"Executive Officer," her captain said, drawing himself to his full height, "are you by any chance trying to ... save me?"
Hobbes was ready for this.
"Sir, 'The study of the battle already fought is as essential as that of the battle to come.' Sir."
'"Engagement,'" Zai corrected, evidently preferring an earlier translation. But he seemed pleased, as he always was when Hobbes quoted the old war sage Anonymous 167. The captain even managed a smile, the first she'd seen on his face since the Empress's death. But then it turned bitter.
"Hobbes, in my hand is a blade of error, of sorts."
He opened one hand to reveal a small black rectangle. It was a single-purpose, programmable remote.
"Captain?"
"A little-known fact: For the elevated, the blade of error can take almost any form. It's a matter of choice. General Ricard Tash and his volcano, for example."
Hobbes frowned as she remembered the old tale. One of the first Errors, a lost battle during the Consolidation of Home. It had never occurred to her that Tash's suicide had involved some special dispensation. The prospect of scalding magma didn't seem so inviting as to require one.
"Sir? I'm not sure--"
"This remote is programmed to invoke a high-emergency battle-stations status in the Lynx, overriding every safety protocol," he explained, turning the remote over in his hand like a worry stick. "A standard command sequence, actually, useful for blockade patrols."
Hobbes bit her lip. What was she missing here?
"Of course, the captain's blister is not part of the battle-ready configuration of the Lynx, is it, Hobbes?"
A fresh wave of vertigo struck Katherie Hobbes, as surely as if the ship's gravity had flipped upside down without warning. She closed her eyes, struggling to control the wild gyrations of her balance, listing to herself the rote procedures of emergency battle stations: bulkheads sealed, weapons crash-charged, full extension of the energy-sink manifold, and blowing the atmosphere in any temporary, acceleration-sensitive constructions such as the blister she stood in now. There were safeties, of course, but they could be countermanded.
She felt as if she were falling, tumbling through the void with this all-but-dead man.
When she opened her eyes, he had taken a step closer, concern on his face.
"Sorry, Katherie," he said softly. "But you had to know. You'll be in command when it comes. No rescue attempts, understand? I don't want to wake up in an autodoc with my eyeballs burst out."
"Of course, sir," she managed, her voice sounded rough, as if a cold were coming on. She swallowed, a reflexive reponse to vertigo, and tried not to imagine the captain's face after decompression. That horrible transformation was something that couldn't happen. She would simply have to save him.
He stepped past her into the open door of the blister's airlock, leaving the black field of stars for solid metal. She followed him into the lock and rolled the reassuringly massive door into its sealed position.
"Now," Captain Zai said as the inner door opened, "I should like to see these visuals. 'No mark of war is too minute to reward careful study,' aye, Hobbes?"
"Aye, sir." Anonymous 167 again.
As she followed her captain to the command bridge, glad to have her feet on dense hypercarbon and hullalloy, Katherie Hobbes allowed herself to shelter an uncertain candle of hope.
COMPOUND MIND
Alexander flexed itself, feeling the ripple of its will promulgate through the infostructure of Legis XV.
The hostage crisis had for a time interrupted the normal flux of information across the planet. Market trading had been suspended, schools closed, the powers of the unwieldy Citizen's Assembly assumed by the Executive Diet. But now that the Imperials had retaken the palace, activity was beginning to rebuild in the world's arteries of data and interchange.
A few days of mourning would be observed soon, but for now the Empress's death was a closely guarded secret. Legis XV had survived its brief Rix occupation, and at the moment there was an outpouring of relief, a release of nervous energies throughout the intertwined systems of commerce, politics, and culture.
As for the existence of Alexander in their midst, the compound mind had not yet created panic. Once the population realized that their phones, data-books, and home automatics had not turned on them, the mind seemed more a curiosity than a threat--a ghost in the machine that had yet to prove itself unfriendly, whatever the propaganda of the grays.
And so the planet awoke.
Alexander felt this increasing activity as new and sudden vigor. The first day of consciousness had been exhilarating, but the compound mind now realized the true vitality of Legis XV. The planet's surge back into ordinary life--the shimmer of its billions, their commerce and politics--felt to the mind as if it were bursting anew from the shadowtime. The flowing data of secondary sight and audio, the clockwork of traffic management, water purification, weather control, even the preparations of the local military readying for another attack, were like the coursings of some morning stimulant through its body public.
Certainly, there were belated attempts by the Imperials to destroy Alexander. Data shunts and hunter programs were deployed, attempting to erase the influence of the Rix propagation, trying to tear down the self-conscious feedback that now illuminated the planet's infostructure. But the efforts were too late. What the Rix had long understood, and the benighted Imperials could not truly grasp, was that a compound mind is the natural state of affairs. As Rixia Henderson herself had theorized in the early days of Amazon, all systems of sufficient complexity tend toward self-organization, self-replication, and finally self-consciousness. All of biological and technological history was, for the Rix, a reflection of this essential law, as inescapable as entropy. Rixia Henderson's philosophy superseded such notions as social progress, the invisible hand of the marketplace, and the zeitgeist--shallow vanities all. The narrative of history itself was nothing more than the working out of the one law: humanity is but the raw material of greater minds. So Alexander, once born, could not be destroyed--unless technological civilization on Legis XV were itself destroyed.
The compound mind breathed deep its existence, surveying the vast energies of its domain. At last, the Rix had come to the Risen Empire, bringing the light of consciousness.
The only sectors of Legis XV that remained dark to Alexander were the gray enclaves, the cities of the dead that dotted the planet. The walking corpses of the Risen Empire eschewed technology and consumerism, so the phone calls and purchases and traffic patterns that informed Alexander's consciousness were missing. There was an appalling absence of bustle and friction from the afterlives of the dead. The needs that underlay technology--to buy and sell, to communicate, to politic and argue--did not exist in the gray enclaves. The risen walked quiet and alone in their necropolis gardens, perfomed simple arts by hand, went on their winding and pointless pilgrimages among the Eighty Worlds, and gave their allegiance to the Emperor. But they had no struggles, nothing from which true AI could arise.