Hidden Empire

In 2427, on a Hansa observation platform above Oncier, a pastel gas giant five times the size of Jupiter, the xeno-archaeologist Margaret Colicos waits to see whether the device she and her husband Louis deciphered will work. They found the Klikiss Torch in the ruins on Corribus, left by an insectlike race that vanished thousands of years ago. The chief scientist, the lean and hairless Gerald Serizawa, explains it to the cameras with his hands:

“the Klikiss Torch anchors two ends of a worm-hole, a tunnel ten kilometers wide.”

One end opens beside a neutron star, the other in Oncier’s core. If the star falls through, the planet will collapse and ignite, and its four big moons, named Jack, Ben, George and Christopher for the first Great Kings, can be made habitable. Chairman Basil Wenceslas, the dapper head of the Terran Hanseatic League, a man whose age is hard to guess, touches his champagne glass to Margaret’s and offers to pay for any dig she likes. She and Louis already have a site picked out: Rheindic Co, an untouched Klikiss ghost world. Privately Basil means the test as a show of human ability aimed at the Ildirans, whom he thinks stagnant.

The first five chapters are one event seen through five pairs of eyes. Outside the platform hang seven Ildiran warliners, refitted for show, under Adar Kori’nh, supreme admiral of the Solar Navy; through the thism, the Ildirans’ racial telepathy, the Mage-Imperator watches through his eyes. On Earth, Old King Frederick, a figurehead for forty-six years, waits in the Whisper Palace, and the green priest Otema, Theroc’s ambassador, sends his blessing by telink through her potted treeling. On the platform Beneto, a green priest and the second son of Theroc’s rulers, receives it beside his own sapling. Halfway across the Spiral Arm another green priest, Arcas, waits with six technicians in a scout ship beside the neutron star.

The anchors fall, the test works, and Oncier ignites into a small new sun. The Hansa celebrates, and Beneto’s telink carries the news across the Arm. Kori’nh goes home to report to the Mage-Imperator.

Then the book fans out. In the Palace District crowds, Raymond Aguerra, a fourteen-year-old street boy who would rather talk his way out of trouble than fight, slips through the spectators, not knowing that the Chairman’s men are watching him. Basil wants a replacement for the aging King, and his expediter, Pellidor, brings him candidates. The Chairman’s view of kings, as Frederick remembers it:

“Humans have a tendency to abdicate their decision-making to charismatic figures.”

At home Raymond scrounges dinner for his three younger brothers while their mother, Rita, works long days.

On Theroc, whose worldtrees are a single mind, twelve-year-old Estarra, the fourth child of Father Idriss and Mother Alexa, has no set role and spends her freedom exploring the forest around the fungus-reef city. Her eldest brother, Reynald, the heir, is touring other worlds before he takes up his parents’ mantle. On Ildira, where night never falls, Prime Designate Jora’h, the Mage-Imperator’s heir, welcomes him to the crystal capital of Mijistra. On top of the canopy a young acolyte, Nira Khali, reads aloud to the trees, and the senior priest Yarrod, Mother Alexa’s younger brother, raises her a level.

The trader Rlinda Kett has lost a ship to the pirate Rand Sorengaard, and she lets General Kurt Lanyan of the Earth Defense Forces use her as bait: she watches from his Juggernaut while her ex-husband Branson Roberts, whom she calls BeBob, flies her Voracious Curiosity into the trap. Then she flies to Theroc, where Idriss and Alexa have no interest in trade but their ambitious, Earth-educated daughter Sarein strikes a deal with her. Lanyan’s ambush springs, Sorengaard is captured and executed, and Frederick drapes a medal ribbon over the General’s neck before the display screens.

The Roamers live by ekti, the hydrogen fuel of the stardrives, which their skymines skim from gas giants. Jess Tamblyn brings a cargo escort to his elder brother Ross’s Blue Sky Mine in the lemony-tan clouds of Golgen. Ross, disowned by their father Bram, is betrothed to Cesca Peroni, the protégée of the Speaker, Jhy Okiah; he does not know that Jess and Cesca have fallen in love, and Jess carries his gifts to her. At a secret meeting on a Roamer yacht, Okiah and Cesca turn down Reynald’s proposed alliance, and when he asks Cesca to consider marrying him she tells him she is already betrothed. Jess flies the inventor Kotto Okiah close to a flaring star to scout a colony site, and the Speaker’s grandson Berndt builds a new skymine among the broken moons of Erphano.

On Rheindic Co, a desert of Klikiss cliff cities, Margaret and Louis set up camp with their compy, DD, the green priest Arcas and three Klikiss robots who unexpectedly volunteered: Sirix, Dekyk and Ilkot, black beetlelike machines with no useful memories of their makers. Arcas carries water to his treelings and plays cards with Louis on desert nights, and the couple wonder what wiped out the Klikiss.

On Earth, Basil has a fire set in Raymond’s dwelling complex. Rita and the three boys die in it. Pellidor’s men stun Raymond and carry him away.

Basil wants a Theron ambassador he can manage. He maneuvers Sarein, his protégée and occasional lover, into Otema’s post. Back on Theroc, old Otema tells Sarein to her face that she is disappointed in her, and uses her new title like an insult. Otema is sent to Ildira instead, to read the Ildirans’ epic, the Saga of Seven Suns, aloud to the worldforest through her treeling, and the council chooses Nira to go with her.

On Golgen’s night side, Ross can’t sleep. Huge diamond-hulled warglobes crackling with blue lightning rise out of the clouds and destroy the Blue Sky Mine. Ross is the first human the hydrogues kill. The clan leader Del Kellum brings the Speaker the news, and Jess goes home to the clan holdings under the ice of Plumas, where Bram is as stern as ever. At Ross’s memorial Bram, gaunt and pale, can barely stand; he will not outlive his son by long. Warglobes go on to destroy skymines at gas giant after gas giant, never demanding terms, and at Welyr a thousand people or more die, among them Kellum’s betrothed, Shareen Pasternak. At a clan council Kellum shouts down talk of waiting, and Tasia, the youngest Tamblyn, runs off in a huff to join the Earth Defense Forces, taking her compy, EA.

Raymond wakes in the Hansa’s hands, his hair dyed a straw-coloured blond to the roots and his brown eyes turned a startling greenish-blue, to be told that he is now Prince Peter.

“Who’s Peter? My name’s Raymond Aguerra.”

The ancient Teacher compy OX, in the room from the first, begins to train him.

The Ildirans have given up their plague-emptied splinter colony of Crenna, which an aged cohort leader, Tal Aro’nh, evacuated earlier in the book, and sold it to the Hansa. Davlin Lotze, Basil’s hand-picked observer, arrives with the first human settlers to see what the Ildirans left. On Ildira the court rememberer Vao’sh meets Dio’sh, Crenna’s only surviving rememberer, still haunted by the plague. Then the warglobes return to Oncier. They obliterate the moon George and destroy the station left to watch the new star, and Serizawa dies with it.

Rlinda, who now has Theroc’s trade, carries Otema and Nira to Ildira. Jora’h himself comes to meet them, to Rlinda’s astonishment, and presents them under the open skysphere of the Prism Palace to his father, the Mage-Imperator, whose projected image hangs over the hall like a full moon. The two priests lodge in the palace and read the Saga to their treeling. Jora’h, who has many assigned mates and grown children, falls in love with the green priest.

In basic training Tasia outshines the spoiled Earth recruits, Patrick Fitzpatrick III among them, and befriends Robb Brindle; when the trainees are shown recordings of a skymine dying at Welyr, she recognises its chief, Shareen. Peter, at his lessons, studies the colony worlds and remembers his mother’s faith. On the farming colony Corvus Landing, the old green priest Talbun asks for a successor so that he can end his work and his life, and Beneto happily takes the backwater post.

Secrets start to surface. Dio’sh uncovers ancient documents proving that the hydrogues fought the Ildirans long ago, and that the war was cut out of the Saga. On Rheindic Co, DD tries to make friends with the robots, and Dekyk asks him whether the humans treat him as a pet or a slave. On Earth the researcher William Andeker lures the Klikiss robot Jorax into his laboratory to take it apart. “There are some things you cannot be permitted to know,” Jorax tells him, and kills him. Afterwards the robot claims that the scientist set off an involuntary self-preservation system, and demands that all Klikiss robots be treated as sovereign life forms; the old King forbids any further dissection. The hydrogues destroy Berndt Okiah’s new skymine at Erphano, and the Speaker counts her grandson among the dead. On the pleasure world of Hyrillka, during a Solar Navy display for the jovial Designate and young Thor’h, a tactical idea from Jora’h’s soldier-born firstborn, Qul Zan’nh, wins him a promotion.

On Ildira the Mage-Imperator tells Jora’h of the attacks at Oncier, Golgen and Erphano. A tale in the Saga, he allows, must bear at least a foundation of truth; then:

“But no, my son, this is not the work of the Shana Rei.”

The Shana Rei are creatures of darkness from Ildiran legend.

Dio’sh takes his discovery to the Mage-Imperator, who kills him to keep it secret. Kori’nh drills his officers in innovative Terran tactics, to the discomfort of the conservative ones, and demotes the stodgiest. He posts a maniple of forty-nine ships at Qronha 3, the gas giant nearest Ildira and the last skymine still worked by Ildirans, under old Aro’nh, who led the Crenna evacuation as a tal and is newly demoted to qul. BeBob, now scouting for the EDF in his own ship, the Blind Faith, flies to Dasra, where the aliens have made their fifth attack on Roamer facilities, sees warglobes and runs. Then warglobes rise from Qronha 3 and attack its skymine. Aro’nh rams his warliner into the nearest and destroys it, at the cost of his ship and his life, and the rest of the Ildiran force is beaten.

In an audience with a delegation of the scaly kith, the Mage-Imperator suddenly writhes in pain, and his hulking bodyguard Bron’n draws his crystal katana on the wailing delegates as if they had poisoned him. They have not; what ails the god-emperor is a secret for the next book. Peter remembers the night his father walked out. On Rheindic Co the team finds a new city in the cliffs, and in it an intact trapezoidal stone window whose border tiles each seem to match a set of coordinates. Louis goes to work on the machinery in the chamber.

A giant warglobe arrives at Earth, and an emissary in a sealed environment tank demands to speak to the King. Basil is away on Ildira, and the flustered Frederick tries to reach him through the green priests. In the Throne Hall the emissary explains: the Torch annihilated a hydrogue world. Humans must abandon the gas giants, and the King’s request is denied. Without ekti humanity’s stardrives will starve, so it amounts to a declaration of war. Then the emissary blows itself up, killing Frederick and the observers in the hall.

On Ildira, with Jora’h away visiting Reynald on Theroc, the Mage-Imperator’s guards kill Otema in front of Nira, because the old woman is of no use to him, and take Nira away, to a place the book does not name. Jora’h is told that both priests died in a fire. On Corvus Landing, Talbun, satisfied that Beneto is ready, walks into his grove and lets himself die.

Jess decides to fight back himself. His loyal workers nudge comets out of their orbits toward Golgen, and he goes back there alone to watch them plunge into the clouds with the force of atomic warheads. Jhy Okiah urges the clans to find alternatives to skymining and steps down as Speaker in Cesca’s favour; Jess watches the woman he loves become a strong leader, further from him than ever. In the EDF, Tasia now commands a Thunderhead weapons platform beside the Juggernaut Goliath. The emissary that killed the King wore her dead brother Ross’s likeness, and when one of her men asks whether to let the aliens take the first shot:

“Shizz, not on your life.”

Basil rushes home and tells Raymond that King Peter must take the throne at once. The coronation is staged to project hope and confidence. Peter plays his part, hiding his hatred of the Chairman, and he is drugged to keep him compliant.

On Rheindic Co, Louis realises that the stone window is a transportal, a doorway connected to old Klikiss machinery. The robots say they remember nothing useful, but Margaret’s translations show that they were partly responsible for their creators’ disappearance and once fought an ancient war against both hydrogues and Ildirans. The Colicoses hurry back to camp and find Arcas murdered, his young worldtrees destroyed, communications cut and the robots gone. With DD they barricade themselves in the cliff city. The robots break through and seize DD, careful not to harm a fellow machine. At the last moment Louis gets the window working and sends Margaret through it to an unknown world. Before he can follow, the gate closes and the robots are upon him. The last chapter is his.