It was an enormous ballroom. Its walls and floor were made of solid reionized gold. The roof held a special design of superglass, which boasted incredible magnification properties. On a whim, it could show the most colorful, most unusual stars in the Milky Way as if they were no farther away than orbit.
Small forests of exotic plant life from around the Galaxy lined both sides of the hall. Trees and high bushes, some reaching thirty feet or more, were swaying in an artificial wind, bathed in a light spray of pure, crystallized water. Later on, it would not be too unusual to see a young girl fighting to get out of this maze of trees, her neck bloody, a mob of drunken revelers stumbling in hot pursuit.
Ethereal chamber music wafted through the ballroom. The ghostly strings were being provided by a vast orchestra of sentinels hiding in the sixth dimension, not seen, only heard.
Ringing the outside of the ballroom were several hundred ceremonial troops. All of them at attention, all of them heavily armed.
Above it, a small fleet of air-chevys and battle cruisers orbited in ever-changing, aerobatic formations.
The people inside the Great Hall were not immortal. They just seemed that way.
They were all Specials, of course, so their veins ran thick with the Holy Blood, the life extender of the Empire's minor gods. Many of mem were destined to live for 600 to 700 years, some even more. Most carried the centuries well. A handful did not. It was a bizarre sight to see an 800-year-old couple gliding around, two feet off the ground, their clothes weighed down with sparkling crystals and aluminum, their skin and bones sagging as well.
The guests moved in a clockwise manner around the long, rectangular hall, floating and talking. The proper height at which one could be at these things was twenty inches, with elders, military heroes, and the top 10 percent of the Specials allowed to glide at exactly two feet. Most everyone here already had a case of red-eye, the telltale sign of significant ingestion of slow-ship wine. There was a small sea of the stuff hovering in the middle of the hall. All one needed to get a drink was to part lips and think: Wine. A thin stream of the highly intoxicating liquor would rise up from the pool and find its way through the crowd to deliver a gulp or two, all without losing a drop.
As for food, there was only one kind served at these celebrations: an ancient and mostly ceremonial dish called potatos. Most times, the vast containers of the white, pasty mash went untouched.
Of the 3,000 guests this night, more than two-thirds were women. Both married and single, by the custom of the Specials, nearly all of them were available sexually. Most of these women possessed beauty beyond words. There really was no describing many of them. The Holy Blood not only kept one alive, it provided a radiance, a luminescence, an aura of gorgeousness that lasted for centuries. Big eyes, high cheeks, great curves, and nice feet. That was the look, and it was hard not to wear it well.
The women glided the hall in twos and threes, seeking out the most handsome and courageous space officers, open to just about any idea and all conversation.
Stunning, all of them.
Many of the women attending the imperial party thought the men were just as gorgeous as they — the Holy Blood thing cut both ways.
No one in the room was more handsome, though, than Razr Joxx.
As the saying went, Joxx had the stars in his pocket. He was blessed with startling good looks. He wore his near-white hair long and ruffled, like the heroes of the Ancient Second Empire, and he stood an even six feet tall. Joxx was a four-star commander in the Solar Guards, the highest rank allowed in the field. He had his own Starcrasher, the very famous ShadoVox. It was the flagship for a unit of SG warships known as the First Imperial Wing.
Joxx had received preferential treatment from the moment he took his first breath. His father, Xayz Joxx, was Supreme High Commander of the Solar Guards. His mother was a sister of the Empress. Joxx, then, was nephew to the Emperor Himself.
Joxx was already a war hero, though he'd yet to reach his thirtieth birthday. While it was true that he had received his Solar Guards commission purely by social rank, he was no coddled son. He'd fought in a number of interstellar engagements, mostly against the space pirates who operated out along the Fringe. He was a brilliant tactician, a crafty strategist, and when in the midst of space battle, absolutely fearless. That he would someday rise to the rank of supreme SG commander — his father's commission — was a given. There was even a chance that, if he managed to live long enough and the line of succession stayed constant, Joxx might one day become the Emperor himself.
This was strange, because Joxx was also quite brilliant. He was master designer, had been known to correct calculations on some of the most complex bubblers, and could commit string matrixes to memory without the aid of thought drops. He was so sharp some whispered that he couldn't possibly be a real Special. Intelligence was not exactly the forte of the extended imperial family.
Joxx enjoyed getting dressed up in his finest regalia and holding court at these things. The topic of conversation was always the same: the art of war. While squads of females orbited him, admiring his long white cape, his moisteningly good looks, thinking that he might be ready for a haircut, Joxx could usually be found near the center of the room, lecturing even the most senior SG officers on his theories of battle strategy and tactics.
Two hours passed. The wine flowed, and the lights went lower. Wisps of hushed conversation began floating above the celebration.
Most of the men on hand were military officers with a direct line of Specials blood. The majority of these officers belonged to the Solar Guards, but there were also some from the Space Forces, and exactly two from the Expeditionary and Exploratory Forces. Those men who weren't military were high functionaries of the imperial court, space diplomats mostly. These types held many secrets. With the slow-ship wine bubbling up as it was, tongues became loosened. All kinds of rumors about the condition of the Empire were swirling around the hall by now. Gossip involving nearly all of the bewildering number of characters in the imperial space opera gushed forth. Revelers flitted from one whispered conversation to another, pollinating the room with hearsay and secondhand information. Careers could be made here, just as fast as old family ties could be broken. The Specials were an insipid, arrogant bunch.
By two in the morning, the intrigue was thick enough to be cut with a knife.
All of this was leading up to the grand entrance of the night: the appearance of the Imperial Family.
At exactly the stroke of three, rumored to be the Emperor's favorite time of day, there was a burst of pure white light at the far end of the Great Hall. Everybody and everything came to a halt. All conversation stopped. Streamers of wine froze in midair. The light grew so intense, many had to shut their eyes. Those who could take it stayed rigid and soaked in the effulgence. Then, at the point near the ceiling where the blinding ray was entering the hall, O'Nay suddenlv aDDeared. He was hoverine in midair, a tinv flame burning beneath his feet. Long, flowing green robe, extra long white hair, snow-white beard, those deeply vacant eyes, he stayed like this — just floating above it all — for what seemed like a very long time.
Then came another white flash, and O'Nay finally began his descent. An ethereal anthem commenced playing from the sixth dimension. A gasp went through the crowd; an involuntary response to all the carefully orchestrated wonder. The music grew; the light became even more intense. Finally, O'Nay glided down to a point exactly three feet above the floor. At this moment, everyone else in the Hall lowered themselves to the deck. Tradition said that whenever O'Nay was in the house, no one could have their feet in the air except him.