine.”

“Good point,” Lyman says, sounding approving for the first time this day. “You have wit enough to call us Olders. Have wit enough, then, to realize we request your help for the sake of decorum. And we’ll open the gate, if you will not.”

Radmer holds up a hand at waist level—a gesture which commands silence. And Lyman—reluctantly—obeys.

“We dare not tarry out here,” Radmer says to the guards. “I bring with me an item of great strategic value, and the Glimmer King’s scouts have found us once already. You do know they’re here, yes? Soon the hills will be lousy with them. If you turn us away, O morbid child, I daresay you won’t last the week.”

Glimmer King. Is that what they’re calling Bruno’s son these days? His only child, his greatest error? If indeed Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui is (a) alive, and (b) responsible for all this mad suffering—Bruno has heard only Radmer’s suspicions on the subject. But those were enough to draw him here, to this unreal place. A father’s disappointment—and atonement—run as deep as his love.

“If he turns us away he won’t last the minute,” Lyman says, drawing his sword. And a sense washes over Bruno yet again, that he is living in some hell of his own creation, for the sword in Lyman’s hand could well be a figment of fevered dreams. Ancient, yes. Sharpened and sealed with a film of epitaxial diamond. The weapon has a wicked point, and a basket hilt to protect the wielder’s hand, and in between there is… nothing at all. Nothing to parry, to grasp, to see flashing in a deadly arc. In showing it off to him, Lyman had called it an “air foil,” and had declined to estimate the number of deaths it had inflicted at his hand, and the hands of other soldiers before him.

Ploughshares into swords, alas. That wasn’t what mass-stabilized wormholes were for.

But Bruno’s musings are cut short when someone up on the wall cries “Bandits!” and hurls down a wooden spear tipped with barbs of iron. Of course it bounces harmlessly off the marble-gray cloak of one of the Olders—Brian, his name is—who picks it up quietly, examines it for a moment, and then breaks it calmly over his knee.

And suddenly everyone is fighting.

“Inviz” was mainly a fashion statement in Bruno’s day, one of many geostat patterns that seemed to hold stationary while your clothes and body swirled around them. In set theory terms, inviz was the special case of geostat in which the display pattern matched the background pattern. But in the hands of an artful dresser it became something more, something beautiful. A complement to the other nonspectral colors—superblack and superreflector, wellwood and glowhoo, animorphic and animimetic and the ever-popular c0unt rs ns. How he misses those! How he misses the fops and dandies who strutted around in them, with hardly a care!

But on the wellcloth cloaks of Sydney Lyman’s band, stealth inviz is just another instrument of murder. The Olders lift their hoods and vanish, or nearly vanish, leaving only smudges in the air and dancing shadows on the ground. They must be wearing speed boots and wall-hugging gecko gloves as well, for in what seems no time at all, the air is shimmering on top of the wall itself, and the guards there are dropping their weapons, dropping their helmets, staggering and falling in disarray. Struggling vainly with unseen assailants.

“Harm no one!” Radmer commands, and it occurs to Bruno to wonder whether he’s speaking to his own men, or to the city guards, or to the world of Lune itself, with a frustration that borders on despair. Here is a man, thinks Bruno, who knows combat all too well, and loves it not at all. He feels a moment of pity, for the earnest young man who had long ago dreamed himself a builder, just as Bruno had dreamed himself a physicist. But the moment passes, for this whole world is like a nightmare, and there’s a great deal Bruno doesn’t know. He’ll take nothing for granted, and he feels—perhaps foolishly—that nothing can truly surprise him, or move him. He’s beyond all that.

Old-fashioned cast iron bells are ringing up on the wall now—alarms from the guards close enough to observe the fray but not close enough to be caught in it. Still, the gate—a simple affair of welded steel bars and plates—swings slowly open on squealing hinges, and Radmer strides casually into the city. Not waiting to be summoned like a dog, Bruno trails close behind.

The city within could have been clipped straight from Bruno’s Old Girona childhood: an environment of stone and brick and heat-trapping colored glass. A cluster of hundred-story towers stands anomalously at the center, ringed by artful moats and bridges, but few of the other buildings are more than six floors high, and (per Radmer’s warning) none seem enlivened. Between them, streets of diamond and cobblestone and muddy gravel slope gradually down toward the seashore.

And on the streets are crowds of dwarfish, big-headed men and women dressed in drab spectral colors. Fluttering gray shadows cling beneath their chins and eyelids, the undersides of their arms. Reactive skin pigment—an adaptation generally used for shedding heat. These people are Eridanians, he thinks at first, but on the heels of that he notices other engineered features as well: the six-fingered, dual-thumbed hands of Sirius, a hint of the thick, trollish skins of Barnardean extremists. Also the occasional head of translucent blue-green hair—a photosynthetic adaptation that had started right here in Sol System, under the very nose of a disapproving Queen Tamra.

At the moment, these strange, patchwork people are scurrying back or fleeing outright, their eyes wide on the opened gate. “Olders!” some of them cry.

“What are they?” Bruno asks quietly.

“They call themselves ‘human beings,’” Radmer answers without irony. “They’re the people of Lune.”

“Ah. Well. What do they call us, then? Olders?”

“Or bandits,” Radmer agrees, “or indeceased, which is an unkind word indeed. But our numbers have faded over the centuries—especially here in Imbria, which is a hard nation to inhabit in secret. They sometimes hunt us, so we try to keep out of sight.”

“Some of us do,” says Sidney Lyman, materializing suddenly at Bruno’s side. He glares pointedly at Radmer. “Others don’t ever learn, no matter how much misfortune they bring down upon the rest of us. These ‘humans’ go through spurts of curiosity and outreach, seeking us out as historical reference works, which is fine except that it lays the groundwork for the next round of bloodletting. Know thy enemy, eh?

“And of course it’s worst for our own children. Immorbidity doesn’t breed through; if they stay with us, we watch them grow old and die. We’re like statues to them, unbending, wearing down on a timescale they can scarce perceive. But if they join the mainstream of human society, they do so as tall, five-fingered freaks. There aren’t even ghettos for them, not anymore, so the freak show never ends. Many of them do become bandits, in the times when relations are poor. And our dear Radmer here is always stirring things up.”

“Was always,” Radmer says. “It’s a habit I’d long abandoned.”

“Until these lucky days,” Lyman answers, with more than a hint of bitterness. “Now you’ve gone all the way to Varna, braving radiation and vacuum to bring this… gift to the Imbrians. How very noble of you.”

“I like to think so, Sid. Really. If this civilization falls, what do you think will succeed it? Another Queendom? Another dark age? Do you really want to find out? Most of the time, the people of this city give little thought to our existence, except as characters in ancient songs.”

“But now they need us, in your opinion,” Lyman mutters. “Even if their own opinions disagree.”

“Yes,” Radmer says simply. Then, “I asked you to bring me this far, Sid, and you’ve done it. I won’t ask any more. In fact, I’ll invite you to leave before things get any worse.”

“And abandon you here for lynching?”

Radmer laughs humorlessly. “I’ve been here a hundred times, Sid, and they haven’t managed it yet. I’ll be fine.”

“Meaning no offense, sir, but I think we’ll wait here a minute and see what happens.”

“Hmm. Well. Suit yourself.”

And presently, as if called forth by this exchange, a new set of guards appear—first a dozen, then two dozen, then a hundred strong. They’re dressed all in yellow, and in addition to rifles and swords they carry, here and there, the elongated wormhole pole-arms which Lyman has called “air pikes.” A few of them, Bruno notes with surprise, are quite obviously female.

“Ah, the Dolceti,” Lyman says, in almost welcoming tones.

“This is more serious,” Conrad murmurs to Bruno. “The nation’s elite guard, trained in blindsight through the channels of fear. Don’t underestimate them.”

“I hadn’t,” Bruno says, meaning it. He has no idea what any of these terms mean, or what anyone here might be capable of. Blindsight? Channels of fear? The name “Dolceti” itself is suggestive; it’s about as unTongan a word as human mouths can utter, and assuming it descends from some species of Latin or Greek, it might mean “sweet” or “pleasing.” It might also mean “pain” or “chop” or “deceit,” or even “whale.”

“You lot are under arrest,” says one of the Dolceti—not obviously marked as a leader but certainly carrying himself that way. His dialect is not quite as impenetrable as the wall guards’ had been, though it does sound forced, as though he’s dredging up some ancient tongue he’d learned and half forgotten.

“Y’all near c’rect,” Conrad Mursk says back to him, in what sounds to Bruno, again, like flawless Lunish. “We’re t’be escorted to the Furies.”

“On whose authority?” the Dolceti wants to know.

“Mine,” Radmer answers calmly. “As Third Protector of Imbria.”

That sends a ripple of surprise through the guards. “You’re Radmer?”

“I am. Are you the captain here? Is Petro dead already?”

“Petro retired twenty years ago, when the haunted towers came down. I’m the captain, yes.”

“Well, Captain,” says Radmer, “I’m afraid we don’t have much time, for the enemy’s scouts are in yonder hills already, and will soon pin you against the sea. Come now: close the gate and do as I ask.”

At that, the Dolceti captain moves with amazing swiftness, drawing a short sword—an ordinary one, though an air foil hangs at his side as well. In an eyeblink, he leaps forward to lay the iron blade across Radmer’s neck. “I take no orders from—”

But Radmer has stepped aside, not quickly but at just the right moment, with the ease of long practice. Centuries of practice—millennia. He’s out of reach, untouchable. Then, with no greater urgency, he tosses a nearly full canteen at another Dolceti, whose rifle is aimed exactly between Radmer’s eyes. The guard doesn’t flinch, but he does swat the projectile aside with a viper-quick motion, letting his rifle waver for a second. Which gives Radmer enough time to draw his blitterstick without seeming to hurry.

Intended mainly for use against robots, a blitterstick—or blitterstaff, or blitter-anything—is an ungainly and rather cruel weapon to turn against human flesh. Rarely lethal, its shifting wellstone patterns—caustic and thermally abusive, alive with pseudoatom disassembly brigades—leave puckers and burns and worse disfigurements which, in a medically impoverished environment like this one, must surely be permanent. But Radmer’s only other weapon is a pistol, far more lethal.

What happens next strikes Bruno as something like a chess opening: no one attacks, but everyone glares and sidesteps, aims and tenses, lining up for a kill. The drop of a feather will set them off, but neither side is crass or undisciplined enough to engage. Not first, not in cold blood. The Dolceti outnumber the Olders ten to one, though, and from the looks on their faces they seem to think it will be enough. To penetrate the diamond weave beneath a soft Queendom skin? To shatter the brickmail and impervium of faxborn Queendom-era bones? Probably not, but they can still drag a man down and pinch his nose shut until he smothers. And they seemed prepared to.

“Always a pleasure, coming here,” Radmer says. “The Imbrians of Timoch are such a fine, appreciative people.”

For a moment, Bruno toys with the idea of unveiling his true identity. Perhaps the shock value will defuse this situation, and get the Olders inside without bloodshed. Then again, he would be a figure as remote in the Imbrians’ past as Aristotle and Alexander were in his own. Would they believe him? Would they recognize his name, or understand its burden of significance? Would they even care?

He is spared any further thought on the matter when a voice from atop the wall calls out “Glints!” in a tone that registers panic across all possible dialects. Bruno turns, looking back across the sloping plains he and Radmer have just crossed at considerable peril. And indeed, yes, the enemy is still at work out there: he sees the unmistakable glints and flashes of sunlight on superreflective impervium. Less than five kilometers away. Less than two.

Behind him, a ripple of concern passes through the Dolceti.

“You must attack,” Radmer says, simply and without fear. “They’re only scouts, but they’re right here, barely a rifle’s reach from your capital gates. And if they report back, the Glimmer King will know I’ve been to Varna and back in a sphere of brass. He’ll know I came here afterward. Assuming he doesn’t know it already.”

“Varna is in outer space,” the Dolceti captain replies, as if to a child’s bad joke.

“Aye,” says Radmer. “I had to launch from Tillspar, over Highrock Divide. All I can say is, thank God for pulleys. You might be interested in my catapult, by the way; properly cocked it can bombard any point on this planette’s surface.”

“You lie,” says a voice in the crowd somewhere.

“Do I? For what purpose?” Radmer’s tone is patient. “The enemy is that way, friend, and if you swear this man’s safety”—he points at Bruno—“upon all that is holy and dear, then I will fight at your side to defend these ill-forged walls.”

The captain is angry but not stupid; he considers the offer, considers the evidence before him. “What’s special about this man?”

“Wisdom,” Radmer answers. “And if you will not pledge his safe conduct to the Furies, then you’ll have two enemies, and no friends, and soon no country to defend.”

“Very diplomatic,” the captain grumbles, then steps forward to offer his hand. “I’m Bordi, grandson of Petro.”

The two men shake on it, prompting Sidney Lyman to mutter, “You’ll be the death of me, General. But I’ll not let you enter this fight by yourself.”

“Nor I,” says the Older named Brian, and the others grunt in assent.

“Natan,” says Bordi, gesturing sharply to one of the taller Dolceti. “Stay here, you and Zuq. Guard this Older, this font of wisdom, until I return.”

And with that, the Dolceti are off and running in a hooting, jabbering mob that quickly settles into three perfect V formations, like flights of geese. Not to be outdone, Lyman’s Olders follow on their springy well-leather boots, quickly overtaking the Dolceti, leaping right over the “human beings’” oversized heads and dashing out in front, to form a smaller, faster V of their own.

“Be safe,” Radmer says to Bruno, not in a kindly way but as a command. Then he, too, is sprinting toward the enemy.

Bruno still carries Radmer’s binoculars, and they’re of ancient design, wellstone lenses and all. He lifts them to his eyes now, and can clearly resolve the enemy squad: another group of twenty, moving rapidly toward the city on feet so dainty and small that a baby girl’s ballet slippers could easily fit them. They carry no energy weapons or projectile throwers, and except for the swords, and the black iron boxes affixed to the left sides of their gleaming faceless heads, they could easily pass for Queendom-era household robots. Valets, yes. Scullery maids. But already Bruno knows, from bitter experience, how fast and strong and remorseless these impervium soldiers really are. Delicate killers, bent on some demented form of world domination for this unseen Glimmer King.

“If ’ts metal they want,” says the Dolceti named Natan, “I say let ’em have it. Right through the ocular sensors and out through the box. Bap! I want to be out there, old man, not wiping your withered old nose.”

“Your captain must have great faith in you,” Bruno says, trying for some reason to be kind to this man, who seems little more than a figment of his senile imagination. Thus far he’s been driven forward by curiosity alone—a desire to see this thing through to the end, like a play. None of it feels real.

“Fester these robots,” Natan spits. He might use the word “devils” or “child molesters” in milder tones.

“They were once our servants,” Bruno says to him, because he’s not sure Natan even knows this.

“Really?” says the younger Dolceti guard, Zuq. He’s shorter, with light green hair underneath his yellow cap. “Well thank you very much. We’ve nothing but your Older mess to live in, and this really contributes. Thanks for the Shattering, too, and the Stormlands. And for Murdered Earth while we’re at it.”

“You’re welcome,” Bruno says dryly. His grief burned out a long, long time ago, and if he starts bogging himself down now in pointless guilt, then where will it lead? Whom will it benefit? “If you had seen the Queendom in its heyday you’d understand. It seemed worth any price. Truthfully, it still does.”

Yes, and there is a damning indictment, for he and Tamra had built, in the words of Rodenbeck, “a house of collapsium and straw.” And they knew it at the time. How could they not? It took a lifetime of determined self-deception to ignore the generation problem, the population problem, the limits of mass and energy and physical law. What had they been thinking?

But then, in all fairness to himself, what could he, Bruno de Towaji, have done differently? He didn’t create the Queendom; he was conscripted by it. And he hadn’t known—couldn’t have imagined—how thoroughly his early discoveries would rewrite the human story. Once collapsium was out of Pandora’s hands, into the ham fists of Prometheus, Bruno had been as hard-pressed as anyone just to keep up. Perhaps if he’d guessed the future better, or raised a gentler child, or succeeded in his later research…

“Well,” he says, suddenly glummer, “if my apology helps, then be assured you have it. We’ve left some terrible messes behind.”

“I can’t understand your prattle, old man,” says Zuq.

“Maybe you should shut up,” Natan suggests.

And in spite of everything, Bruno finds his neck growing warm, for no one has spoken to him like that since his earliest days at Tamra’s court, and rarely then. Even the megalomaniac Marlon Sykes had been polite—often deferential—toward his fellow declarant-philander. Well, usually.

He waves a hand at the yellow uniforms, and in his best professorial tone he advises, “Overconfidence is the chief failing of elites, boy. The robots will have no trouble finding you in these canary suits.”

“We don’t hide from our enemies,” says Zuq. “Our enemies hide from us. That’s not overconfidence, it’s psychology. And my rank is ‘squad leader,’ not ‘boy.’ This is Deceant Natan.”

“Well,” says Bruno, “‘old man’ isn’t my rank, either. I won’t invoke ancient titles that mean nothing here, but I was fighting robots when the Queendom itself was young.”

And so he was. They’d made him king for it! But the Dolceti’s point is taken nonetheless: he isn’t a king here, nor a soldier, nor even a guest. If anything, he’s a sort of commandeered munition, hauled from the mothballs of history and pressed back into service. He can’t really imagine what knowledge Radmer thinks he possesses, to turn the tide of this war. His Royal Override has already failed to halt the enemy’s advances, though in fairness to Radmer it did give them pause. They do carry within them some vague memory of the old allegiances.

Bruno raises the binoculars again, and sees to his mild surprise that Lyman’s Olders have already engaged the enemy, with Radmer and the canary-colored Dolceti not far behind. The robots fight well—they fight perfectly, with the fluidity of dancers and the cool precision of clockwork. Their swords flash in elaborate sweeping arcs, as if spelling out glyphs in the afternoon air. But oddly enough, the Dolceti are faster. And the Olders are certainly more cunning, and anyway the robots are—for once!—badly outnumbered.

One of them manages to raise an antenna—the robotic equivalent of a scream for help—but it’s quickly cut down by the swords of human beings. The mast is a telescoping wand of impervium, theoretically unbreakable, but it isn’t all one piece, and everyone seems to know where to hack, where the vulnerable joints are. Meanwhile, the box on the robot’s head explodes in a hail of metal bullets. The other robots are down just as quickly, and the only casualty Bruno can see is a single Dolceti guard, holding her throat while a spray of blood jets between her fingers, turning her yellow tunic bright red. She looks calm, but she’ll be dead within the minute.

And Bruno takes this as a bad omen indeed, for if twenty robots can strike a blow against the elite guard of this world’s strongest nation—with Queendom technology assisting, no less!—then what will happen when the robots return in their hundreds of thousands? In their millions? Radmer has been right all along: without a miracle, the city of Timoch doesn’t stand a chance.

Damn Conrad Mursk anyway, he can’t help thinking. This isn’t the first time the boy has swept into Bruno’s life, turning everything on its head. Even in the days of the Queendom, Mursk had always had an uncanny talent for trouble.