A long silence stretched out between us.

I sighed at her question, because honestly? I had no idea what the fuck I meant to do. Other than a vague sense there was something seriously wrong in both livisk and Terran society, and my girlfriend had a military at her disposal that might be able to do something about that.

I worried it was a silence where she was going to decide I was talking treason that would threaten at least two species. She did grow up under the old empress-worship system, after all. It was possible she might decide that was too much, and I'd finally pushed things too far.

I kept waiting for the moment when she'd say I pushed things too far, but it didn't happen.

"I don't know," I said, throwing my arms up and sending hot water splashing every which way as I did. "I just know the way humanity is doing things right now is supremely fucked up. We have nobility in all but name. People who have a shitload of money who are keeping everything under their thumb. We have people living in poverty even though we're more successful and richer than we've ever been at any point in history."

"That sounds familiar," Varis said, shaking her head.

"Yeah, it's same shit, different empire," I said. "You have a bunch of people who are the haves and they want to make sure there are a lot of have-nots out there in the galaxy because that lets them look down their nose from on high in their ivory tower."

"Ivory tower?" Varis asked, frowning.

"It's a phrase from Earth, one that doesn't even make all that much sense these days. Synthetic ivory is totally a thing, and it's not a big deal that somebody can make a tower out of the stuff. Not that anybody has ever gone to the trouble of making a tower out of it, which you think some rich asshole would do, but whatever."

"You're getting distracted, Bill," she said.

"Yeah, that seems to happen to me a lot," I said. "The point is, people are getting fucked over in the Livisk Ascendancy on the regular. People are getting fucked over in the Terran Republic. They keep voting and yet nothing ever changes. The rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful. Nobody ever faces any sort of consequences if they're over a certain level of wealth or power."

"Yes, that does sound a lot like how things work in the Ascendancy as well."

"Yeah, well, it's been going on forever and maybe I'm taking a little too much from the Roddenberry school of rebuilding society, but I feel like we should be able to do better. Our species have reached for the stars. We are literally the phoenix rising from the ashes of the Ancients whose civilization fell a few million years ago when they accidentally seeded our world with their ancestors who got cut off from the rest of their galactic empire."

"We're the ones who managed to rise from the ashes without creating an ash pile of our own," Varis said, looking down as a contemplative mood came through the link. "We've found worlds where there was nothing left but ruins in the fossil record. They discovered nuclear weapons and that was that."

"There was one planet humanity discovered where they literally got into a global war because of social media."

She blinked. Surprise and disbelief came through the link.

"Social media? Seriously?"

"What can I say?" I said with a shrug and a grin. "Human civilization was on the verge of falling a couple of times back in the 21st century because a website a dude made for creeping on bikini pictures of girls in his class who were on spring break started being used to destabilize governments around the world."

"We never had that kind of trouble in our history."

"Are you sure about that?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

I took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. This was another thing that brushed up against some of the research I'd done with Arvie in my man cave, but yet again, it was another question that had to be asked.

"I've been spending a lot of time digging into a lot of the historical record here on Livisqa," I said.

"You have?" she asked, blinking.

"I mean, you have to go out and actually run your little slice of the Livisk Ascendancy during the day, and I don't have a lot to do. So I've been spending a lot of my time boning up on livisk history. Among other things."

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I didn't want to go into how I'd been boning up on the nobility and how all that worked. That seemed like the kind of thing that would get close to letting her know everything I'd been planning. I didn't want her to know too much. She'd said herself on multiple occasions that she was more comfortable with having plausible deniability.

"It seems to me that you should have been spending more of your time boning up on livisk culture," she said.

I grinned. "I'm willing to concede that point, but I have things I've been working on."

"Yes, and I'm very fascinated to find out all about these things you're working on."

"In time," I said. "But for the moment, you can't tell anybody about something you don't know about."

"As long as I haven't gotten a warning from my shard, I am willing to go along with whatever William is saying on that score," Arvie said.

"Whatever," Varis said, giving an idle wave of her hand. "So, you were about to tell me something you've noticed about livisk culture. Something you think all the people living in the Livisk Ascendancy, all the researchers who spend their time going through our historical records, haven't noticed for themselves."

"Well, yes," I said. "It's not exactly something you don't acknowledge. More like it's one of those open secret things everybody knows about. Everybody can see it right in front of their noses, but they don't say anything about it because of the whole autocracy thing and being worried about having their head chopped off by a capricious empress."

Varis let out a dramatic sigh.

"Go ahead, then. I know you're not going to be happy until you've had a chance to tell me what you think you've figured out."

"Well, think about my crew," I said.

There was a pang of regret there. I was going to get them, damn it. That was at the top of my priority list now that the gloves were off with the empress, but I had to get the radiation purged from my body first.

But fuck the empress and fuck anybody who tried to stop me. If she was willing to drop a nuke on our heads because she thought she could operate with impunity? I was more than happy to run a raid on one of her reclamation mines, and fuck the consequences.

It's not like those consequences could be any worse than what she'd already done to us, after all.

"What about the reclamation mines?" Varis asked.

I shook my head and chuckled. I figured if a livisk was suddenly stuck in the middle of human society for some reason then they might be able to tell us a little bit about our society because they were looking at it from the outside and could see things we couldn't with that outsider perspective.

"Those reclamation mines sit on top of old versions of this city," I said. "Presumably it's been bombed into oblivion more than a few times. It's my understanding those reclamation mines go deep."

"They do go deep, yes," she said. "There are multiple layers where there are technologies that can be useful to the empress, or materials that have been lost to time. There are even some pockets of Ancient technology that can be found."

My eyebrows shot up at that. "Ancient technology?"

"Yes," she said. "This city sits on top of an Ancient city. Ancient with a capital letter, mind you."

"Fascinating," I said, arching an eyebrow.

Common wisdom held that most Ancient cities would've been ground into dust by conditions on a planet long, long ago. Only there were some rocks out there floating in deep space where there wasn't an atmosphere to wear things down and erode them, or places where micrometeorite impacts hadn't destroyed everything.

It was exceedingly rare. The idea that there was an Ancient city under Imperial Seat on a planet with plate tectonics and weather patterns and all sorts of other things that would presumably wear all of that stuff into dust long before the livisk had a chance to rise from the ashes of the precursors stretched credulity, but maybe there was something to it.

There certainly weren't any Ancient cities or artifacts on Earth. We had to go out into the solar system before we discovered evidence of the precursors. Funnily enough on Iapetus, which had the science fiction buffs back on earth going wild.

All of that was beside the point, though.

"You're thinking, aren't you?" she said.

"Was my look the first tip? Or was the link telling you what was going on?"

"A little bit of all of the above," she said. "So what are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking there are multiple massive holes in the livisk historical record going back for thousands of years. Like, you keep excellent records and you have historians who have done some amazing work, but there are also massive plot holes in that history."

"Plot holes in history?" she said.

"Well, yeah. Talking about a civil war like it was a revolution because an empress managed to take over. Discussing this war or that as though it was nothing even though there is a layer under your cities where old cities sat before they were destroyed in nuclear fire. It's a wonder your civilization has managed to survive this long."

"The livisk are strong," she said.

It was a simple statement of fact. The same as an ancient American might say that they were the land of the free, even though anybody looking back on their society with a historian's eye could tell that any place where somebody might be bankrupted in an instant because they had the misfortune to get cancer wasn't as free as they liked to pretend it was. Or people in the ancient Soviet Union saying everything was owned by the people, even though there was a small cabal of dictators and oligarchs who ran everything.

"Okay, I'm just going to be blunt since we keep going around and around about this. Your history is littered with a bunch of times there was an empress who was deposed because she was either wildly unpopular, wildly incompetent, the people decided they didn't like her, or there was a group of elites who decided they would have a better time if there was a new boss. Only every time that happens, you discover that ancient maxim we figured out on Earth long ago."

"And what's that?" she asked.

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

"What exactly are you proposing then, Bill?" she asked.

"I'm proposing that maybe the new boss is the same as the old boss, but things around here would be a whole lot better for us and for everybody serving under us if you were the new boss. And maybe we can work on you not being the same as the old boss."

She stared at me, and again I was left with a chilling feeling as confusion came through the link.

Like maybe all this talk about straight-up high treason would finally be enough to overcome her love for me and result in me losing my head so she could serve it up to the empress on a platter to curry her favor.

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