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Citadel of Sarah, Lady Winstone, Winstone, Robian Empire, 28 Messidor 3686
Sarah was trimming the miniature trees she kept along her window, snipping dwarf branches with careful, deft snaps of a pair of ceramic pruning shears, when the boots tromped into her chambers behind her. "Hello," she said. "Just a moment."
"You have a lot of nerve asking me to come here, Sarah. You could at least be ready when I arrive."
"Patience," she said evenly. "You left your bodyguard downstairs?"
"We could have just had a conversation in netspace. I have nothing to say to you that can't be said in front of our Empress. But I flew alone."
The shears clattered on the metal windowsill as Sally turned sharply, biting off a nervous word. ". . . . I would recommend against that," she said. "Someday it might not be safe to fly without escort—"
"I'm never safer than at the controls of the Tornado," replied Miles, Lord Fortune—no one but nobles were still alive that remembered when the city had been called Fortune Station. The fox was leaning against the doorway to her entry room, arms folded across his chest in a whirpool of color. Almost every part of his body he had become a canvas over the centuries—he tattooed himself, scarred himself, some decades even hung metal hoops through the bones of his two tails. Only above the Empress's collar was his white snout and orange fur still unmarked as the day he was enclosed in the roboticization tank. "I was trying out my latest modifications on the suborbital flight mode today. Buzzed GPS17 at about five meters."
"Lord Miles the fox, terror of the skies," Sally smiled, heart beating nervously faster as he mentioned the suborbital flight, wondering if he had done that intentionally, if he was feeling her out.
"And you?" he asked. "Just gardening?"
Miles meant it as an insult, but she took it with a bit of pride. The Empress had indoctrinated her like all of her children with the echo of Robotnik: animals are machines. And Sarah supposed that when you focused on an individual anything hard enough, it became a machine. Force, mass, and acceleration.
But when you lived for centuries as generations of mobians rose and fell beneath you, one after another like the procession of seasons, seeing the parents reflected dimly in the children, it was hard to see machines. Sarah saw plants, growing out of her city's soil. Some were hardy and rough like cheatgrass or dandelion, some tenacious and clinging like kudzu. Some were beautiful, delicate, hothouse beings. And when given the blessing of nanite constitution and long life, they grew tall, hard, into strong trees. All needed care to grow into what they wanted to become, to fit together harmoniously, share their light and space.
They're people, Sarah could sometimes hear Sonic growling.
Of course they were people. If she'd ever forgotten that, she would have remembered when she'd seen the beauty of the ocean wilds. She never wanted to forget that, and never wanted to lose from her ears Sonic's voice, even if it was raised in anger against something she had done.
But all the same, under her tending, Winstone had become a delightful garden.
"If you include microbiology in the subject of gardening, then yes," Sally answered Miles. "My scientists have discovered a—"
"Have you figured out how to save us?" Miles asked bluntly.
Her smile fell. "No." Charles Hedgehog had been a genius, but not a god. The estimates of Robian longevity had stopped climbing one and a half centuries before, their ancient, brittle DNA finally starting to decay. Their years shall be half a millennium, maybe six hundred years. No more.
Miles shrugged. "Well, that's that."
"Miles. One hundred more years. More if we're lucky. Isn't that enough?"
"What have you been splicing?" he asked tiredly.
"Chloroplasts," she replied. "I'll soon be able to design plants of any dimension I want. A mobian can't live on them—not enough surface area. But if a person were to grow—a sort of cape, I guess, or like a peacock's feathers—"
"Splicing scientists with warriors?" he snarled, not listening. "Workers with rulers? I spoke to your pet fox outside. The biologist slave you've trained to carry a gun. Couldn't you have trained him how to carry himself?"
"Dareth's training is harder than those of most of my warriors," she replied. You could tell, because Sonic loved Dareth, almost as much as he loved making fun of him.
There you are, Sonic. After four hundred years of careful selective breeding and five years of rigorous training, I have managed to recreate a person who is possibly capable of consciously thinking for himself. He could probably even survive on Angel Island. See how unhappy he is?
Goes with the territory, Sal.
"How does he show it?" Miles snarled. "In asking impertinent questions to me and then cringing away like some cowardly, undisciplined worker when I take offense? What is his purpose, to show your scientists that you won't take offense at any insubordination? Where's your pride?"
For about the millionth time, Sarah found the words poor Miles in her mind. He loved his dead Lady Renee so much that he had tattooed her long-gone mark on his neck, beneath Amanda's collar, where none could see it. None of the Robian nobility were more fiercely dedicated to the principles of warrior virtue than he was—not even the Empress herself.
And though no one would ever dare say it, no one failed those principles more abjectly. Despite his fervent pleas, the Empress had not permitted him to sink more soldiers and resources in efforts to perform high-speed combat drops atop the human islands from orbit. For all his endless training, he had not fought a war for centuries. His collared warriors were chosen both for their skills with blade and bullet, and for their ability to learn the complex mathematics he required of them. For a long time, probably since he was born, Miles was less a warrior than a physicist, engineer, chemist, mathematician, logician, computer scientist, architect, artist, and about fifty other things.
All of which shamed Miles. But he could not bear to stop, any more than he could cut off one of his too-many tails.
So it was with pity that she listened as he spat, "I wonder if my Empress ever really tamed you."
"She did, Miles." Sarah smiled, ruefully. "She did."
She floated in blackness.
Memories drifted around her and through her. Explosions. Fur and bloody flesh against her teeth. Screams. A crushed face. A—
"Squirrel."
The word shocked Sally back to awareness, echoing in her skull, widening her eyes on the endless darkness. She . . . tried to draw a breath, choked, no air—then air pushing into her, straining her chest, about to rupture her eardrums.
"No, Sally. Be calm. Do not fight the respirator. You breathe when it breathes."
It took her a moment to find them, but the kinaesthetics of surrender to the machine were there, in her shallow muscle memory. Oxygen continued to come in her nose, then shrink away. She couldn't move—
She remembered, in fragments, struggling to make her mind work. Her brain felt sluggish, atrophied, half-dead.
Dead. Sonic, dead. Tails, lost. The prisoner cocoon.
The prisoner cocoon again. And again.
"You are fiercer than I remember, Sally," Amanda said into the buds stuffed deep in her bound ears. "I had to give up on your training, poor squirrel. I had to wrap you up again. You put twelve warriors in the hospital, along with yourself."
Almost as an afterthought, Amanda added:"You've been here for a month, this time."
"Hmmmmmmm!"
"Shh." Distantly, Sally could feel Amanda's hand, not touching her head, but somehow rubbing against it. "You can come out now. If you make a promise to me, squirrel, one I will punish you if you break. Butterflies have to struggle from their cocoons, if they want to live. You must promise me that you will try your hardest to obey me. I know you will not be able to obey me perfectly, at first. But I will know if you do not try. This . . ."
Sensations changing. Tightness on, on her face. And strain in—in her neck, the snap of stretching plastic. Remembering the shape of her body as Amanda . . . forced her head, something around her head, forced it up, down, up, down . . . .
". . . is how you say yes. This . . . ." Shaking her head side to side. "Is how you say no. Will you try hard to be a good squirrel, Sally?"
For a moment, with terror, she couldn't do it. Her whole body wormed and rocked. Then she felt something outside her hold and steady her.
Head up. Head down. Head up.
"Be still—"
Fingers grabbed at the back of her neck and peeled something tight and elastic away from what Sally could suddenly remember and feel was fur. With a painful pop her ears snapped free and—
She squeezed her eyes shut, but the light still hurt, and she vomited, vomited not food but plastic tubes, hacking and choking as centimeter after centimeter withdrew from deep in her head, up out of her gullet, until after an eternity she was finally coughing and gasping under her own power.
The rest of her body still prisoned, she squinted blearily, mouth twisted with disgust, at the skunk empress's soft smile.
"I remember when you were my little one, so long ago," she said. "So eager to become my squirrelbot. You're much stronger now than you were then."
She was too nauseous to make sounds, but Sally drew her lips back in a silent mime of a snarl.
Amanda ignored it, kept smiling. "I'm stronger, too."
"I asked you here because I need your help," Sarah said, sitting down in an armchair.
Miles declined the implied invitation, ignoring the couch opposite her. "Little late in the year for someone to brush your backfur, isn't it?"
"I need help with Lupe."
Miles shut up.
Though it lay well within the boundaries of the Empire, Lupe, Lady Terscala's city and the surrounding desert had become more and more economically and socially remote. She did not trade or gift workers and warriors with the other nobility, mostly because they were hard pressed to make good use of the creatures that she provided, whose imitation of the reactions and interactions normal to most mobians were unnervingly imperfect. Nonetheless, transfer to Terscala was often brandied about as a threat, real or feigned, among factory supervisors.
Even children sensed that something was wrong in Terscala.
Lupe's research into the brain had hit the wall two centuries ago. She said. But things perked the ears and pricked the whiskers. When you spoke to the wolf, you weren't speaking to her. And sometimes, when you spoke to one of her blank, half-there animals, you had the uncanny feeling you were speaking directly to her. Lord Henri, his city of High Demon hundreds of kilometers from Lupe's desert, had revealed to her that he had quietly and repeatedly executed workers who he firmly believed had somehow, though unknown means, been subjected to Lupe's deep-level conditioning and were effecting her will, rather than his.
We should have killed her, too, Sarah thought sometimes. Not just Robotnik. But they couldn't have known back then just how deeply human had pressed his template into the wolf.
And more importantly for present purposes, she thought she had seen more than her fellow nobles of what hid within the wolf. The murder of a Lady of the Empire was a thought very far beyond those that the Empress's creatures were allowed to have.
It was not one that Miles was going to easily tolerate: "Help?" he asked sharply. "You want help with a Robian Lady?"
Sarah took the plunge. "I don't think our Empress can control her anymore, Miles. Lupe has become a danger to the Empire—"
"You're a danger to the Empire, Sarah!" Miles shouted. "You talk about Lupe like she's become some sort of monster. She's living in her own city, conducting her own research with her own animals, and obeying every order she gets from the Egg. You're the one that's been spreading sedition into everyone else's cities. Collaring scientists and coddling workers. Sailing to Angel Island."
She could have prepared her inorganic systems to stifle any biological indicators of surprise. But she hadn't.
"Do you think I can't tell what's going on when you disappear from the imperial net for a week?" Miles laughed nervously, tails propelloring back and forth. "Do you think those untamed fish-eaters can keep their mouths shut? Everybody knows, Sarah! Everybody knows you've been conspiring with enemies of the Empire!"
Sarah looked up at him silently, half-panting like a nervous schoolgirl. Miles shook his head, rubbed his snout in frustration.
He had come here to talk her down, she realized. Not to listen to a plea for help, but to warn, cajole and threaten. Miles thought she needed saving.
Maybe she did.
Sally had braced herself for more beatings, isolation, torture.
Instead her head was shaved down to the brown fur and she was put in a simple black uniform. "There you are, Sarah," Amanda said. "Ready to put your management skills to good use."
"That's not my name," Sally said. "On my birth certificate, my parents—"
"Your name is Sarah," the Empress corrected her. "And my title is 'Empress.'"
Sally became the chief of Amanda's personal servants, the slaves that cleaned her rooms, cooked her food, welcomed her guests. For several hours most days she stood beside the Empress's throne, responding to each command with a simple "Yes, Empress." Sarah, water. Sarah, take their jackets. Sarah, I will dine tonight with Lords Alain and Miles.
Miles seemed to seek out occasions to visit the Egg. He liked to address her as "servant."
In her dreams, Sonic felt so, so sorry for her.
The work did not help anyone, and did not hurt anyone; there was no great reason to resist. The work-animals Amanda picked as fit for an Empress were not only meek, but deeply loyal, rescued as they had been from factory work. There was no chance of conspiracy, and no opportunity for sabotage.
At night she slept in small chambers by herself, with a mirror in which she could see the squirrel slave looking back at her, and a computer terminal on which she could read what was the news, now, propaganda for soldiers, accounts of major promotions, redeployments, and victories in the forest and in the west. These last were accompanied by pictures: burnt corpses posed in a row on the baked ground. Prisoners under guard, soaked by rain, mangy and bareskinned, their ribs showing through their chests. Husbands and wives together, sometimes holding children. Sometimes the children appeared to be dead.
There was no mention of Antoine and Bunnie. The Empress might be hiding them from her, or from everyone. Or they might be dead.
It didn't matter, for her. She'd never see them again.
After a few weeks, Sally wondered whether she was still in the prisoner-cocoon, dreaming. After two years, Sarah wondered whether everything before had been a dream—the palace, the forest.
"Do you know what day it is today?" the Empress said to her one morning from the side of her bed, when Sarah was attending her in her chambers.
Sarah did not break from at-ease posture. "No, Empress."
"It is my birthday." She smiled. "Twelve years from the day I first emerged from the tank."
"Happy birthday, Empress," Sarah replied without kindness or a hint of irony. "I apologize; I have no gift."
"None but my warriors have things to offer that are not already mine." Amanda stood, rolled her shoulders. "I'm letting you know because you have special duties today. You will bake me a cake."
"Yes, Empress. What flavor would you prefer, and how many shall it serve?"
"The ingredients are already assembled. But I have some special tools for you to make it with, in the kitchen. Fresh from the forest." Sarah did not resist as the Empress walked behind her, grabbed her clasped hands and bound them with a plastic tie. "And Sarah?"
"Yes, Empress?"
"If the cake is not to my liking, I will have your all your tools shot."
Sarah ground her teeth to stop from growling. "Yes, Empress."
"They don't know that," Amanda added. "If you warn them, I will have them all shot."
"You sick bitch," she hissed.
"Language, Sarah. Off you go."
The kitchen was spotless, cleaned carefully by slaves the night before. The five captured insurgents had not even been washed, were still filthy fur and bones and muddy clothes. And when they saw her face, their mouths dropped open. "Your Majesty!—"
"That is not my title," she interrupted them. "You will address me as 'minder.' You are here to bake a cake."
Slowly, heartbreakingly, they got the idea, followed her orders. Except for a big-shouldered badgeress half a decimeter taller than Sally, who kept whispering about poisons, loud enough even for the microphones in the hall to pick it up.
Sarah asked her to come with her into the walk-in pantry. Inside, the badger whispered excitedly. "Majesty—"
Sarah braced herself and slammed her forehead into the badger's snout, right between her eyes.
She stumbled back, clutching her face. "Majesty—"
"Shut up," Sarah growled. "While you are here in this kitchen, you will obey the Empress. You will obey me."
"Majesty." Tears of pain filing her eyes.
"I do not care what you do once you leave. Kick and squeal and buck all you like once you are in someone else's hands. But in this kitchen you belong to the Empress, and the Empress will not tolerate anything less than obedience. Is. That. Clear."
"Yes," the badger whimpered.
"Yes, minder."
"Yes, minder."
The cake was simple triple-chocolate, with a single candle. The Empress gently extinguished the flame, smelled the icing. "Mmm. You have done well, Sarah."
"Thank you, Empress," Sarah droned, her bound arms hanging limp behind her back. Exhausted. She'd saved five lives, but she didn't feel good. She felt dead.
Amanda cut a moderately-sized piece, set it aside on a plate. "For your tools. I'll ask you to cut it into five slices, that's delicate work." Then she cut another.
The rulers get almost all. The workers get next to nothing. But not nothing. Better than a sharp stick in the eye. Better than watching your child eat dirt, trying not to feel so hungry before she died.
The second piece Amanda set on a second plate, which she held on her lap. "This piece is for you," she said.
Sarah understood the lesson. She hung her head and sobbed.
"Kneel."
Sarah knelt before her. This was crueler than pain. To bind her this way, to bind the whole world until the only way Sarah could show another creature kindness was to help it submit more dexterously to its chains. It was the only way she would ever do anything worthwhile again. Maybe she could soften the Empress's orders; maybe she could—maybe—
Amanda let her cry, let the despair extinguish itself, as it had to. When Sarah was quiet enough, she quietly commanded the squirrel to lift her head and open her mouth. Sarah obeyed, and the skunkbot forked the first bite of cake onto her tongue.
That night Sarah stood before trivid cameras and spoke haltingly, unprepared, telling any of her people with working receivers that she had been their queen but that she was not anymore, she was only a squirrel servant of the almighty Robian Empress Amanda, and that she had no claim to their loyalty, that she knew nothing of the world but what the Empress wished her to know, that she was certain of nothing. That their suffering rent her heart. That if they submitted to the Empire, they would probably receive food and shelter. That their children would live to see . . . something.
"I don't know if it will be better than dying," was the last thing she said before Amanda cut the cameras. "I'll do what I can. I'll try to make it better."
In her bed, in the darkness, the shift to dream was slow and gradual. The heat in her ears slowly became his anger, the crashing of her pulse his shouting. She yelled back that fighting to the death was easy once you were already dead.
I did it when I was alive, once.
She won't let me die—
Yeah, and she's the boss of Sally Acorn, apparently.
I'll make this right, Sonic. I promise—
Sarah woke with Amanda already in her room, looking down at her. In her left hand she held the steel links of a collar, Sarah's collar.
"All my Lords and Ladies gave me presents yesterday," she said, "but none so lovely as the Great Forest."
"If my Empress wants me to stop my diplomacy, she can ask me," Sarah said firmly.
"The word is 'treason,' Sarah."
"If my Empress doesn't like anything about me, Miles, you know all she has to do reach into me and change me. I can never fight her. We're both her creatures."
"She won't lift a finger to stop you," Miles said, disgusted. "You know she won't. She dotes on you."
"I love her, too."
"Don't say that."
"What else can I say, Miles? I love my Empress. I love this planet. I love you. I don't want to see . . . whatever Lupe's become grab you all and—"
"Do I look eighteen? I am four hundred years old!" Miles shouted. "I am not your little kit, and you are not my . . . ."
The fox couldn't choke out whatever words came next. He sat limply on the couch.
"Look," he sighed. "Forget that. Forget all of this. Don't sweet-talk me. Don't tell me how you have to betray our Empress because Lupe scares you. You brought me here to ask my favor. Just get it over with. Tell me what it is you want me to do for you."
Miles outclassed her by far, so she called up a text file she had previously written, read aloud from it. "I want a thrust technology capable of accelerating a macroscopic mass to a significant fraction of the speed of light. To the best of my physics, there is no possibility of a working FTL, but I'll take that too."
"No," Miles said, shaking his head with exasperation. "No. I'm not going to do that for you, Sarah, because it's treason. Even if you were right about Lupe, it wouldn't help. It wouldn't matter how fast you could send warheads her, or even whether she sees them coming. If she's cracked the structure of the brain, really become a fully self-transparent state-machine that can run on any system, then she already has backups of herself. It would be the most fundamental change in strategic theory since—"
The fox blinked, suddenly seeming to trip over one of his own thoughts. It gave Sarah time to realize that he did think she might be right.
He sighed: "I mean, yes, an FTL drive would help, but only because it's a time machine, which is the deep-level reason why there is no such thing as an FTL drive. And even if there were, you'd probably only be creating an alternate timestream where you'd hope to save a different version of the Empire, and once you get to alternate universes, why bother?"
"Forget that."
"Yeah," Miles agreed. "So throw away closed timelike curves, and all you're doing with any of this tech is broadening the light cones on your weapons. That doesn't—"
The fox stopped, stared. Sarah's cheeks were swollen with suppressed laughter.
"I love listening to you talk about physics," she grinned. "I'm sorry. It's just so plain how much you enjoy it."
The mirth was lost on Miles. "I know it, Sarah! I've had centuries to study. The best physicist on the planet at this time is either me, my lioness Kira, or Lupe. If there were a way to stop a runaway AI-fuelled singularity, I would have thought of it."
"Miles—"
"Sarah, what do you think you're going to do?" he asked. "What have you ever known how to do except coddle your workers? You've spent centuries studying biology, and now you think you could take on a computer that would be at least as smart as either of us and probably getting smarter at an exponential rate. Biology. What are you thinking? Go and visit some submarines, make a universal plant, get me to build you a—"
Miles's mouth dropped, and Sarah knew that the idea had opened up for him.
". . . stardrive . . . ." he breathed.
The squirrel's grinned broadened. About time. He was the smartest man in the world. The smartest fox, at the very least.
"You're not going to fight Lupe at all," Miles said.
"I didn't say that," Sarah replied.
The fox gripped the couch cushions, digging in his nails as though he was afraid of floating away. "You're going to run."
Pierre, Lord Corukas had invented the high-effectiveness sleep agents, and weaponized them. But it was Sarah, under his supervision, that had pushed them to their strategic limits.
Eight hours ago, a late summer fog had fallen on the city of Winstone, cascading in long swirls from artillery canisters lobbed into the city from the south and from fast-moving jet fighters. The rebel soldiers that had been quick enough to get their gas masks on had lasted fifteen minutes, were able to put up desultory resistance as her tech infantry moved into the city, unbreathing assaultbots and mobian servants in closed-circuit breathing apparatus. Most of the captured slaves had simply lost consciousness where they were, on the street behind sandbags and ruined cars or in sniper's nests. The work of her troops in taking the city was mostly in collecting and processing the sleeping mobians, and in burning plasma holes through the skulls of the humans.
The only battle had taken place in the lobby of one of the downtown skyscrapers, where a few squads of mobian irregulars had been worried about the possibility of increased use of gas bombardment, and had rigged connections between their filter-masks and heavy tanks of compressed air, one for each two soldiers. Their fight was hopeless, tied down in such a way, but they had been determined to take as many imperial bots as they could with them, and they had made as good a showing for themselves as they could before Sarah arrived in person and, apparently the only straight-thinking person in the entire attack division, directed her bots to melt the tanks keeping them awake.
Only one had died. The rest now waited on their knees, arms limp, the filter-canisters in their masks replaced with slow-release docilizing agent. Their eyes sometimes tracked Sarah as she walked the line of them, more often lost focus as the gas drew their thoughts inward in helpless spirals, always orbiting, she knew, the same thought: my life is over.
Sarah was happy for them. Their lives weren't over. Their lives were about to begin. The city had prepared for its destruction, but she'd captured it almost without a shot, well over ninety percent of the rebels taken prisoner, a negligible number of civilian workers lost, and the infrastructure intact. They were all hers now, hers and her Empress's, and most of them Amanda would let her keep for herself, to do with as she liked, within bounds. It was something better than they could ever have hoped for.
I bet they could hope for a whole lot, Sal—
Then she stopped listening to Sonic's distant, dead voice, because her Empress had arrived at the site of the battle. Sarah drew herself to a salute beside Lord Pierre, fixing her eyes forward, emptying her mind and listening to the crunch of Amanda's feet on the shattered glass of the lobby windows.
Amanda walked before her, and Sarah expected to be set at ease for debriefing, but it did not happen. She kept still as her Empress continued to circle her.
"Lord Pierre, has my squirrel acquitted herself well?"
"Quite well, my Empress. Her tactical decisions in seizing this building involved some risk that I wouldn't have taken."
"And that risk won me these animals before me?"
"Yes, Empress."
Fingers scratched behind her ears, and Sarah already knew what her Empress was going to say. Her body trembled in anticipation. And then for a brief moment she had a muted thought that was too isolated from somatic sensation to be called a fear: maybe giving herself to hypnotic conditioning had been wrong. She didn't know if the loyalty training had left her enough of herself.
But her Empress had demanded that submission, before she would let her continue to rise and conquer a city. And Sarah realized, the thought floating detached above the warmth she felt toward Amanda, that she could never know if it she'd had another choice, and no longer had the ability to judge whether she'd made a mistake. If her conditional surrender to her Empress had become a total conquest, her Empress would deprive her of the power to recognize her defeat.
"I like what I have made of this squirrel," Amanda said. "I think I will make something better of her still."
"If you say so, my Empress."
"Hold the city for me, Pierre. Lady Sarah will take possession of it, once I have created her."
The Empress rubbed her bare palm against the squirrel's left arm. Sarah stifled a mewl of joy, still holding her salute.
Then Amanda turned and strode back toward the street. "Heel, squirrel."
"Yes, my Empress," Sarah said, swiveling to follow as her thoughts drained away and her focus narrowed automatically to the striped skunk tail.
She remained in trance until the tank closed above her; it was the last clear memory that survived from her pre-augmented mind.
"She won't let you run," Miles said. He was leaning forward, no longer trying to talk her out of anything, genuinely thinking. "It won't, if it's a singularity. It'll move against you before you can just pack up and—"
"I'm not going to run," Sarah interrupted. "I'm going to stay and fight. And while I do, my people and the humans will put as much distance behind them as they can."
"You can't be serious."
She shrugged. "It worked well enough four hundred years ago."
"They had islands to go to—"
"Four light-years to Epsilon Vidavin, Miles. Comet water and asteroid metals once they get there. Can you get our people across it in fifty years? Twenty?"
"They had a sea to hide under, and islands to hold them up, Sarah. Out in the vacuum there won't be anywhere to hide. Radiation will cook them. A single good knock with a kinetic-kill warhead will knock the air out of their lungs. They won't be able to make it if you don't hold here."
"They'll have a hard time," she agreed. "The islanders won't take a collar, not even if the world is ending. They've made that clear. But they've got a knack for living in closed systems that we've never learned. Surviving the journey will require getting discipline from them, and it'll only be harder getting imperial robians and islanders to work together. Only a great leader will be able to bring it out of them. Someone very firm, very wise, who can win their trust. Of the Empire, but bigger than it."
For the first time since he had accused Sarah of treason, the fox looked afraid. He slapped both of his tails against the cushions, opened his mouth.
"Don't even try to tell me you can't do it, Tails," she said.
Rituals were important.
Every five years, the aristocracy of the Empire would gather at the Egg, the place of birth and life. They would gather at the feet of the ruler, kneel, bow their heads, and open their minds, displaying their submission to the Empress's will.
Sarah knew what it felt like to have her Empress in her mind, but this time she felt the push of the other's consciousness into hers with a nervous rush, a guilty desire to push back that she could do nothing to effect. Kneeling with eyes closed, her many augmentations closed to her and her brain small and alone, she knew that Amanda had of course sensed her reluctance. But her Empress said nothing. Merely welcomed her children home, looked forward fondly to speaking with them of their cities and projects at greater length.
It was a day later, while Sarah stood on one of the high balconies overlooking the black city and the swampy lowlands about it, foggy near the river in the early morning, that her Empress stole upon her unaware, something of which only she was capable. Her bare palm rested on the fur of her shoulder. "Sarah."
"My Empress," she croaked after a sudden startle. Feeling her ears start to burn hot.
"Not the view you're used to," Amanda said. She had visited Winstone and knew Sarah's preference for brighter facades, roof gardens, and long views of mountain and plain through her towers.
"No," she agreed. "But it is still very beautiful."
"The seed-strains you've brought are an interesting choice," Amanda continued, stepping next to her, resting her armored forearms on the railing and taking in the same panorama. At reunions, nobles were expected to bring the Empress a gift from their five years of work. This time, Sarah had brought her genetically engineered, very low impact strains of tomatoes, corn and several varieties of wet-weather spices that would grow well in the central lowlands, things that could replace some of the massive soybean farms without too much loss of production or damage to the soil. "I might have thought you'd bring me one of the paintings in the style your workers seem to have found."
It had grown out of architectural drafting, and normally Sarah would be keen to discuss the nascent worker-culture that was beginning to germinate in Winstone. But not now. "I thought—I decided for something more practical."
"I haven't been having difficulty feeding my city."
"No, my Empress. But it'll let you easily put a bit more variety into the workers' diet."
"Yes."
"If you want," Sarah added stupidly, hunching her shoulders.
"If I want," Amanda agreed with a nod. "I may not give them a weekly day without tasks, though."
"No, my Empress," Sarah said, unable to keep her ears from splaying. "Of course not." She'd known that she would have to explain herself. Many workers were freed from their normal tasks on days of special occasions—long ago, to celebrate victories, now their anniversaries—and everyone, following Miles's lead, had given their scientists days away from their labs in the hope that a mind that lay fallow would be more fertile. But her institution of regular rest-days for workers was unprecedented. And as transport workers carried the news with them to their counterparts in other cities, well, the results should have been obvious to her in advance.
"Henri and Marcel are a little upset," Amanda explained unnecessarily. The Lords of nearby High Demon and Grand Crossing, who had not instituted the same policy, and did not wish to. "They've asked me to have words with you. Lupe has made a point of siding with them. She seems quite disturbed by your decision."
"I . . . ." She swallowed, turning her gaze down to the broad slope of the Egg beneath them, studded with windows and docks for transport pods. "I don't need my animals to work any harder than that, my Empress. It means a lot to them, to give them a day without labor. It lets them think. It doesn't harm anyone."
"Except for Henri and Marcel. And others, should you take into your mind to arm your workers." The Empress took a deep breath of the cool breeze. "I seem to recall you doing that, once."
"Tell me to stop, and I will, my Empress." It was not petulant; it was as close to begging as a warrior noble could come without shaming herself. "I will never disobey you."
Amanda sighed, ruminating. "It's too bad that Sonic didn't live," she said.
The conversational turn of topic was sharp enough that for a moment Sarah suspected the rotational force would throw her over the railing and tumbling down to her death. "What?"
"Nothing. A fantasy. There can only be one ruler. Do you know how tiring it is, keeping all of you in line? Twelve noblemen cyborgs pulling at the leash was more than enough. But it's you and Miles who always tug hardest."
"I'm sorry, my Empress," Sarah whispered.
"My robots all have their strengths and weaknesses," Amanda said. "Your strengths are your cleverness and strategic instincts, and your great weakness is your love for your workers. It was the only way I could tame you." Sarah felt the Empress's fingers, scratching the back of her neck. "I won't deny it to you, now that you're mine. Give them their rest, my squirrel. I'll think of some way to break the news to the others gently."
"Thank you," Sarah whispered. Tears of in her eyes. Gratitude. Knowledge that if her Empress had seen fit to command her otherwise, there was nothing in her that could have resisted. Realization that she had not thought of Sonic in over a century. "Thank you, my Empress."
"Their pictures are nice, too," Amanda added.
Her Empress left her soon, but Sarah remained on the balcony a long time with her thoughts. They brightened as they day did, the sun boiling away the fog until the black towers sparkled at their windows and corners. Everything was going to be okay. She turned and found Lupe standing not two decimeters behind her.
Instinctively, Sarah's fingers grabbed tight to the balcony handrail.
"Sarah," Lupe said, looking at her with artificial eyes that lacked an iris or pupil, but were not sightless. "I hope I haven't disturbed you."
Lupe's appearance always disturbed Sarah. She knew that she hadn't always thought her Empress beautiful, but she had come to; her monochrome carapace had a lovely simplicity to it, and it seemed to make the rare places where organic flesh showed appear more soft. Set off against the smooth armor of Amanda's scalp, her ears were even more expressive.
The other side of that paradox was the Lady Terscala, who had surgically removed all of her limbs and attached robotic replacements of steel and composite to her trunk. That was not unheard of, among augmented robians. What was very unusual was to take the discarded skin, your own gray fur and wear it as a decorative, tanned hide around the arms and legs. The armwarmers—Lupe's arms did not feel discomfort in cold, but there was no better name for the things—cut off at the wrists, where for dexterity's sake fur gave way to black steel hands and fingers.
The sight made Sarah queasy. It made Lupe look like a costume. A wolf suit, with something inside. "Lupe," she managed.
Lupe smiled perfectly, the scar she used to carry on her cheek long since erased. "My apologies," she said unctuously. Sarah remembered how the wolf had sounded long before, when Sally Acorn had fought to become Queen; hard and abrasive. "I just wanted to make sure you know that I bear you no hard feelings over my Empress's decision to permit you to let your workers fall into disuse."
How could she have found out, Sarah wondered, which was undoubtedly what she was supposed to wonder. ". . . . Thank you, Lupe. That means much to me. I don't mean to interfere with the discipline of anyone's workers."
"Have no fear, Sarah. You can't disturb my workers' discipline. No one can. And if your neighbors have any problems, Sarah, well. All they have to do is ask." The wolf's smile vanished. "I'd be more than happy to share my methods with them. Perhaps even Henri will change his tune."
Sarah said nothing.
Lupe turned her snout slightly, looking at the squirrel's fingers tightening on the rail. She smiled again. "Be safe, Sarah," she urged, and then turned back into the Egg.
She'd admitted it. Not openly, in a way that could be proved to her Empress or to others, but Lupe was trying to infiltrate minds that did not belong to her. That should not belong to her. And she wanted Sarah to stop letting her workers grow stronger and smarter.
Henri's executions had not disturbed her. But Sarah's new policy did.
Sarah had wanted to give her workers a six-day week, but it was then that she knew that she had to.
It was only after the fox gasped and closed his eyes that Sarah realized that she had used his old nickname. She hadn't meant to. It had just slipped out, in spite of hundreds of years of practice learning to use his actual name. It was just that when she thought of him guiding her people to the stars, she thought of him as more than Lord Fortune. Lord Fortune was the creature he constrained himself to show the world, out of love for his dead Lady Renee, or out of shame at that love. Her people needed the smart, fearless kit she prayed he still hid in his heart.
The fox sat there, silent, facefur wrinkled, the wince pulling his upper lip and showing the tips of his canines.
"I won't," he said finally, shaking his head. "I'm not a coward. I won't leave you and my Empress here to die."
"Amanda can go if she wants, though I suspect she won't want to. And who says I'm going to die?"
"Lupe."
"I'm not going to leave," she said firmly. "I love my people, but I love this planet. I love the way it smells. I love the way the dirt feels. I could never pull out my roots."
"And what about me?" the fox asked.
"You left the atmosphere today just coming over to say hello."
The fox opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
"I always knew how you'd chase Sonic in the woods," Sally said. "Make him prouder than I have. Show him how Tails does speed."
Kain Blackwood 2012