Emperor of the Universe Read online

  “We’re safe,” Clave said. His voice sounded oddly flat. “We survived.”

  Nicholas, who wasn’t entirely sure that was an accurate statement, sat up and checked to make sure his jaw hadn’t been turned into an assortment of bone fragments clustered in a chin sack. It seemed to be intact. As did the back of his head.

  “You didn’t wait for us,” he said.

  “You made it,” Clave said. “You’re alive. Stop complaining.”

  Nicholas didn’t feel like arguing. “Are you okay?” he asked Henrietta, who’d plumped back to her usual shape. Between the mind-numbing effects of acceleration and a minor concussion or two, Nicholas was feeling fairly dazed himself.

  “Just fine,” she said.

  “But you were flat.”

  “That’s not unusual for me.” Henrietta flattened herself, then plumped up again. “I’m surprised you can’t do that. It comes in very handy.”

  Nicholas looked over at Jeef, who had also plumped back up. “Who’s Marike?” he asked. He started to get to his feet, but decided he needed to rest a moment and catch his breath. After all the running, it felt good to sit still.

  She’s … It’s hard to remember …

  “You called for her,” Nicholas said.

  Wait. I remember. She read to us from a book she always carried. Beautiful words. “The ear of the wise seeks knowledge.” I didn’t understand all of it, but it sounded so nice. Very beautiful and full of advice. “For wisdom is better than rubies, and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.”

  Henrietta walked over to Jeef and bumped her nose against Jeef’s side.

  Stop sniffing me!

  “I’m not sniffing you,” she said. “I’m reading your biography.” She lowered her head and resumed reading. In fairness to Jeef, Henrietta did sniff a bit when she read. And when she didn’t.

  “That explains it,” Henrietta said.

  Nicholas felt like he was ten steps behind Henrietta. Granted, Henrietta took tiny steps, but still, Nicholas never quite caught up. He waited for her to explain what she was talking about.

  “See for yourself.” Henrietta pointed one foreleg at Jeef.

  Nicholas leaned over and read the printing at the bottom of the front of the package, next to a small drawing of a barn on a hill. He’d seen it before, but never really paid attention to it—sort of like his French textbook.

  All our products are lovingly raised by Mennonite Farmers in Lancaster County, PA.

  “Oh, I get it.” He didn’t know a lot about Mennonites, but he grasped the basics. They were very devout. He pictured a woman, Marike, sitting on a stool in a pasture, reading verses to the cattle from the Bible, or maybe just reading them aloud to herself. “So that’s why you keep coming up with stuff that sounds…”

  “Holy?” Henrietta suggested.

  “Yeah, holy,” Nicholas said.

  As the words left his lips, and his brain made a somewhat obvious connection, Nicholas was, for once, cogitating at exactly the same speed as Henrietta. In evidence of this, it needs to be noted that the two of them shouted the same dreadful pun at exactly the same time:

  “HOLY COW!”

  Nicholas couldn’t help laughing. “Jeef, this is hilarious.”

  Hardly, Jeef said. I have become a laughingstock to all my people, their mocking song all the day.

  “Better than a livestock,” Henrietta said. “Or a deadstock.”

  “Hey, Clave, did you catch that?” Nicholas said. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had such a good laugh. It felt great. He pivoted on his rear so he faced toward the console. “This is really funny. Let me explain. There’s this expression my grandpa uses all the time, when he’s surprised. It’s…”

  The explanation died in Nicholas’s throat when he saw Clave, who stood frozen by the front of the cockpit, his face highlighted by an unnatural light streaming through the viewport.

  LET’S GET ALL HYPER

  Soon after jump nodes were discovered, and the basic techniques of hyperjumps were ironed out, the Great Mapping began. A fairly clever group of engineers designed a probe that, when placed at a node, would replicate sufficient copies of itself to make jumps to all the connected nodes. The probe at each node would send its coordinates to the Great Mapping command center. More raw material would be shipped to those probes through the original jump node (this was before the development of Thinkerator technology), and they’d each repeat the exploration steps from their new base.

  This was not a rapid process, since the number of probes grew exponentially, as did the need for raw material. The mapping is actually still going on, and will probably go on forever, or until the end of the universe, whichever comes first.

  That same group of engineers established Hyperjump Unlimited to make and sell j-cubes and navigation systems, partly as a way to fund the mapping, and partly as a way to retire early and buy cool toys that flew really fast or blew things up. Hyperjump Unlimited quickly became the largest company in the universe. But not for long.

  ON THE RUN

  “What’s wrong?” Nicholas asked.

  Clave pointed toward Menmar. “This is terrible.”

  All thoughts of humor vanished from Nicholas as he stared at a glowing heap of slag that had been a planet just a few minutes earlier. Until this moment, thanks to his thumps on the head and his relief at escaping from danger, he hadn’t really been able to absorb and accept the inconceivable idea that a whole planet could be destroyed by a single weapon. Right now, staring out the viewport, he could feel the shock in his heart as Menmar was consumed by fire. He couldn’t imagine how horrifying and mind-numbing it would be to see that happen to Earth.

  “How…?” Nicholas asked.

  Clave was too numbed to even say, “It’s complicated.”

  It wasn’t complicated. But it was terrible. The planet scorcher began as a mining machine known as an Elemax. Like many tools, from the simple rice thresher that became the nunchaku on Earth to the Aldebaran cybermagnet that had been reengineered to generate a death ray that could penetrate walls, the Elemax had been converted from a useful device into a horrendous weapon capable of doing unspeakable damage.

  When the planet torcher the Menmarians launched touched down just outside the underground capitol of Zefinora, it drilled a hole directly beneath itself. As the hole deepened and the ship descended into the ground, it covered itself with the debris it had created. This was purely a defensive move, to keep it safe while it extracted a series of elements and compounds from the planet’s crust and redeposited them on the surface at two locations 180 degrees apart, using a technology based on teleportation. The final layer, at the top of the deposition, was composed of potassium carbonate. But this was not the final step.

  After the potassium carbonate was deposited, the carbon was removed, leaving an area covered with pure potassium. The potassium, which burns when wet, combusted after exposure to moisture in the atmosphere. The resulting fire grew hot enough to ignite the layers of lithium and magnesium beneath it, each of which was seeded with aluminum oxide as a source of oxygen for the fires. These layers set fire to the next layer. And the next. Essentially Zefinora had been turned into the global equivalent of a friction match, using the principle of rising kindling points. As each element combusted, it rose in temperature until it was hot enough to ignite the next one. Inevitably, as the fiendishly designed layers on Zefinora burned hotter and hotter, the entire planet caught fire. As did Menmar, thanks to the Zefinoran planet torcher.

  “Your whole planet,” Nicholas said to Clave. “Your home. Your friends.”

  “Your pets,” Henrietta said.

  Your cattle, Jeef said. (The more sensitive among you will be relieved to know that there were, at the time of destruction, no cattle on Menmar. They’d all been slaughtered decades ago.)

  “Yes, it’s terrible.” Clave sounded like someone who’d lost a watch he wasn’t all that fond of. “We should figure out where we’re
going. We might as well head for the jump node while I work on finding a destination.” He set the course, then sat and stared down at the instruments, not looking at the dwindling view of his former planet.

  “Can’t you just take me home?” Nicholas asked.

  Clave tapped the container that held the four warp cubes. “I’d need seven of these to get to Earth, and another seven to get home. Not that I have a home anymore.”

  Nicholas wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Clave’s expression gave him no clue, and he was never comfortable offering sympathy to others for even the most minor of tragedies, and especially not to adults, so he shifted the subject. “Where can you get them?”

  “On just about any civilized planet or docking station,” Clave said. “I would have bought more on Menmar after I got paid for transporting you. I guess we can forget about that.”

  “Are they expensive?” Nicholas asked. He reflexively tapped his pocket, as if feeling for his wallet, which he’d left at home. Not that it would do him much good anywhere except for Earth.

  “Let’s save this discussion for some other time.” Clave pointed to an object in the lower left corner of the viewport. He magnified the view enough to reveal the Yewpee cruiser. “It looks like they tracked us to Menmar. They’re headed for the planet, but they’ll figure things out soon enough, once they see what’s happening.”

  “Wait! Won’t they assume we’d died down there?” Nicholas asked. “So they’ll stop looking for me.” That, at least, was one small bright glimmer for him in the current darkness.

  “Um…” Clave glanced at the sfumbler, which was on the console next to him. His expression showed as much guilt as was possible for a Menmarian, which, though minuscule, was still enough to signal what he’d done.

  “Tell me you didn’t,” Nicholas said.

  “It was just a short one,” Clave said. “I couldn’t bear knowing how sad my fans would be if they thought I’d perished. I did it for them. But we really need to get out of here. Hang on.”

  Clave punched the accelerator. Nicholas slammed into the back wall. Henrietta was in his pocket, which cushioned the blow for her. Jeef slid across the floor and smacked the wall next to Nicholas.

  Every movie he’d ever seen where the bad guys make a run for it ran through Nicholas’s mind. Especially the ones where the bad guys ended up getting run through by bullets. “Maybe I should turn myself in,” he said. “I mean, I really did kill those Craborzi.” The confession brought back a pang of guilt.

  “You’d probably spend the rest of your life in prison,” Clave said. “And I’d be in the next cell, doomed to listen to endless questions for the rest of my life. Why do birds swim? Why is the sky green? How come that man has three heads? Blah, blah, blah…”

  Nicholas walked up to Clave and asked a much more important question. “Are we done with unannounced bursts of acceleration?”

  “We are.”

  “Good.” Nicholas dropped into the empty seat and watched the pursuers, who’d turned around, as Clave had predicted, and now seemed to be closing the distance at an alarming rate. “They’re pretty fast,” he said.

  “So am I. We’ll be fine as long as they don’t get within dead-pulse range before we jump,” Clave said.

  “What’s that?” Nicholas asked.

  Clave shot him a glare. “More questions?”

  “It seemed important,” Nicholas said. “Pretty much anything with ‘dead’ as part of its name is worth avoiding.”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds. They can’t fire a lethal weapon at the ship if there’s anyone on board besides the suspect,” Clave said. “So they have to kill the ship’s drive. The pulse is powerful, but it isn’t long-range.”

  “I’m glad they can’t shoot at us,” Nicholas said.

  The ship jolted.

  “Hostile fire detected,” the ship said. “Shields activated.”

  “Someone’s shooting at us.” Clave thrust his hands into the navigation field and twiddled his fingers like a jazz pianist trying to play seven variations at once.

  “Who?”

  An inset image of a sleek ship resembling a six-winged wasp appeared in the viewport.

  “The worst possible enemy in the universe,” Clave said.

  WE ARE KEEPING YOU IN OUR THOUGHTS

  Great inventions and scientific theories often arise independently in multiple places. That’s the way it was with the Thinkerator. On Kindar, Selvned, Thrax, and seventeen other planets, at roughly the same time, scientists theorized that if thoughts instantly spread throughout the universe, it was worth investigating whether it was possible to attach matter to a thought, and deliver that matter elsewhere. The Kindari, being excellent thinkers, were the first to achieve a successful practical application of this theory, harnessing the thoughts of a volunteer to propel a microgram of cadmium across a laboratory. Unfortunately, due to an unanticipated feedback loop, the thinker’s head exploded, setting Kindari experimentation back a decade or so. This allowed the Selvned to move ahead. Nobody is sure why their entire lab disintegrated after several successful experiments. Fortunately, word of these disasters never reached Thrax, where the basic techniques of thought-borne matter transmission were ironed out.

  A century or two of refinement followed, because scientists had to grapple with the fact that everywhere and somewhere weren’t the same. Eventually, after all the technical difficulties were ironed out, Thinkerators were used to supply colonies with basic materials. But this offered no real advantage over delivery by jump shuttles, since every colony was already within shuttle range of a jump node. The Thinkerator might have faded away, joining millions of other interesting but inessential inventions, had it not been for one merchant’s brilliant realization.

  A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE

  “Who is that?” Nicholas asked.

  “That’s a Craborzi ship,” Clave said. “I’ve seen them on that program, Let’s Hunt Things Down! Their favorite technique is to cripple a ship and then board it so they can capture their victims alive and intact.”

  Nicholas pictured himself strapped to a Craborzi lab table. Now it made even more sense to surrender to the police. “What if—”

  “Quiet,” Clave said. “We’re almost there. This is going to get tricky.”

  He loaded one j-cube, then reached into the nav field.

  The ship decelerated rapidly.

  “Hang on,” Clave said, somewhat too late.

  Nicholas flew out of his chair, tumbled head over heels as his feet hit the console, and slammed upside down into the viewport, which was strong enough, fortunately, to take the impact.

  “You told me you were finished accelerating,” he said as he slid to the floor.

  “That was deceleration. It’s difficult to make a jump when you’re moving fast.” Clave pulled the jump lever.

  Nicholas felt the falling-in-different-directions sensation again. Outside the viewport, the star field changed. As before, the ship tumbled. Nicholas slammed into a bulkhead.

  “Stupid gold,” Clave said as he battled to regain stability.

  “Stupid gold,” Nicholas said after the motion stopped. He spotted Jeef and Henrietta nearby. Neither seemed harmed.

  “At least we’re safe, for now,” Clave said.

  “Can’t they just follow us?” Nicholas asked.

  “No. There’s no trail. No way to see where we went. And they don’t know we’re low on cubes. As far as they can tell, we might be anywhere. We’ve escaped.” He pulled out his sfumbler and pointed it at Nicholas. “I need to post this. People seem interested in you. Though it’s my style that really makes the story special.”

  “No!” Nicholas said. “Cut it out with the sfumbles. That’s how they found us the first time. And the second! I don’t want to go through a third mad chase.”

  “You might as well issue a news flash,” Henrietta said.

  Triggered by that phrase, Stella sprang up to give the news. After reports on music, politics, and spo
rts, and a touching account of the Emperor of the Universe making a surprise visit to some of the evacuees of Plenax IV, who were fleeing an imminent supernova, she said, “And this just in. Nicholas the Slayer has struck again, in an exponentially greater fashion.”

  “Slayer? What happened to brutal assassin?” Henrietta said.

  “I think ‘Slayer’ sounds better,” Clave said. “It’s very catchy. Almost as good as Crazy Clave.”

  Nicholas shushed everyone as Stella continued her story. “Planet-wrecker Nicholas the Slayer, destroyer of Menmar and Zefinora, already infamous for his brutal murder of seventeen Craborzi scientists, has been tied to the treacherous destruction of two entire worlds.”

  “Seven scientists!” Nicholas shouted.

  “They got the number of worlds right,” Henrietta said. “At least, for now.”

  An image appeared behind Stella, showing a split screen of incinerating planets.

  “Authorities nearly caught up with him before he escaped the crime scene with the help of a tenth-rate sfumbler and freelance messenger named Lazy Crave.”

  “Clave!” Clave shouted. “Crazy Clave!”

  Stella had more to say. “It was actually a sfumble that led authorities to Menmar. They would have been there sooner, if anyone had noticed the post before now, but this Crave person doesn’t have a very large following, so it was pretty much a miracle the sfumble was spotted at all. The hunt continues.”

  Stella faded.

  “Tenth rate!” Clave said. “I certainly am not tenth rate. And I’m not a messenger. I’m a courier. There’s a difference!”

  Nicholas waited for Clave to calm down, then said, “Can I see the gold?” He knew Clave felt it was worthless. But he also knew how valuable it was. There had to be some way to use the gold to buy the j-cubes they needed so he could get back home.

  “Sure.” Clave opened the hatch that led out of the bridge. He walked past the lockers in the corridor, then tapped a foot pedal that jutted from the floor near the wall. A small hatch in the floor sank at one end, forming steps as it lowered. “It’s there.”