Succession 1 - The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld

Author:Scott Westerfeld
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Space Opera, Fiction
ISBN: 9780765305558
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2003-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

COMMANDO

The commando's heart, if you could call it that, was closer to a turbine than a pump. A pair of long screws, one venous and the other arterial, rotated inside her chest, threading the vital fluid through her body at an inhumanly fast and even rate. The liquid carried oxygen and nutrients but was not, properly speaking, blood. It also served the purposes of a lymphatic system, transporting uptake nanos from thousands of tiny lymph nodes distributed along her arteries. The substance in the commando's veins had little else to do with her Rix immune system, however. It contained no white blood cells, whose functions had been delegated centuries before to a scattered population of organs roughly the size of rice grains, themselves generated by small machines hidden in the marrow of her bird-light, aircraft-strong, hypercarbon bones.

The surging fluid did, however, contain enough iron to oxydize red when it was spilled, a situation that the commando was currently attempting to avoid.

She was tucked into an area smaller than an overnight bag, a space that normally housed a cleaning robot. The Rixwoman had disassembled the previous occupant, hoping the scattered parts would not reveal her appropriation of its home, and folded herself into the space, limbs bending at sharp angles like some origami construction. According to the messages sent to her from Alexander, her invisible and omnipresent benefactor in this chase, the local militia were searching for her with sonic sweeps. These devices were designed to find escaped fugitives by detecting that steady, unstoppable, telltale rhythm of humanity: the heartbeat.

Apparently, no one had told the locals that she, a Rix commando, had none.

The tiny turbine purred inside her chest, an infrasonic hiss without rhythm or vibrato, and the nervous, soft-shoed sweep operators passed by her hiding place, blissfully unaware.

The commando, who was called H_rd, had gone to ground in a building that was called, in the local language, a library. This structure served as a distribution point for proprietary data, information not available in the public infostructure. Corporate secrets, technological patents, personal medical records, and certain erotic poems and images available by paid subscription were deposited here, accessible only to those with special physical keys, totems of information ownership. Alexander had guided H_rd here, helping the commando fight and creep her way across a hundred kilometers of dense city that swarmed with militia, police, and the occasional Imperial marine, all searching for her. But Alexander was a powerful ally, and even a single Rix commando was deadly quarry. The local forces made a show of the pursuit—evacuating buildings, running sweeps, and occasionally firing their weapons—but were more interested in self-preservation than glory. And the Imperial marines numbered fewer than a hundred.

The commando waited in the library with inhuman patience. For seven hours, she lay folded in her compartment.

It was strange here in the darkness, so alone. H_rd had spent her entire life in the intimate company of her drop-sisters, never separated from the sibling group for more than a few minutes.

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