Chapter One
The one thing Finbar Charles Louis Griffin Jalgori-Tobu (Finn to his friends) promised himself was that under no circumstances would he ever scream. He wasn’t going to give his captors the satisfaction. So he remained silent as their sharp knife sliced through his soiled one-piece thermal regulator undersuit, gritting his teeth every time the blade nicked his skin. Nor did he flinch as his now naked body was shoved to the ground and his wrists and ankles were bound. He refused to grunt in pain as they dragged him up to the rooftop landing pad, deliberately knocking his shins on the metal stairs as they went. His jaw remained resolutely shut as they dumped him on the utilitarian floor of the sleek squad-deployment plane waiting on the pad.
Finn didn’t know if it was the fury he felt at his betrayal or the stubbornness that his family always chided him for, but he managed to keep his mouth closed throughout the whole flight as he endured the humiliation of being used as a footstool for their boots—a footstool they had fun kicking.
A couple of hours after takeoff, when they were in Anoosha’s southern hemisphere and cruising eight kilometers above the Camurdy Mountains, the plane’s rear ramp hinged down, letting in a blast of freezing wind. His captors pulled on their oxygen masks and laughed as he sucked down the perilously thin air. He even managed not to scream as they hauled him onto the ramp. One last kick sent him tumbling off the end into the clear night sky.
He saw the delta shape of the plane silhouetted against the vibrant clouds of the Poseidon Nebula, which filled the skies above Anoosha. A bright orange strobe flared underneath the fuselage as it dwindled away. Then he was hurtling down at terminal velocity toward the jagged snow-capped mountains below.
Finn started screaming.
*
The starship
Alumata was an elegant sculpture of polished silver-white metal, consisting of a cylindrical engineering section two hundred meters long that sprouted sinuous copper-shaded spokes to connect it to a broad life-support ring. Its fuselage was inset by the shallow contours of photothermal radiators, glowing an outlandish grenadine as they disposed of excess heat from the internal machinery.
Sitting on a couch in the lounge at the forward end of the ring, where the bulkhead was a curving window of ultrabonded diamond, Makaio-Yalbo, Archon of the Now and Forever Queen of Wynid, stared out at the dramatic vista provided by the Pillar of Zeus nebula in which the starship was immersed. The nearby star, Tinaja, was the only visible light source, and behind it the extravagant blues and greens and purples of the cloud strands swirled in complex ragged patterns that took millennia to dance around each other as they slowly expanded outward from their ancient explosion core.
Visits to the Tinaja system were rare for Makaio-Yalbo. His assignment as one of the queen’s spymasters was to cover the Kelowan system. Yet this meeting had been agreed five years ago, after he’d received an unexpected message from Olomo, Archon of the Heresy Dominion, whose brief was similar to his own. It was a heavy investment in time. The trip through the Gates of Heaven that connected Kelowan and Tinaja had taken only a couple of weeks relativistic dilation time on board the
Alumata, while nearly two years had elapsed outside. Then after they arrived at Tinaja, they’d taken ten days to fly just over an astronomical unit, 150 million kilometers, from the Gate of Heaven to this gas giant Lagrangian point—a location so remote that no one would ever observe them by accident. Such an in-person meeting between dominion archons was extremely rare; normally their business was conducted by secure encrypted messages at pre-agreed drops. The rarity was the reason Makaio-Yalbo had accepted the invitation without question. The Heresy archon clearly believed it was exceptionally important—in itself a worrying notion.
The
Alumata’s life-support ring rotation slowly brought the HeSea into view—a sinuous onyx blemish with dainty intergrowths of scarlet filigrees, so dense it could easily be mistaken for a solid object against the nebula’s gentle iridescence. It was an astronomical anomaly Makaio-Yalbo never grew tired of seeing: a unique high-density zone of helium-3, a sea of the gas half a light-year in diameter, the residue of a mini-nova. None of the astronomers of the Celestial dominions in the Centauri Cluster understood the mechanism of such a nova. Yet somehow a helium gas macroplanet, four thousand times the mass of old Jupiter yet too small for fusion ignition, had exploded, flinging out the cloud, which was such a significant resource to the Crown Dominion.
Fleets of large scoopships owned by the five Royal Families gathered up the helium on decade-long flights, bringing it back to Tinaja’s Gate of Heaven, and from there distributed it across the stars of the Crown Dominion. Every civilian and commercial starship in the Centauri Cluster used helium-3 for fusion fuel, as did all the industrial fusion generators powering the habitable worlds of the dominions. Having the HeSea inside their boundary gave the Crown Dominion an economic resource which many dominions envied.
“That’s amazing,” Faraji said. “I see what you mean now.”
Makaio-Yalbo turned stiffly to look at his son on the couch next to him. The boy was seven years old and, like all Imperial Celestials, had almost reached his full height. Already he was over two meters tall, although his torso was still childishly narrow; he wouldn’t begin to broaden out until he was over ten and puberty triggered the final growth phase of his marsupial womb.
“It is something quite admirable, is it not?” Makaio-Yalbo conceded. “For darkness to draw the eye, it must possess its own brand of majesty.”
“Yeah. Has the HeSea always been so dark?”
Makaio-Yalbo did his best not to frown in disapproval at such a graceless question. “Just about. I believe it might have been even darker four thousand years ago when I first saw it. However, nostalgia always aggrandizes reality.”
Faraji grinned happily. “How many bodies have you—I mean,
we—had?”
“It is not the quality of the glass that matters, only the wine that it holds.”
“Okay. Got to be about seventy or eighty, though. Am I right?”
“I expect you are.”
The smile grew wider. “And I’m next.”
“Indeed.”
“When? When will I be you? I mean, when do I inherit the mindline?”
Makaio-Yalbo’s hands rose of their own volition to caress the elaborate configurations of bloodstone that were growing from his head in a final flourish that anticipated the body’s approaching death. Under his direction, the calcium-like biotech had spent the last eighteen months expanding to cover most of his skull and cheeks, leaving only his mouth, nose, and eyes unencumbered. From that base a crown of scalloped horns had wound their way out, curling around each other and embellishing the pattern of surface scissures with faint hues of turquoise and gold.
The rest of his body, beneath the formal toga he wore, was equally brocaded by growths of bloodstone. It made moving his arms and legs increasingly difficult as it continued to spread along them in a lacework pattern. Within a few years the progression would finish engulfing his flesh entirely, at which point he would gift his mindline into the Faraji body, becoming Makaio-Faraji. All that he was would continue inside the new host, ensuring athanasia. And the boy’s immature first-level personality element had been right: there were seventy-seven previous host bodies. They lay in the Family Gaziz crypt, where his current host body would join them after the succession was fulfilled, newly interred in its own mausoleum of bloodstone. It would be the eighth such bloodstone entombment, which was surprising. Makaio-Yalbo had always considered the symbiote a fashion fad, but it had lasted far longer than he expected. Still, the queens of the Crown Dominion enjoyed it, so everyone else obediently followed suit.
“Soon,” Makaio-Yalbo said.
“Yes, but . . .”
“Enough. Enjoy the knowledge that, of all your brothers, it is you that I have selected to host me.”
“I am so grateful, father,” Faraji said admiringly.
“Good.” Makaio-Yalbo placed his hand on one of the small connection bulbs at the side of the couch. Information flowed into him through the neural induction pad in the center of his palm. Was it imagination or was the knowledge not as clear as it used to be? Definitely a sign that he’d lived in this body too long. But finding the time to move on was difficult at best in his profession. And this unexpected voyage hadn’t helped.
“I believe his ship is approaching,” Makaio-Yalbo said.
Copyright © 2024 by Peter F. Hamilton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
