Measure Of Adulthood: Politics of Empire, #4

By Dan Melson

Kusaan del.  It means 'divine finger'

 

The Empire of Humanity is locked in a war for survival with the Fractal Demons.  Years on, the dice are still tumbling.  Billions have died and planets have been destroyed.  Meanwhile, an old loose end has resurfaced and forced Grace to confront a mistake from her teenage years - her son by a long-dead lover has lost his adulthood, and only Grace can save him from exile.

 

But the Fractal Demons initiate a new strategy, and are starting to turn the tide in their favor.  Grace is unlucky enough to be assigned to deal with one of their first strikes under the new strategy, and she's unable to prevent several million deaths.

 

But she's learned enough to master her problems, both as the new mother of a two hundred year old son, and as one of those defending the masses of the Empire from assault by the demons.  She has grown from her origins, and just because she seems to have a knack for attracting trouble doesn't mean she can't handle it.  When the divine finger points at her, she steps up to deal with it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Melson
• Release date: Mar 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224261062

Dan Melson

Dan Melson is married to the World's Only Perfect Woman.  They have two daughters in training for world domination.  They live in Southern California

Book preview

Chapter One

Esteban Scimtar di Juarez, you have passed the threshold of adulthood.  There is no return to childhood in this life.

The ceremony was pure show.  My eldest had wielded most of the trappings of adulthood for years.  The few deficiencies had already been rectified within a second of his passing the final formal test, Implied Responsibility.  But Scimtar was a believer in the power of such ceremonies, and he was head of the family.  So we were all standing around the family dinner table.

My part was simple.  You have unlimited access to your money.  Most of what Esteban owned, he’d earned himself.  Legal children weren’t prohibited from working; it merely required parental concurrence because the child could not be responsible.

You have unlimited access to public data and public spaces.  That was Asto’s splinter, standing in for Asto himself.

You have an adult’s access to family resources.  That was Scimtar again. 

You have an adult’s tools and weapons.  Amras, the family heir and current commercial head, buckled on belt with holster and sheath, Asto’s splinter presented Esteban with a blaster for the holster and I handed him a bondsteel sword for the sheath.  Esteban had better – these were family heirlooms from Scimtar’s youth, and would be returned before the end of the evening.  These days, most hand weapons were lasers or antimatter needlers, charged bondsteel for swords.  Esteban carried all three to my certain knowledge, in kored ‘pockets’ hidden from casual sight.

Use them responsibly, the entire family chorused, ending the ceremony.  It was an admonition.  The family might be your only reliable allies, but if you misbehaved badly enough, they’d put you down themselves in self-defense.

Really, the major change for Esteban was that henceforth, his family’s consent would not be required for what he’d already been doing, and he would be solely responsible for his deeds.  When he returned from a planned visit to his cousins on Earth, he would begin his first adult job, as an assistant to Amras, expediting and troubleshooting issues facing House Scimtar’s commercial interests.  The commercial branch was far and away the most important of the family’s activities - only the commercial operations head and assistants focused solely upon a single sector of House Scimtar’s activities.  Everyone else timeshared with commercial, even Scimtar himself.  Assistant to Operations was the traditional first job for the family’s new adults.  These days, it was a minimum of two of the youngest generation.  Esteban’s majority would likely release Urona immediately, and perhaps Anosha as well once Esteban was up to speed on the job.  Urona wasn’t quite useless on the scale of the rest of the family, but she lacked dedication to anything except her own immediate gratification.  I was sincerely grateful that none of my five had her issues.

Brief ceremony over, the rest of the family moved to sit at the table.  Nightly family dinners were a tradition among the members of House Scimtar, going back to the end of the Interregnum at least.  The table sat close to forty; it said we were a prosperous and growing family.  It was important to Helene that we were a family; daily attendance was mandatory for all blood members, either in person or by splinter.  Spouses, not being able to generate splinters, could be absent if they had a conflict, but I tried to attend every night.  I hadn’t yet discussed what would happen when I transitioned to Sixth Order – but at four point fiftytwo in reality, I’d accepted it was probably a matter of time rather than a question of ‘if’.  Like my transition to Fourth Order, we’d likely pretend I hadn’t transitioned as long as possible.

Official Imperial Time had nothing to do with planetary cycles.  Right now, family dinnertime was in the predawn hours for Sumabad, and the wide band of Indra Habitat One stretched across the sky, barely two seconds distant, shining with a light that exceeded thirty full moons on Earth.  Indra’s planetary day was slightly shorter than the Standard Imperial Day, so every official day was a little more advanced in terms of planetary day than the one before it.  People who needed to synchronize with planetary day were few; I’d be getting ready for work about the time the sun came up, but that was just coincidence.  The angle of the window was wrong to see the almost equally bright arch of Indra Habitat Two – we’d had a crossing just four days previous and the best view was on the other side of Residence Arcology.  But ten ithirds below, the lights of private water-going ships dotted the Strait of Sumabad, once the busiest commercial artery on Indra, now simply a place for people who liked watercraft to sail.  Goods traveled by portal or by starship now.  The massive spherical bulk of a size six capital hull reflected lights off its dark gray hull descending in the greenbelt between arcologies off to my right as I took my place next to Asto’s splinter at the table.  Fortyfive ifourths in radius – call it three and a half Earth kilometers diameter – it was nonetheless dwarfed by the arcologies that towered over the greenbelt. From my previous profession as a pilot, I knew more than most about the intricate dance that kept goods flowing into and out of imperial planets.

But for the past twentyfour imperial years, I’d been an Imperial Investigator.  These days, my warrant came from Scimtar himself as I was strong enough to hunt most noble-caste enemy on my own.  I still didn’t want to face any basileus, and I stepped carefully around jopas as well, but the two top castes together were only a tiny fraction of contacts.  Even spraxos were less than four iprime of the total and these days I wouldn’t hesitate to take on two of those at once.  The fractal demons were hard pressed, most of their agents had always been nephraim, and they’d begun using even terostes. 

Tonight the family meal was something I’d never had before.  Had no idea what it was called, but it tasted like I imagined a too-spicy rat stir-fry would.  One of Helene’s rare misses.  From the way Scimtar ate, though, I’d guess it was a childhood favorite.  I had a few bites to be polite to Helene, then got a double cheeseburger and fries out of the converter.

I won’t say the mood was grim at dinner that evening, but it was restrained.  It was a common mood these days. The major offensives against the fractal demons were over – successfully.  Every demonic holding we’d known about when the war started, and many we’d discovered since then, had been eradicated.  But it was a big cosmos, and the demons could reproduce faster than we did.  We had to keep the pressure on – or everything we’d won would be in vain – but major battles were getting fewer and further between.  Meanwhile, the demons were still dangling out the prizes of false operancy to induce turncoats, and they’d adapted their strategy to raids that were intended to kill people and destroy industrial capacity, rather than conquer and hold territory.  A nephraim could lead a few prime of manesi on a raid of an Imperial planet or habitat, kill a couple square humans, do a couple fourths of damage, and be gone (usually with captive humans for later consumption) before organized resistance could respond.  It took the Empire at least thirty years to produce a new citizen, and a lot of opportunity cost.  The demons could toss off an adult manes much faster and for almost no opportunity cost.

When we could find a demonic holding, superior Imperial technology would enable clearing it at casualty and expense ratios that would be conclusive in the setting of a direct war with another human polity.  But the fractal demons didn’t work like that.  Bottom line was they were born with everything they needed to wreak havoc.  Humans weren’t.  We were winning the war, but it wasn’t as one-sided as you’d think, and the Empire was under a noticeable strain.  This showed in the social atmosphere, here more obviously than most – many of the family were directly involved, and everyone knew the issues.

Corella and Anara were talking about the issues with building a detection array, enabling the Empire to locate demonic holdings directly.

It seems you want to build something like the fixed tachyonic network that connects First Galaxy and a lot of our more thickly settled holdings, Imtara asked, Could you please explain why you can’t make them mobile?

It’s not that we can’t make them mobile, Corella explained to her, It’s that it adds a lot of expense to a given unit.  The array range is dependent upon physical size.  Given that she was talking about something that searched eleven dimensions, a halving of the range meant you’d need over thirty prime times the number of units for the same capacity.

Aren’t the demons certain to find anything with a fixed location?  Wouldn’t making them mobile drastically cut the number of units required? Imtara asked, It’s not like a new demonic holding is going to be dangerous in an hour or even a day, and if they’re mobile, each array can cover many such locations.  Do we really need continuous monitoring at all station posts?

We haven’t got anything big enough to move the sensor arrays intact.

Do they need to be intact to move?  Even if the answer is ‘yes’, Mom told us about how she was working mass haulers for a while.  That had been all of three days, ending with a duel that had damned near killed me, and Esteban as well.

I need some time on this, Anara broke in, Mounting the arrays on a ship would help us ameliorate a production bottleneck.  But I need some time to program simulators.  Anara was the multispacial specialist between them; she and her husband Gilras had participated in the patent that made Interstitial Vector commercially viable.  Corella was more of a talented production engineer.  For all I knew, Anara already had one of her other splinters working on the idea, but so far as I knew, Corella couldn’t make splinters any more than I could.  She might have a couple of para working the problem internally, but no external splinters.

Right there in the middle of dinner, a priority message came into my queue.  Thinking it was from one of the support types I worked with over on the military side of the Residence and could simply deal with it via one of my para, I accessed it.  But it was a much bigger bomb than that, from Adulthood Services back on Earth.

It seemed my bastard son had lost his adulthood and named me as a potential parent.

Chapter Two

I need to ask a favor. 

Scimtar responded, What sort of favor?  Asking Scimtar meant Helene was part of the package.  They were linked at least as tightly as Asto and I.

When I was a young idiot on Earth, I got pregnant...

Yes, within limits.

What?

Grace, this is a home for the whole family.  Because of who I am, it also has to serve some other purposes.  For those reasons, it may not be suitable for someone who needs remedial childhood.  Some of them are too far gone to recover, and the armory and various restricted areas could be dangerous to someone with your son’s deficiencies.  But if you want to bring him here, he will be welcomed.

At first I hadn’t been sure what he meant.  Then I understood he was warning me that the Residence might not be suitable.  There were things and places in the Residence where Scimtar or his agents would be forced to take lethal action if my wayward son were to transgress.  Nor could the Residence be detached from those danger points.  Depending upon how bullheaded he might be, the Residence might be the worst place I could possibly bring him to.  But Scimtar was willing to include him in the family.  I never told you...

You think I wouldn’t investigate?

Now that I thought about it, no, I didn’t think that at all.  It would be completely against Scimtar’s nature not to have investigated everything about me.  But he’d accepted me into the family anyway.  My message says only that he is operant, so the alternative is exile.  I was about to ask Scimtar if he had any more information than I did, but he cut me off.

Conduct your own investigation.  Make your decision, but you are family, Grace, so your son is welcome as well.

Which was why I’d told Esteban I’d be headed to Earth as well.  We weren’t going to travel together – I knew he planned to spend a significant amount of time on Earth, meeting what was left of our Earth family.  Both Scimtar and I had discouraged him – there was no Residence security, no shelter of more experienced family members for a newly adult member of House Scimtar, but that was the thing about adulthood.  We had to allow him to make his own decisions.  Anything else denied that he was adult, and Esteban was at the stage where he had to be allowed to make his own mistakes, however dangerous they might be.  But while my visit was going to be as quick as I could make it, I’d at least check in with my closest relatives.

I had basically no information on my other son beyond his name, identification number, and the fact he was operant.  I was pretty sure he hadn’t been born operant, but I had no idea how long he’d been operant.  The Empire was better equipped to recognize and enable it than Earth had been, pre-contact.  Given the fact that time on Earth ran about four times faster than in the Imperial Home Instance where I’d spend most of the last prime twelve years of my personal duration, he was likely five prime of age while I was just under two, so I’d be trying to mother a son who was considerably older than I was.  Assuming I really did decide to take the job on.  Theoretically, failing to do so was a clear failure of implied responsibility, but the Empire had been forced to realize there were practical limits.  My son must have managed to pass the adulthood examinations at some point, demonstrating he had a mental understanding of the requirements.

Why was I responsible at all?  The Empire allowed responsibility to be delegated, but never avoided.  Even taking into consideration that I’d been an irresponsible fool at the time, I was adult now.  Adults took responsibility for past deeds.  I’d given him up for adoption, but I couldn’t break the chain of responsibility.  Only an imperial viceroy sitting in judgment could do that.  Maybe there was a little bit of gray in that the adoption had taken place before Imperial contact with Earth, but adults didn’t plead technical details.  The only thing shielding me from responsibility was that my son had demonstrated mental understanding by passing the adulthood tests at some point.  Because he’d passed those tests, the law required that he be treated as a responsible adult until he demonstrated he wasn’t, and therefore nobody else could be held responsible for his actions between the two events.

Sitting around Indra wasn’t going to get the situation resolved.  I considered requesting a cutter – maybe my son would have stuff to haul – then rejected it.  Siphons and converters meant anything bulky could be duplicated easily, and if there were health issues I could heal them myself.  A two-seat Starbird would be plenty, and if I were wrong, I could afford to ship whatever it was.  I borrowed the aforementioned Starbird from the Residence pool, went through the checklist, and requested departure.  Asto wished me luck as I applied thrust to the impellers.  Two minutes and one Interstitial Vector later, I was contacting Solar System Traffic Control.

It had been thirteen Imperial years since my last visit, four times as long on Earth.  Earth wasn’t home any more, but it would always be where I was from, and my eyes got a little misty when I made the Vector assigned to a height of about an iprime above surface – evidently I’d hit a moment of peak traffic for the area, and I was number seven in the arrival queue.  Few Imperial ships had windows, but knowing the camera feed is live was still something.  It would have filled forty-five or fifty (Earth) degrees of the sky had I been outside to look – but not close enough to see anything beyond continents and oceans.  I found the beacon path and my traffic, and turned to follow the beacon path Earthwards.

Once I’d landed in