The revelers were stunned. This wasn't like her; she just wasn't herself. They tried to tell her so, even offering her some jamma. But the Empress wasn't listening. She was simply getting annoyed.
"I have somewhere I have to go," she told them. "So, if you don't mind…"
With the arch of her eyebrow, she indicated that they should all leave. But they were much too thick to get the hint.
Instead, one relative begged her, "Please tell us where you are going—"
"We will go with you," another pleaded. "We need to celebrate… something!"
"I am going to the desert," the Empress told them harshly. "Alone."
They were shocked. Going to the desert… alone? This seemed not only foolhardy but dangerous as well. There was no water out in the desert. And without water, the Empress could actually die — and this they could not allow. She was the center of their universe. If she disappeared, they all would.
"But my lady," one asked her, "why would you want to go to such a horrible place?"
"That's not of your concern."
"But how? How will you be going?"
"By air car," was her surprising answer.
Now her relatives were simply baffled. Did the Empress even know how to drive an air car?
"But my lady, by air car, a trip to the desert will take days."
"I know!' the Empress said.
With that, she pushed past them and was gone.
20
Two miles away, on the ninety-ninth floor of the Space Forces headquarters building, the Secretary of SF Intelligence was also packing a bag.
It was just a precaution, though. He'd told the SF troopers guarding the building that if the SG attempted to take over Blue Rock, then they would have to carry him out in a box. But this was a rare case of bluster from the Secretary. He was much too valuable to the SF to be skinned alive by the Solar Guards — and he knew it. There was an evacuation plan in place, and a space cruiser docked on the roof. Should the Huns make a grab for the rest of the aerial city, the Secretary would be the first one on that ship out.
Until then, though, he vowed to pray over every piece of intelligence that came into the soaring building and, to the best of his ability, try to figure out what the hell was going on out there, among the stars.
He'd just finished packing when the secure bubbler in the corner of his office came to life. It began spitting out the moming's SF3 intelligence summary, a compilation of field reports from across the Empire. The Secretary retrieved the viz doc, floated over to his desk, poured himself a shot of slow-ship, and then sat down to read. Usually the summary was dry and routine. But one look at the opening passage of this report told him it was a shocker.
It detailed a number of horrifying incidents that had happened across the Galaxy in the last twenty-four hours — events of sheer madness that had been widely rumored across the Empire. An X-Forces ship in the Eight Arm came upon a convoy of transport vessels lying dead in space, covered with blaster burns and with huge holes torn in their fuselages. The convoy had been carrying more than 12,000 passengers, including many members of the SF Youth, future officers in the Space Forces.
Everyone on board had been killed.
An interstellar hospital at the bottom of the Three Arm had been evaporated by a gigantic blast from an X beam. More than 250,000 patients and nearly 20,000 doctors were inside the facility at the time.
Now their bodies were floating in loose orbits around the point in space where the hospital had once been. There were no survivors.
A huge agri-planet called Kansi One in the Nine Arm had been attacked by two warships using X-beam arrays. Each bolt had the force of one million thermonuclear strikes. The two ships vaporized all of the planet's farming complexes, destroying billions of tons of grain and foodstuffs. Not only would millions across the Galaxy face starvation because of this act of terror, the subatomic residue from the X-beam strike had poisoned the soil of Kansi One forever.
The report went on and on and on. Attacks on isolated civilian ships, massacres in schools and orphanages, unprovoked bombardments of innocent worlds, some of which were unaware that the Empire even existed. There was little doubt who was behind these barbarities. So many people had reported seeing the REF's mysterious Red Ships before and after the attacks, they were too numerous to discount. And these weren't military strikes, the report concluded. Nor were they part of the interstellar war still going on between the SF and SG. Each incident seemed to have just one goal in mind: to be especially cruel to the especially helpless, to cause only misery and pain.
The Secretary was both furious and baffled. Why was the breakaway SG unit doing these horrible things? How could the elite special operations group so suddenly turn into an army of bloodthirsty thugs?
No one knew, certainly not the Imperial Court, nor the SF — not even the Solar Guards themselves. Of this last point the Secretary was sure. How? Because SF3 had been eavesdropping on SG string communications for decades. The Secretary frequently knew their high-priority orders before some of the people inside SG headquarters did. And he knew that not only had the REF stopped responding to orders from Black Rock weeks ago, Black Rock had no idea where the REF was at any given moment.
Nor did SG Command have an explanation for the REF's ability to appear and then suddenly disappear apparently at whim, or for their unexplained thirst for innocent blood, or even why they murdered SF3 agent Gym Bonz on Doomsday 212 in the first place.
The most recent SF3 snooping had picked up a conversation inside Black Rock among the top SG officers on Earth. While it was clear by their nervous chatter that the Solar Guards were becoming overwhelmed by both their war against the SF and maintaining their martial law over the One Arm, one question that haunted the SG staff was especially telling: Where and when would their renegade REF strike next?
There were twelve SG officers in the top-level meeting. Not one of them had a clue.
The Secretary poured himself another drink. This time a strong one.
In his centuries of working for SF Intelligence, he'd never faced a situation quite like this before.
Strangeness was rarely in short supply in the Galaxy, but there seemed to be a surplus of it these days.
Case in point: forty-eight hours before, he'd received a report from several SF ship commanders who had just fought in the huge battle against the Solar Guards up in the Two Arm. These men swore that at the height of that battle, they'd seen a ship suddenly appear amid the chaos. It hadn't come from Supertime, because they were all in Supertime when it materialized. Nor had it come from any of the other single-digit dimensions because it had left absolutely no sub-atomic wake. But the strangest thing was, the SF commanders insisted this ghostly vessel was actually the Resonance 133, one of the cargo 'crashers stolen by the Two Arm invaders in the same area just a month before, only to disappear with the rest of the invaders' fleet shortly afterward.
The Secretary now reread this report as well as the long list of recent atrocities. What is really going on here? As if the Empire tearing itself apart wasn't bad enough, he now had dozens of inhuman brutalities taking place, plus a ghost ship suddenly appearing as if from nowhere.
He sipped his drink, and suddenly his mind kicked into overdrive: Could there be a connection between all these things?
He quickly called up every viz doc he'd received in the past five weeks, ever since the short-lived invasion of the Two Arm, and assembled them chronologically. The time line read like a bad novel. First, the rebel fleet invaded the Two Arm, defeated Joxx at Megiddo, and incurred the wrath of the REF.