He'd been doing undercover missions for them ever since.
He walked down the long, nearly empty concourse now, the great plaza of aluminum and gold that served to divide this part of the floating city neatly in two. At one end stood the soaring, brightly lit headquarters of Space Forces Command. This was his destination.
Known as Blue Rock, the headquarters was an extremely futuristic building, climbing dozens of stories into the sky, with a jumble of moving walkways, flying bridges, and air tubes surrounding it like so many sparkling halos. This place served as the supreme operations center for the Space Forces, the largest of the Empire's holy trinity of military services. The Space Forces were the Emperor's front-line troops, nearly thirty billion regulars in all, with millions of spacecraft to get them where they needed to go.
Invading and holding hostile planets was its specialty, and its soldiers enjoyed great elan. Comprised primarily of the Navy, the Army, and the Air Service, the SF was well trained, highly motivated, and very loyal to the Emperor. And as its roots went back more than 1,000 years, its members liked to think they were the real professionals of the Empire's vast military, and for many reasons, they were.
By contrast, hanging off the floating city's northern tip was another very futuristic building, this one made entirely of black superglass. Unlike the brightness of SF's Blue Rock, it was rare to see any light at all coming from this place. This was Black Rock, the operations center for the second service of the Empire's triad: the Inner Defense Forces, also known as the Solar Guards.
Essentially, the SG were the military police of the Empire. They were mainly responsible for security within the Pluto Cloud, as the boundary of the Earth's Solar System was called. Or at least that's how it was supposed to work. Truth was, the Solar Guards could be found in just about every corner of the Galaxy these days. Though not quite hah0 as large at the SF, they still fielded nearly fifteen billion soldiers; maintained millions of precincts, outposts, and ports of call throughout the Galaxy; and had many shady mercenary armies serving in their employ as well. Their far-flung influence, built up since the SG's inception three centuries before, was in contrast to the Space Forces who, by tradition, had many of its bases, repair stations, barracks, and training facilities much closer in to Earth. This meant SF patrols were always longer and then-resources always more stretched out. Frequently, it took the SF more time to get to their destinations, while the SG, with its established presence just about everywhere in the realm, were rarely very far from the action. This disparity was one of the great ironies of the Empire.
The opposite-end location of the two headquarters atop Special Number One was no coincidence.
The SF and the SG did not get along. They used different types of weapons and flew different types of starships. They had different orders of rank and different style uniforms — the Space Forces wore blue with yellow trim, the Solar Guards wore black with red. Their missions were nothing alike. While it was the job of the Space Forces to project military policies throughout the Empire, the Solar Guards cruised the Galaxy, unencumbered by long traditions, conducting countless "investigations," some of them legitimate (like tracking down tax outlaws and criminal armies) but many of them not. SG troops were also considered more specialized and better trained man those in the Space Forces — and far more ruthless.
A difference in philosophy fueled the main conflict between the two services. The Empire was incredibly vast. As the Galaxy was 100,000 light-years across, the realm encompassed more than 100 billion star systems, upwards of 500 billion planets, and trillions of citizens — no one was sure of the exact number. Three Empires and several Dark Ages had passed since humans first left Mother Earth more than 5,000 years before. During the First Empire, which ran from about 2100 to roughly 3200 a.d., every planet in the Milky Way had been discovered, explored, terra-formed, (or puffed, to use the common term) and made part of the realm. But with three successive imperial falls, billions of these planets became lost again, their populations in upheaval, some not even realizing that they were still part of a huge Empire. Indeed, after successive waves of time and history over 5,000 years, some planets' inhabitants weren't even aware that life existed beyond their own atmospheres. The fourth and current Empire had reclaimed about 85 percent of the Milky Way during its reign, and the process continued unabated. The Empire's starships and soldiers were still investing planets, bringing them back under the imperial rule, whether they liked it or not, at a rate of about 1,000 a day. This is where the clash in doctrine between the SF and the SG came in.
The SG believed the Empire's best path to success was to reclaim as many of these worlds as possible, as quickly as possible, no matter what the means. This included invading unsuspecting planets without prior warning, a hugely traumatic event for the inhabitants of the unlucky world. The Space Forces were dedicated to the same goal of reclamation but believed the best way to accomplish it was to go after the troublesome planets first — those millions of worlds inhabited by pirates, criminals, tax dictators, and other interstellar low-lifes — and bring the more peaceful, law-abiding planets back in gradually.
So, it was not a question of expansion — that was everybody's objective — it was how quickly and humanely that expansion should be carried out. It seemed to be such a simple point really, but it was the dividing line between the two enormous military branches, one just as wide as the concourse that separated them up here on Special Number One. No one in the Imperial Court dared favor one service over the other, at least not in the light of day, and Emperor O'Nay was characteristically mute on the subject.
So the SG conducted their own reclaiming operations— most times on very flimsy criminal evidence — and the SF conducted theirs. Thus, the SG fought its own wars and the SF fought theirs. Not once in their combined history had the two services joined forces and fought side by side against a common enemy.
In fact, more than a few times of the past three centuries, they'd come close to trading shots themselves.
None of this would be of any help for what was about to come.
The Fourth Empire was in turmoil, perhaps the worst since its rise to power 500 years ago. Things started going wrong about a month before, when an army of mysterious invaders suddenly swept down the Two Arm, the second of the nine major swirls that, along with the Ball, made up the Milky Way.
Though the Empire had been at war for centuries with space pirates, outlaw mere armies and other space trash out on the Fringe, the realm itself had never been invaded before. Even worse, no one had any real idea who the invaders were. They had appeared as if from nowhere farther up the Two Arm and, despite their relatively small numbers, had created widespread panic in that part of the Galaxy, causing a flood of refugees in the sector that had still not slowed down.
For a while, it even seemed the invaders were heading for Earth itself. The Empire's Starcrasher warships traveled in the Seventh Dimension at speeds reaching two light-years a minute. This made a trip to the far end of the Galaxy possible in less than a month. Earth, on the odier hand, was located about two-thirds of the way out on the One Arm. Thus, the Two Arm was only a few days' travel away.
When news got around that the invaders had managed to steal six Supertime-capable cargo ships, a shock wave went through die Empire. The enemy was only forty-eight hours away from the mother world! The crisis produced enough concern that O'Nay was forced to cancel the Earth Race, die centuries-old contest that was the most important social and political event in the realm. That had never happened before, either.