The Interdependency Series: The Collapsing Empire, the Consuming Fire, the Last Emperox by Scalzi John

Author:Scalzi, John [Scalzi, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250344168
Amazon: B0CCMCD6TZ
Goodreads: 194489999
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2023-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

“Okay, this gets complicated,” Marce said. He fumbled with his tablet to call up his latest presentation.

Cardenia kept herself from giggling at the warning. “I know that,” she said. “Remember what we’re doing. Your job is to make what you’re about to say comprehensible to people who aren’t Flow physicists. Politicians. Journalists. Normal humans. Me.”

“You’re not normal,” Marce pointed out.

“No,” Cardenia allowed. “But once upon a time I almost was. I’m definitely not a Flow physicist, however. For the purposes of this presentation, I’ll do.”

The two of them were in the small media theater attached to Cardenia’s personal apartments. It could seat about twenty-five and was where the emperox, when she felt like letting her hair down, could invite friends to watch the latest entertainments on a large screen with genuinely amazing sound.

That was the theory, at least. In reality, by the time Cardenia was done with her daily tasks as emperox, the last thing she wanted to do was to have a couple dozen people whooping and yelling at something bright and noisy. She mostly just crawled into bed with Marce, and if the two of them watched anything, it would be on one of their tablets, propped up by one of their knees. Marce had once observed the irony of the most powerful person in the known universe consuming media like a starving college student; Cardenia had replied by hauling him out of bed and making him watch their show in the theater. They ended up watching five minutes of the show and then did something else entirely, which did not involve watching what was up on the screen.

Cardenia smiled at the memory. What they were doing in the theater now was not what they had done then.

“Okay,” Marce said, and then activated his slideshow on the theater’s very large screen. The first slide’s title was “What Is the Flow?” Marce frowned. “You, uh, already know this part,” he said to Cardenia.

“Yes I do,” she agreed. “Why don’t you skip ahead to the new, complicated part.”

Marce flipped forward through several additional slides covering the very very basics of Flow physics and the astrography of the Flow and the Interdependency; Cardenia made a note to have one of her people ask one of the visual artists in the Imperial Information Office to help Marce pretty it up for general consumption. Marce might be a genius in many respects, but visual design wasn’t his forte.

“Right,” he said, finally, and stopped at a slide that featured a visual representation of a Flow shoal. “This is a Flow shoal as we typically know it. It’s where ships enter or exit the Flow, and it’s static, relative to the most massive object in its system, usually its star. Indeed, in a way you could say the Flow shoal is anchored by gravity—it’s why we find shoals in star systems but almost never outside them.”

Marce tapped his tablet and then another representation of a Flow shoal appeared, this one moving and shrinking, on a loop.

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