“It was nice. It wasn’t written by the committee, was it?”
“No.” The executive committee had complained about Naffa’s rewritten speech until Cardenia informed them that it was either Naffa’s words or none at all. She enjoyed her first victory over the tripartite political forces counterbalancing the emperox. She did not pretend that there would be many more of those once she came into power.
“Good,” Batrin said. “You should be your own emperox, my daughter. No one else’s.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“Do.” Batrin closed his eyes for a moment and appeared to drift off. Then he opened them again and looked at Cardenia. “Have you chosen your imperial name yet?”
“I thought I might keep my own,” Cardenia said.
“What? No,” Batrin said. “Your own name is for your private world. For friends and spouses and children and lovers. You’ll need that private name. Don’t give it away to the empire.”
“Which of your names did my mother call you?”
“She called me Batrin. At least long enough to matter. How is your mother?”
“She’s fine.” Three years prior, Hannah Patrick had accepted a position of provost at Guelph Institute of Technology, ten weeks from Hub via the Flow. By now news of the emperox’s worsening condition would have reached her. She wouldn’t know her daughter had become emperox until well after the fact. Cardenia knew her mother was deeply ambivalent about her ascension.
“I considered marrying her,” Batrin said.
“You’ve told me.” Cardenia had heard a different story from her mother but this was not the time to bring it up.
The emperox nodded and changed the subject. “May I suggest a name to you? For your imperial name.”
“Yes, please.”
“Grayland.”
Cardenia furrowed her brow. “I don’t know this name.”
“When I die, look her up. And then come talk to me about it.”
“I will.”
“Good, good. You will be a good emperox, Cardenia.”
“Thank you.”
“You’ll have to be. The empire is going to need it, in the end.”
Cardenia didn’t know what to say to that, so she just nodded, and reached out for her father’s hand. He seemed surprised by it, and then gave it the smallest of squeezes.
“I think I’ll go to sleep now,” he said. “I’ll go to sleep and then you’ll be emperox. Is that all right?”
“It’s fine,” Cardenia said.
“Okay. Good.” Batrin gave Cardenia’s hand a squeeze so light it barely registered. “Farewell, Cardenia, my daughter. I’m sorry I didn’t make more time to love you.”
“It’s all right,” Cardenia said.
Batrin smiled. “Come see me.”
“I will.”
“Good,” Batrin said, and then drifted off.
Cardenia sat with her father and waited to become emperox.
She didn’t have to wait long.
Chapter
2
Kiva Lagos was busily fucking the brains out of the assistant purser she’d been after for the last six weeks of the Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’s trip from Lankaran to End when Second Officer Waylov Brennir entered her stateroom, unannounced. “You’re needed,” he said.
“I’m a little busy at the moment,” Kiva said. She’d just finally gotten herself into a groove, so fuck Waylov (not literally, he was awful) if she was going to get out of the groove just because he walked into it. Grooves were hard to come by. People have sex, and he was unannounced. If this was what he walked into, it was his fault, not hers. The assistant purser seemed a little concerned, but Kiva applied a little pressure to make it clear festivities were to continue.
“It’s important.”
“Trust me, so is this.”
“We’ve got a customs official who won’t let us take any haverfruit off the ship,” Brennir said. If he was shocked or scandalized by Lagos’s activities he was doing a good job of hiding it. He mostly looked bored. “Offloading our haverfruit is why we came to End. If we don’t sell it, or develop licenses, we’re screwed. You’re the owner’s representative. You’re going to have to explain to your mother why this trip was the cause of the financial ruin of your family. So perhaps you might like to join Captain Blinnikka in talking with this customs official right now to see if you can resolve this problem. Or you can just go on fucking that junior crew member, ma’am. I’m sure those are equivalent activities as regards your future, and the future of this ship, and your family.”
“Well, shit,” Kiva said. Her groove was definitely gone, and the assistant purser, her little project, looked pretty miserable at the moment. “That was a pretty impressive jab you just gave to someone who can fire your ass, Brennir.”
“You can’t fire me, ma’am,” Brennir said. “I’ve got tenure with the guild. Now, are you coming or not?”
“I’m thinking.”
“I should go,” the assistant purser said. “I mean, I can go. Maybe I should go?”
Kiva sighed and looked down at her conquest. “When are you on duty again?”
“Three hours.”
“Then you stay right here.” She untangled herself from the assistant purser, put on something acceptable for the outside world, and then followed Brennir out of her stateroom and through the ship.
The Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby was a fiver, a ship whose size and design meant that theoretically it could support a full complement of crew from its own resources for roughly five standard years before everything began to go bad, internal biological and support systems began to fail, and the crew collapsed into a brief spasm of unspeakable horror toward each other before the end, as all crews marooned in the vast emptiness of space with no hope of rescue eventually did.
As a practical matter, however, within the Flow streams of the Interdependency, no one human outpost was more than nine months from any other. Fivers and tenners, their larger siblings, typically dedicated enough of themselves to support their crews for a year—a three-month margin for error—and the rest of their space and systems were given over to cargo and, in the case of the Yes, Sir, astroponics, growing the agricultural products that the ship’s owners had a monopoly on and traveled from outpost to outpost to deliver.
The House of Lagos, the owners of the Yes, Sir, had a monopoly on citrus. The entire genus, from root to fruit, from the heirloom species like lemons and oranges to more recent hybrids like gabins, zestfists, and haverfruit. It was the last of these that the Yes, Sir had come to End to do business in—to sell the fruit it had grown and harvested on the trip out to End directly, and to negotiate licensing for local agribusiness to grow it on End on behalf of the Lagos family.
That was the plan, anyway. Except now some asshole customs official was trying to fuck them all.
Kiva entered the Yes, Sir conference room where Captain Tomi Blinnikka, Chief Purser Gazson Magnut, and some miserable shitfuck of an imperial customs official waited. Kiva nodded to Blinnikka and Magnut and took a seat at the table they were at. Blinnikka dismissed Brennir, who slid the door closed behind him as he left.
“All right, what’s the problem?” Kiva said, when Brennir was gone.
“Lady Kiva, I am Inspector Pretan Vanosh, assistant head of imperial customs for End,” the miserable shitfuck began.
“Charmed,” Kiva said, cutting him off. “What’s the problem?”
“The problem is a closterovirus,” Vanosh said. “That’s a type of virus—”
“My family has had the monopoly on citrus fruits for eight hundred years, Mr. Vanosh,” Kiva said. “I know what a closterovirus is. I also know it’s been two hundred years since we’ve had a confirmed case of a citrus closterovirus affecting any of the crops we either sell or license. We genetically engineer our crops for resistance.”