On this night, the SF building was lit up as always, each of its many levels glowing brightly. A full duty shift was inside, more than fifty thousand people. They were all working nonstop, lording over millions of superfast communications bubbles, the cells from which the reports of the nonstop comings and goings of the vast space service gurgled up.
At the exact opposite end of Special Number One, hanging off the floating city's northern tip, was another very futuristic building. It was built entirely of black superglass, and unlike the brightness of SF's Blue Rock, it was rarely seen emitting any light at all.
This was the operations center for the second service of the Empire's triad, the Inner Defense Forces. More readily known as the Solar Guards, they were about half as big as the Space Forces and were responsible for security within the Pluto Cloud, as the boundary of the Earth's solar system was known.
Or at least that's how it was supposed to be.
Truth was, the Solar Guards could be found in just about every corner of the Galaxy, while many vessels of the Space Forces fleet spent their time on assignments closer to Earth, where most of the Empire's major repair and training facilities were located. This disparity was one of the great ironies of the Empire, and it had been like this for longer than anyone could remember.
To say the two services did not get along was a ridiculous understatement. Their top officers never communicated with each other. They used different types of weapons and flew different types of starships. They had different orders of rank and even different style uniforms. The Space Forces wore blue with yellow trim; the Solar Guards wore black with red. Their missions were nothing alike. The Solar Guards were like an army of policemen. They cruised the Galaxy, working on countless investigations, some of them legitimate (like tracking down tax outlaws and criminal armies), but many not. As a result, the Solar Guards conducted their own wars and the Space Forces conducted theirs. The two services had never fought side by side against a common enemy.
The Solar Guards had been established just three hundred years before — or so they claimed. And while they boasted fewer men in arms than the Space Forces, their troops were considered more specialized, better trained, and more ruthless. They were also much closer to the inner workings of the Imperial Palace, the ultimate seat of power. While the Space Forces were never shy in making their views clear to the Emperor, by tradition they usually did so through normal channels of protocol. The Solar Guards, on the other hand, excelled in getting the Emperor's ear via back channels and well-practiced intrigues.
A difference in philosophy fueled the main conflict between the services. The SG believed the Empire's best path to success was to reclaim as many of the Galaxy's planets as possible, as quickly as possible, and bring them into the Empire's fold. The Space Forces were dedicated to the same goal but believed the way to accomplish this was to go after the troublesome planets first — those inhabited by pirates, criminals, and other interstellar lowlifes — 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 that expansion should be carried out.
The Solar Guards ops building was almost always covered in shadow. Even now, in the dead of night, no lights illuminated its main entrance. Barely two dozen people were on duty inside, and none was working very hard. Unlike their SF rivals, SG commanders rarely reported in on a regular basis — not officially, anyway. Anything of any importance they always sent in deeply coded layers of biosecrecy, the so-called "brain-proof cryptics that very few people could read, least of all the building's night shift. So while any bubble noise being transmitted to this place during the night was probably coming from the darker places in the Galaxy, the handful of communications beams received were simply stored away to be read by others in the morning.
Unlike the SF building, though, the Solar Guards had built a bunker below their ops center. It went down thirteen levels. In one section of the lowest level was a room restricted to everyone but a select few at the top of the Solar Guards' hierarchy.
In this room there was an ultrasecret communications beam selector, one that was always set to the same atomic band. This apparatus worked even less frequently than those in the upper levels of this shadowy place. But a message had come in through it this night.
It would make sense only to someone who understood exactly who was on the other end of the communicator.
"Post-Fringe Five Mission, Day 3," the encoded message bubbles read. "Nothing new to report… "
The Expeditionary and Exploratory Forces, known more simply as the X-Forces, was the third service of the Empire's trinity.
It had about one-tenth the number of troops as the SF; way less than half that of the Solar Guards. The X-Forces' mandate was to fly to the Outer Fringe — meaning all arms of the galactic spiral — and identify those planets lost since the last Dark Age and even beyond. In many ways, they were the scouts before the cavalry. Any planets they did not reclaim themselves were left for the Space Forces. The X-Force's starships carried highly trained troops but also professional humanitarians, scientists, physicians, and representatives of the Empire's diplomatic corps. Very often the first time the people of a reclaimed world saw the Empire's banner it was painted on the side of an X-Forces vessel. While the SF and SG battled each other for influence both on Earth and throughout the Galaxy, the X-Forces went about their far-flung jobs somewhat quietly.
As such, they had absolutely no political power anywhere in the Empire and least of all on the Imperial floating city.
In fact, they didn't even have a building up there.
All of the buildings immediately surrounding the Imperial Palace were brick-by-brick reconstructions of ancient dwellings found on Earth thousands of years before.
There were twelve of them in all, their interiors full of intricately carved oak, one of the rarest commodities in the Galaxy. These buildings had very few windows and many were made of stained glass. Though elegant, this made the buildings unnaturally dark inside. Full of shadows and dimly lit hallways, they were also honeycombed with secret passageways, and, it was rumored, dungeons.
These were the Holy Houses, the places where the Specials resided. And it was into a room on the top floor of one of them that Petz Calandrx suddenly popped in.
He hadn't traveled so fast in years. One moment he was standing in his foyer talking to the spy; the next, he was here, in this dark place, his head throbbing with pain, his skin still emitting a greenish glow. He checked to make sure all of his vital parts had survived the transport process. They had, thank God. Then he studied his new surroundings. No windows, no furniture, not even a chair. He knew he was inside a Holy House though; the room's exquisite woodwork gave it away.
But where was he exactly? Which house? Whose room? These things he didn't know.
This had all happened so suddenly he'd not been given the opportunity to even change his clothes. Whatever member of the Imperial Family had summoned him, Calandrx would be greeting them in his smoking jacket and slippers!
And what shape had he left his house in? Had he extinguished his reading candles before answering the fateful knock? He couldn't remember — not that it mattered. He was sure the spy was rummaging through his things at that very moment, doing what spies do. He just hoped the man would blow out all the candles before he left.
Calandrx suddenly felt a bit claustrophobic. This room was very small by imperial standards. Why was he here? Who was he supposed to see? The Emperor? Hardly… O'Nay would not have gone through the trouble of sending a spy for him. He could have simply willed it into the wind, and Calandrx would have been standing before him instantly. The Emperor's wacky son was a more likely suspect. The kid was a royal fuckup, known as much for his inability to handle slow-ship wine as the disrespectful way he treated real women, a rarity throughout the Empire. He also loved Starfighters and in the past had approached Calandrx to talk tactics. But Calandrx had always put him off, having little desire to spend even a minute in the presence of such an idiot. Could this be the Prince's method of revenge?