The Purge

What was done

The Purge Virus was engineered — deliberately, patiently, and over a very long time — by subject peoples of the Empire acting in concert with its external enemies. It was not a weapon of war in any sense the Imperium recognised. It was keyed to the Voltrumite genome and to nothing else, and it did not need to be delivered to an army, a fleet, or a capital. It needed only to be delivered to the species.

It was. It worked.

The Voltrumites came out of one high country, long-lived, few, and married to one another for an age, and a people so narrowly descended is a people with a signature. They had then ruled tens of billions for centuries — and in the whole of that time their physicians were foreign, their dead were handled by foreign hands, and their blood was drawn, carried, and entered in foreign registers by the subject peoples who did the ordinary work of the Empire. It did not occur to the Imperium that the tens of billions it governed were, in the aggregate, a research programme.

The fall of Voltrum

Voltrum is gone. Not fallen, not occupied, not ceded — destroyed, with Voltris upon it, and the throne room within Voltris, and the Starfinder within the throne room, and the seventh Signet setting beside it that had been cut and left empty against a return.

The capital world had for a long time been a place the Empire visited for ceremonies. Its principal industry was the Search. When it ended, the Empire lost in a single stroke its capital, its instrument of succession, the register in its original hand, and the only ground it had ever treated as significant.

The loosing of the six

The six systems are free. The Empire uses the word its enemies use, and does not qualify it, and does not dispute the fact.

Tens of billions of subject peoples across six systems ceased to be subject within the span of the contagion, because there was no longer anybody to be subject to. Whatever those peoples have built since is their own affair and the Imperial Government has issued no instrument concerning it — a restraint the Empire regards as a matter of record-keeping rather than of magnanimity. The Empire does not enter claims it cannot prove.

The count

The deposit

One thing survived that was not an accident, and it is the only reason there is an Empire to read this.

Long before the Purge, Voltrumite genetic material was seeded into the stock of Earth — an uncounted world, of no strategic value, in no register, holding nothing the Imperium wanted. It was not a colony and was not a claim and no garrison was ever placed there. It was a deposit against a contingency nobody at the time could describe, placed precisely where nobody would think to look for it, and left to lie dormant across an unrecorded number of generations.

The condition of its recovery was not a date and not a signal. It was awakening: the dormant blood coming to consciousness in a living person, at its own time, without instruction.

It has begun. His Imperial Majesty is one of several so awakened, and the register of the Empire is the count of them. See the standing of the awakened.

The position of the Empire

The Voltrumites were never conquered because nobody ever tried properly, and they never once mistook that for invincibility. The Purge is what trying properly looked like, and the Empire has entered it in the record in the plain, sequential, unapologetic, and very short manner in which it records everything.

What it has not done is stop. A people who reckon strength as the load a member will take before it fails do not regard a catastrophic reduction as a disproof of themselves; they regard it as a measurement. The Empire has been reduced to fewer than a hundred citizens, no ground, and a replica seal.

It has an Emperor, which it did not have for the whole long age before the fall.