At her gesture, the audio events of the last few seconds split into separate visual strip charts in front of her, showing volume and source. In seconds, she had confirmed her worst fears.
The sudden, angry sound had come from the council chamber. She played it again. The sovereign boom filled her head like a peel of thunder.
"Ma'am!" the situation officer began to report. He'd been monitoring the room directly, but he'd also had to replay the event before believing it. "We've got a--"
"I heard it."
She turned to the captain. He looked down from the con and their eyes locked. For a moment, she couldn't speak, but she saw her expression drain the color from his face.
"Captain," she managed. "Shot fired in the council chamber."
Zai turned away, nodding his head.
TEN YEARS EARLIER
(IMPERIAL ABSOLUTE)
LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER
His full-dress uniform crawled out of its case like an army of marauding ants.
Lieutenant-Commander Laurent Zai suppressed a shudder and turned the lighting in his hotel room to full. The uniform reacted instantly, turning a reflective silver. Supposedly the garment could shift quickly enough to reflect a laser before it burned the wearer; the uniform was fully combat-rated. Now it looked like a horde of mercury droplets scattered roughly in the shape of a human. A little better.
The garment still moved, though. Its tiny elements tumbled over one another to probe the bedcover, sniffing to determine if it was Zai's skin. Losing interest when they decided it wasn't, they shifted aimlessly, or maybe with hidden purpose. Perhaps the uniform kept its shape through an equilibrium of these small adjustments and collisions.
Like ants, Zai thought again.
He decided to quit stalling and put the damn thing on.
There were more dignified ways to do this, but he hadn't attended enough full-dress occasions to become proficient at any of them. He turned his back to the bed, dropped his dressing gown, and fell backwards onto the writhing garment. He rotated his arms in their shoulder sockets and flailed his legs a little, as if making a small-winged angel in the snow. Then he closed his eyes and pretended not to feel the elements of the uniform, now discernibly and unpleasantly individual, crawling onto him.
When the sensation of motion had mostly stopped (he knew from experience that the uniform's minute adjustments of fit and tailoring were never entirely finished) he sat up and regarded himself in the hotel suite's large and gold-framed mirror.
The machines that composed the armor were now one continuous surface, the facets of their tiny backs splayed and linked, their overlapping plates shining in the bright roomlights like galvanized steel. The garment clung to Zai's skin closely. The lines of his muscular chest had been reproduced, and the scars on his shoulder and thighs concealed. The suction of the machines' little feet was barely perceptible. Overall, it felt like wearing a light mesh shirt and trousers. The draft through his open window mysteriously penetrated the armor, as if Zai were naked, regardless of what the mirror told him. The regulation codpiece he wore (thank the Emperor) was the only undergarment that dress-code regulations allowed. He wondered if an EMP or sudden software crash could kill the little machines, cause them to tumble from him like shards from a shattered mirror. Zai imagined a roomful of brass at a full-dress occasion suddenly denuded. He didn't smile at the thought.
A crash like that would do worse things to his prosthetics.
He asked the lights to return to normal, and the armor lost its metallic reflectivity, sinking back to the earthy colors of the hotel room. Now it looked like dark brown rubber, glinting as if oiled in the capital's lights, which played on Zai through the suite's large windows. He finished dressing. The absorbent cushioning inside his dress boots shaped itself to his bare feet. The short formal gloves left his wrists uncovered, one line of pale white floating in the mirror, another of metal.
He didn't look half bad. And when he stood absolutely still so that the uniform stopped its constant tailoring, it wasn't really uncomfortable. At least if he found himself starting to sweat at the Risen Emperor's party, the clever little machines would handle it. They could turn perspiration and urine into drinkable water, could recharge themselves from his movement or body heat, and in the unlikely event of total immersion, they would crowd into his mouth and form a water rebreather.
He wondered how the uniform would taste. Zai had never had the pleasure of eating live ants.
The lieutenant-commander placed a row of campaign ribbons on his chest, where they affixed automatically. He wasn't sure where to place his large new medal--the award that was focus of this party--but the uniform recognized it. Invisibly tiny hands tugged the decoration from his grasp and passed it to a position just above the bar of campaign ribbons.
Evidently, the small machines were as versed in protocol as they were in survival tactics. The very model of modern military microtechnology.
Zai supposed he was ready to go.
He made an interface gesture that felt distinctly wrong in the tight gloves, and said his driver's name out loud.
"Lieutenant-Commander," the response came instantly in his ear.
"Let's get this over with, Corporal," Zai commanded brusquely.
But he did stay at the mirror, regarding himself and keeping the corporal waiting for perhaps another twenty seconds.
When Zai saw the car, he touched his chin with the middle three fingers of his real hand, the Vadan equivalent of a long, low whistle.
In response, the car lifted from the ground silently. The pair of wheeled transport forks that had carried it here pulled away, scraping the streets like respectful footmen in low bows. The car's rear door raised before Zai, elegant and fragile as the flexing wing of some origami bird. He stepped into the passenger compartment, feeling too cumbersome and brutish to enter such a delicate vehicle.
The corporal's face turned back as Zai sank into the leather rear seat, a glaze in the man's eye. They looked at each other for a moment, their disbelief forming a bridge across rank.
"Now this," Zai said, "is lovely."
Scientifically speaking, the Larten Theory of Gravities was three decades outmoded, but it still served well enough for Navy textbooks. So, as far as Lieutenant-Commander Laurent Zai was concerned, there were four flavors of graviton: hard, easy, wicked, and lovely.
Hard gravity was also called real gravity, because it could only be created by good old mass, and it was the only species to occur naturally. Thus fell to it the dirty and universal work of organizing solar systems, creating black holes, and making planets sticky. The opposite of this workhorse was easy gravity, unrelated to mass save that easy gravity was hapless against a real gravity well. Hard gravitons ate easy ones for lunch. But in deep space, easy gravity was quite easy to make; only a fraction of a starship's energy was required to fill it with a single, easy gee. Easy gravity had a few problems, though. It was influenced by far-off bodies of mass in unpredictable ways, so even in the best starships the gee-field was riddled with microtides. That made it very hard to spin a coin in easy gee, and pendulum clocks, gyroscopes, and houses of cards were utterly untenable. Some humans found easy gee to be sickening, just as some couldn't stand even the largest ship on the calmest sea.