Necropolis Empire

Book : Twilight Imperium

by Tim Pratt

Genres: Media Tie-In; Space Exploration; Space Opera

Synopsis

The key to controlling the galaxy is hidden on a distant planet, and interplanetary powers will do anything to unlock its secrets, in this epic space opera from the best-selling game, Twilight Imperium Bianca Xing has spent a lifetime on a provincial planet, dreaming of travelling the stars. When her planet is annexed by the Barony of Letnev, Bianca finds herself being taken into custody, told that she’s special – the secret daughter of a brilliant scientist, hidden away on a remote planet for her own safety. But the truth about Bianca is stranger. There are secrets hidden in her genetic code that could have galaxy altering consequences. Driven by an incredible yearning and assisted by the fearsome Letnev Captain, Dampierre, Bianca must follow her destiny to the end, even if it leads to places that are best left forgotten.

Release date: August 3, 2021

Publisher: Aconyte

Print pages: 352

Sample

PROLOGUE

On a scientific outpost clinging to an icy moon, orbiting a world of mud, jungle, and abominable light, Doctor Archambelle worked to change the galaxy.

She gazed at her screen, at an array of images found in scores of archaeological sites – including the most recent, in a crumbling metal temple on the planet below. Isolated glyphs and symbols lit up on the screen as her system collated, cross-referenced, and attempted translations. They’d found these same ideograms and symbols over and over, in samples taken from planets, moons, and technological ruins scattered throughout the galaxy. None of these symbols belonged to any known culture, but they clearly belonged to one culture – something ancient, that had spread throughout all of inhabited space, and perhaps beyond, an incalculably long time ago.

Over and over in these fragments, Archambelle had found references to a secret world, a hidden place, a paradise, a promised land: Ixth.

That was a place she had heard of before, in the prophecies of her own people, the Letnev, who imagined that paradise as a hollow world full of caverns crammed with weapons and treasure. But Ixth appeared in the legends of most of the other species in the galaxy, too. For the Muaat, Ixth was a place of volcanic forges and endless geological riches. To the Hylar, it was a teeming temperate sea, with dormant alien factories waiting in the depths. To the humans, Ixth was all cities of gold and fountains of liquor. Every culture had their own idea about the nature of that paradise, but all agreed that anyone who found it would be granted immeasurable wealth and power. If everyone had stories about that place, however varied, those stories had to be rooted in some fundamental truth, didn’t they?

If Archambelle’s theory was right, Ixth was much more than a story. It was the homeworld of an ancient race, almost totally forgotten, but once rulers of the galaxy. Those people were gone, but she believed their treasures remained, and that even the memory of those treasures was great enough to inspire songs, stories, and prophecies all these millennia later.

There had to be a way to find Ixth. Archambelle would be the one to–

Her computer purred, and several items on the screen rushed to the forefront and fitted themselves together into a whole, though their source materials came from millions of kilometers apart. There were small sections missing, yes, but there was enough for her to discern a star map, and a spot marked, a world, could this be Ixth? Surely it couldn’t be that simple?

She ran the image against the astronomical database and found the coordinates. To her surprise, the fragments depicted a known system, though not a very interesting one, and the planet was definitely not Ixth. That world was nobody’s promised land. It was, if anything, a planet that anyone with sense would try to get awayfrom.

It was something, though. A clue. A stepping stone.

The computer hummed again, translating another reference to this unimpressive little world: “the key to the key”.

That was promising. “I’ll step on you soon, little world,” Archambelle said, and went to call in the necessary favors.

 

CHAPTER 1

The night before the aliens came, Bianca Xing stood in the south meadow and gazed up at the dark. As always, her eyes were drawn to one particular part of the night sky: a blank space at the center of an irregular triangle formed by three stars. That seemingly arbitrary point drifted around the sky as the seasons progressed – dipping low, rising high, sometimes hidden behind the horizon – but since she’d been old enough to look up, something about those three stars and the dark they surrounded had fascinated her. After nearly twenty years here on Darit, her whole life defined by cliffs and meadows and forests (and the flock of caprids, horns and dirty wool and all), she was no closer to understanding why that spot in the sky drew her attention.

“Maybe because it’s the most faraway place I can imagine,” she said aloud. “A place so far away even the stars they have there aren’t visible from here.” The wind blew her long white-blonde hair back from her brow in a way she hoped looked romantic and tragic, even though no one was watching. Bianca had a dramatic streak, to the bemusement of her parents, and was known to wear a flowing nightgown and walk the fields at night while lamenting the state of her life. She was too self-aware to do so entirely seriously, but it helped to pass the time.

There was no real danger in her nightly wanders. Predators were kept out by the scramble-fence – meant to protect the caprid flock, but equally good at protecting her – and the nearest human was kilometers away. Even that was just Torvald at the mech farm, and he didn’t mean her any harm. He was so old he couldn’t chase her across the fields anyway, with ill intent or otherwise.

Nobody ever chased her across the fields, with murder orromance on their minds. She was very put out by it. On her family’s rare visits to town, to trade or attend the monthly Halemeetings, she sometimes saw other village youths making eyes at her, but there weren’t any she wanted to make eyes back at, except maybe Mallory Zeen (her biceps!) or Compton Sadler (his eyelashes!), but they were already dating each other, and rich besides, not a farm girl on the outskirts like her. Bianca steadfastly ignored the occasional flirtations from the sons and daughters and androgynes of the outskirters who visited the farm; she’d given her neighbor Grandly a little too much encouragement one summer when she was bored, and he’d clung to her like a tick for ages. Grandly was nice enough, and both sets of parents thought they’d make a good match, but Grandly’s life was just like Bianca’s, give or take a biteweed patch or a bigger root cellar. She wanted more out of life, not more of the same.

Her mother, Willen, said she set her sights too high: “You’re always looking at the stars, Bianca, but there are wonderful things down here all around your feet.” Her father, Keon, would just puff his pipe and say, “Mmmm, ayuh.” Parents.

Bianca was about to turn twenty, though, and the hints had become more explicit lately. She needed to figure out what she was doing with her life, because mooning around in the fields every night wasn’t sustainable, even if she did always make sure to do her chores first. Her options were just all horrible. Pair-bond with Grandly? No, thank you. Go work for Torvald at the scrapyard? Better, but still too small. Steal a sack full of food and set off to seek her fortune? Much better, but she could walk the circumference of Darit and never get any closer to the stars, where she really wanted to be. She’d read stories about space travel, but no one on Darit could do it.

A new light appeared in the sky. At first, Bianca thought it was a stray reflection from one of the orbital mirrors. Darit was a rocky, frigid, inhospitable place, but the long-dead original colonists had taken steps to make regions of the planet habitable, chiefly orbital mirrors that focused light to raise the surface temperature in dozens of zones. There were also the perpetually floating rainmakers, bulbous pale-gray shapes that drifted high above, collected water, and stimulated the clouds to make rain. Old Torvald speculated that there were other ancient technologies at work – atmospheric engines disguised as mountains, carbon sequestration devices in the guise of trees, buried soil-enriching technology – but who knew for sure? The ancients had possessed great power, but no one knew the extents or the limits, or why they’d bothered to make parts of an iceball like Darit habitable in the first place.

She squinted and decided the light couldn’t be a mirror-glint, because it was moving too fast. Just a shooting star, then? No, because its streak slowed and stopped, and it became a fixed point, not twinkling. It looked like a star now, but Bianca knew every star in her part of the sky, and she wasn’t fooled.

She stared at the light for a long time, but it didn’t do anything interesting. Maybe it was a ship? A real, actual starship? Torvald had pieces of what he claimed were ships at the mech farm, but those were broken, rusting, and cracked. This starship would be sleek, shimmering, and powerful, like those in the stories.

Maybe it was an envoy from the emperor of the galaxy! She’d read about the empire in books scavenged from the vault under the Halemeeting hall, and old Torvald had a lot of stories about wars and battles and intrigue, though they didn’t add up to a consistent history, as he was the first to admit. What could the emperor want with a place like this anyway? Maybe Darit had some rare resource the empire needed – there were empty mines everywhere, so perhaps there was an ore you couldn’t obtain anywhere else? Or maybe a rare plant, or perhaps the caprids were the source of some miracle drug that granted immortality, and the emperor was going to build a spaceport here, and bring in new people from all over the galaxy.

Or, maybe they’d come for her. That was the start of an old fantasy, one she’d refined carefully over the years: she was secretly a princess, hidden away on a backwater planet for her own safety, but, when the time came, she’d be rescued and restored to the glory of her birthright.

It wasn’t that farfetched. Bianca was adopted, and her real parents were unknown: that much was true. Her father had found her in the forest when she was a baby, squalling and helpless, and her parents had raised her as their own ever since. The truth of her origins was the mystery at the center of her life – in a small community like hers, the appearance of an unknown child was genuinely baffling. What if she was secretly the emperor’s daughter, born of a mistress, and the emperor’s wife would have killed her, so her father sent her away to this remote planet where she’d be safe, because no one would ever look for her here? Maybe that new light in the sky belonged to a ship full of assassins, come to murder her before she could take the throne?

Bianca frowned. No, too dark. Better: the emperor’s mean wife was dead, and the emperor was sick, and since there were no other heirs, they needed her, because without her presence on the throne, the empire would crumble! They were here to whisk her away on an imperial pleasure ship, to dress her in shimmering gowns, to crown her with rare jewels, and to teach her proper manners and comportment. When she landed on the imperial homeworld – she forgot what Torvald called it, Mehibatel Rocks or something? – her loyal subjects would shout her name and scatter flowers at her feet. She’d get to meet her real parents then, her mother promoted from mistress to queen (or empress, or whatever), the emperor recovered from his illness but ready to embrace his long-lost daughter, and teach her the ways of battle and diplomacy and culture and–

A caprid, shaggy and blunt-horned, head-butted Bianca in the rump and bleated at her.

Bianca sighed, patted the caprid on the head, and trudged back to the farmhouse, the new light in the sky already forgotten as thoughts of tomorrow morning’s chores filled her mind.

•••

The next day Bianca rolled out of her small bed at dawn and lit the house fires. Her mother had done that for most of Bianca’s life, but Willen was getting older and didn’t move as well as she used to, and Bianca was keenly aware that she herself was aging out of being a responsibility and into being a burden, so helping out was more important than ever.

Her father emerged while she was heating the water, and kissed her on top of her head, bending down to do it. Bianca was the shortest person in her family by nearly half a meter. That was just one of the things that marked her out as a child of fortune rather than blood: she also had hair so pale it was nearly white, compared to her mother’s bushy red exuberance and her father’s curly black; her skin was golden and unlike either her mother’s paleness or her father’s deep brown; and while Willen and Keon were both broad and thick-limbed, Bianca was more petite, though you couldn’t spend your life working on a farm without putting on muscle. Her mother had blue eyes, and her father’s were a hypnotic green, while hers were so dark they were nearly black, and – well, she could go on.

The sense that she didn’t fit in with her family was just the start of her outsider feelings. The people on this part of Darit were a varied bunch, but almost all of them were taller than her, and heartier-looking, and she’d often heard people say she looked “sickly” , though she’d never been sick a day in her life. In the books she read, people with unusual qualities were objects of speculation and attention, but around here, people just frowned and looked at her like she was a problem someone else should work on solving. That was when they looked at all, which wasn’t often.

“Could you go over to Torvald’s and get a new power cell for us today?” her father said.

“He doesn’t have anything new,” Bianca muttered, warming up a pot of grain mush for family breakfast.

“New to us is good enough,” Keon said affably. “The well pump is drawing water real sluggish, and the lights in the barn are getting dim. We can limp along a few more days on the cell we have, I reckon, but I’d like a new one on hand when the lights go out.”

Bianca sighed and said, “The journey will be long, and perilous, but if my family needs me, I’ll brave the–”

“Much appreciated.”

Her father was impossible to annoy. That didn’t stop Bianca from trying. She didn’t mind going to the mech farm, honestly. It would be a nice break from the routine farm work. But it was the principle of the thing: all chores were abhorrent, all errands were wastes of her time, and her whole life on the farm just an obstacle standing in the way of… well. That was the problem. Her parents would have supported most anything she wanted to do. But what was there todo? She just couldn’t bear to settle down with Grandly and have some kids and spend her life feeding babies and caprids. Not yet. There had to be more to life than this, or she wouldn’t feel like she’d lived a life at all.

She put on a short yellow dress – her mother grumbled that those were for Halemeetings, and weren’t practical for farm work, but Bianca could at least have style, couldn’t she? She put on trousers and boots underneath the dress, and added a dark brown canvas jacket because it was a little crisp today, which sort of spoiled the light effect she was going for, but again: it was the principle of the thing.

Bianca had a bicycle with nice fat tires for getting around the property, and there were trails that would take her all the way to town if she wanted, but the mech farm was on the other side of a few kilometers of uneven uphill ground, perched on a bluff overlooking the bay, and since she didn’t have mechanized transport, the easiest way to get there was on foot.

She set out, a walking stick in one hand, good for fending off bandits, she liked to imagine. Not that there were any bandits hereabouts. In books, cutthroat marauders lived in the forest, but anything that tried to live in the forest here would be lucky to survive a week. After dark, the nightclimbers came out, and they’d carry off a person just as promptly as any other prey. Even during the day, there were dangers in those woods. Old things were buried in the forest, ancient machines from Darit’s mysterious past, and some of them weren’t buried very deep. Bianca had grown up hearing stories of glowing stones, shining pillars, and buzzing wires twined around trees like ivy, all remnants of an older age. Some of those remnants would kill you faster than a nightclimber would… or much slower, which was worse.

The sky was mostly blue that day, with a few fat clouds and one rainmaker drifting aimlessly along. The sun was sending out light but not much in the way of real heat, and of Darit’s three moons, only a pale crescent of Child was visible, Father and Mother hidden by the horizon. Torvald said he’d once visited a distant valley where the people called the moons Mum and Pop and Babe. How silly was that?

She followed the trail over a ridge and paused at the top to take in the view. Off to the south, she could just see the jeweled sparkle of the sea, its true vastness hidden in distant haze. To the west, the spire of the Halemeeting hall was the only visible sign of her village, though the road to the next nearest settlement was that way too. To the east and north, there was only the forest. From here it was a brown blur, but up close it was a dense world of towering trees and twining vines (and the delicious mushrooms the brave, the foolish, or the well-armed went in to harvest). The northern part of the forest was less menacing, since the foresters picked away at the edges there, but the eastern expanse was purely wild.

Bianca turned and looked back the way she’d come. Her house was there, surrounded by fields and pasture. Smoke rose from the fire she’d lit. In the nearest meadow, the tiny speck of her father walked around their caprid flock. The animals made milk and they made wool and, every once in a while, they made meat, but mainly what they made was dung and noise and mud.

Bianca wanted so desperately to get out of the mud. There was no mud among the stars.

She continued along the ridgeline until she reached the dry streambed that led her at last to the proper trail, almost a road, that meandered from Torvald’s gates down to the town. The last part of the road was steep, though, and in poor repair. She’d asked Torvald once, “Why don’t you fix it? Surely you could cobble together a road-building mech.”

“Ah,” he’d said, “but since the road is bad, and people can’t get carts or wagons up here, that means they usually rent one of my cargo mechs to carry things to and from their transport, and that’s good for old Torvald, innit?”

She’d snorted, knowing he was full of it – half the people he dealt with bought on credit that Torvald wasn’t too zealous about collecting, and many of the others paid him with a portion of the harvests his mechs made so much easier. He just liked pretending to be a canny trader sitting on a hoard of treasure. In a way, he was as prone to fancy as Bianca was. That was probably why they got along so well.

She stood before the tall gates of the mech farm, made of welded-together scrap, and pounded on the metal with her walking stick.

“State your name and business,” the gate said, its mechanical voice harsh and grating.

“My name is Empress Bianca, and I’m here to kill the old man.”

“Enter,” the gate said. The small door set into the left gate clicked unlocked for her. The big gates only opened when something reallylarge had to come in or out.

“I mean it,” she said. “I am here on a mission of murder.”

“Enter,” the gate said again, this time buzzing afterward, as if for emphasis. During business hours, the gate opened and closed for visitors, but that voice didn’t actually understand or care what you said. Torvald said he’d read about intelligent machines, but there weren’t any of those on Darit, and he didn’t know if those stories were any more real than the tales of forest demons or alien sorcerers or sea monsters he’d collected over the years.

Once inside, Bianca gazed around the chaos of the mech farm to see if there was anything new. Mostly she just saw piles of scrap junk, some merely as tall as her, others three times as high, all waiting to be repaired or repurposed or melted down. Some of those piles had been waiting for decades. There were wheels, and rods, and sheets of metal; mysterious cylinders, and spheres, and cubes; and messy coils of wire, cable, and conduit. The predominant colors were gray and dull silver, but there were flashes of bright paint or peculiar iridescence. There were bits of things that might have been automated transports or even spacecraft, once upon a time, but they were all jumbled in with iron bedframes and rusty farm implements, metal drums and busted appliances. Grandly’s family had a working icebox, courtesy of Torvald; that had halfway tempted Bianca to accept Grandly’s last proposal, during the hottest part of the summer.

There were also countless busted-up mechs, ranging from ones half her size to behemoths as big as her house. Once upon a time, Torvald said, Darit had been a mining planet, a colony of the empire, and there’d been legions of mechs to work the seams and serve the inhabitants. Of course, that was so long ago nobody even knew if the empire still existed, and most people didn’t know it had ever existed in the first place. There were still remnants aplenty buried all over, though, and Torvald’s family had been experts at salvage and repair for generations. People found things in their fields sometimes, and more often in the forest (when they dared to venture in), and brought those curiosities to Torvald for trade. Bianca had earned enough money for a few dresses over the years with her own lucky finds while stone-picking in the fields – just bits of colored glass and mud-packed springs and fist-sized bolts, but Torvald could get them shiny and useful again.

Torvald emerged from his shack, wiping his greasy hands on his perpetually stained overalls. He grinned, his wrinkled face lighting up. “Bee! Did you bring me something nice?”

“I brought myself. What’s nicer than that?”

“I’d trade you for a broken rheostat, but I suppose you’ll do, if that’s all you’ve got.” Torvald had never pair-bonded or had children of his own – rumors were that exposure to some of the more exotic items in the depths of the mech farm had made him infertile, but Bianca was pretty sure he’d just never bothered – and she wondered, sometimes, what would happen to this place when he eventually died. He’d pretty much told her she could sign on as his apprentice if she wanted, and that was currently at the top of a mental list titled “The Least Terrible of All the Terrible Options I Hate,” just above “Run Away from Home” and “Pair-Bond with Grandly And At Least Have Ice All Summer.” (Running away from home would have been higher up, but this habitable zone was only so big, and the places she could reach without transport and cold-weather gear to navigate the tundra in between weren’t much different from her own.)

“What can I do for you, if you didn’t come bearing gifts?” he asked.

“Pa says our power cell is running down. I came to see how bad you’d cheat us for a new one.”

He rolled a toothpick around in his mouth. “Oh, only medium bad. One of the foresters tripped over a rock that turned out to be the corner of an autonomous cargo container buried in a dry streambed. I don’t even care to guess how long it’s been there. He used a stump-puller mech to clear the ground around it until he found a hatch, and do you know what he found inside?”

“Certain death?” Bianca was seething with jealousy. She’d never found anything bigger than she could pick up in both hands.