He leaned in to sniff one of the bouquets of spring flowers the stall in Lietowice Street was selling, seemingly appreciating the aroma of the recently sprung blossoms. He exchanged a few words with the elderly lady that ran the stall, but he was running on auto-pilot and couldn’t for the life of him remember what he had just said the moment the words left his mouth. Vijktor Saldys used the opportunity when the woman turned about to show him some other example bouquets to look around the busy shopping street. Coming to Lietowice had been no mistake on Vijktor’s part, it was the busiest open market street in the whole of Lemberg, running for over a kilometre of cobblestoned piedway, stalls and carts and skytrucks filling the sides of the piedway, leaving the centre free for pedestrians. It was, however, growing late, and many of the stalls were closed or closing. And that meant there would be fewer people about. That meant it would be harder for Vijktor to blend into the crowd. From the corner of his eye he noticed a woman he had seen before. There wasn’t anything particular about the woman, she was dressed just like any other person passing through Lietowice, a tightly pulled wool coat over a grey work skirt and some sort of jumper underneath. Thing is, Vijktor had seen her five times today already; at least, he was pretty sure it was five times, it could well be more. And if that woman was here, the rest of her colleagues wouldn’t be far off. He hadn’t slept for three days, and only adrenalin and a probably illegal stim-shot bought from a non-licensed pharmacy in a side street off Kaiser Friedrich III Platz was keeping him on his feet.

He excused himself to the flower-lady and resumed his walking down the market street, trying at all times to keep a sizeable group of people between himself and the by now too familiar woman. It was getting harder and harder though, the crowds were thinning out as shoppers started to turn towards home, tourists headed for restaurants or to partake in central Lemberg’s rather famous nightlife, and this part of the city started to close up for the evening. Vijktor only hoped the crowd would provide enough protection for him to get to his intended destination, because he was pretty sure that there was a certain threshold of acceptable witnesses his pursuers were willing to tolerate in order to snag him. Genetics was not on his side right now, he thought for probably the twentieth time today, since he was about one-ninety tall (pretty tall for a Myndowan) and his medium long hair was a shining blonde colour that he had tried to hide as best he could by wearing an Eintracht Kajserwald cap. A thick white rollneck sweater under a tan fur-lined bomber jacket and black trousers and black boots completed his outfit; he had aimed for not standing out in any way, neither being very shabby nor very chic, aiming for a nominal middle ground. That went out the window when he remembered his pursuers would have face-recognition surveillance drones, so he had bought the cap at the first sports store he had come across. Nothing screamed “anonymity” more than wearing a hat with the logo of the most popular sports team on the planet.

Lemberg, the capital city of Tschornohora, was both fortunately and unfortunately smaller than his native Kajserwald. On the positive side, it meant that getting to where he needed to go on foot was far easier than if it had been a huge metropolis like Cordelia or New Zanzibar, but at the same time it made it harder for Vijktor to blend in with the crowds. He briefly contemplated tagging along with the groups heading for the fashionable nightclub district; he’d done that the first night in Kajserwald, pretending to be intoxicated and managed to blend in with a group of drunken students on their way from one watering hole to the next. Had circumstances been different, Vijktor might have been part of a similar group right now, instead of skulking through the streets and back alleys of the Myndowan capitol and looking over his shoulders constantly. He walked past a duo of patrolling police officers dressed in black and yellow, nodding politely as he passed in order to not attract attention, all the while fighting back another painful wave of headache that washed across his brain from somewhere in the back of his head. It was getting harder to think, harder to concentrate; simply walking in a straight line was getting increasingly difficult. Some of it had to be the aftershock of his system flushing what remained of the stim-shot’s effects, but most of it was three days and three nights of only a few short bursts of fitful sleep.

Although without any proof to back it up, Vijktor knew he was the last one left. Daniella had been the first to disappear. She’d simply not shown up to morning classes fifteen days ago, which Ignace had pointed out had to be her first time, and Cecylia had joked maybe it wasn’t the only “first time” in the making, considering Ferenc also hadn’t shown up. Following the mind-numbingly boring nano-mechanical engineering lectures, they’d spent the rest of the day idling away at their assigned computer laboratory at the Kaiser Maximillian II Polytechnische Universität. The next day, Ferenc showed up to their lab at lunch time, but when asked the whereabouts of Daniella, he had been nonplussed; he’d been home sick with a mild case of green lung, not with Daniella. Suspicion had started to gnaw at the back of Vijktor’s mind at that stage, but only as an afterthought, and Ignace had decreed they’d simply continue their work, so Vijktor had gotten back to refining his tracking DAI’s algorithms, while Cecylia had continued her efforts to crack the security codes of one of the tertiary sensor banks at Kajserwald Shuttleport.

Stowing away the recollection of the past two weeks for a moment, Vijktor realised he had reached the end of Lietowice Street, and was now standing by a large intercrossing where six piedways met three carrumways. Groundcars in chromatic hues passed by almost languidly, the variable speed limit of the downtown carrumways set to low during the evening to avoid accidents and reduce noise levels. Under-passage walkways connected the crossing piedways, as well as overhanging raised piedwalks that rested on tall columns of carboncrete with small skycar landing pads jutting out at regular intervals. He checked the traffic coming from both directions, and dashed diagonally across on a red pedestrian light. A quickly veering black limousine honked at him and he put his hand up in an apologetic manner. Shit, he’d not even seen that one, his brain had to be more fried than he realised. The last time he’d actually rested his eyes was during the train ride from Kajserwald to Lemberg, choosing the cheaper and slower, but much more incognito mode of transport instead of a trans-shuttle or a tether-drop shuttle. Nodding off for about twenty minutes at a time, all the while reassuring himself he was surrounded by other passengers. By doing that, he’d avoided a natural chokepoint where he could be snagged away, like shuttleport transit security checks. Vijktor had boarded the train the same day Ignace had stopped answering his ‘com calls. That had been two days after they’d all learned the destination of the ghost shuttles taking off from Kajserwald Shuttleport were going, thanks to their combined hacking efforts. The same night Cecylia posted something very random in their chat group, before seemingly deleting her account. The next day, Vijktor had managed, thanks to the completed arc-server popper programme left behind by Cecylia, to acquire passenger manifests for those ghost shuttles, ominously electronically stamped by both the Kaiserliche Marinenachrichtendienst, and the Generalauditoriat. The names and the implied ethnicity of those names immediately made Vijktor, Ignace, and Ferenc realise why their friends were not answering their ‘coms anymore. That was why Vijktor, the last of his group of friends free, or alive, a concerned voice in the back of his brain opined, was now on the other side of the continent, continually trailed by what had to be operatives from either the Nachrichdienst or the Geheimdienst, trying desperately to get to the one spot on the whole planet where he would be safe; the Auroran Embassy.

The driver corrected the car and Commodore Dame Sylvia Raharuhi tutted as she looked back through the ‘car’s rear-window at the twenty-something who’d tried to cross the carrumway instead of using any of the piedwalks or under-crossings.

“Damn drunk kids,” she hissed in annoyance, “putting themselves unwittingly in mortal danger like that.”

“Funny that,” Post-captain Raphael Barham answered, a slight slur to his words, “mortal danger was almost what I would describe the atmosphere at the Kaiserin’s celebration.”

He was aware of the slurring, and was hoping the de-tox pill he’d popped as their embassy car had arrived, would start to work its magic soon. This much sweet wine in his system would lead to a horrible tomorrow if it wasn’t washed out before he hit the hay.

“Yes, you did indeed seem to spend a lot of time with your new friends. Did our good allies and fellow members of the Royal Union have anything interesting to say?”

Raharuhi’s tone was almost coy, as if she knew already what Barham was going to say, but he indulged her anyway. His eyes wandered uninvited towards the glass separating the passenger section of the limousine from the driver and passenger seat. It wasn’t only a physical pane of glass separating the two, the ‘car also had a privacy shield installed between the two compartments. But since their driver was an employed local (with exemplary curriculum vitae reports and nothing but praise from previous employers, sometimes perhaps a bit to positive to completely believable) Secret Intelligence Services didn’t want to run any risk of state secrets being betrayed from the backseat of an embassy limousine, so their operatives had simply bugged their own ‘car in an attempt to see if they could pick up on their own peoples’ conversations. The fact that the results had come back as just incomprehensible muffles was a very positive sign.

“I swear the Kaiser was trying to drink me under the table in order to spill some juicy news,” Barham said, his face making a quick grimace.

“And my attempt at staving off intoxication by trying to get alcohol-free drinks was seen through immediately by the good Fleet-captain, who decided to resort to the time-tested old tactic of drumming up the local vintage, accompanied by you simply haaaaave to try, etc. etc. I tell you, trying to play drunk is so much harder than actually being it.”

“The non-existent thespian in me cries for you,” Raharuhi said in a dead-pan voice which made Barham chuckle.

“Anyway, on the whole, it was a very informative evening. I did in fact learn more than a few things.”

“Such as?” Sylvia Raharuhi was not Royal Navy Intelligence, she was a genuine Naval Attaché with several commands under her belts as well as stints at Admiralty’s Department of Planning; she didn’t have the same training and eye for particular details that Raphael Barham had.

“First off,” he said while looking out the ‘car’s window into the Lemberg cityscape evening, “why do we even have enemies when we have friends like the Dionysians. I mean, they’re the most enigmatic people in Human Space.”

Raharuhi opened her mouth as if to object, but closed it instead with a slight click, her face made a knowing expression. Barham nodded with one eyebrow raised in return.

“Secondly, both were clearly Eugeneis in origin, but only one of them were truthful about their surname.”

“What do you mean?”

Raphael pursed his lips slightly, a hand rising up to remove his black-white-gold visored cap and the other running through his hair before putting it back in its place.

“Fleet-captain Lord Heliophoros was honest enough to provide his true last name. Arch-commander Lady Indosphoria was not.”

Raharuhi’s eyes squinted in suspicion.

“How do you know this, and why does it matter?”

“Because, Ma’am, the Dionysian aristocracy are all clon- err, I mean Gen-Two people, and as such they’re all ‘made’ to a certain mental and physical standard. But since this tradition has existed for such a long time, their noble families have reverted to adhering to a relatively limited number of phenotypes. It is, in a way, like the inheritable genetic traits of our own noble families, like the Allencourts, the Blackshores, the Howelands, and even the Royal Family, but scaled way up because they’re made by DNA-clones instead of naturally passed down alleles. And Arch-commander Indosphoria was very clearly a Doukas, not an Indosphorian.”

“How can you tell? I mean, I’ve met quite a few Dionysian officers over the course of my career, and they’ve always looked quite same-y to those two.”

Barham managed to suppress the smirk he felt was coming.

“Ma’am, I can tell them apart for the simple reason that I was sent out here. I have studied Dionysian society and I have, particularly, studied their nobility. They’re on paper quite like us, but at the same time, very not. At the very least we’ve not descended to a Hobbsian state of ‘Natural Order’ like the Dionysian nobility has. And I have observed the Doukas phenotype enough times to be certain when one of their numbers crosses my path.”

“So do you think the Dionysians are plotting something here on Tschornohora?”

Barham amiably snorted.

“Ma’am, they’re Dionysians,” he said with a large smile on his face, “they’re always plotting something. Whether it will transpire here in Lemberg, or on Amaranth or Alpha Verdis, I cannot tell you. The Dionysians are constantly laying plans upon plans upon plans, they’re the very definition of labyrinthine. However, I can tell you that they have no love for the current Emperor and the policies being enacted in his name, that much is clear.”

“What leads you do believe that?”, the commodore asked, one eyebrow hiked up in a suspicious manner. Barham simply shrugged.

“Because that’s their nature, when you have a society that is so heavily oriented towards its nobility in such a way, which completely institutionally embraces how the very ancient Hellenistic monarchies worked, this is what you get. Queen-Empress Epiphaneia Neas Dionysia has made it very clear that any courtier who is crafty enough to murder her is very welcome to take her throne. The Dionysians live in a dog-eats-dog world that is completely devoid of any semblance of our democratic institutions, and that lack of common undertone of cultural understanding is the first step to actually knowing these people. Also, I don’t know if you noticed, but there were exactly zero Lithuanians in that ballroom apart from the Kaiserin.”

Raharuhi started to form a counter-argument regarding the Dionysians, but that last sentence threw her off her beat.

“There wasn’t?”

Barham shook his head.

“Only Germans, Hungarians and foreigners, apart from a few Ruthenians. That doesn’t rhyme very well with the direction the Emperor is officially trying to communicate, especially since he married a Gen-Two Lithuanian.”

“Huh, I suppose that is quite a bad look.”

Captain Lucas Mitchell was an officer in the 4th Battalion of the Royal Kavenha Regiment (33rd/45th Foot) and damn proud of the fact. Following completion of his three-year course at the Royal Military Academy he had served in a number of peace-keeping missions in Lucidia and the Three Sisters, earning his several promotions during that time, being mentioned in dispatches at one time which added a certain gusto to his name. And he was a proper gentleman, as officers should be in his opinion, and when his work-only handcom rang while out with his Myndowen beau, he had to suppress a very angry mien.

“Es tut mir so leid, mein Fraulein,” he said in pretty bad (not even correct) German to his companion for the night. The Empire of Myndowen –unlike the Kingdom of Aurora– approved of “women of the night” if they were employed by a union and had regular health checkups. But Natalya was not a simple “lady of the night”, she was an escort, and as such came with a hefty price for her services. Captain Mitchell, even with his very extravagant pay from both the Royal Army and the Auroran Embassy Service could only pay for her services twice a month. Which was why he was so extremely pissed that he had been yanked out the theatre production he was enjoying with Natalya. It had been a pretty good production of King Lear after all.

“Yes, Captain Mitchell speaking?” he said angrily into his ‘com, once alone in the reception hall of the theatre building. The person who answered him was an extremely agitated embassy guard.

Vijktor Saldys had walked down the piedways for a couple hours, trying to make it less obvious where he was heading. But as he walked into Peredovna Straße, he suddenly realised he was being tailed. Not by some agent from the Geheimdienst, but by a very tall individual.

“Hey dude, what’s yar up to?”

He was about two feet taller than Vijktor, but the newcomer laid his arm around the newcomer like two old friends if old reconnected.

“I’m sorry,” Vijktor started, “do I know yuu?” The tall newcomer had grabbed Vijktor’s right arm and drew him into a side of the piedway they were currently walking on.

“I know where you’re trying to reach, and I would advise not talking about it at all,” the tall man hissed into Vijktor’s ear; “please believe me when I say I am an ally, I will take you to the Aurorans.”

At that exact moment a duo of roving Lemberg policia officers turned the corner and looked at the two. Vijktor's immediate reaction was to freak out, but as such he jammed his mouth into his new friend’s mouth as well. The police officers passed by, both of them “Ruthenian”, commenting on the new Kaiser and the Kaiserin. A couple kissing and exchanging body fluids like this was not in the ‘fuck you’-mandate of the Lemberg Polizei.

“I see you know how the secret services work,” the much taller person said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I can get you to the Auroran Embassy, you just have to say the word.”