“My meeting is scheduled for fifteen minutes at nine a.m., and I don’t have anything else today, so …” Singh said. He did not say,
“All right,” Natalia said, then kissed his cheek. “I’ll be at the lab today until at least six, but your father agreed to monster duty if you can’t pick her up from school.”
“Fine, fine,” Singh said. “Until then.”
The dark naval staff car pulled up outside. Singh paused at the mirror by the door to give himself one final inspection, and wipe away an errant bit of Monster’s breakfast shrapnel. Natalia was at the table now, trying to eat and also get some of Monster’s own food in her mouth and off her shirt.
Dread welled up from his belly, swamping his heart. He had to swallow half a dozen times before he could speak. He loved his wife and their child more than he could say, and leaving them was always a little difficult. This was different. Generations of navy men had faced mornings like this. Meetings with superiors that heralded change. Surely, if they’d faced it, he could too.
The imperial view, a history professor at the Naval Academy once said, is the long view. Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever.
While Martian intentions had never been explicitly imperialist, they had a fair bit of this same hubris. They’d built their tunnels and warrens as temporary living space in the stone of Mars, then gotten down to the generations-spanning work of making the surface habitable.
But their first generation died with the work still unaccomplished. And the generation after that, and so on, child following parent, until the children only knew the tunnels and didn’t think they were so bad. They lost sight of the larger dream because it had never been their dream. Once the creators and their intentions were gone, only the tunnels were left.
As Singh looked out at the capital city of Laconia whizzing past the car’s window, he saw the same masses of material and intention. Giant stone-and-steel buildings designed to house the government of an empire that didn’t exist yet. More infrastructure than Laconia on its own would need for centuries. Their columns and spires called back millennia of Terran and Martian culture, and remade them as a vision of a peculiarly human future.
If the dreams of empire failed, they’d just be big buildings that had never been used.
It was an open secret among the high-ranking officers of Laconia’s military that the high consul’s labs had made incredible breakthroughs in human modification. One of their most important projects was dramatic life extension for the high consul himself. The captain that Singh had served under as a lieutenant had received an official reprimand for getting drunk and referring to the high consul as “our own little god-king.”
But Singh understood why that particular project for the high consul was so important. Empires, like buildings, are aspirations made material. When the creator dies, the intention is lost.
And so the creator couldn’t be permitted to die.
If the rumors were true, and the high consul’s scientists were in fact working to make him deathless, they had a chance to create the sort of empire history had only dreamed of. Stability of leadership, continuity of purpose, and a single lasting vision. Which was all well and good, but didn’t explain why he had been summoned to a personal meeting with Duarte.
“We’re almost there, sir,” his driver said.
“I’m ready,” Singh lied.
The State Building of Laconia was the imperial palace in all but name. It was by far the largest structure in the capital city. It was both the seat of their government and the personal dwelling space of the high consul and his daughter. After passing through a rigorous security screening administered by soldiers in state-of-the-art Laconian power armor, Singh was finally ushered inside for the very first time.
It was a little disappointing.
