The Last Emperox (The Interdependency #3) - John Scalzi ,Wil Wheaton Page 0,1
fomented a civil war even as he publicly allied himself with the previous duke;
i) Who he then assassinated, pinning the assassination on the Count Claremont, who Ghreni assumed was just the imperial tax assessor;
j) And became acting duke by promising to end the civil war, which he could totally do because after all he was the one who was funding the rebels;
k) But it turned out the Count Claremont was also a Flow physicist whose research determined that the Flow streams were collapsing, not shifting;
l) Which turned out to be correct when the Flow stream between End and Hub, the only Flow stream out of the End system, collapsed;
m) The count then offered, in the spirit of pragmaticism, to join forces with Ghreni to prepare End for the imminent isolation caused by the collapse of both the Flow and also the Interdependency, which relied on the Flow for its existence;
n) Ghreni didn’t take the count up on this offer for, uuuuuhhhhh, reasons, and instead disappeared the count;
o) This pissed off Vrenna Claremont, the count’s daughter and heir, who rather inconveniently was also a former Imperial Marine officer with lots of allies and who knew the details of her father’s Flow research;
p) Which she then told everyone about;
q) Who were pissed that the new acting duke had kept them in the dark concerning this whole “Flow collapse” thing;
r) And thus this new civil war;
s) Against him;
t) Which featured new rebels;
u) Shooting missiles at his goddamned aircar.
In Ghreni’s defense, he had never asked to be born.
But this was cold comfort as Ghreni’s aircar slammed into the surface streets of Endfall, End’s capital city, rolling several times before coming to a full and complete stop.
Ghreni, whose eyes had been closed during the entire ground crash, opened them to find his aircar upright. Blaine Turnin’s body was in the seat opposite him, quiet, composed and restful, looking for all the world like he had not been a human maraca bean for the last half minute. Only Turnin’s head, tilted at an angle that suggested the bones in his neck had been replaced by overcooked pasta, suggested that he might not, in fact, be taking a small and entirely refreshing nap.
Ten seconds later the doors of Ghreni’s shattered aircar were wrenched open and the members of his security detail—none of whose aircars were apparently even targeted what the actual hell, Ghreni’s mind screamed at him—unclasped him from his seat belts and roughly dragged him out of the car, hustling him into a second car that would make a direct beeline back to the ducal palace. Ghreni’s final view into his ruined vehicle was of Turnin’s body slumping to the floor of the cab and making itself into a human area rug.
“Don’t you think it’s suspicious that none of the other aircars were targeted?” Ghreni said, later, as he paced back and forth in a secured room of his palace that lay far underground, in a subterranean wing designed to withstand attacks for weeks and possibly months. “All the aircars were identical. We didn’t file a flight plan. No one knew we were going to be in the sky. And yet, bam, the missile hit one car, and it was mine. I have to assume that my security detail is compromised. I have to assume there are traitors in my midst.”
Jamies, Count Claremont, sighed from his chair, set down the book he was reading, and rubbed his eyes. “You understand my sympathy for your plight is somewhat limited, yes?” he said, to Ghreni.
Ghreni stopped pacing and remembered to whom he was spinning his dark conspiracies. “I just don’t know who to trust anymore,” he said.
“Probably not me,” Jamies suggested.
“But am I wrong?” Ghreni pressed. “Doesn’t it sound like there’s a traitor in my security?”
Jamies looked wistfully at his book for a moment, and Ghreni followed his gaze to the somewhat tattered hardcover with the title of The Count of Monte Cristo. Ghreni assumed it was a historical biography and wondered idly what system Monte Cristo was in. Then he looked back at the count.
“No, you’re probably not wrong,” Jamies said, finally. “You probably do have a traitor. At least one. Probably several.”
“But why?”
“Well, and this is just a hypothesis, it might have something to do with the fact that you’re an incompetent who assassinated his way to the dukedom and has lied to his subjects about the imminent collapse of civilization, which, incidentally, you have to date done nothing to prepare for in any meaningful way.”
“Nobody but you knows I assassinated the duke,” Ghreni said.