The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, #3)

by John Scalzi

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.

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.

I have to assume that my security detail is compromised. I have to assume there are traitors in my midst.” Jamies, Count Claremont, sighed from his chair, set down the book he was reading, and rubbed his eyes. “You understand my sympathy for your plight is somewhat limited, yes?” he said, to Ghreni.

“You asked why I keep visiting you,” Ghreni said. “I need someone to talk to.” “You have an entire governmental apparatus to talk to,” Jamies reminded him. “Which has traitors in it.” “Let me remind you that I’m not exactly on your side.” “No, but”—Ghreni motioned to the room—“you’re not going anywhere.”

“You could still help me,” Ghreni said. “Help me prepare for what comes next with the Flow.” “You mean, despite the fact that I am your prisoner and you are fighting a civil war against my daughter, who you would kill if the opportunity presented itself.” “She just tried to kill me.” “The fact you are trying to reduce a civil war to ‘she started it’ does not fill me with confidence,”

Ghreni— If you’re reading this then things have gone poorly on this end. What it is I can’t tell you because this was written in advance. But whatever has happened, I’ve put the backup plan into effect. Which is: I’m sending you a troop carrier, the Prophecies of Rachela. It is fully armed and carries 10,000 Imperial Marines. Its commander and most of his executive team are ours; those who aren’t probably won’t survive the voyage. It should arrive not long after this message.

“Let’s be clear about what’s going on,” Deran Wu said. “It’s the end of civilization as we know it. And it’s going to be great for business.”

“As for why we’re here, it’s simple.” He pointed at Deran. “Our new managing director is not entirely stupid. He knows that even if the emperox has given him complete control of the House of Wu, that ‘control’ is an illusion. He doesn’t have a power base in this room. He doesn’t have enough allies outside of it. And as he correctly notes”—Proster swiveled back to Deran—“the end of human civilization is coming. He doesn’t have time to wait us out.

“The point is, unrest is coming,” Deran said. “Heightened unrest. Sustained unrest.” “And we want to make money off the chaos,” Tiegan said. “We want to offer the ability to hold off chaos as long as possible,” Deran replied. “The unrest will happen. It’s already happening. It’s inevitable. But ‘inevitable’ doesn’t have to mean immediate. We can buy time for system governments. Or more accurately, they can buy that time from us. Because, yes, we want to make money off of that.”

“End is where our civilization is going to survive,” Deran said. “It’s the one system in the Interdependency that has a planet that’s capable of sustaining human life on its own. And from what the emperox’s scientists tell us, it’s the last place that will have a Flow stream going into it from Hub. Civilization will continue there.”

“So your plan is spaceships for some, and riot control for the rest,” Tiegan said, after the moment had passed.

Proster nodded. “So we build ships and arms now—” “While it’s still cheap and easy, because as more Flow streams collapse, it will be more expensive to get materiel, and harder to source as well,” Deran interjected. “—and take as much as we can get up front, and then as the Flow streams collapse, move our base of operations to End, where the money will still have value and the remainder of civilization will still need arms and spaceships.”

Yes, this is all coming together nicely, Deran thought, took another sip of his tea, and collapsed dead, teacup tumbling beside him.

“Then here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go back to your bosses and tell them that the House of Nohamapetan thanks them for the offer, and our counteroffer is that the House of Wolfe goes and fucks itself sideways, because we’re not agreeing to change a single fucking comma in our current contracts. If the House of Wolfe wants to file a suit with the Guild Courts, they can go right ahead, because the House of Nohamapetan will tie that shit up, not only until the collapse of the Flow, but until the actual heat death of the observable fucking universe.” Kiva turned to Fundapellonan. “We have the resources for that, right?”

If the Guild Court decides that the collapse of civilization means contracts are null, that’s chaos.” “You suddenly don’t like chaos.” “I don’t like it when it’s not working for me.” “See, this is what I mean by self-interested.” “In this case it wouldn’t be working for anyone,” Kiva said.

You’re self-interested, but it seems your self-interest has expanded somewhat. At least temporarily.” “Don’t get used to it.”

she did realize that at the moment, the number of fundamentally selfish and self-interested people that human civilization could tolerate, particularly in the social tranche that could actually have an impact on the fate of humanity, had shrunk considerably. Kiva had been struck by a realization that, if not exactly an epiphany, was certainly enough to make her stop in her tracks: Either she was going to have to become less fundamentally selfish, or she was going to have to find a way to make others less so.

whenever selfish humans encountered a wrenching, life-altering crisis, they embarked on a journey of five distinct stages: Denial. Denial. Denial. Fucking Denial. Oh shit everything is terrible grab what you can and run.

made his snoring both louder and more random. When it woke Cardenia up, Marce sounded like he was two cavemen having a very urgent conversation with each other about discovering fire, or hunting a feral hog, or something else along that line.

Grayland had recently learned that Rachela I, the first emperox, had built Jiyi with another function entirely: to seek out and find hidden information throughout the Interdependency.

several of the noble houses have secretly begun to transfer some of their wealth to End, and are planning to have key and critical members of each house follow.”

it had finally sunk into the heads of the noble families and the mercantile guilds they controlled that the Flow was actually collapsing, and that maybe they would want to preserve at least some of their wealth and send it to the one place in the Interdependency that, in theory, had the capability to survive beyond a few decades at best.

Our civilization is collapsing and yet Deran Wu still got poisoned, she thought. If nothing else, it marked a commitment to nefariousness that Grayland could almost respect if it hadn’t also made her life more complicated.

“Did you have anyone assassinated?” “Not openly,” Attavio VI said. “‘Not openly’?” “Assassination was not a tool I preferred to use. That said, there may have been times when I wished that someone would rid me of a turbulent priest.”

aside from anything else, his death does me no good,” Grayland said. “He was meant to control the House of Wu and keep it in line. Now he’s dead and the members of the governing board are already fighting among themselves for control. If Deran is the only Wu cousin who is assassinated in the next few months, we should count ourselves lucky.”

I think you’re right. This was meant to send a message. We just need to decipher to whom.” “That would depend on who was behind the assassination,” Attavio VI said. “And as you said, there are no obvious suspects.” “There aren’t,” Grayland said. “But I can guess.”

And to Captain Robinette, Nadashe was just another thing to be smuggled on the Our Love, with the exception that she was never offloaded, just charged an exorbitant rate for every leg of the journey, from Hub to Orleans and then back again.

Even Nadashe had a ship name, for what good it would do in anonymizing the former fiancée of the crown prince of the Interdependency, who also happened to be the current Imperial Enemy Number One. Rules are rules, Robinette said, and dubbed her “Karen.”

Intellectually, of course, she could understand perfectly well why she was in this position. When one has fomented a planetary uprising, murdered one’s own brother while attempting to murder the emperox, escaped violently from prison and become complicit in a plot to overthrow royalty, obviously being a fugitive is not only a likely consequence, but honestly the best-case scenario. She got it. But that didn’t make being sequestered in a smelly stateroom on a rusting ship filled with kidney-stabbing miscreants any better, either on an existential or a day-to-day basis.

Nadashe had been furious when she learned that Roynold had been incorrect and would have had her dealt with, had her mother not already and inadvertently had her blown up in space, along with dozens of other people, in an ill-advised revenge attempt against the emperox. Her mother! Which was another thing she hated.

For all that, Kiva Lagos did not hold the top spot on the Nadashe Nohamapetan Hate List. Neither did the Our Love, its crew, her stateroom, her fugitive status, her mother’s stupidity or bronchitis. The top spot was held—and was held by a considerable margin—by the current emperox, Grayland II.

more than anything else, Nadashe hated Grayland’s persistent unwillingness to just simply die, whether from bombs or runaway shuttlecraft or explosive decompression into the vast depths of space, or, hell, she was not picky, a wodge of pie crust stuck in the trachea or something banal like that.

When everything came down to it—to the bare, rusting stateroom walls of it—Nadashe had very little left to her but hate for the emperox, and the continuing frustration that the aggravating naïf who held the title continued to exist. At this point, if Nadashe did nothing else but bring down Grayland II, she’d consider herself even in the game of life. But of course she—still!—had other, grander plans than that.

“Would you like a code name?” Nadashe asked, sitting at one of the cramped, dingy tables in the cramped, dingy room and motioning at her visitor to do the same. “Not really,” her visitor said. “‘Proster Wu’ is a good name. I think I’ll keep it for now.”

“So now are you convinced that I am still a force to be reckoned with?” Proster smiled. “I have to admit that it took me a minute to realize that you had poisoned Deran. I was expecting something else.” “What else were you expecting?”

When you get back, look for a member of your custodial staff who hasn’t come in to work since the day Deran died. When you find their name, have your people look into their background and whereabouts. You’ll discover that they don’t actually exist, despite having worked on your custodial staff for years.”

Proster might have been willing to let Nadashe poison Deran—and Nadashe was delighted to do so, as the two of them had a history that she felt obliged to revenge—but at the end of the day he was for the House of Wu through and through. He had been a power behind the throne long enough to know there was no one else among the Wus who merited that throne right now.

what I’d like from you, Proster Wu, is to organize a little get-together for me. To talk to those whom our emperox has discomfited.”

“Of course you didn’t give me anything,” Cardenia said. “What could you give me that I don’t already have? I mean that literally,” she said, after catching his look of feigned hurt. “You know I have actual warehouses full of things people give me, that I never see.” She held up the pocket watch. “In fact, that’s where this came from.” “Your first gift to me is a regift?” Marce said in mock horror.

Marce looked over, shocked. “You engraved it? To me?” “Well, yes. Since I was giving it to you as a gift and all.” “But you said it was a couple hundred years old. It probably belongs in an actual museum.” Cardenia smiled and kissed Marce. “And if it were from a museum, I could still have it engraved, and then it would become even more historically valuable. Because I am emperox. Which is ridiculous, but true.”

“Also, you’re keeping time with the emperox. You’re the imperial timekeeper.” Marce carefully set the pocket watch onto the small table on his side of the bed. “That’s a terrible pun.” “Yes it is,” Cardenia agreed. “But as long as you get to keep time with me, do you care?” Marce did not.

he was, in fact, the imperial timekeeper, the one person who knew, best of all, how much time the Interdependency had left. And yet. The more Marce looked at the data, the more he thought he should be something more.

“There’s something about how the evanescent streams are appearing that’s bugging me, and I needed someone else to look at it to see if they see it. Because whatever it is, I can’t quite grasp it.

“What I feel is that there is a pattern,” Marce said. “Not a pattern, exactly. But something not random about it, either.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t have words for it.”

“There’s no time here,” Marce said, tilting his head toward the blue lines. “If we want to save more than a few, we have to look here.” He glanced toward the red. “We have to find more time. I have to find it.” He looked over to Chenevert again. “And I feel like I’m missing it. Whatever it is.”

The imperial palace compound of Xi’an was immense—so large that it was said that an emperox could visit one room of it a day for their entire reign and still not have visited every single room.

an entire wing of secure offices and interview rooms where either you needed very high clearance or to have done something genuinely awful, or both, to see the inside of.

“A few weeks ago, and in the aftermath of the coup attempt against you, my section was asked—I presume at the direction of Your Majesty—to offer a threat assessment for the Interdependency, in light of the imminent collapse of the Flow and other factors.”

“You mean our throwing a couple hundred of the highest-ranking and most connected members of parliament, royalty and clergy into jail on account of their treason,”

“The most probable course of action is that you attempt to commandeer some or all of the Interdependency’s fleet of starships, to transport as many people as possible to End, which is the only planet in the Interdependency capable of supporting human life on its own.” “And how well does this work?” “It doesn’t,” Sebrogan said.