Hell's Gate

Surely no one would be insane enough to burn down a palace full of i

The child in her hoped not; the budding imperial heiress, who was begi

Davir Perthis stood at the window on the seventeenth floor of the Mahkris Shipping Corporation Building and watched the procession winding its way through the streets of Tajvana. He'd been in this building, at this window, for the arrival of every delegation to the impending Conclave. He'd watched all of them rolling down the city's avenues towards the Grand Palace. Some had been greeted by curious crowds. One or two?like Emperor Chava's Uromathian delegation?had been greeted with near-silent, cold-eyed suspicion. None of them had been greeted by anything like the roaring sea of people who had turned out to welcome Emperor Zindel back to his family's ancient capital.

Perthis smiled, just a bit smugly, at the thought. He never doubted that thousands would have crowded the sidewalks no matter what he or SUNN had done. But he did doubt very much that as many thousands would have been there, or that the welcome would have been quite so frenzied.

His smile faded. Whether or not he achieved his goal remained to be seen … as did the interesting question of whether or not he'd still have a job when it was all over. No matter how Perthis looked at it, his last few weeks of effort were a clear violation of both SUNN's internal code of conduct and its official editorial policy against taking sides on political issues. Jali Kavilkan had never specifically said so, yet Perthis strongly suspected that the executive manager knew exactly what he was up to. That probably made Kavilkan's silence either a good thing or a very, very bad thing, but whatever happened to his career, Perthis had no regrets.

His smile was a distant memory now, as he allowed the horrific images of Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr's final Voice transmission to play through a corner of his mind. He'd convinced Kavilkan to transmit those images raw, without the normal process of editing out the emotions and surface thoughts of the originating Voice. Kavilkan had wavered back and forth for an hour or two, well aware of just how horrible that transmission would be. In the end, he'd shown the moral courage to authorize it anyway. Not because of its titillation value?although SUNN was no more immune to the need to maintain high viewership than anyone else?but because it was important for Sharona's people to know what had really happened out there. Not to be fed some sanitized version, but to experience the terror and the anguish?and the raw, blazing courage?of Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr.

And so, every SUNN Voicenet subscriber, which meant effectively every Sharonian with even a scrap of telepathic Talent, didn't just know what had happened. They'd been there. They knew, with absolute fidelity, exactly what Sharona faced. And they knew exactly who had fired first. Who had shot down an unarmed man, holding out his empty hands in an effort to open some sort of dialogue.

The print accounts had pulled no punches, either, and Perthis was privately prepared to admit that the print journalists as a group had actually done a better job of analysis. But the sheer, raw, punch-in-the-gut impact of the Voicecast transmissions were what had truly awakened the white-hot fury sweeping across the entire explored multiverse.

And it was also the Voicecasts which had first emphasized the need for a planet-wide government to meet the emergency. Not some temporary lash-up designed to deal with the immediate crisis. Not even some international military alliance to coordinate the forces of existing nation states. No. What Sharona needed?required?was a functioning government. One which could give orders to anyone's military in its own name. One with no need to debate strategies and accept limitations because it was forced to cajole its "allies" into cooperating with it. One with the force of law behind its decisions. One which could speak for all Sharonians … and which could wage deadly war in their name.

Whether or not Kavilkan had recognized what Perthis was up to, Tarlin Bolsh certainly had. The international news division chief had chosen his "talking heads" well, and he'd shaped his entire division's editorial policy to point subtly in the direction Perthis wanted to go. For example, the guest lists for all of the various Voicenet discussion shows his division produced had seemed to somehow feature distinguished statesmen and foreign-policy experts who all just happened to have very favorable views of the Ternathian Empire and its current Emperor.

Bolsh's people had also produced both a series of print articles and a Voice documentary on Tajvana's mille

The documentary had been a superlative historical survey. It had also been scrupulously accurate, which had only made it even more effective for Perthis' purposes. By now, everyone in Tajvana had either viewed the Voicecast version, or read the print version, and been reminded of their city's glory days under the Caliraths.

Inevitably, there'd been some backlash. Much of it, Perthis admitted, was completely justifiable. Tajvana?and Othmaliz?were independent once more. They had better than two hundred years of independence and achievements in their own names of which to be proud. The thought of being once more submerged into someone else's massive embrace, losing that regained individuality as part of some vast, corporate whole, wasn't going to find a ringing welcome in every heart.

But against that stood the Calirath reputation for honor and responsibility. For the administration of impartial justice, and for fairness. And Perthis had been quietly astonished by how many Tajvanis?and how many people of other nations?had turned in their moment of greatest fear and uncertainty not to their own governments, but to the Calirath legend. The life of Emperor Halian had been recalled from the dusty archives, and with it the memory of of his death, personally leading his army in the defense not of his own people, or his own Empire, but of their Bolakini allies. He and his army had been hideously outnumbered, but they had been all that stood between a Bolakini city and the barbarian horde which had slaughtered its way across half of Ricathia.

The Ternathian Navy had been waiting, just offshore, prepared to whisk Halian and his troops safely out of the path of destruction. And Halian had refused.

Refused not simply to withdraw his army, but to have himself taken to safety. And so three quarters of his army had died, and him with it … but the walls of that Bolakini city still stood today, and the statue of the dead Emperor lay before the Halian Gate, exactly where his hideously hacked and hewn body had been found on the field of battle, surrounded by every member of his Imperial Guard.

Halian was not the only Calirath who'd made a similar decision. Oh, there'd been the occasional Calirath coward, even the occasional Calirath treacher or tyrant. At least one Emperor had clearly been insane, and there were persistent (unproven) rumors that he'd eventually been assassinated by his own bodyguards. But there'd been remarkably few of those over the endless, dusty centuries of the dynasty, and people had remembered that, too. Two hundred and thirty years of freely granted independence had not been long enough to erase the memory of mille