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used in an emergency. The men were equipped with ID implants, body armor, and one pistol each, the maximum amount of armament that the Emperor’s security detail would allow outsiders to bring into the Imperial Tower. More men were on call, of course, and could reach the Tower in a matter of minutes, should an emergency extraction become necessary.
    Not that there was any reason to expect trouble—since the race-day party would be smothered in security. Of the sixty-two people who had ruled the Uman Empire over the last five-hundred-plus years, eighteen had been murdered while in power. Usually by rivals or psychopaths, though two of them had been murdered by lovers, and one had blown her brains out in the Senate rotunda.
    But assassinations were a fact of life, which was why many officials wore pseudoflesh faces while in transit to public functions, or made use of custom-made robotic body doubles like the one Usurlus sometimes referred to as “my brother.” The android’s car departed first, banked to the east, and soon disappeared.
    Usurlus was forced back into the plush upholstery as the air car took off, banked to the west, and turned toward the 1,600-foot-tall Imperial Tower, which rose above the city’s jagged skyline. The cylindrical building was thicker at the bottom than the top, was home to the government’s senior officials, and was said to be impregnable to anything less than a direct hit by a nuclear device. That scenario was theoretically impossible given the fleet of warships in orbit around Corin, the fighters that circled above the Imperial City, and other precautions, all of which were secret.
    Below, and visible for as far as the eye could see in every direction, was a city that occupied roughly five hundred square miles of land, and boasted a population of more than fifteen million people. Most of them were forced to live in high-rise buildings. So, in spite of a well-run subway system, air travel was important to the Empire’s movers and shakers, who preferred to be flown from building to building rather than compete with plebs for the dubious privilege of traveling on extremely crowded surface streets or aboard underground trains.
    Of course that meant airborne traffic jams were a fact of life, too, even though a host of computers were dedicated to trying to prevent such problems. There was very little air traffic over the city on that particular day, however, because of the race scheduled for early afternoon, so the pilot was able to deliver Usurlus to the twenty-second floor of the Imperial Tower with a minimum of delay. The entire floor was dedicated to the task of launching and retrieving official vehicles; but the facility was crowded in spite of all the space dedicated to it, so the atmosphere was one of eternally impending chaos as a steady stream of air cars arrived and departed.
    Thanks to his passenger’s rank, the pilot was allowed to land in one of the VIP slots, where one of the Emperor’s army of administrative androids was waiting to receive Usurlus and escort the official and his bodyguards off the noisome flight deck and into a spacious elevator lobby. During the short journey the visitors were examined by a variety of hidden scanners, and had any unauthorized weapons been identified, sections of the seemingly solid black granite walls would have opened to allow remotely operated weapons to kill specific individuals or everyone present. Then, once the bodies had been removed and the floors hosed down, the entryway would be opened for business once again. Estimated turnaround time: thirteen minutes and twenty seconds. Because, as Emperor Emor liked to say, “A good government is an efficient government.”
    As the foursome entered the lobby, the acrid odor of ozone, mixed with throat-clogging exhaust fumes, came in with them but was quickly removed by the building’s extremely efficient air-conditioning system. “Greetings on behalf of Emperor Emor,” the machine said