Why did the Technocracy bother with the expense? Because humans needed Mandasar medical technology and Fasskister robotics. Once we got involved in the mess, we couldn’t walk away without infuriating both our trading partners. And as the situation on Troyen got worse, we all still thought the bickering could be sorted out with just one more formal accord.
Sure.
In one of those accords, I got married to Queen Verity. Sometimes I think Sam set it up as a joke — so she could claim to be the only twenty-fifth-century human who’d arranged a diplomatic marriage. She also had a great time teasing me about snuggling up to an elephant-sized lobster… which I didn’t actually do, not in any sexual way.
Unlike gentles, queens don’t go into egg-heat on a nine-year cycle. Instead, they produce an egg once every twelve weeks; at the right time, they grab themselves a warrior, do what has to be done, then forget about sex till the next egg comes along. In other words, queens are nearly as platonic as gentles: when they have sex, it’s about fertilizing eggs, not, um… well, about all the things that sex is about with humans. Since I was the wrong species, Verity would never even think about me at such times.
(Then again, she gave me all those maidservants to sleep with. It never occurred to me before this very second, but maybe she thought I might want to… um.)
I haven’t said much about the other queens: Fortitude, Honor, and Clemency. They each had their own huge continents to rule, like provincial governors who answered to the high queen. The lesser queens were never too happy being subservient, but they’d got along okay till things turned tense with the Fasskisters. Then the whole political order started to fall apart. When the world goes to pot, queens have this natural instinct to boss folks around. It doesn’t matter whether they have any good ideas to deal with the crisis, they’re just absolutely convinced they must take charge.
That’s what happened with the Fasskister mess: clamp-downs on the Fasskisters, or the Mandasars, or both. While Verity sat in Unshummin and tried to keep everyone cool, the lesser queens ached to exert their own power. Next thing you knew, each lesser queen had created a secret police force to deal with the troubles… and these forces were made up of segregated warriors.
Segregated: kept in separate barracks, where they didn’t interact with workers or warriors. In troubled times, the queens said, it was important to have elite squads of soldiers who would take orders without asking the tiniest questions. Maybe some bleeding hearts would condemn this as brainwashing, but it was just so darned efficient.
Verity had to tread softly — if she angered the lesser queens too much, they might revolt outright. Lesser queens had rebelled against the high queen before. So maybe a few segregated warriors weren’t so bad. And after that, what was wrong with segregating workers in key industries, to make sure production didn’t decline? And segregating a few gentles to use in think tanks, because they were so much more focused when not distracted by family.
You get the idea: the thin edge of the wedge prying Troyen apart. But law and order still might have survived if someone hadn’t cracked open the frozen queens.
Just outside the grounds of the high queen’s palace stood the Royal Cryogenic Center: storehouse for the next generation of Troyen’s rulers. The thing was, only an existing queen could create a new queen, by nursing a six-year-old gentle girl for a full year. Then what did you do? It was really really dangerous to have queens hanging around when there was no land for them to rule — that’d just be asking for trouble.
In olden days, the solution was usually for a queen to avoid suckling up a successor till very late in life — by the time the new queen was ready to rule, the old queen would likely be dead anyway. But anyone can see how many things can go wrong: a queen might die before she creates an heir; the queen might create an heir but die before the girl is old enough to take over; the old queen might actually live a long long time, leaving the younger queen seething and plotting a coup.
So the modern approach was for queens to produce heirs whenever they wanted, let the girls grow to age eighteen under the guidance of their mothers, then freeze the kids into suspended animation till one of the old queens died. This made sure there were always young queens ready to take over, but kept them from interfering with their seniors. Even if the junior queens weren’t too happy being put on ice, they accepted it as a reasonable compromise — it guaranteed that sometime down the road, maybe two or three generations after she was born, each queen would have her full chance to reign, without having to fight other claimants to the throne.
All well and good… till the night when I was woken by a huge whacking explosion near the palace.
I leapt out of bed and shouted something stupid like, "What was that?" But the maidservant who’d been keeping me company didn’t answer: she just lay there trembling like a scared rabbit. By then, I knew the symptoms well enough — even if I couldn’t smell it myself, there must be a ton of royal pheromone wafting through the air. The pheromone couldn’t have come from Verity, since she was gone on a visit to Queen Fortitude; I suspected the Fasskisters had set off a big old gas bomb somewhere close by, and they were now up to no good in the palace.
The palace guard had learned to take precautions against pheromone attacks, with gas masks part of their standard equipment and a few airtight security control rooms. I ran to the nearest of those rooms to see what was going on; the sergeant on duty told me the explosion wasn’t in the palace itself, but the Cryogenic Center next door. That was very bad… especially since the palace forces couldn’t spare many people to check out the situation there. They were afraid the big boom was just a diversion to draw guards outside the walls, while the real target was the palace.
In the end, I ran to the Cryogenic Center by myself. Well, not by myself — I didn’t have a squad of warriors backing me up, but I sure wasn’t the only person hurrying to see what the explosion had done. Half the folks from Diplomats Row were racing in the same direction, Divians, Myriapods, even a thing that looked like a tumbleweed with eyestalks. Me, if I’d been a diplomat, I would have stayed in a nice safe embassy rather than going to gawk at the latest act of terrorism in a not-quite-declared war; but diplomats are real big fans of viewing atrocities close-up, and maybe getting their pictures taken in the process.
By the time I got to the Cryogenics building, my sister was already standing outside, staring at a big hole in the wall. Gushers of steam poured out through the gap, so thick you couldn’t see a thing inside… but you could hear sounds like metal clanging and stuff getting thrown against other stuff. Someone in there was making a real mess.
"Fasskisters?" I whispered to Sam.
"Looks like their handiwork," Sam told me, not whispering at all. She didn’t seem to care if other bystanders heard every word she said. "First, pheromones to neutralize the locals. Then a bomb attack against young queens… frozen and unable to defend themselves. This has Fasskister written all over it."
I stared at the steam pouring out into the night. "Maybe we should go in and see if someone needs help."
Sam looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, "All right."
We moved forward… and the crowd of gawkers parted to let us through. I think they were eager to see someone go inside: just not eager to be the ones to do it. Sam let me go ahead — I was the bodyguard, wasn’t I, the one who should take the lead — so I was the one who stuck my hand, slowly and carefully, into the steam.