The Rix commandos had assaulted the Imperial Palace on Legis XV less than a standard day before. It wasn’t known how the Rix heavy assault ship had reached the system undetected; their nearest forward bases were ten light-years spinward of the Legis cluster. Orbital defenses had destroyed the assault ship thousands of kilometers out, but a dozen small dropships were already away by then. They had fallen in a bright rain over the capital city, ten of them exploding in the defensive hail of bolt missiles, magnetic rail-launched uranium slugs, and particle beams from both the Lynx and groundside.

But two had made it down.

The palace had been stormed by some thirty Rix commandos, against a garrison of a hundred hastily assembled Imperial Guards.

But the Rix were the Rix.

Seven attackers had survived to reach the throne wing. Left in their path was a wake of shattered walls and dead soldiers. The Child Empress and her guests retreated to the palace’s last redoubt, the council chamber. The room was sealed within a level-seven stasis field, a black sphere supposedly as unbreachable as an event horizon. They had fifty days of oxygen and six hundred gallons of water with them.

But some unknown weapon (or had it been treachery?) had dissolved the stasis field like butter in the sun.

The Empress was taken.

The Rix, true to their religion, had wasted no time propagating a compound mind across Legis XV. They released viruses into the unprotected infostructure, corrupting the carefully controlled top-down network topology, introducing parallel and multiplex paths that made emergent global intelligence unstoppable. At this moment, every electronic device on the planet was being joined into one ego, one creature, new and vastly distributed, that would make the world Rix forever. Unless, of course, the planet was bombed back into the stone age.

Such propagations could normally be prevented by simple monitoring software. But the Rix had warned that were any action taken against the compound mind, the hostages would be executed. The Empress would die at the hands of barbarians.

And if that happened, the failure of the military to protect her would constitute Error of Blood. Nothing short of the commanding officer’s ritual suicide would be acceptable.

Captain Zai peered down into the schematic of the palace, and saw his death written there. The desperate, lancing plans of rescue—the marine drops and bombardments and infiltrations—were glyphs of failure. None would work. He could feel it. The arciform shapes, bright and primary like the work of some young child’s air drawing toy, were flowers on his grave.

If he could not effect a miraculous rescue soon, he would either lose a planet or lose the Empress—perhaps both—and his life would be forfeit.

The odd thing was, Zai had felt this day coming.