The Great Hall was long and empty, and echoed loudly. The man walking down its center, almost lost in the shadows of dawn, had squeaky shoes, and the noise echoed faintly down the stone walls. He began walking on the edges of his feet to minimize the squeaks, even though the normal scurry of people through the building, going hither and thither on the vast business of government, would not begin for another two hours.
In spite of the predawn hush that lay over the capital city of Celesius, there was an unusual amount of activity in the chambers of the Hall, and the squeaking man was due for an appointment with the ruler of Celesius, and the Celesian Empire. The fact that the empire consisted of exactly two inhabited systems, and one other uninhabited, bothered no one since there were no others within reaching distance. There was, as far as anyone knew, no other inhabited worlds in the entire Galaxy.
The Celesian Empire in its present form had existed for nearly two thousand years, since space travel became a practical form of transportation. The planet of Celesius had been the home world for a colonists' expedition to the only neighboring system, where probes had discovered a planet apparently capable of supporting life. Marlia was rather rocky in places (thus its name) and very cold in others, but the colonists had been able to carve out a more than adequately comfortable existence. The planet was very rich in metal ore, and fertile enough to grow food.
As time went by, the Marlians' distance from Celesius proved to be one of the major factors in the planets development. It took nearly ten years to travel from one to the other, so visitors and shipments were rather scarce. It was because of this that the Marlian technology developed in a different direction than on Celesius; it had, in fact, developed in a decidedly bizarre fashion. Since labor was needed to till the soil, and there was a large supply of easily mined metal, machines of all sorts were designed to fulfill every need. After a thousand years of this development, the machines and the human race had merged, and the Marlians were constructing machines for their own bodies. They had, in short, developed into a race of cyborgs. Generally human appearing, their bones had been replaced by metal, their circulatory system by pumps and tubes, and their musculature by much more robust mechanisms. Their brains were the only part of them unaffected.
This went on over a period of some two thousand years, with the occasional arrivals from Celesius shocked into insensibility by the apparitions that greeted them on their arrival. At first, the human graces of the Marlians had remained largely unchanged by their mechanical adaptations, but as time wore on, they began to turn as cold as their metal implants. A growing fear was theirs-that the Celesians, hearing of their augmentations, would try to put a stop to it, and this led to predictable results. Outgoing travel was highly restricted, with the reason given that infections may have developed on Marlia that would be fatal to the Celesians. There were very few arrivals from Celesius, due to the length of the voyage, and once there, they did not leave again. Most were augmented, and liked it. One or two did not, and died.
A gigantic breakthrough on Celesius in the science of space travel changed everything. It was found that, although the speed of light could not be exceeded in normal space, other dimensions existed into which a ship could be placed, and in those dimensions speed was theoretically infinite. Practically, the voyage time to Marlia was cut from ten years to two days, and the Marlians' worst fears were realized. The public outcry on Celesius against the augmentations was enormous, especially so since the augmented Marlians were much their physical superiors. An increasingly heated exchange began between the two worlds, and in the end, the Celesians outlawed any further augmentations. In a century, they hoped, no trace would remain of this blasphemy against the human body.
The Marlians, enraged by the summary ruling, ignored it. The Celesians, similarly incensed by the disobedience, placed Marlia under martial law, and the King appointed a governor for the planet, whose responsibility it was to ensure no more augmentations took place.
The King sat in the breakfast room in his chambers in the Great Hall. The squeaking man, more familiarly known as his foreign minister Jol Ducat, was on the other side of the table, speaking.
"Sir, they've declared independence. Porram was deposed, and barely got out alive on the Pariea. He ought to be here soon."
The King sat, relocating the food on his plate with his fork. Finally he looked up, and his face was stern.
"Very well. Go and find the ambassador, and bring him here. Find Vong as well, and tell him to meet me here as soon as possible."
"Yes, sir." Jol Ducat rose, bowed, and squeaked away, down the hall.
Yes, this is obviously unfinished.