Oath of the Empress
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		<h2 id="linktree">Play-By-Post: Bondage, D/s, S&amp;M =&gt; Bondage: Human Solos =&gt; Topic started by: Dirigible on 27-07-2010, 05:03:29</h2>
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				Title: <strong>Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Dirigible</strong> on <strong>27-07-2010, 05:03:29</strong>
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				Outside the multilayer window, space beckoned.<br><br>Danyl Philion lay on the hospital bed, his cheek against the window and his eyes focused on a point light years away. Without blinking or shifting his gaze, he lifted his arm. The muscles that ran taut over his broad chest and shoulder coiled painfully over each other, not fully regenerated; yet he stretched his fingers out as far as they would go, trying to reach the pane that separated him from the yawning void.<br><br>Bare to the waist, many patches of flesh on his muscular body still had that pink sheen that suggested recent regrowth. His wounds had been severe. Chiselled pectorals flowed down to a hard corrugated stomach, his strength undiminished despite prolonged inactivity thanks to the enhanced recuperation treatments he had been given. They doctors here had worked wonders on his body, true enough, but they could do little for Danyl's mind, which stalked the room he was confined to like a caged beast, or brooded on the recent past. This was no military hospital; the quality of care was too good, and he had seen no signs of other casualties. The staff were tight-lipped about everything beyond the progress of his recovery, so the question remained: who was willing to spend so much on first-rate private medical care for a half-dead spaceman?<br><br>A painful tremor ran through Danyl's extended arm as the damaged tissues cramped. He grimaced, enduring the pain, straining, stretching towards the window... but at last his arm fell, too tired to reach further. He stared blindly at the distant silvery motes of the stars, unable to place any constellations that would tell him even what system this hospital station was in. Devoid of other stimuli, his thoughts spiralled back, to before the darkness of unconsciousness...<br><br><em>Ironheart – Osiris IV, to give it its proper designation – was a huge, dense, metal-rich gas giant, its atmosphere painted in blue slashes of cobalt and yellow cerium. Its gravity had ground ten moons into icy powder that formed wide, sweeping rings that glittered in the star Osiris' hot blue-white glare. True to its nickname, a vast ferrous sphere spun like a dynamo below that, generating an enormously powerful magnetic field.<br><br>The rebellious Duke of Vortigern's captains knew this as well as anyone. The gravity, the reflective rings, the magnetic field – Ironheart was a nightmare to navigate around, much less fight in. Against the Imperial Navy's superior numbers and firepower they formed a wall with their backs to the planet, deep within the danger zones of his hazardous emanations. Rear Admiral Kowan had replayed the words of the Emperor himself to the Imperial fleet's crews, including Danyl's ship, the </em>Moscow<em>; they were to attack the rebels at once, crush them between Ironheart's atmosphere and their guns so that this would be remembered as a slaughter, not a valiant last stand of the insurgency.<br><br>It was suicide. The </em>Moscow<em>'s railguns, along with those of every other ship in the fleet were next to useless, their projectiles curved off course by the magnetic fields. Beam weapons were useless in the fog of ice crystals. And the intense magnetism flayed their shields off, leaving them exposed to the chemical rockets and crude nuclear warheads of the Duke's gunboats – technology three centuries behind the cutting edge, but robust enough to survive Ironheart's impossible conditions. The screening ships were cut to ribbons and tumbled, and burned, down into the gas giant's blue and yellow skies. Danyl's friends, his classmates from the Academy, dying in their hundreds as ships flared into incandescent globes. At least they died doing their duty; following the orders of a vainglorious tyrant, and bu enough time for the dreadnoughts <em>Petraeus</em> and <em>Alexander</em> to pull away, saving the Rear Admiral's rear.<br><br>Danyl remembered the klaxons, the illuminated maps of the </em>Moscow<em>'s compartments going dark one at a time, the ship's Virtual Intelligence reporting casualties and losses in a calm, reasonable voice. Nuclear flashes, all around; his helmsman screaming as a wave of plasma erupted into the command deck, the ship's own air supply superheated and ignited into an electrothermal shockfront. He remembered the greasy eel of the charred body as he'd hauled it out of the chair while the captain took the other, and together they had twisted the </em>Moscow<em> so that her remaining port side drives could push them away from the planet... even if that meant turning her belly to the rebels. They had paid for that choice with most of the crew's lives and most of the ship's systems; rocket salvoes eviscerated her gun decks, her supply hangars, her quarters, leaving only the survivors on the command deck and engineering spine alive. For a time, at least; as they drifted away from Ironheart, they had sunk into unconsciousness as air reserves dwindled and remaining life support bled out into the void.<br><br>But he had not died. The captain had died, the chief engineer had died, the gunnery officer had died, the damage control teams had died... but he had been plucked from that graveyard of ships, that monument of Imperial madness, and he. Had. Survived.</em><br><br>Sluggishly, Danyl turned his head as the door whispered open, forcing himself to focus on whoever the new arrival was. He had no timepiece here, but by his own internal count it was not time for another round of surgeries or injections. Whoever this visitor was, it was better than dwelling on the morbid ache of the past again and again.
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				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>cassia</strong> on <strong>28-07-2010, 06:27:21</strong>
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				Tana Chambior, the estranged daughter of Emperor Stephen, knew that there was trouble at the Gebor Medical Center many hours before she arrived. Four different orders for supplies from Kartis-Vashell, the galactic leader in medical equipment and pharmaceuticals, had been placed by the facility and canceled within minutes for lack of funding, each of them smaller than the previous order. It was that kind of odd activity that brought her out of her sixtieth-story office on Dolcir IX to oversee the transaction herself. There was something rank about a 75-million yenar order dwindling to less than a quarter million. She had no intention of allowing Nyria-One Transport to be involved in something that would tarnish its name and hers.<br><br>The scene that they arrived to was not what she had expected. Gebor was located just off the Osiris-Luxport space lane, deep within Sector 17. It was a tiny neutral planet situated between several systems, each often at war with another and a few even daring to rebel against the Imperial Navy. Tana guessed they would see containment vessels holding victims of biological warfare, requiring speedy treatment. Instead, the crew came upon the skeletal remains of four large battleships floating idly in orbit, unmanned and torn apart. The “continued violence in Sector 17” mentioned in passing over newsfeed that morning must have been a gross understatement, and Gebor was the only medical center close enough to collect any of the shards.<br><br>Then the medical director informed her that of the 180,000 yenari he had secured, only 95,000 was coming. The Emperor had finally agreed to give Gebor ninety-five thousand to treat the wounded servicemen. Not one yenar more.<br><br><em>“Madame, Your Highness, please. We have over two thousand wounded, in critical condition, from Osiris, and we’re losing dozens every hour. We’ve been waiting for His Majesty, the Great Emperor Stephen, to approve the acquisition of more equipment. We don't have enough to keep the remainder alive for transport to Vashell. Ninety-five thousand is all we’ve been granted now. But there is another request-”<br><br>“I want no part of this, Dr. Zeir. If my father said no, then the answer is no. We must depart. Good day, sir.”<br><br>“Your Highness, wait! Ten minutes, that’s all I ask. Look and see for yourself what we’re facing.”<br></em><br>She agreed, to make him quiet, and followed him to the elevator. Six floors down were the wards, brightly lit and separated from the hallway by sterilization chambers and clear leaded window glass. The center’s robotic nurses wheeled around from bed to bed, flitting through what looked like the aftermath of a hypernuclear blast. Maimed bodies lay on sheets stained red and brown, some moving wildly and some lacking the limbs to move. Every few rooms, a nursebot could be seen covering a frighteningly still shape with black plastic.<br><br>She cursed in her mind and thought, <em>could he be under the wrong impression about what happened? Ninety-five thousand would barely save one!</em> But her voice was steady and quiet when she spoke: “Doctor Zeir, a quarter-ton of medications and bandaging supplies are going to do you no good here. You’re wasting my time, and your own. These men have been exposed to lethal levels of radiation and have plasma burns down to bone. You aren’t equipped for it, whether you receive your shipment or not.” She watched stoically as another stopped shuddering and the electronic display of his heart rate plunged to zero; she looked away and to the right, where another was unconscious but alive. “This is unusual. How is <em>he</em> not dead? He looks worse than the one who passed on.”<br><br>“I don’t know, Your Highness. There are always a stubborn few who hold on to the last minute, even when they‘ve been deserted by… forgive me, my Lady, but…”<br><br>Tana had an idea that she had been contemplating for three years, but she had never found the precisely right opportunity to begin. She needed a person, a flesh and blood person without the limitations of artificial intelligence or the unfocused wildness of an animal, and it had to be just the right one. Dr. Zeir’s words became background noise. “You may not understand it, but I know of a few university students who would like to. And they may pay a handsome sum for the opportunity to find out and have a thesis worthy of Highest Honors. If you agree to send him to the Quintis Nyria Academy with a nursebot to assist with transit, I can assure you that the remainder of your balance will be paid.”<br><br>It was a lie, and one that would remain a secret; Gebor hadn’t even identified any of the casualties, and couldn’t follow up on any particular one. Dr. Zeir kept the meager supplies, Tana slipped the cash shortage through as a billing error that Nyria-One would have to swallow, and her new charge lived through the trip not to Quintis Nyria but to Dolcir IX, where a trauma team was already waiting.<br><br>That was four weeks ago, and her team had done… adequately. They promised he would be physically healed in one month, and while their work thus far had been nothing short of technological miracle, they were behind schedule. Furthermore, she had been unable to gather much information about him - she knew his name, position, and date of birth, as well as the fact that he was, according to public records, dead.<br><br>She chose to ignore the small failures in favor of recognizing success, and see his progress from a closer viewpoint. The need for a completely aseptic environment was finally behind them. She wore a half-veil to prevent easy identification and hide her microbial filter mask, and let herself in.<br><br>The air smelled of chemical sterilizing agents and other cleaners, bitter and faintly metallic for the first few breaths. The man lying on the opposite side of the room appeared to be recovering well, but without speaking to him directly, she couldn’t know if he would fit into her plan the way she had hoped.<br><br>“Hello,” she said, when his head turned towards her and he appeared to focus. “I won’t bother you for long today. I know you need to rest. Tell me, Lieutenant - are they treating you well here? Is there anything you need that hasn’t been provided?”
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			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Dirigible</strong> on <strong>28-07-2010, 09:55:37</strong>
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				Since regaining consciousness, Danyl had seen only four different people, as best he could tell with the biocontamination suits they wore. Four different regeneration specialists, surgeons and immunologists... but something told him that the woman standing inside the doorway was not a doctor. In his surprise and effort to see better, the spacer dug his elbows into the bed and levered himself halfway towards a sitting position, barely grimacing despite the obvious pain the movement caused and blinked at her. His hair was shaggy and jawline shadowed by stubble, giving his handsome face and strong (not to mention expensive) body a rugged appearance, but the look he fixed on Tana was unclouded and suspicious.<br><br>She was a tall, well-built and well-proportioned woman, dressed with far to much cost and elegance to be medical staff. Danyl recognised the air of command, the charisma about her even in the few words she spoke and the moments she just stood there<br><br>'Lieutenant', she said. A possibility that hadn't occurred to him before suddenly flared in his mind. Who would have cause to spend so much on retrieving him and healing him. Not the Empire... but perhaps the Duke of Vortigern. As an intelligence source or a propaganda trophy to be paraded before the media, he was... no. That didn't make sense. A bridge officer on a destroyer was hardly a prize, or likelyto hold many secrets. Besides, the Vortigern insurgency was small and ill-funded. They didn't have the resources for a full near-death regeneration, let alone medical facilities that reeked of core-world luxury like this one.<br><br>None of this served to tamp down his paranoia, however.<br><br>“Ackgh...” Danyl began, breaking off into a choked cough. His throat still ached from the polymer mesh stent that had held it open as they re-wove his aesophagous. He took a breath, and tried again: “Answers,” he wheezed roughly
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			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>cassia</strong> on <strong>29-07-2010, 08:42:10</strong>
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				He didn’t trust her, but was curious enough to ask about the situation, and understood that she was the one to ask. Those were good signs, though she knew better than to proceed too quickly or believe any more than what she could observe. “That's a reasonable request,” she said, “and I need answers, too. I will trade with you, one for one.”<br><br>There was little risk that he would discover what she had in mind for him to do, not this early; no one was aware of the full scheme, not even her closest handmaiden, whose position was a cover-up for technological spying. Amya had delivered what little concrete information Tana had about Danyl, and attempted to gather more about the Osiris incident. What came in was patchy and third-hand, since even Amya was unable to break into the secured systems of the Imperial Navy or the central military command center in Amber City, and the archives on Gebor had been wiped almost entirely clean.<br><br>All she had been able to gather was that the Imperial Navy had suffered an embarrassingly total defeat at Osiris IV - and that every effort was being made to sweep it under the rug. Her father was clearly up to no good and done a good, but imperfect, job at cloaking it. She had a more reliable information source, with potential to be much more than that, who was out of the reach of the Navy and the entire current incarnation of the Empire. After all, they thought he had perished.<br><br>Without knowing the strength of his loyalties and where they lay, though, she didn’t want to say too much. She tilted her head, making her long red braid sway, and looked him over again. Healing, not yet healed; better to wait than rush and endanger the work they had already done. “You are in a privately owned surgical center on Dolcir IX, and have been for twenty-nine standard days. What I need to know is whether or not you can remember what happened on your last mission. You may keep the story to yourself for now, but give me yes or no.”
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				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Dirigible</strong> on <strong>29-07-2010, 21:21:23</strong>
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				Danyl watched the woman curiously. An answer trade... not what he'd expected. His elbows began to ache from supporting him, and he lowered himself heavily back down to the bed with a grunt, staring back up at the pearly overhead light-panels. Unconsciously, he reached up and scratched at a pectoral muscle. His flesh itched as if it was full of sand... which, considering that silicon-based nanobots that were suturing his tissues back together was not far from the truth.<br><br>Dolcir IX. He'd flown past it more than once on training or deployment flights, passing through the vast orbital logistics center. A glittering trade hub, the empire's 'Second Jewel' after the throneworld. He hadn't seen the planet through his window, though... which either meant a false image projection, or simply that he was on one of the hospital station's outward-facing wings. Even assuming she was telling the truth, Danyl felt much less relieved than he expected to know that he was back in Imperial dominion.<br><br>“Twenty nine days?” he muttered. That was a <em>long</em> stay in medical confinement, one of the longest he'd ever heard of. Anything more than that, and they'd either dump you out a wastelock or just upload your brain to a Virtual Intelligence shell and discard the husk of meat. He twisted his head, peering across his prone form at the woman with even greater confusion than before. That just added to the mystery of why they – whoever they was – had gone to so much effort to restore him.<br><br>His jaw muscles twitched at her question. <em>In his eyes, reflected battleships burst into incandescent light as their reactors ruptured, and the intense magnetic field of Ironheart blew the plasma clouds into comet-like streaks.</em> “Yes,” he said gruffly, turning his eyes back to the ceiling. “I remember.”<br><br>Avoiding the most obvious question that troubled his mind, he raised his voice and asked: “Are you in command here? The doctors were deferring to someone.”And you hold yourself like you're in command, he added mentally.
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				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>cassia</strong> on <strong>30-07-2010, 10:01:29</strong>
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				"Here, yes, I am." She didn't elaborate. Her official power was almost nil, even as she was the first heir to the Emperor; it was unspoken common knowledge that his own doctors had been working for over three and a half decades to reverse the effects of the nanotoxin that rendered him sterile. If they succeeded and he produced another heir, young and ready to mold into his image, that she would be stricken from his list of family members. Even so, an eighth of the planet had her name on the title deed, including the entire N-1 Spire building, jutting eighty-six stories high. "What did they say?"<br><br>Before there was time for him to speak, though, her remote communicator buzzed softly in her ear. Tana had turned on the filter that allowed no one through without a passcode, and only three people had that passcode. "One moment," she said to Danyl, before saying "Accept transmission" to allow the person on the other end of the link through.<br><br>Amya's message was short: she had intercepted a short broadcast, one that would be released to several news stations that evening, concerning "Phase Zero" and the recent enforced total restriction on travel near the system in question. Phase Zero was Tana's name for the previous month's battle.<br><br>"I will return shortly," she said, and abruptly left the room. Four floors down, in the comfort of a large silk-upholstered chair in the main office, she watched the brief program. The 3-D image of Stephen looked tired and even aging, but she knew that was little more than makeup tricks; at eighty-seven, he didn't look a day over fifty, with a full head of brown hair and only the barest whisper of a crease in his forehead.<br><br>He was finally releasing information to the public about Osiris IV - information that, thanks to tight security and a focused effort at plugging leaks, could not easily be contested. He said that the Duke of Vortigern had been allowing the creation of illegal human look-alike androids and programmed one to infiltrate the Imperial Navy. The android's spying led to Imperial defeat and blocking of all routes for reinforcements and medical assistance for the wounded. And after quietly ensuring that there were no other spies, Stephen was forced to take action. Osiris IV was cut off from all incoming and outgoing ships, save one. The Kraken virus had been released five days prior and would "tame" them, for the safety of all Imperial citizens.<br><br>With an incubation period of two days, and a near certain death within twelve hours of the onset of symptoms, the Kraken virus would do far more than tame anyone. Soldier and civilian alike would be wiped out.<br><br>"He's lying," Tana said as soon as the disk went dark. "He's a crackpot, using his own mistake as an excuse to bring out his shiny new toy. Three years ago there was an outcry over the idea of using the K against insurgents - so he makes up a 'he broke the law first' story to slip it through."<br><br>"Yes, ma'am. The evidence supports your conclusion," Amya agreed. "No robot could pass a physical."<br><br>"You have been most helpful. Thank you. Now erase everything about my trip to Gebor. Replace the crew names with bot serial numbers." Tana had a few minutes to think while she walked back to the elevator. <em>Daddy's losing his mind.</em> This was the latest, and most outrageous, of a long string of questionable or blatantly cruel acts. She alone was sure that at least some of his speech was false. The route from Osiris to Gebor had been clear, and the Duke didn't have a large enough naval force to lay in wait on <em>every</em> possible path. The Emperor may not have intended failure - that much was uncertain - but he allowed the survivors to die so he could seize the opportunity to bring out the galaxy's smallest superweapon.<br><br>She returned to Danyl's room. "I had an urgent family situation," she said, explaining her departure. "I have a relative who may be going mad. But enough about me - most people enjoy talking about themselves, but I find it dull. I want to know more about the man strong enough to survive Ironheart, even when the Emperor himself turned his back on the entire fleet."
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			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Dirigible</strong> on <strong>30-07-2010, 22:49:29</strong>
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				If this was an interrogation, it wasn't anything like the mock ones he'd been through at the Imperial Battle Academy. Bemused, relieved to have a moment's rest but frustrated that his best source of information about what was happened seemed to have more important matters to attend to, Danyl lay back and frowned at the ceiling. It's emotion-reading software sensed his mood, and began displaying idyllic scenes of pastoral splendor. He grunted at the VI's condescension, and growled: “Off!” The machine obeyed, having already lost one screen to a hurled bedpan when itinsisted on playing the full audiovisual therapy.<br><br>He sighed, shifted, unable to fall back into an apathetic doze now that his curiosity had been whetted. The spacer rolled onto his side, draped his legs over the edge of the bed and hauled himself upright. Fresh, tender organs and joints squeaked and groaned, reminding him of how much had been lost; the pain of testing a regenerated muscle a shadow of the pain of having it blown off in the first place. He began to pace the room, working his shoulders, flexing his limbs and joints to work out the kinks, waiting for his mysterious benefactor to return.<br><br>When the door did slide open again he turned, instinctively assuming an at-ease stance, hands clasped behind his back, spine ramroded, chest jutting, emphasising his physical presence. He was a big man, from hearty agri-world stock. His size had almost disqualified him from the navy and they would have sent him to the marines, where there was a call for people who could swing a boarding hatchet and lug heavy weapons, had his test scores not been so good. He held himself steadily in place, controlling the sensations of fatigue and dizziness that plagued his freshly-healed body as he watched the woman.<br><br>He nodded with unconscious understanding at her statement about a mad relative. One of his uncles had caught a prionic sickness from improperly recycled food during a particularly harshly taxed year, and they had been unable to afford the protein cleansing offered by the doctors. Estren herbs from an ethnobotanist-shaman who lived outside the colony had at least kept the symptoms at bay, until the Cultural Directorate had declared such traditional practices 'an insult to Imperial dignity'.<br><br>Danyl's poise only slipped when she said he had survived the battle. Until then, those halves of his life had seemed disconnected, but her words formed a bridge between the man who woke up in a cellular matrix tank and the one who had clung to life on a burning, irradiated hulk in the Osiris system. He shuffled his feet and swayed a little. “Were... how many other survivors are there?” Anger flicked across his rugged features. “Who are you? Why am I here?”
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			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>cassia</strong> on <strong>31-07-2010, 09:41:39</strong>
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				"You shouldn't be up yet. You could set yourself back a full day, or more." The difference between their statures was more striking now that they were both standing, and when Tana first re-entered, she had been briefly surprised by it. She wasn't intimidated, though; she'd dealt with true aggression from bigger people, and on their property yet. Furthermore, she had a slim tranquilizer autoinjector hidden in her jacket pocket, with the agility to bring it out in less than a second if needed. "I don't want to have to order you a sedative, and if I administer it myself, I may get the dosage wrong. The side effects of that are unpleasant."<br><br>She was still trying to guess how he might react to different pieces of information; she had too few data points to make the estimations easy. She chose to give him the condensed story, with the main ideas intact and the more gruesome details left out for now. He seemed agitated enough already, and it was a fine line to walk, fanning that flame enough to make him think and make him angry, but not enough to endanger him or anyone else, or create anger at the wrong party. "I don't know how many other survivors there are, if any. That information hasn't been released and I don't have access to it. What I do know is that Emperor Stephen's version of it is full of falsehoods. He claimed no one escaped, even though I saw with my own eyes over a thousand who were alive when they were found. He used the defeat as an excuse for revenge. Who would argue with the use of Kraken against people who plotted against and slaughtered every crew member of an entire Imperial fleet, using androids that look human? There weren't any such thing, but the populace doesn't know that. Now you do, and when you're fully restored, I can show you the proof. There are lines that are never to be crossed. They <em>have</em> been crossed."<br><br>Tana stared quietly at him from a few steps away, her blue-green eyes narrowing in thought while she waited for him to absorb what she'd said. She had told him nothing but the truth, and would maintain that honesty if at all possible without endangering the overall plan. "You are here because I want you to be. I saw you over four standard weeks ago and knew you were different. Tougher than the others, more focused. We may have had a hand in keeping you alive, but the first day - that was you and you alone. I wanted to keep it from going to waste and I always get what I want." She reached up and unfastened the golden clasps that held her veil to her hair, letting the veil fall to the floor. The transparent foam filtering mask was visible, without hiding her features. "Do you recognize me now?"
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			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Dirigible</strong> on <strong>31-07-2010, 21:15:50</strong>
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				A threat, then. Danyl studied the veiled woman as she calmly and implicitly offered to incapacitate him unless he behaved, and his fingers tightened around his wrist behind his back. A little testing, and he'd felt the first hints of the prison bars that came with this hospital. He raised head, looking down at her as a muscle tensed in his jaw. “I'm to be held here 'for my own good', then?”<br><br>He'd wanted answers, and quickly discovered why the adage <em>be careful what you wish for</em> had survived the centuries. The woman began laying out information in a precise tone and clipped diction, layering fact on revelation until his head was spinning. No survivors? Imperial reporting ususally overstated enemy casualties while underplaying their own losses – why would the propaganda heralds do the opposite? But she had seen others that had escaped Ironheart's orbital slaughterhouse, which gave the man some cold, stark relief. His secret, shameful actions hadn't doomed the rest. <br><br>No longer staring at her, Danyl gazed dumbly at the floor, slowly stumbling backwards to sit on the edge of the bed. Kraken. His empty stomach clenched, found nothing to heave up. Possession of or research on that bioweapon had been declared a mortal sin by the Conclave on New Mecca and the Union of Scientific Progress, let alone deploying it. He looked back up in bafflement and horror at the notion anyone could believe in android infiltrators these days, since the Machine Schism and Exodus War a hundred years ago. The Battle of Ironheart had been... an excuse for deploying Kraken without rousing the populace? <em>Casus belli atrox</em>? “We... we were thrown into that deathtrap to provide... fifty ships, twenty-five thousand men... just pawns to... to explain a bioholocaust?”<br><br>Distantly, he heard her remarking on his resilience, but her words did nothing to fill the hollowness he suddenly felt inside, a yawn chasm of abandonment, betrayal, senseless death. What did fill that void, moments later, was anger.<br><br>The veil came off, and Danyl surged to his feet, fists knotted, lips curled back from spittle-flecked teeth. He <em>did</em> recognise her. He's seen the face in a gallery somewhere; just another Imperial courtier, he'd thought at the time, memorable only for the striking beauty of her profile. Stephen's daughter. “This was all a test?” he snarled, eyes flashing like boric acid on a fire. “Tempt me into treason by revealing what your family did to my brothers and sisters in arms?!”
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			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>cassia</strong> on <strong>31-07-2010, 23:51:15</strong>
			</dt>
			<dd class="postbody">
				<em>This is going well,</em> thought Tana, catching herself just before taking an instinctive step backwards. <em>One might have better luck reasoning with a pirate. At least they understand the concepts of money and paying attention to who has the bigger guns. This one… those levers won’t work. I must find out what will.</em> She glanced down at her pocket, just slowly enough that the motion of her eyes could be seen, then back up. “A test? What good would that do me? So I find a man, trick him into saying something impolite about my father, then turn him in. All I would get for weeks and millions is fifty yenari and an electronic thank-you form letter that he doesn’t sign himself and never sees. I would be better entertained and lose much less at the Corebright Casino.”<br><br>She sighed and shook her head. “Your concept of family is… distorted. I don’t know much about yours, so you’ll have to tell me what it‘s like to share more than genes. Have you ever heard the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer? Where I come from, family is the list of people who want you dead the most. There is no love lost between the old man and myself. We act independently and avoid the other. My only value to the Emperor is keeping the crown from leaving his bloodline should a comet collide with Prima Nyria before he produces a more malleable heir. Thirty years ago he at least had enough sense not to murder children; after he killed my stepmother, he allowed their son - my half-brother - to live in prison until he reached sixteen. Now, all children on Osiris IV are wiped out with the adults. He felt insulted by the Duke and threw a temper tantrum. Only instead of smashed vases and spilled snacks, we get this. Almost thirty thousand of our own dead, followed by tens of millions of enemies and their civilians. As I said, when you're at the end of your treatments, I’ll show you the proof. If you hurt yourself in a rage now, I have to pay for it and you. It won't be much longer now.”<br><br>Tana softened her voice. “I hope the scientific union makes this latest display of selfish indignation the last one, but they aren’t the only authority. My fear is that Karsella is next.” She reached inside her jacket to pull out a thin, opaque sheet of plastic that had been folded inside an inner pocket; she had to undo the top two pearl-and-gold buttons to get to it, briefly revealing a few centimeters of the synth-cotton lace underneath. This was done in a casual move, and quickly reversed once she retrieved the sheet. She held up the map and pointed to a labeled black circle. “There’s Karsella, under the rule of Marquisa Fariagnes. The one who refused to allow a naval station on Karsella Minor.” Her neatly manicured finger traced over a few lines radiating out on the map, marking trade routes, one of which passed through Epsilon Cool. “Fifteen billion people on Karsella alone. Two shipyards. Along the path of nine major tradeways. If Karsella becomes unsafe, assuming that the virus is contained and doesn‘t spread along any of the paths, the human devastation increases over tenfold and transport through that entire sector destabilizes. Here, take it, look at it, keep it. I have other copies. If you want to help, tell me. If you don’t, that’s understandable - you’re alive and fed, and no living soul but us, the surgeons, and my maidservant knows you’re here. Lie down and think about it, and sleep. I will return to discuss it tomorrow. If you‘re cleared for it by then, I can bring flash-sterilized beverages. Anything non-alcoholic that you ask for.”
			</dd>
			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Dirigible</strong> on <strong>01-08-2010, 01:26:52</strong>
			</dt>
			<dd class="postbody">
				What she said rang true; there was no point in bringing a man back from the borderlands of death just to hang him for <em>lèse majesté</em>. There was no doubt he had been healed at great expense by this woman – this princess, or a perfect facsimile thereof – so it seemed unlikely that she had directly harmful intentions for him. Danyl lowered his hands to his sides, feeling foolish and off-balance, as if her arch remark had shifted the floor under him during melee drill.<br><br>She continued, cooly offering a horrific window into the machinations of the royal court which presented to its subjects and the rest of the outside world a flawless, gilded façade. In his current state he could barely grasp the details, but she vividly painted a picture of a wilderness of mirrors, never knowing which smiling reflection held a dagger behind its back. He winced instinctively at her off-hand references to the Emperor as 'the old man'; such disrespect would have earned fifty electric lashes in the service, but apparently things worked differently for princesses. Danyl shook his head. “I think it's your concept of family that is warped. Your... highness,” he added belatedly. “I'm sorry,” he said, green eyes softening, though for the breach of etiquette or the tribulations of having a homicidal father, he didn't elaborate.<br><br>There was more, and Danyl felt obscurely as if her explanation of plot, counter-plot, Imperial threat and deceit was filling up the void inside him left by his dislocation from the navy, his comrades... and apparently everything else. Being dead felt much like he had expected it to. He was strangely grateful to her for giving him this covert lifeline, something to hang on to and pull on that was outside his own turmoil. He reached out a large hand numbly, taking the map sheet and staring at it. His fingertip traced the line from Karsella to his homeworld's system, and his grip on the flimsy tightened. “You are... opposing the Emperor's plans?” he asked neutrally. <em>Out of compassion, or for your own courtly game?</em> he wondered.<br><br>And vile plans they were, if this was true, if the evidence she promised was real. But, still... this was treason! His viscera twisted at the idea that went against all his training and loyalty indoctrination (perhaps in anticipation of the fate that awaited them if he was convicted). Looking more unsettled than ever, Danyl slumped where he sat, brows drawn together in consternation.
			</dd>
			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>cassia</strong> on <strong>01-08-2010, 03:38:02</strong>
			</dt>
			<dd class="postbody">
				Tana stopped turning around towards the door and faced him again. She sensed a change in his demeanor and observed his motions, including those that were only barely visible muscle twitches; for all she knew, it was a feint, and he was waiting for her to get close enough to strike. “I oppose pointless slaughter, especially when the risks of it spreading to innocent allies is so high,” she said, refusing to answer directly. “It won’t be the end of the human race, but he could erase a myriad of years of progress. In the worst case, we return to the Silent Age. Nobody wants that.”<br><br>She was trying to find the different layers of meaning in his question, knowing that there may not have been many. Tana wasn’t used to plain speech; in her old circles, avoiding one verbal trap often meant falling into a bigger one if one was not careful. It made tiring, complex puzzles out of simple conversations. <em>He can’t get out unless I let him out, so he can’t repeat this to anyone,</em> she thought, <em>and he’s too smart not to know the futility of pulling me into a confession that he can’t tell.</em><br><br>“I have a strong interest in not allowing the Empire to crumble. My life, my inheritance, and my corporation all depend on it staying intact and healthy. Who benefits from a failed government, besides looters and pirates? I don’t. You don’t. No one does, and there are a few who can see the rot already. It’s a great credit to the palace security department that the Emperor is still alive. There have been military operations on rebel worlds attempting to kill him for many years and none have even reached the palace walls. One asked me for help, but I won’t ally with foreign leaders who oppose Imperial authority, especially on an mission doomed to fail. As long as there’s an Empire to defend, Prima Nyria is impenetrable... from the outside. As it should be.”<br><br>She hadn’t said it, not yet. Tana wanted to get an answer before she even asked. The Emperor wouldn’t stop until he was dead, and he wouldn’t voluntarily die. Someone had to kill him. Military operations and extraplanetary attacks were always thwarted, but she said nothing about civilian plots and people who were authorized to enter Amber City without subterfuge. Tana’s biological mother was still there, and from time to time, business transactions took place there. She could get him three kilometers from the palace without raising any alarms, though she could go no closer.<br><br>Tana felt a rare quivering in her stomach, halfway between excitement and apprehension. The plan would be insurmountably difficult without his initial consent, and not much easier with it. That small difference might be enough. She stepped just out of arm's reach and, in a calculated move, crouched down to eye level. “When one party breaches his end of a contract, the other party is released,” she said quietly. “You swore to defend the Empire first. When someone’s choices are certain to ruin the organization you stand for, that person becomes the enemy. Any agreement between him and you is void now. What do you call someone on an Imperial world who willfully arranges the deaths of thousands of servicemen to salve his damaged pride? Leader isn't the word that comes to mind.”
			</dd>
			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Dirigible</strong> on <strong>01-08-2010, 22:45:59</strong>
			</dt>
			<dd class="postbody">
				She offered up Necessity as the reason for her actions. In Danyl's career, the higher in the ranks he had risen and the closer he came to the flag commands, the more he had heard people invoke Duty as their beacon. He had always thought of Necessity as the motivating daemon of civilians, Imperial serfs like his family, who did whatever they had to do to survive to the next cycle, while officers, admirals and the stellar aristocracy served that higher power, Duty. It was a strange revelation that at the very highest parts of the social mountain, the penultimate classes, things could curve around like spacetime itself and Necessity took the pilot console once more. The idea of actively sabotaging the Emperor's plans had been enormity enough that Danyl would have struggled to get his mind around it all night, but the princess had yet more plots to unveil.<br><br>The assassin's knife implicit in her words gleamed.<br><br>Danyl shuddered at the thought, even as his teeth clenched and arm muscles hardened, indulging in vivid fantasies of revenge against the madman who had ordered them into the teeth of oblivion. “I swore an oath,” he said huskily at last, glancing at the crouching woman out of the corner of his eye. “The emperor is my Commander in Chief and my lord.” Not his god, thankfully, Estre had only a few members of the Imperial Veneration Cult, mostly living on the peripheries of the settled zones.<br><br>“However...” he said slowly, tongue rasping over dry, cracked lips. “The Scarlet Codex does contain protocol for... repurposing that oath. Article 31 states that under conditions of widespread threat to the Empire, members of the court's inner circle – Councillors Grade I, Viceroys... Imperial Princes and Princesses – may assume control over sworn forces in a region to contain and control the crisis. By whatever means necessary.”<br><br>It was a bit of legalistic trickery, but to Danyl it was a slim, icy bridge that would let him go against everything he had been indoctrinated to do, without breaking his oath. Tacitly, he begged the princess to take command of him, so that in obedience he could begin to rewire his loyalties to do what he was slowly coming to realise needed to be done.
			</dd>
			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>cassia</strong> on <strong>02-08-2010, 04:45:33</strong>
			</dt>
			<dd class="postbody">
				“Very good.” Tana nodded and offered a brief, small smile, a quiet outward sign of mixed joy and relief. She had been concerned that he would continue to argue with her, making stronger and harsher methods of persuasion necessary. She reached up to put her hand on his shoulder, but drew back; even though she was immaculately clean, to a human eye, that much contact with raw and healing skin could transfer enough bacteria to cause infection. She settled for picking a short piece of hair off his forehead and nudging it to the side. “Starting now, you answer to me. Your duty has become this: do what I tell you to do. Nothing more, nothing less. My promise is that I won’t put you in needless danger and I’ll never hurt you without cause.”<br><br>She had chosen her words with care. The path to the heart of the Palace - whether the figurative path or the literal - was perilous, and required a combination of physical and psychological strength that no one had yet achieved. There was no way to create it without great discomfort. He’d come this far without breaking, an encouraging sign, but rebuilding his body was only the beginning. The rest couldn’t be delegated to others and he couldn’t be shielded with narcotics; they were useless against the tamely named Area Protection Sphere that surrounded the Imperial Palace.<br><br>The APS had the nickname Gateway to Hell; a faintly shimmering electrical field in a spherical shape, covering the palace on all sides, including underground. Its frequency had been carefully calibrated to stimulate pain receptors in any living being that came in contact with it; so powerful was the force that some would-be infiltrators died of stroke or fatal cardiac arrhythmia in seconds. The dead were the lucky ones, not living for years in a state asylum with shattered minds. Tana had tested several simple ways of sneaking a living being through the Gateway, using animals. Drugs, surgical destruction of parts of the animal’s brain, severing particular nerves in its spinal cord. The medications had no effect and the animals with surgical interventions were electrocuted. She still remembered watching it on the news, four palace guards carrying away the majestic desert leopard and tossing its body into a trash incinerator. The Gateway’s inventors had thought of everything - except the possibility of passing through not by an artificial decrease in pain threshold, but by a natural, gradual increase in tolerance.<br><br>Success would depend on Danyl being able to enter the sphere; gaining legal entry to the Palace required a summons and biometric data that would instantly reveal one’s identity. A dead man with a fake summons? There was precious little that would raise more alarms. <br><br>Tana uncurled her left hand, her mood soured. A sphere that simply killed invaders made sense. Installing the Gateway had been a wordless way of saying <em>The rules don’t apply to me, look what I can do, because I’ve declared myself your God.</em> Her fingernails had dug into her palm and were they any longer, they would have cut her instead of leaving four small, angry red arcs. “You’ll learn how to use ancient bladed weapons, and how to move unseen. Yes, even you.” She forced herself to chuckle at her own bad joke; lightening the tension had never been one of her stronger skills. “You’ll be a better soldier than you thought possible. But right now you need to sleep and let your body heal. Let the doctors finish their work. I’ll instruct the staff to do everything they can to make you comfortable, and bring you anything you desire that won’t harm you or endanger our project. When they’re done, I’ll send my maidservant to take you to my private office. It should only be a few more days.”<br><br>She stood up and exited the room, with only one more look behind her, out of the corner of her eye.
			</dd>
			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Dirigible</strong> on <strong>03-08-2010, 01:34:57</strong>
			</dt>
			<dd class="postbody">
				Danyl was startled by the tiny contact; such a small and intimate gesture, yet so unexpected. He looked up at the princess with surprise in his eyes, unsure of what to make of contact with a royal personage.<br><br>He listened to her promise with a cynical frame of mind; no needless danger, she said. But for what she seemed to have in mind, the need for danger was extreme in any case. He grasped the edge of the bed and carefully hefted himself off, arms throbbing with taut muscle as he lowered himself to the floor. Danyl fell to one knee, his head bowed before the princess. “I am her highnesses to direct, to shape, and to use,” he uttered throatily but firmly, feeling the situation required rather more ritual than she was assigning it. He was a soldier, and once against he had a purpose; even and impossible mission was better than no mission at all.<br><br>Even in supplication, he could feel her tension and anger directed at something beyond this room. Perhaps the offence she took to the senseless slaughter at Ironheart was more than just an analytical, political objection. That gave him a sense of optimism, that whatever sort of weapon he was to be made into would be wielded towards just ends. Once she had addressed him again he rose slowly to his feet, resuming his respectful stance and watching her leave. “As you command,” he said, eyes speculative as he watched her go.<br><br>Once he was apparently alone (barring the suite of medical scanners that kept a constant and holistic eye on him at all times), Danyl fell back onto the bed. Purpose. Already, he felt stronger, more energised, the strands of his restored being tightening and winding back into a unified, focused cord. A cord that would one day loop around the emperor's neck and pull <em>tight</em>.
			</dd>
			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>cassia</strong> on <strong>04-08-2010, 07:23:40</strong>
			</dt>
			<dd class="postbody">
				Paranoia, as a survival tactic, had one important thing in its favor: it worked. Routing money from one place to another without leaving a trail was impossible, and she always assumed that transfers were being monitored, but making the trail so difficult to navigate that it wasn’t worth it was simple enough when the amounts were small. When they reached millions it was a bit more difficult, and Tana got to work looking into making multiple transfers and burying them on supply and maintenance lists. In the end, she decided to pay her invoice to the surgical center in full, from a single account. She arranged to receive a prescription for a strong antifungal drug, in her own name; if anyone did investigate, they would be led to the assumption that she’d contracted an illness in her travels and was being treated in secret, with an embarrassing enough reason for the secrecy that it wouldn’t be questioned further. Hiding her activities with so little to shield them made her nervous, but her hired team was paid well for their silence. She filled the prescription, then began destroying the pills in the trash disposal, one per day.<br><br>For three days after setting up her conference room, she waited, and resisted the urge to call and ask what the holdup was. The extra time made her think. She wondered if she might not have bitten off more than she could chew, undertaking a dark mission that had been tried multiple times, by several well-organized and well-funded groups throughout the galaxy. And none of them even came close to succeeding. <em>They aren’t doing it my way</em>, she assured herself. It wasn’t as though any of them had more to lose than she did. They might have been hoping to preserve entire worlds and avert a war, but if a full-scale civil war broke out, she stood to lose <em>hundreds</em> of planets. The fact that they were never officially hers was but a small detail. She would also be caught in between, seen by the Emperor as a threat, and by his enemies as a representation of his government. Stopping that otherwise inevitable outcome was her only way to save herself.<br><br>She wanted to stop with the back-and-forth thoughts, and submerged her mind in the tedium of administrative work, breaking away only for sleep, food, and hygiene. When she finally received the terse message, <em>fit for transport</em>, she felt as though a weight hung around her neck had been shifted. Still there, but now she could breathe again, soon to be far too busy to contemplate the consequences or chances of failure.<br><br>“It’s time to bring Lieutenant Philion here,” she said to Amya. “Get one of the shuttles from the fortieth floor, and when you return and lead him up from the shuttle bay, take as many turns as you can. Keep him off-balance and unsure of where he is until he arrives. Answer no questions.”<br><br>Amya left quickly, and Tana waited for them, alone in a quiet and secure room deep within the complex. It was one of the few places she knew was safe, without any doubt; she alone controlled access, and changed the passcodes often. She placed her chair at the end of a rectangular table, with a computer system and small array of other tools within easy reach. She smoothed out her teal and black pants suit by the glow of the projected screen, which displayed only the standard date and time against a white background, and counted the minutes.
			</dd>
			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Oath of the Empress</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Dirigible</strong> on <strong>10-10-2010, 22:05:09</strong>
			</dt>
			<dd class="postbody">
				The newly point-manufactured outfit he had been given was not a uniform, but it was crisp and formal enough in its design that for the first time in a while Danyl felt comfortable. Even though it was itchy and starchy, he preferred it to the soft exposure of the hospital clothes. He stared out of the shuttle's porthole as it plunged through the atmosphere, enveloped in a plasma corona, the clouds coming up from below like layer after layer of watercolours. He felt... surprisingly good, for a man who had been rebuilt almost from the double helix up. There had been a few minutes of dizziness when he was first released from his room, but the treatments they had given him included psychoactives to dispel any nausea, disorientation or agoraphobia from the change of scenery, and counter-atrophy drugs to restore muscle tone and proprioception that might have been damaged by his prolonged recuperation. He glanced across at Amya, sitting primly in the opposite seat, and wondered briefly if there had been any stupefactants in the cocktail as well, given the docility with which he had followed the imperial daughter's secretary towards their clandestine meeting.<br><br>As they plunged through the clouds, the searing atmospheric display shimmered and cooled, and Danyl got his first glimpse of the Gebor Centralis arcology. It rose like a man-made mountain from the tundra of the planet, a curved pyramid of glass and polymer and alloy, shining electrum and pale ceramic yellow-orange. Spires rose erratically out of the environmentally sealed slopes, featuring shuttle docks, penthouse suites, observation towers, business complexes. The entire city of some five million souls was self-contained, importing only oxygen from the air and water from the icefields, growing its own food in the vast hydroponic gardens of the outer levels and treating its own waste with near 100% efficiency.<br><br>He shuttle arced gracefully towards the tallest tower, the one that rose from the very centre of the arcology like a tentpole and a lightning rod. They docked, and Amya rose, leading the solider their a thin airlock tube while the frigid winds howled outside. The shuttle port bustled with clients of Nyria One Shipping, hurried and important-seeming, with uniformed staff rushing too and fro to service them and facilitate their business needs. Once they had gone past the heavily trafficked areas, though, an elegant silence filled the floors of offices and meeting rooms and the winding, sleekly minimalist halls. The only other signs of occupation Danyl saw was the odd service robot hovering past, or a scrap of conversation from a logistics centre where imports and exports were being coordinated galaxy-wide.<br><br>He made no effort to keep track of the path they took, but soon came under the impression that Amya was taking him on the scenic route, as if wanting to be sure he saw every storage closet in the tower. At long last, though, they came to a room far form the top and far from the windowed flanks of the building. Danyl knew a saferoom when he saw one; every ship had a command bunker like it, buried in the heart of the hull and far from the reach of superficial weapons fire. The secretary stood aside, gesturing him towards the door, and with only a modest sense of foreboding Danyl tapped it open and stepped inside.
			</dd>
		</dl>
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