Scott Westerfeld - Succession 02 - Killing Of Worlds.pdf

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V1.0 Notes
There ARE only 3 chapters in the book. All the remaining sections are split up with
the various titles of the characters in the novel (e.g. Captain, Executive Officer,
Senator, Pilot, compound mine, etc.)
The "Commando's" name really is H_rd ("h" underscore "rd")
No spellcheck was performed (the scans were pretty clean and I hate spellchecking
sci-fi)
Hope you enjoy
The Killing of Worlds
BOOK TWO OF SUCCESSION
SCOTT WESTERFELD
ISBN 0-765-30850-9
Acknowledgments
This novel is indebted to Wil McCarthy's research on programmable matter, from
his Nature article on the subject, to a paper I heard him give at Read-ercon 2001, to
his kind vetting of this manuscript.
Another debt is owed to Samuel R. Delany, whose views on the typography of
Swords and Sorcery, expressed in 1984: Selected Letters, gave me the courage to
capitalize "Emperor."
Copyright 2003 by Scott Westerfeld
To Justine, with whom I have a genuine and continuing relationship.
A Note on Imperial Measures One of the many advantages of life under the
 
Imperial Apparatus is the easy imposition of consistent standards of infostructure,
communication, and law. For fifteen hundred years, the measures of the Eighty Worlds
have followed an enviably straightforward scheme.
• There are 100 seconds in each minute, 100 minutes in an hour, and ten hours in a
day.
• One second is defined as 1/100,000 of a solar day on Home.
• One meter is defined as 1/300,000,000 of a light-second.
• One gravity is defined as 10 meters per second squared acceleration.
The Emperor has decreed that the speed of light shall remain as nature has
provided.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO
The Imperial Civil War —compiled by the Academy of Material Detail
Two thousand years ago, it is believed, the population of diasporic humanity
surpassed one hundred trillion, including various more-or-less human types in addition
to the main germlines. This was a very rough count, and given the scale of the galaxy
and the unattainability of translight travel, informed estimates can no longer be made.
Certainly, no census is possible. But it is obvious that humanity is a vast object of
study, even when matters of merely local concern are engaged.
The Risen Empire, with its eighty worlds, its trillions, and its core-ward
position—dense with neighbors such as the Rix, the Feshtun, and Laxu—is huge enough
to seem unaffected by the actions of individuals. Historians speak of social pressures
as if they were physical laws, of "unstoppable" forces of change, of destiny. But for
the men and women who walked the historical stage, these forces were often invisible,
hidden by their sheer scale and the rank propaganda of the times. Social pressures
built invisibly over lifetimes, not across the pages of a history text. And destiny only
became apparent after the dice had been thrown. For those who experienced them
directly, historical events were ruled by the fortunes of war, the whims of lovers, and
 
dumb luck. Fate arises out of such humble parts as these.
In the current era, when the inevitability of the Imperial Civil War is received
wisdom, we must work to remember that it was the product of specific events.
Collapse would have come in any case, true, but it might have come centuries earlier, or
(more likely) centuries later than it did. For the generations who lived under the
cultural and military tyranny of the Risen Emperor, the difference was not trivial.
The origins of the Civil War are now learned by rote. The Risen Empire was riven
into two parts. The limited democracy of the Senate contested the iron rule of the
Emperor in an uneasy dance of powersharing. Representative government provided an
outlet for popular will, while the Imperial cult of personality supplied a patriarch to
bind together eighty worlds, the living populace and the risen dead each playing their
part in the machinery of the Empire. The great majority of Imperial citizens were
alive, and constituted the collective engine of change and economic productivity. As
inventors, capitalists, and workers, they were the functional, instrumental members of
society. The risen dead, on the other hand, represented continuity with the past. They
controlled the established wealth, owning the land, the shipping charters, the ancient
copyrights, dominating religion and high culture, an undead aristocracy of sorts. These
tensions, fundamentally a class conflict, had to find release eventually. The immortal
Emperor and his fanatical Apparatus had held onto power at any cost for centuries,
making it almost certain that any resolution would be a bloody one. Adding to this
instability, the small gene pool of its founder population made the Empire particularly
susceptible to mass manias, cults of personality, pandemics, and other forms of radical
upheaval.
Still, specific events brought about the Civil War in a specific way, and are worth
historical study. There was a Second Rix Incursion, a Senator Nara Oxham, a Captain
Laurent Zai.
The Second Rix Incursion began on Legis XV. It was at root a religious war. The
Rix Cult worshiped planetary-scale Al, which the Emperor's Apparatus jealously
stamped out of existence wherever it arose. The Rix viewed this as deicide, and
planned a deicide of their own, perhaps from the moment the Child Empress retired to
Legis. Sister to the Emperor, Anastasia was his only equal as an object of worship.
Sixteen hundred years earlier, the Emperor had worked to save Anastasia's life
from a juvenile disease, inventing immortality in the process, and forming the basis of
the Risen Empire. Thus, she was known as the Reason, the child for whom the Old
Enemy death had been defeated. When a small Rix warship penetrated Legis's
defenses and took her hostage, the Risen Empire had suffered a devastating blow.
Captain Laurent Zai found himself in the unenviable position of being in command of
 
the only Imperial warship in the Legis system. The Lynx was a capable ship, a small,
powerful frigate prototype, but any attempt to rescue Anastasia from a squad of Rix
commandos could only be a desperate gamble. Under the military conventions of the
day, failure would constitute a so-called "Error of Blood," demanding ritual suicide
from the commanding officer.
There was little time to weigh the issue. Once the Rix had taken the Child Empress,
they set loose a compound mind within the Legis infos-tructure. Over a few hours,
every networked machine on the planet— diaries, market mainframes, pocket phones,
traffic computers—was amalgamating into a single emergent consciousness: Alexander.
Captain Zai had to act quickly.
Given the chaos of the rescue attempt, it will never be clear if the Child Empress
was killed by her Rix captors or by the Imperial Apparatus; theories of the
Emperor's involvement have never been decisively proven. Easier to confirm is why
Laurent Zai refused the Blade of Error, flying in the face of tradition. Although he
was from an ancient and gray military family, sworn to the Emperor's service, he had
recently sworn a different sort of loyalty to Nara Oxham, a Senator from the
anti-Imperial Secularist party. The two were in secret contact, he at the Rix frontier
and she at the capital, throughout the beginning of the Rix War. When she asked Zai
not to kill himself, he assented. Love, in this case, was a stronger force than honor.
The rescue attempt had come too late for Legis. The Rix compound mind emerged
within the planet's infostructure, an alien intelligence in possession of a hostage world.
But Alexander was cut off. The polar facility that maintained Legis's interstellar
communications remained in Imperial hands. Alexander was alone, save for a single Rix
commando who had survived the rescue attempt. With the help of omnipresent
Alexander and her hostage/lover Rana Harter, this Rixwoman disappeared to the far
north to await the compound mind's next move.
On board the Lynx, Captain Laurent Zai faced a mutiny, an attempt by gray
members of his crew to enforce the Error of Blood. Though he and his able first
officer, Katherie Hobbes, easily thwarted the mutineers, a farmore dangerous threat
approached. Another Rix ship, a battlecruiser of far greater firepower than Zai's
frigate, had entered the Legis system. Although officially pardoned by the Emperor
for his Error of Blood, Zai was ordered to engage the battlecruiser to prevent it from
making contact with the compound mind, a suicide mission, the Emperor no doubt
assumed.
Of course, Laurent Zai could not have imagined the fate that awaited Legis XV if
the Lynx should fail.
The Emperor probably planned a nuclear attack from the moment the Rix mind came
 
into existence. Total annihilation of the Legis infostructure offered three advantages
to the sovereign. He could destroy the compound mind, rally the Empire behind another
costly war with the Rix, and, most importantly, maintain the secret that had underlain
his rule for sixteen centuries, a secret grasped by Alexander in its first hours of
consciousness. Against the objections of Senator Oxham and the anti-Imperial parties,
the Emperor's hand-picked War Council approved the attack by a narrow margin,
providing political cover for this desperate act.
But Laurent Zai and the Lynx proved far more resourceful, and luckier, than anyone
might have expected.
Prologue
Captain
The Lynx exploded, expanded.
The frigate's energy-sink manifold spread out, stretching luxuriant across eighty
square kilometers. The manifold was part hardware and part field effect, staggered
ranks of tiny machines held in their hexagonal pattern by a lacework of easy gravity.
It shimmered in the Legis sun, refracting a mad god's spectrum, unfurling like the
feathers of some ghostly, translucent peacock seeking to rut. In battle, it could
disperse ten thousand gigawatts per second, a giant lace fan burning hot enough to
blind naked human eyes at two thousand klicks.
The satellite-turrets of the ship's four photon cannon eased away from the primary
hull, extending on hypercarbon scaffolds that always recalled to Captain Laurent Zai
the iron bones of ancient cantilever bridges. They were removed on their spindly arms
four kilometers from the vessel proper, and the Lynx was shielded from the cannon's
collateral radiation by twenty centimeters of hullalloy; using the cannon would afflict
the Lynx's crew with only the most treatable of cancers. The four satellite-turrets
carried sufficient reaction mass and intelligence to operate independently if released
in battle. And from the safety of a few thousand kilometers distance, their fusion
magazines could be ordered to crashfire, consuming themselves in a chain reaction,
delivering one final, lethal needle toward the enemy. Of course, the cannon could also
be crashfired from their close-in position, destroying their mothership in a blaze of
deadly glory.
 

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