Firstborn

back toward his speeder, but running would be useless. This was Varion Silvermane. He did not lose. People did not escape him. Those eyes . . . looking into those eyes, Dennison knew that this man could destroy him.
    Varion stopped right in front of Dennison. The High Admiral’s eyes looked contemplative. “So,” he finally said, voice clear even over the gunfire and yells. “They
did
clone me. Well, the High Emperor will find that I am even capable of defeating myself.”
    He turned and left. Someone finally got a big repeating Calzer gun working, and it fired a blinding barrage of blue bolts. Varion’s shields repulsed them. There should have been some blowback, at least, but there was nothing. Varion walked up the ramp to his ship as calmly as he had strolled down.
    The Calzer soon drained the pavilion’s energy stores, and the weather sphere collapsed, letting in the full fury of the winds. Dennison stepped forward through lines of smoke torn and then dispersed by the gale, ignoring the voices of angry, confused, and frightened men.
    Varion’s drop-ship blasted off, throwing Dennison to the ground. By the time his vision cleared, the ship was a dark speck in the air.
    * * *
    “We knew he had
something
,” Kern said, watching the holo for the tenth time. “But his shield. Where did he develop it? We put spies on each world. . . .”
    “He brought them with him,” Dennison said quietly, standing against the view railing.
    “What?”
    “The scientists,” Dennison said from the side of the hologram room. “Varion doesn’t trust anything he can’t watch directly. He would have brought the scientists from Gemwater with him, probably on his flagship. That way he could supervise their work.”
    “Gemwater . . .” Kern said. “But he conquered that planet over fifteen years ago! You think your brother has been keeping secrets for that long?”
    Dennison nodded distractedly. “He knew from that first battle at Seapress. He understood that by quelling the Reaches, he would make the High Empire stronger and harder to defeat when the time came. That’s why he took Gemwater so early, to give its scientists decades to build him secret technology.”
    Kern watched the holo again.
    The universe felt . . . awry to Dennison. His father was dead. Sennion Crestmar had never been loving, but he had instilled in Dennison a powerful will to succeed. He’d been demanding, rigid, and unforgiving. Yet, Dennison had hoped that someday . . . maybe . . . he would be able to make the man proud.
    And now he never would. Varion had robbed Dennison of that.
    What does it matter?
Dennison thought. The hologram below showed the firefight through smoke and verdant grass.
Sennion wasn’t even really my father. I have no father. Unless Varion was wrong.
    No. Varion was never wrong.
    Only two men could verify the claim for certain. The first lay dead from an energy blast to the head. The other—The High Emperor, who had to approve all cloning requests—had yet to respond to Dennison’s request for an audience. But Dennison knew what the answer would be. The saddest part wasn’t that Dennison was a fabricated tool, it was that he was a defective one. Genetically, he was the same as Varion. He had even checked in the mirror and found a few silver hairs. Varion had started to go gray at twenty-three—Dennison’s age now.
    So many things made sudden and daunting sense.
You
cannot
be like other officers,
his father had said.
The High Empire expects more.
No wonder they had pushed Dennison so hard; no wonder they had refused to let him leave the service. He
was
Varion.
    And yet he wasn’t. Whatever Varion had, it hadn’t been transmitted to Dennison. That confidence of his hadn’t come from a random mingling of chromosomes. The victories, the power, the sheer momentum. These could not be copied.
    The High Emperor will find that I am even capable of defeating myself.
Varion knew—knew that he was special, somehow.
    “Dennison,” Kern said.
    Dennison looked up. Kern sat below, in a chair just before the holo, looking up disapprovingly. He had paused the recording. The point he had inadvertently chosen showed a disturbing image. Varion’s weapon raised, smoking, a corpse falling to the grass below. . . .
    “Dennison, I asked you a question,” Kern said.
    “He’s going to win, Kern,” Dennison said, staring at the holo. “The empire . . . to Varion, what is the empire but another collection of recalcitrant planets to