The Shaa was the last of its kind. It lay on a couch in the Great Refuge, the huge domed building carved out of the great granite plateau of the High City, the massive edifice from which the Shaa had once set forth to conquer their empire, from which their councils had ruled the destiny of billions, and—now—to which they came to die.

The Shaa was named Anticipation of Victory—it had been born in the early days of the Praxis, when the Shaa had commenced to plan conquests but had not yet begun them, and in the course of its long life, it had personally witnessed the glories and triumphs that followed. Other races had fallen, one by one, beneath the Shaa yoke, and on these the Shaa and its peers had imposed the uniformity of their rule.

Anticipation of Victory itself had not left the Great Refuge in centuries. It was surrounded at all times by attendants and officials, members of subject races who brought reports and requests, who transmitted its orders to the farthest reaches of its dominions. Servants washed and dressed the Shaa, maintained the vast computer network to which its nerves had been connected, and brought choice foods to cater to its diminished appetite. Though it was never alone, not for an instant, nevertheless the Shaa was tormented by the bitter pangs of loneliness.

There was no one left to understand. No one with whom to share its memories of glory.

Memories of those early days were undiminished. The Shaa remembered with brilliant clarity the fever that burned among its peers, the urge to bend all others, to bend the universe itself, to the perfect truth of the Praxis. It remembered the splendor of the early victories, how the primitive Naxids had been turned to the service of the Shaa, how others had then fallen—the Terrans, the Torminel, the Lai-owns, and others.

Yet with each conquest had come diminished expectation, a slight reduction of the fever that burned in the Shaa. Each race first had to be raised to the knowledge of their duty, cultivated with exquisite care like trees raised from seedlings, trees whose limbs had to be tied and twisted and shaped so they would achieve perfection and union with the Praxis. And, like trees, the servitor races had to be pruned, pruned with bullets and whips and skinning knives, with the great annihilating fire of antimatter bombs, with the slow wasting of radiation and the slower, inexorable decline of starvation. The labor had been immense, the burden enormous, and the results uncertain.

If only the Shaa had more time! If they had only had a few more thousand years in which to cultivate their garden of perfection, Anticipation of Victory could die in the certainty that its glorious task would be fulfilled.

But the Shaa hadn’t had the time they needed. The oldest succumbed first, their memories fading—not the old memories, which remained clear, but the newer memories which, unable to displace the old, failed to find a place in their minds.

The Shaa became unable to remember the flourishing of their own dream. They lost not the past, but the present.

They sought artificial aids—massive computer memories that could be linked to their own nervous systems and record their own lives in exquisite detail. But in time, accessing these memories grew wearisome and, eventually, a painful burden no longer worth the effort.

So one by one the great constellation of the Shaa began to wink out. The Shaa did not fear to inflict death, nor did they fear death themselves. Sad in the knowledge that they had become a burden on their own dream, they chose their own deaths, and when they died, they died with ceremony.

And now Anticipation of Victory lay on its couch, among the great machines through which it searched for his memories, and it knew that soon the time would come to lay down its responsibilities.

It had done its best to guide the younger races along the proper paths. In its time, it had awarded both great riches and terrible punishments. It had created a system by which the Praxis could be maintained after its death and hold the empire stable.

Its greatest hope was that after its death nothing would change.

Nothing at all. Or ever.

“Of course, following the Great Master’s death, I will kill myself.”

Lieutenant Gareth Martinez, keeping pace alongside the longer-legged Fleet Commander Enderby, felt himself stumble as he heard the words.

“My lord?” He drove his legs through the stumble, to stride once more off Enderby’s left shoulder. Their heels rang again in unison on the shaved, glittering asteroid material that floored the Commandery.

“I’ve volunteered,” Enderby said in his prosaic, literal tone. “My family needs a representative on the pyre, and I’m the most suitable candidate. I’m at the apex of my career, my children are well-established, and my wife has given me a divorce.” He looked at Martinez from beneath his level white brows. “My death will assure that my name, and my family’s name, will be honored forever.”

And help everyone to forget that little financial scandal involving your wife,Martinez thought. It was a pity that Enderby’s spouse couldn’t be the family sacrifice instead of the Fleet Commander.

A pity for Martinez in particular.

“I’ll miss you, my lord,” he said.

“I’ve spoken to Captain Tarafah about you,” Enderby went on. “He’s agreed to take you aboard as communications officer on theCorona.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Martinez said, and tried not to let his voice reflect the dismay that echoed coldly down his bones.

The Martinez family was among the Peers, the clans that the Great Masters—the Shaa—had placed over all creation. Though all Peers were equal in the sight of the Shaa, the Peers’ own views were less Olympian. It wasn’t enough just to be a Peer. You had to be theright kind of Peer.

And Martinez was definitely the wrong kind. While near-omnipotent on its distant home world of Laredo, the Martinez clan were provincial nobodies to the high-caste Peers whose palaces ornamented the High City of Zanshaa. The fine gradations of rank perceived by the Peers had no status in law, but their weight was felt everywhere in Peer society. Martinez’s birth entitled him to a place in the Peers’ military academy followed by a commission, but that was all.

In six years’ service, he had risen to lieutenant. That was as far as his father had come in a dozen years, before Marcus Martinez resigned in frustration and returned to Laredo to devote himself to making money on a grand scale.

His son knew he needed a powerful patron who would advance him in the service hierarchy. And Gareth Martinez thought he had found that patron in Fleet Commander Enderby, who seemed impressed with his abilities and was willing to overlook his obscure home and the wretched provincial accent that, try as he might, he’d been unable to lose.

What do you do when your senior officer announces his intention to commit suicide? Martinez wondered. Try to talk him out of it?

“Tarafah is a good officer,” Enderby assured. “He’ll look after you.”

Tarafah is only a lieutenant captain,Martinez thought. So even if Tarafah decided that he was the most brilliant officer he’d ever met—and the chances ofthat were not high—Tarafah wouldn’t be in a position to give him a promotion to the next rank. He could only recommend him to a superior, and that superior would be patron to another set of clients whose needs, Martinez knew, would rank greater than his own.

I am hip deep in the shit,he concluded. Unless he could talk the Fleet Commander into changing his mind about annihilating himself.

“My lord,” he began, and was interrupted as another officer, Senior Squadron Commander Elkizer, approached with his entourage. Elkizer and his staff were Naxids, members of the first species to be conquered by the Shaa, and Martinez suppressed annoyance as they scuttled across the polished floor toward Enderby. Not only did they interrupt a conversation vital to Martinez’s career, the Naxids were a species that had always made him uncomfortable.