"Scott Westerfeld - Succession 2 - Killing Of Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

In the current era, when the inevitability of the Imperial Civil War is received
wisdom, we must work to remember that it was the product of specific events.
Collapse would have come in any case, true, but it might have come centuries earlier, or
(more likely) centuries later than it did. For the generations who lived under the
cultural and military tyranny of the Risen Emperor, the difference was not trivial.

The origins of the Civil War are now learned by rote. The Risen Empire was riven
into two parts. The limited democracy of the Senate contested the iron rule of the
Emperor in an uneasy dance of powersharing. Representative government provided an
outlet for popular will, while the Imperial cult of personality supplied a patriarch to
bind together eighty worlds, the living populace and the risen dead each playing their
part in the machinery of the Empire. The great majority of Imperial citizens were
alive, and constituted the collective engine of change and economic productivity. As
inventors, capitalists, and workers, they were the functional, instrumental members of
society. The risen dead, on the other hand, represented continuity with the past. They
controlled the established wealth, owning the land, the shipping charters, the ancient
copyrights, dominating religion and high culture, an undead aristocracy of sorts. These
tensions, fundamentally a class conflict, had to find release eventually. The immortal
Emperor and his fanatical Apparatus had held onto power at any cost for centuries,
making it almost certain that any resolution would be a bloody one. Adding to this
instability, the small gene pool of its founder population made the Empire particularly
susceptible to mass manias, cults of personality, pandemics, and other forms of radical
upheaval.

Still, specific events brought about the Civil War in a specific way, and are worth
historical study. There was a Second Rix Incursion, a Senator Nara Oxham, a Captain
Laurent Zai.

The Second Rix Incursion began on Legis XV. It was at root a religious war. The
Rix Cult worshiped planetary-scale Al, which the Emperor's Apparatus jealously
stamped out of existence wherever it arose. The Rix viewed this as deicide, and
planned a deicide of their own, perhaps from the moment the Child Empress retired to
Legis. Sister to the Emperor, Anastasia was his only equal as an object of worship.

Sixteen hundred years earlier, the Emperor had worked to save Anastasia's life
from a juvenile disease, inventing immortality in the process, and forming the basis of
the Risen Empire. Thus, she was known as the Reason, the child for whom the Old
Enemy death had been defeated. When a small Rix warship penetrated Legis's
defenses and took her hostage, the Risen Empire had suffered a devastating blow.

Captain Laurent Zai found himself in the unenviable position of being in command of
the only Imperial warship in the Legis system. The Lynx was a capable ship, a small,
powerful frigate prototype, but any attempt to rescue Anastasia from a squad of Rix
commandos could only be a desperate gamble. Under the military conventions of the
day, failure would constitute a so-called "Error of Blood," demanding ritual suicide
from the commanding officer.

There was little time to weigh the issue. Once the Rix had taken the Child Empress,
they set loose a compound mind within the Legis infos-tructure. Over a few hours,