The Emperor's New Clothes (Royce Ree #1) Read online

  Royce Ree #1

  THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

  Copyright 2013 Aldous Mercer

  Smashwords Edition

  In This Series

  The Emperor’s New Clothes (Royce Ree #1)

  Drivepolitik (Royce Ree #2)

  The Gorilla In The Vent (Royce Ree #3)

  Madman’s Rue (Royce Ree #4)

  Imperial Command (Royce Ree #5)

  On The Take (Royce Ree #6)—Coming 2014

  Regia (Royce Ree #7)—Coming 2014

  Legal Things

  This is—just in case the FTL travel didn’t clue you in—a work of fiction. All characters in it are fictitious. Unfortunately. Any resemblance to real persons, or our respected Alien overlords, is purely coincidental. Except for the gorilla in Part 3; Him, I based off a cub I once saw at the Toronto Zoo.

  Cover Credits

  Design by Aldous Mercer

  3D Model by percy999 from fiverr

  Pismis 24 and NGC 6357: NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain)

  Under the “wing” of the Small Magellanic Cloud: NASA, ESA, CXC and the University of Potsdam, JPL-Caltech, and STScI

  Star-Forming Region S106 & Hubble Sees a Horsehead of a Different Color & The Pencil Nebula/Remnants of an Exploded Start (NGC 2736): NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

  Contents

  YESTERDAY

  8 DAYS AGO

  7 DAYS AGO

  A REQUEST…

  Excerpt: THE PRINCE AND THE PROGRAM (The Mordred Saga, Book 1)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  YESTERDAY

  IMPERIAL AUDIENCE CHAMBER, TRINITY PRIME

  Starlight lit the most tastefully decorated interrogation room Royce had ever been in. Not that that was the room’s normal function, but to Royce’s mind, any room where one was being interrogated…

  The Spymaster’s sigh brought Royce back to immediate concerns. Dressed in the most severely formal style, the glitter in the Spymaster’s eye could have been amusement.

  “Tell me again, agent Ree,” he said, “did you understand your mission objective?”

  Royce swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

  “And what was it?”

  “Covert retrieval from the Baldasshi, sir.”

  As the Spymaster’s silence lengthened, Royce stared straight ahead at the wall behind his employer’s head. The swirled green-in-green pattern brought to mind the gentle sway of grass in a summer breeze.

  “Retrieval of what, agent?” asked the Spymaster, finally.

  “Their impeccable sense of style, sir.”

  “And yet…and yet what you actually brought me was their Royal Princess, intent upon marrying the Emperor.”

  Royce didn’t dare shift his gaze from that perfectly neutral wall to look at the other occupant of the room.

  “You also,” continued the Spymaster, “brought me half of Baldessh’s parliament, six hundred Nova class battleships, and a menagerie of wild animals.”

  “Psychic wild animals, sir,” ventured Royce.

  “Of course,” said the Spymaster. “Psychic wild animals.”

  “I finished my mission, sir!”

  A soft laugh greeted Royce’s protest. Not from the Spymaster’s direction—he looked even more pissed off, though it was hard to tell.

  “Tell us,” said the voice Royce was not supposed to acknowledge, “How this happened. From the beginning.”

  8 DAYS AGO

  “The Empire has survived wars, supernovae, democracy, and the collapse of a neighborhood universe. Let us hope it survives the good intentions of Agent Royce Ree.”

  -personal communication to the Emperor

  Author unknown

  INSTITUTE OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, NESSDAR, BALDESSH

  Royce crouched behind a molecular analyzer in the basement of the planet’s most secure laboratory. The Baldasshi workday had ended a while ago, and now the only people in the building were the guards—armed, vigilant, un-bribable.

  The laboratory’s network power-cycled just once every two months, giving Royce a half-minute window to retrieve the data he was looking for.

  He was two hours overdue at the orbital transfer station, where mission specifications dictated he should be. But it would be a cold day on Prion-5 before anyone at HQ acknowledged that the mission specifications were utterly stupid.

  The network would power-cycle in fifteen seconds.

  Fourteen.

  The lab’s bright lights flickered once, imperceptibly, their spectrum uncomfortably rich in UV. If he was captured, it would embroil three civilizations in one of the nastiest diplomatic incidents in recent memory.

  Nine.

  The legalities of extraditing him would take years. And that was if anyone at HQ even acknowledged Royce as an Imperial Agent, after this little self-assigned break-and-enter exercise.

  Five.

  The Imperial tattoo on the inside of his wrist glowed a pale blue under the UV; it might get him shot on sight. A clean, fatal, shot, if he was lucky. It’d be easier to take than the Spymaster’s caustic sarcasm during the post-mission debriefing.

  Death was certainly preferable to returning home without the one thing he had come to this planet for.

  Two.

  Royce darted out onto the floor, towards the lead scientist’s console.

  One.

  “Ree?”

  Royce whirled around, drawing out his ballistic without conscious thought. And stopped shock-still, a hairsbreadth from pulling the trigger.

  Because in the doorway, dressed in a Baldasshi lab-technician’s uniform, stood the man Imperial Agent Royce Ree had once been married to.

  “The moment a planet discovers Faster-Than-Light travel, it attracts the attentions of every other civilization in the universe. We descend like vultures, to pick clean any unique tech the planet has managed to accumulate in its pre-FTL isolation. Some consider it a rite of passage for the poor world.”

  -Commentary on First Contact

  Cytus Solei’el, left-wing historian

  VENTILATION DUCT, INSTITUTE OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, BALDESSH

  Royce decided that a ventilation duct was the absolute worst place in the universe to have a post-marital argument.

  “Six months working my way up that lab’s hierarchy,” Les snarled, “and the one night you decide to drop by is the night I’m stealing their damned tech?”

  Royce felt a passing regret for the canapés he could have been eating right now in the spacestation’s VIP lounge.

  “Look,” he said, “it wasn’t personal. HQ had to assign someone to another tech-acquisition, I was in the area.”

  Les looked at him through narrowed eyes.

  “And the last time anyone gave me an update,” continued Royce, “you were running a desk on Trinity.”

  “Fine,” said Les, then immediately started shucking off his lab coat. The space was narrow, and Les had to contort himself into unnatural shapes to accomplish the task. Les hadn’t lost any of his flexibility in the past three years.

  Royce gritted his teeth and turned away, continuing his crawl up the ducts to street level. His ex followed, the air quickly taking on the overtones of Les’s scent. Cloves, dipped in sugar.

  Royce cleared his throat. “I thought,” he began, “that you left fieldwork to be closer to civilization.” Like you left me.

  Les, perceptive as always, heard the unspoken thought. “You left me,” he hissed. “On a backwater outpost so far away from home that…that it took my family four months to convince a courier ship to pick me up.”

  Royce decided it was time to change the subject. “Wh
at did you steal anyway?”

  “Need to know.”

  Royce stopped, and half-turned to look Les straight in the eye. “Considering the fact that were are crawling through a ventilation duct while guards with a vaporize-on-sight order look for us,” he said, “I think we can safely assume that I am very much in the ‘Need to Know’.”

  Les’s shoulders slumped. He expelled one shaky breath, then another, and he looked down at his fist, curled tightly around a small object. He’d been clutching it since his surprised exclamation of “Ree?” triggered the facility-wide security claxons.

  Les’s fingers uncurled.

  Royce took in the glittering, tightly-wound coils sitting on the palm of Les’s hand, and a cold sweat broke out all over his body.

  “Are you insane?” he whispered. “Stealing another civ’s drive?”

  “The Emperor commanded me,” said Les.

  “Bullshit,” said Royce. “The Emperor hasn’t issued an Imperial Command since—”

  “How would you know?”

  Royce snorted. “My classification’s about as high as it can go without running out of air.”

  “Which means nothing on Trinity, and less than nothing in the Emperor’s social circle,” said Les. “My mother dines with His Imperial Majesty on a regular basis.”

  “I know,” said Royce. “She reminded me of that each time she came to our house.”

  Les had the grace to look away.

  “And it’s not a matter of being pals with the Emperor,” continued Royce, “it’s a matter of Protocol. Imperial Commands involve the do-or-die, trillions of lives on the line sorts of missions, not tech-theft. Everyone who’s ever seen a historical drama knows this, alright?”

  Silently, Les twisted his torso, then drew his hair away from the nape of his neck.

  There, embedded into the flesh just beneath Les’s hairline, was an implant bearing the Imperial Seal. The do-or-die.

  Shit.

  “An Imperial Command has been put into play…we feel the Emperor may be transcending his Authority.”

  “To what end?”

  “To the only End there is, old friend. Drivepolitik.”

  -Transcript, Casual Conversation, Trinity Prime 20.1881.93

  EMERGENCY EXIT, INSTUTITE OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, BALDESSH

  Despair curled around Les’s limbs, leaden, made him want to curl up and sleep, right there in the vent. My mother dines with the Emperor? His ex-husband should have seen that line for the bullshit it was. Royce hadn’t twitched.

  Les had held out for months, waiting, ignoring the increasingly strident commands from HQ to evacuate Baldasshi Space. He smiled, bitterly, in the dark. He’d been convinced the Imperial Command was a forgery. The Empire does not play drivepolitik.

  The Merakavwi, a species of biped on the other side of the universe, were a complex people, with a history marked both by unspeakable atrocities and profound philosophy. They had over a thousand definitions of ‘rape’. One of those, sandwiched somewhere between coercive sterilization and mutagenic warfare, was Vanakhi - theft of a civilization’s FTL drive.

  He’d knew that if he didn’t return with the drive, they—whoever “they” were—would send someone else to retrieve it. It was just a matter of time before he came face-to-face with a ballistic as he rounded a corner. He’d prepared himself for that.

  But nothing could have prepared him for Royce Ree. Who is a nightmare so detailed, so absorbing, that you wake from him, gasping in remembered fear, then long to go back to sleep so you can enter that twisted landscape again. Royce was the Emperor’s man, heart and soul. No, I’m the traitor here.

  “Why did you waste six months on this retrieval anyway?” asked Royce, his voice both echoing and muffled in the confined space. “Baldasshi security is crap.”

  So why did they send an agent of your caliber? Anger twisted, deep in Les’s stomach, turning soul-weariness to energy that propelled his limbs, faster, closing in on the crawling half-shadowed form of Royce.

  My Emperor sent the only man I've ever loved to kill me.

  “Close call, though,” said Royce, his tone batting ineffectually at the uncomfortable silence in the air. “If you hadn’t gotten your hands on it just now….”

  Les had been cleared to work in the drive-core laboratory—albeit on an unrelated project—two months ago.

  “I assume you’re getting off the surface ASAP,” said Royce.

  Les made a noncommittal noise. Tonight was the third night he held vigil in that lab, caught in the throes of selfish indecision: to leave the drive where it was, and die, or take it with him.

  My honour or my life, can’t have both.

  Then, Royce Ree dropped in. And Les picked up the drive and pocketed it, almost by reflex.

  My mother was right. Royce is a bad influence.

  “The Empire’s supposed to have two FTL drive-variants. Except that everyone’s only ever seen the younger one. Where’s the older, hmmm? Has it failed, like Rzmala’s? Will the younger one fail too? …those isolated, defenceless, fertile planets…. Perhaps Trinity itself could be breached….”

  -Transcript, Casual Conversation, Ulebre-Belt-III

  AIR EXCHANGE JUNCTION, INSTITUTE OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, BALDESSH

  They were taking another one of the irregularly scribed breaks called for by Royce’s escape plan. Les sat uncomfortably close to his ex-husband, crammed into a ventilation cul-de-sac above a ground-level laboratory.

  Royce shifted, probably trying to find a comfortable position within the angular vent. The movement triggered something, deep in Les’s psyche. He found himself turning, reckless, offering his throat to Royce. If you want my life, take it, take it please and end this.

  But Royce didn’t. Didn’t even seem to notice, his eyes sliding away to a spot over Les’s shoulder.

  Hope whispered in Les’s ear, seductive and terrifying. The basis for his first assumption—the lack of professionalism in the woman who’d implanted the chip in his head, the small hesitations in giving answers, the almost-expired crypto-key on the “Imperial Order”…none of that had changed. The Imperial Command could still be the work of traitors, because Royce didn’t need an exposed throat.

  He could have killed me any time in the past hour, left my corpse here in the vents and nobody would have been the wiser for hours, days perhaps.

  “So,” said Royce, shifting again, “what’s your exit plan?”

  Les didn’t reply.

  “Do you have an exit plan?”

  Les looked down and away. “I was just going to walk out...”

  “What idiot gave you a deepcover assignment?” Royce muttered.

  “The same one that gave you yours,” Les snapped, though he wasn’t at all sure about that. Is he really on an unrelated mission?

  “Alright, let’s move,” said Royce.

  Obediently, Les twisted, levering his legs out of the confined outcrop, making room for Royce to drop into the crawlspace.

  Les didn't believe in coincidences. But maybe…maybe they believed in him. But he had to be sure. Absolutely sure, that Royce wasn’t here for the drive.

  As they resumed their crawl, Les fingered the small, rough patch of neurotoxin nano-fabric painted over his right index fingernail.

  It was dangerous, to both love Royce Ree and commit to killing him if required. Desire—addiction—was a cunning beast. A shard of hope, that Royce was truly not against him, and it leapt free, escaping through Les’s mouth as a giddy smile.

  He prayed, recklessly, for something bad to happen, something that would distract his emotions, wipe the telltale signs of hopeless obsession from his body-language. It didn’t help; his hearing was focused on every whisper of cloth-against-cloth as Royce crawled.

  Cloth?

  Les’s hand darted out, closed around Royce’s ankle in warning.

  Royce stiffened, then relaxed in the next moment. He’d heard it too—muffled thumps, from boots running overhead. Five. Six.
Eight. Far too many to be lab security; there were only three guards on duty today.

  Nine. A full squad.

  Long moments after the bootsteps faded from his hearing, Les let go of Royce’s ankle.

  “Other civs’ agents, stealing what they can before….”

  Royce twisted around. In the semi-darkness, Les could almost hear the rapid pulse at the hollow of Royce’s throat.

  “It’s the Kova,” said Royce.

  Les shook his head in negation.

  Royce’s lip curled in a characteristic show of exasperation. “R&D centers are always the first targets of an invasion!”

  “It’s not an invasion.”

  The shuttered light from the vent intakes illuminated a strange expression on Royce’s face. “This is the Kova we’re talking about. How can it be anything else?”

  “Sir, the planetary ruler of Baldessh is hailing us.”

  “Good. Pipe them the standard script. We will protect them and their tech, in exchange for…yadda…yadda.”

  “We already did. This is a response. Um. Sir, I would suggest you take the call. Personally.”

  “Explain.”

  “They’re offering an unconditional alliance. If you’d be willing to marry their planetary ruler, sir.”

  “Are they insane? Or just plain naive?”

  -Transcript, Kovan Flagship: “Exchange between Fleet Commander and Kovan Warlord, approaching Baldasshi Planetary Space.”

  GUARDROOM, INSTITUTE OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, BALDESSH

  They moved forward in complete silence.

  The world became an endless stretch of shadowed vents; time was measured by the almost imperceptible seams under Royce’s hands and knees that marked the boundaries between sections of ductwork.

  It’s been three years since we saw each other. Royce had been passed out in their tiny ship’s cabin, after a double shift in the mines. His exhausted state was the only reason Les was able to slip away. Quietly, and without a note. He’d sent one, months later, with the divorce papers.