1BAD NEWS
In the time-honoured tradition of bad news, the call came in the middle of the night.
She activated the comm next to the bed. An image of Dr. Moreno’s face appeared, blued out and grainy. The technology was old, redundant—secure.
“Katherine. I’m sorry to say I have some bad news.”
She rubbed her eyes. She had been in such a deep sleep. Next to her, her husband Eskil stirred. Beyond him, the comm’s blue light cast the round contours of his frame in sharp relief against the wall.
“What is it?” she asked blearily.
“It’s best if you come to the centre and I can explain.”
Katherine sat up in bed. Next to her, Eskil grumbled. “I have a conference in the morning,” he muttered.
“I’ll see you shortly,” Moreno said apologetically, and the comm went dark.
Katherine threw off the sheets and activated the lights. Warm yellow replaced electric blue.
Eskil growled his displeasure. “What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night!”
“That was Dr. Moreno,” Katherine said, struggling to keep her voice and breathing level. “He wants us down at the centre. It’s bad news.”
Now Eskil sat up. A portly, hirsute man, he was as washed out as Moreno on the comm, but without the static for an excuse. He looked as though he were one more piece of bad news away from an early grave.
“Fucking hell,” he said, and went to the wardrobe to don his Party uniform.
* * *
They declined the services of their human driver—an important piece of ostentation, but which would go unobserved on that cold, wintry morning—and took the autocruiser to the medical centre. It swept low through the remnants of the wealthy Isolda Magro residential district, and skirted over the Battle of Wolff’s Crest Commemorative Highway. Katherine’s eyes traced the lines of the Imperial Treasury through the foggy haze: a ziggurat of marble ringed with pillars the size of blackwoods. Next to the high-rises ensconced by the highway and the Potenza Road, it looked like an absurd anachronism, something that might have been constructed a thousand years before.
They said nothing to each other during the journey. Katherine knew already what the news was. She had no doubt. She had no doubt that Eskil knew too.
Their child was dead.
What could there possibly be to talk about?
They stared out of opposite windows into the gloomy predawn haze. Eskil took her hand in his.
Her stomach lurched as the autocruiser jinked left, redirected by a traffic interdict. They sped over the enormous Victory Boulevard, making straight for the Central Government District. A collection of structures, each bigger than the last, reared out of the ground like funerary monuments to dead princes of the universe. Everybody else was relegated to the Western Air Distributor, but Eskil was Party. They could fly as low as they pleased.
They skirted round the northern curve of the enormous dome of the Imperial Chancellery and on to Kaspar Timeo Island. Below, the frost-rimed buildings were dark and quiet. Kada Gamar, the city that never slept, had at least one eye closed.
The medical centre—in this case the Gerigian Natal Hospital—was ten kilometres due east. Once it was free of the heart of the city, the autocruiser accelerated smartly. Katherine watched the cruiser’s flight computer as it rendered the metropolis below into a topographic grid. She snorted quietly. Even that seemed like treason: to take the brilliance of the Fatherland’s capital and diminish it. In the gloom of the cruiser, a thousand years of architectural tradition was reduced to a screen of orange geometric shapes.
She took secret pleasure in these small, quiet heresies.
It took only several minutes to reach the hospital. It sat to the north of the Imperial Water Gardens, a great plain of rectangular lakes now glassed over with ice a hand thick. The autocruiser cheerfully overrode the centre’s suggested flight plan and deposited them on the landing pad normally reserved for ambulances.
Eskil patted the back of her hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Dr. Moreno was waiting for them by the rooftop entrance. He was a member of the Party, too—most professionals were required to be—and saluted Eskil smartly. “Please, come in from the cold,” he said in a great flurry of iced breath. He gestured them inside, and then followed.
Katherine loathed the natal hospital. It was a place her friends, associates, and peers frequented as they might a trendy café in Central City North. And in an empire which prized fertility, salaried pregnancy, cherished childbirth, and rewarded large clutches of children—in a very literal way—motherhood had stratified into a strict hierarchy, one which she had quickly found herself at the bottom of. The wife of Leutwin Falco, Party Leader, had ten naturally born children, with an eleventh on the way. She had recently been awarded the Fertility Medal in a lavish ceremony in the Party Chancellery gardens. Even Jaroslav Droor, the gaunt, sallow creep who ran the Ministry of Information, had six naturally conceived and delivered boys, each more gaunt and sallow than the last—though, now that she thought about it, at least one had been killed in action.
Katherine and Eskil had one, and they were about to have none. They were incapable of natural conception, though there were no discernible medical reasons as to why. If Eskil had been anything other than Party, they would not have been allowed to marry in the first place; but given his position as head of Lamprey Corporation ITG, they had been permitted to attempt ectogenesis. The way Katherine’s friends spoke about it, one would think she was moulding a baby out of offal and animating it with witchcraft. Still, for all their undoubted gossiping, they had to be pleasant and respectful to her face. That, she supposed, was something.
Dr. Moreno led them down the warm, dimly lit corridors. They turned right, away from the hospital proper and to the ectogenetic centre. It seemed to her that this wing of the hospital looked shabby and neglected, though Eskil had told her many times she was being too sensitive. Whatever the state of the corridors, the centre itself was a place of high technology. In spite of its outward appearances, the secret spaces of the Empire tended to be.
“Please,” Dr. Moreno said, and ushered them into his office. They sat, Eskil with a groan. He was getting much too fat. “Can I get you anything? A drink, or—”
“Just get on with it,” Eskil rumbled.
Katherine felt her fingers curl into claws.
Dr. Moreno nodded. “I am afraid the foetus has become unviable. We became aware of a problem early this morning. It’s called Leiderman’s failure. It is exceptionally rare. I checked the numbers. This will be the fortieth recorded case.”
“In Kada Gamar?” Eskil asked.
“In the Empire,” Dr. Moreno said. “I am terribly sorry. I know we were all hoping for a good outcome with this one.”
“What is it?” Katherine asked. Her voice was bright, perhaps slightly brittle, but freighted with none of the sudden and crushing despair which she felt. It was a voice she had practised for many years.
Dr. Moreno clasped his hands in front of him. When he spoke, it was to Eskil. “Leiderman’s failure is a sudden and irretrievable breakdown of the nervous system. We don’t know what causes it. There is an emerging theory that it’s a reaction to the ectogenetic fluid, which only comes about at the end of the third of the four semesters. But it is a problem which arises so rarely that there has been little research into it.”
“Something which I trust you will now correct,” Eskil said.
“Indeed,” Dr. Moreno said, with a brief, nervous smile.
Katherine cleared her throat, but nothing could shift the painful lump in the back of it. “May I see him?”
“Katherine,” Eskil sighed. “You will only distress yourself.”
Dr. Moreno addressed the answer once more to her husband. “You may see him if you wish; it will not be overly upsetting. There is no visible damage to the foetus.”
Eskil pressed himself to his feet. “Come on then. Let’s be done with it.”
* * *
The ectogenetic pod was a sealed, fluid-filled box the size of a briefcase. Dr. Moreno pulled it out of its slot in the wall like a morgue drawer. At its head, a tangle of pipes and cables connected to some unseen nutrient feeds and redundancy power systems. The box itself was covered in warnings, arrows, and instructions. Dr. Moreno tapped something, and the top of the pod dissolved into a false window.
“My boy,” Katherine said, laying a hand on the top of the box. Inside was her baby boy, all but mature. They had been so close. So close. Her mask slipped. She was overwhelmed for the briefest of moments. A tear pattered onto the pod. “My Gabriel.”
“Come, now, Katherine, you embarrass yourself. Barely three-quarters of the way through the process.” Eskil turned to Dr. Moreno. “What are the chances of this ‘Leiderman’s failure’ happening a second time?”
“Astronomically low,” the doctor replied flatly.
“See?” Eskil said, nudging her. “We’ll just do it again. Come on. Let’s get home. I have a busy day.”
Katherine felt a very familiar sense of helplessness and self-loathing as she allowed herself to be moved on. Her hand squeaked against the edge of the pod where she tried to maintain as much contact with it as possible. Then she used the same hand to wipe away a second errant tear, and comported herself. It would not do to be seen crying, unless she was crying tears of joy at seeing Pater Aeternus.
“Contact me any time to arrange another appointment,” Dr. Moreno said as he led them back up to the roof.
“Yes, yes,” Eskil said. They exited into the cold dawn, and Eskil returned the doctor’s salute. Then he pressed his hand into the small of Katherine’s back, and she found herself inside the autocruiser without even realising it. Then the door was closing, and they were flying home to the Isolda Magro District. The whole thing might have been a dream.
“Take us east. Do a loop of the island. Go slowly,” Eskil said to the autocruiser’s computer. It obliged, heading for the Mariasole River air lane. It would add fifteen minutes to the journey.
It was the only thing Eskil said. He gripped Katherine’s hand in his, looked out the window, and quietly sobbed until they got home.
* * *
By the time the autocruiser reached their house in Isolda Magro, both of them had wiped their eyes and straightened themselves out. It would not do to let the staff see them weep. Plenty of them were Droor’s informers.
They lived in a palatial residence, nestled in several hectares of grounds which themselves abutted the Potenza Road. The autocruiser landed on its pad, and Katherine climbed out into the cold morning air. She spared a brief glance at the large surveillance pylon at the corner of the street, which rose up thirty metres high and filled the air with a dull electronic hum.
“I’ll see you this evening,” Eskil called from the back of the autocruiser.
“You aren’t coming in?”
Eskil shrugged. “What’s the point? I have a lot to do and I’m already dressed. Have the chef make your favourite tonight. That type of steak you like. And get a bottle of the Voridan out, the brandy. Yesper will know which one.”
“You do not want to talk about what happened?”
Eskil, his vulnerability apparently forgotten, crushed, squeezed into atoms, waved her off. The autocruiser door was already closing. “Later, later. We’ll discuss it tonight.”
Katherine clenched her hands as the autocruiser returned to the air lanes and headed for the Lamprey Corporation headquarters, back to the Central Government District, which they had already crossed over that morning.
* * *
Eskil didn’t come home to enjoy the steak and brandy which Katherine had spent the entire day having prepared.
It was a simple task, something which should have taken the—considerable—staff less than half an hour. But Katherine had been so hyper-focused on ignoring her grief until her husband returned that she had managed to stretch it out to last much of the day.
She walked around the residence slowly, moving between butlers and valets, footmen and housekeepers and cooks and scullery maids as though none of them were there at all. She extrapolated each facet of the task until it had taken on almost unachievable proportions. The steaks—not from the food printer, but from a secret, illicit farm several hundred kilometres away—had to be unpackaged and brought up to room temperature. She took on this task personally, using the kitchen terminal to monitor the air temperature and quality and then placing the steaks in a controlled, sealed cubicle. She stopped checking on it after she noticed the similarities between the cubicle and the ectogenetic pod.
She spent several hours thinking of side dishes. The Party provided a list of foodstuffs which were considered politically unacceptable, and this was updated weekly. After examining this, then cross-referencing it to previous iterations to ensure their dinner was politically correct, she took her findings to the head chef. The man listened to her patiently, doing a good job of concealing his alarm at what must have seemed like the beginnings of a manic episode.
The brandy she had to fetch from the cellar. That, Katherine managed to make last almost the entire morning. The cellar was located deep underground, in the same place as their private orbital-bombardment shelter, and was a welcome ordeal to reach. She had worried that the quiet, cool dark of the place would provide fertile ground for her mind to wander, but she focused on the old dusty labels on the many thousands of bottles there—inherited, rather than purchased, from the previous director—admiring the artwork, the calligraphy.
Yes, she managed to put off confronting her grief for the whole day. By the time the meal was prepared and the brandy unstoppered by Yesper, Katherine felt as though she were about to erupt. Eskil, for all he affected not to care—ten years as the director of Lamprey Corporation had made the costume of his Party loyalty ironclad—would listen to her. Perhaps not with the depth and empathy that she would have liked, but better than most.
And yet, he did not arrive.
In fact, his secretary informed Katherine, he had not been in the office all day.
In fact, as the inspektors would inform her several weeks later, it was unlikely he would ever be seen again.
And so her grief remained compressed. With Eskil gone, so was her release valve.
And it would not do to be seen crying in front of the staff.
* * *
Lamprey Corporation was one of five companies which sat at arm’s length from the Decurion Empire and which, collectively, were responsible for providing all of the materiel which went into the Citizens’ Entitlement. It had meant Eskil had been both extremely important within Pater Aeternus, and exorbitantly wealthy.
It also meant that Katherine’s request for a quiet, private remembrance was briskly rejected. The funeral would be a lavish state affair. Every Party Minister would be there. The Emperor would not attend, but there would be a pre-recorded message of condolence.
At no point did anybody from the Inspektorate actually sit down with her and explain what had happened to Eskil. Instead, she had pieced it together from conversations with a number of different people.
Eskil’s autocruiser had gone down in the Mariasole. That was the working assumption, anyway; the Kaspar Timeo ATC had lost contact with it as it had transited north past the orbital tether exclusion zone. The timing of the abrupt drop in communication had coincided with the launch of an old Hakasian megafreighter, whose downwash might have been enough to knock the cruiser out of the sky. Unfortunately, the Mariasole in that part of Kada Gamar, sandwiched between the spaceport and the industrial zone, was several kilometres deep. The transponders, both those of the autocruiser and those implanted in Eskil himself, were not powerful enough to broadcast through that much water.
No one seemed to be asking the obvious question as to why the autocruiser had been there in the first place, but no one seemed troubled by it either. Eventually, Katherine reasoned that, as on their journey back from the natal hospital, Eskil had simply wanted to spend some time alone, and had become an unfortunate victim of circumstance.
Tragic accidents happened, after all.
“A most tragic accident, indeed,” Ruben Morozov said to her on the balcony of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The building played no role of particular significance in the funeral ceremony; it simply had one of the largest and best-placed balconies overlooking the Gethin Vasuda Victory Boulevard.
Katherine watched as an empty coffin was towed down the length of that immense road by six black horses, themselves led by a procession of a thousand Imperial soldiers marching in lockstep. There was something amusing about watching a legion of these élite warriors honouring her husband, when he had undertaken his Imperial service in the secretly but widely derided safe posting for Party scions, the Naval Defence Reserve.
“Indeed,” she said demurely. The coffin might have been empty, but she had been instructed to pretend it wasn’t. What were people supposed to think? That the Inspektorate couldn’t dredge the Mariasole if they needed to?
Morozov was a man of late middle age. He was very tall, which he attributed to too much time in zero G—“loose bones,” he called it, though he had the frame of a bodybuilder. He was the Councillor General for the Permanent War Council, a collection of six senior Party officials who oversaw Pater Aeternus’ perennial war efforts across the galaxy. Ironically, he was rather avuncular, and now the closest person she had to a confidant.
Of course, he was not a confidant; she was not that stupid.
“And so shortly after the loss of your baby. A son, was it?”
Katherine’s breath briefly snagged in her throat. She felt as though Morozov had slapped her, though he seemed completely at ease with broaching such a personal subject.
She might have kicked herself. Of course everybody knew about it. Of fucking course. She had told nobody; Eskil certainly wouldn’t have done. She doubted even Dr. Moreno had told anyone. It was more likely that the natal hospital’s records were accessible to the Ministry of Information, and the ghastly Droor had been keeping tabs on them.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was level. “A small boy. Eighteen months.”
“Oh, only six months to go,” Morozov said, not unsympathetically. “Ecto is, what, two years?” Then he chuckled. “I wish my children had been born at two!”
Katherine felt as though she had stepped into a parallel dimension in which it was perfectly acceptable to dredge up a stranger’s grief in public—at her husband’s funeral, no less—and make light of it.
Her hands bunched into fists. This was Pater Aeternus. The only thing that was surprising was that she was surprised.
“How many is it for you, now?” she asked. Her voice was bright and pleasant. A perfect simulation of a polite enquiry as magma pulsed through her arteries.
“Goodness, seven. No, eight! Jenna had another girl in the spring.” He chortled again, as though they weren’t at a funeral at all. “I never see them. Any of them.” There did not seem to be a hint of sadness about him. “I have been so busy. You heard about the deaths on Talishan?”
Katherine nodded, though she hadn’t. The most important thing was to move the conversation along.
“A shabby business. Very illegal, too, under the Harmonious Societies Convention. Personally, I don’t think we should have done it, though I shouldn’t say that,” he added with a brief sideways glance in her direction. “But I don’t think anything will happen.”
“What was the reason for it?” she asked absently, scanning the crowds lining the highway.
“I don’t ask too many questions. Foreigners of one stripe or another, getting too big for their boots. Building warships, starting a navy.” He turned to her, smiling conspiratorially and raising his eyebrows. “Can’t have that!” He turned back to the procession, and sighed. “I don’t know. They’re all gone now. The whole capital, or certainly a decent chunk of it.” He blew over his hand as though he were holding a dandelion.
Katherine watched the funeral procession pass in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was probably the only time she would be permitted to publicly grieve, and yet she felt completely plugged up. A strange sort of calm had overcome her. All she could think about was how repellent Morozov was. How much she detested all of this—these people, this absurd pageantry, the theatrical lunacy of it all.
“You are not worried about the Alliance?” she said, referring to the Free Nations’ ostensible mutual-defence pact, which apparently had done nothing to prevent the outright destruction of one of its members.
“Nah,” Morozov said. He turned and took a glass of something from a tray proffered by a waiter. The medals on his chest, a stupid, preposterous number of them, overlapping like the discs in a coat of scale armour, tinkled together. “They probably know it was us, but our fingerprints aren’t on it. Besides, the Alliance is pretty toothless. They let us get away with one every now and then in return for something or other.” He took a drink from the glass, putting half of it away in one long swallow, and winked at her. “They know when it really comes down to it, they can’t stop us.”
Katherine certainly believed that Morozov believed that. She had also arrived at the conclusion that he considered her to be utterly insignificant, someone so unimportant that he could speak freely in front of her without even the vaguest fear of repercussion. She was a woman, first and foremost, which already put her at a disadvantage. But she was also a woman who could not conceive naturally, and who had recently become untethered from the only person who had made her vicariously important. In other circumstances she’d be considered practically unproductive. A Class II citizen at best. The only thing she had on her side now was the Party’s fanatical obsession with appearances. The wife of the director of Lamprey Corporation was a senior public figure. They might relocate her to an apartment, rather than the enormous residence on the Potenza Road, and slowly relegate her to obscurity. But they would not let her embarrass herself or the Party.
Of course, they could always kill you.
No. She pushed the thought away like a piece of flotsam from the side of a lifeboat.
They killed Eskil, and now they are going to kill you.
“No,” she said out loud.
Morozov, who had not been speaking, looked at her quizzically. Then, seeming to remember that they were at the funeral of one of his senior colleagues and friends, and of course making allowances for her irrational womanly grief, he nodded patiently. “I know. This must all be so difficult to bear.”
“Yes. Indeed. My poor, dear Eskil.” She sighed. There was not a hint of a tremble in it. Her eyes were completely dry. It was not good. The Party would not want her making a scene with great wailing sobs of grief, but to be completely dry-eyed suggested disloyalty to her husband—and therefore to Pater Aeternus.
Knowing that there would be cameras on her, she pretended to dab her eyes with a handkerchief. Morozov patted her on the shoulder.
“What will happen to the people on Talishan?” she asked. It was an innocent question, one posed simply to keep the conversation going, which had faded to the point of awkwardness.
Judging by Morozov’s expression, he clearly regretted having brought it up.
“I wouldn’t trouble yourself about it. The survivors will probably set up somewhere else, like roaches. Perhaps then they will have some sense and keep their heads down.”
“You mean, set up a new nation?”
Morozov nodded absently, clearly tiring of the conversation. “Indeed. Hell, you could probably do it yourself with the amount of money Eskil will leave you.”
Katherine said nothing for a little while. She hadn’t even considered her inheritance. She kept expecting Eskil to simply turn up. She was watching a fake funeral for a man who sounded more like he was missing than dead.
“Yes, well. Nothing can replace my husband. No sum of money in the Empire,” she said dutifully.
“A few hundred billion might change your mind.”
She snorted. “You jest,” she said, turning away from the procession to make use of the bathroom before the eulogy started.
“I don’t. Where are you going? You are going to miss the Salutations. It will be noticed.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, flustered.
The balcony abutted a large, empty mezzanine. She made for the unisex facilities at the far end, and flung the door open. The attendant, a young man, had been watching the hypersled broadcast on a portable holo. Katherine caught sight of a young foreigner clad in flashy overalls at the Soma Beck circuit. It was night-time there, tens of thousands of kilometres away. She could not help but feel put out; if Eskil had been a Minister, they would have cancelled the race and made everybody watch the funeral broadcast.
Copyright © 2026 by Richard Swan
