No sooner had I flown under the first support strut, the thing was pockmarked with rust and it looked like somebody had taken potshots at it with a plasma gun once upon a time, than another massive support strut loomed in front of us. Though this one looked more like the remains of a skyscraper that had been knocked over in some ancient fight.

I flashed back to being inside the radioactive firestorm from that fortress building that got blown up on the outer ring of Varis's defenses. That had been the empress sending us a message. She could take out those defensive structures whenever she wanted.

Of course that would be a Pyrrhic victory if she did that enough. Other nobles and military types would start to get nervous as she showed her willingness to use nukes against them. Other nobles getting nervous could mean itchy trigger fingers, and that could result in a situation where the current capital of the Livisk Ascendancy was added to the burnt-out ruins of all the others it had been built on top of.

"Would you do something, please?" Varis asked, her voice rising as fear shot through the link.

"Working on it," I said.

I reached out and activated the shields. There was a purple glowing flash all across the canopy, and the ship banged against that support structure. Then we were through and into a more open area. I could feel Varis's eyes on me. I could sense the displeasure coming through the link.

I looked over at her. "What?"

"You know what," she said.

"Okay. So the drone we used to map out this course before we came out here was a little smaller than the fighter we're in now."

"And it was way smaller than the troop transport we have all of Selii's people flying in on," Varis pointed out.

"Yeah, don't remind me," I said. "She's going to give me some shit about that."

I pivoted the fighter while keeping our momentum going and blasted a massive hole in the support strut. Which caused a few other bits of debris to go tumbling down, but that hole was definitely big enough to get a camouflaged troop transport through.

"There. Now they can get through," I said.

"By making a racket someone might detect," she said.

"I thought you said the only people really paying attention were brigands, pirates, people in the reclamation mines, and nobles if you get too close to their buildings."

"Your point?"

"The only building we're near right now fell into that hole," I said. "And it didn't even look like anyone was working near it at this time of night."

"And the part where you activated the shields and just rammed the ship against the parts of the building that were in the way?"

"Well, sometimes you need to go with the Janeway school of piloting."

"The what school of piloting?"

"Ancient Earth reference. Sometimes if you can't do something with finesse, you need to just ram it in there."

"Oh, you mean like when we tried that thing Arvie said came from a linguistic artifact in your language back in the hot tub and…"

"Anyway," I said, talking loudly to get her to stop before she could really get going.

Besides, I hadn't done the Janeway school of things there. Though the Janeway school of getting frisky technically involved going really fast and turning into a salamander thing.

No, we'd used plenty of preparation and a lot of… Actually, I wasn't even going to finish that thought in my head. Though from the way Varis was grinning at me, she could sense the embarrassment pinging back and forth through the link.

This was one of those moments when I was glad the link allowed you to get vibes and emotions, but it didn't actually translate thoughts one-for-one.

Instead, I concentrated on the Undercity that had opened up all around us.

The presence of the Undercity below Imperial Seat was the sort of thing that honestly shouldn't have come as a surprise. They talked about how cities were built on top of cities, sort of like Rome or Paris where you could dig down and find yourself in the catacombs.

Or the lost city of Seattle, which really wasn't all that lost at all. It's just that the version of it that was destroyed in a little war between the United States and Russia that went hot long enough to happen on the western seaboard rather than the eastern where everybody expected it to happen resulted in a situation similar to this one.

But even there it wasn't quite as intense as what I was seeing through the canopy now. There were multiple layers of multiple cities, complete with skyscrapers and all the environs of modern construction that any civilization could come up with, and they'd been destroyed at different times by nuclear weapons or traditional bombing campaigns.

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It really made me itch in between my shoulder blades. Especially after everything that happened with the empress. Like there was a nuclear weapon that was about to be dropped on us all over again by simple virtue of living in Imperial Seat.

For all that they would sometimes go thousands of years without having a city-ending conflagration. And they always built things back up rather quickly, to believe the records Arvie had gone through with me.

"What are you thinking about?" Varis asked.

I continued looking at the ghostly skyscrapers that rose out of the darkness in front of us, and this was merely the topmost level of the Undercity. Supposedly it went down farther than this. Buildings getting older and older. Technology getting older and older.

And under it all, at least if Varis was to be believed, there was an Ancient city. Like Ancient with a capital letter. In the sense of the Ancient precursors that had given rise both to the livisk and to humanity, and to a few other civilizations out there that had two arms, two legs, and opposable thumbs.

The number of fingers and toes could vary from species to species, and the color of skin could vary greatly. Not to mention things like height and strength and all that.

"This is amazing," I said, as I flew along a predetermined flight path we'd mapped out by flying drones through the Undercity and trying to find the quickest way to get from here to the reclamation mine. The nice thing about my crew being stuck in a reclamation mine was it turns out we didn't have to worry about flying over the city to mount a rescue.

Not that I was entirely certain we were going to be mounting a rescue. No, as I looked at the city all around us, my mind filled with all sorts of thoughts. All sorts of ideas. All sorts of ways we could take advantage of this peculiar feature of Imperial Seat and use it to our advantage.

It was also entirely possible we'd die down here. Supposedly, there were a lot of ways to die in the Undercity. The architecture was naturally hostile. There were the aforementioned outlaws and brigands who lurked down here. Like actual outlaw bands that used the place as a base of operations where they didn't have to worry about the authorities.

And there was always the possibility of running up against the defensive systems for one of the massive noble towers that dotted Imperial Seat—in what I liked to call an architectural dick-measuring contest. It was my understanding that phrasing of the livisk skyline race was something that was starting to catch on with the nobility after I'd given voice to that theory in polite company a few times.

"This really goes under your entire city, and this is only the top level?"

"It is," she said, pointing down below. "If you look down there, you can see the remains of the Circle of Empress Clauthe."

"The Circle of Empress Clauthe?" I asked, turning to her and arching an eyebrow.

"The particulars about her aren't important," Varis said, shaking her head. "She was an empress once upon a time, and when this level of Imperial Seat was the surface they had a circle dedicated to her that was destroyed in the nuclear conflagration that eventually took this version of the city."

"Damn," I muttered, looking down there. "So nobody cared enough about this Clauthe bitch to name a circle after her up in the current version of Imperial Seat?"

"It's not that nobody cared enough to name a circle after her. More that there were several people who cared enough to not name a circle after her. She was a descendant of the old imperial line whose last successor opposed the current empress's mother when she was trying to rise to power."

"I see," I said. "So she's been scrubbed from the historical record."

"She's been minimized in the historical record up above, but anybody who comes down here and spends any amount of time in the Undercity will see the burnt-out monuments to her past glory."

That had me wondering what else might be lurking down here. They talked about lost technology and valuable materials that could be recycled, but what if there were also other historical records that could be recovered to give a more complete picture of livisk history?

Their habit of rewriting history made Stalin look like Indiana Jones demanding everything belongs in a museum in comparison.

"My name is Ozymandias," I muttered.

"What was that?" she asked.

"It's an ancient Earth story about a king who thought he was hot shit, and the only thing that was left of him in the historical record was a chunk of a statue in the middle of the desert or something. Though I'm pretty sure he was actually Ramses. So we have some record of him or something. I'm not sure, I never really looked into it all that much. I just know the quote."

"A commentary on how ephemeral power can be."

"Who knows," I said, turning and hitting her with a grin. "Maybe someday they'll be making circles dedicated to the Empress Varis."

Varis let out a shiver that I was pretty sure was involuntary. After all, we were talking about overthrowing dear leader, and if I'd learned anything about the unfortunates who grew up living under an asshole who had an almost cult like devotion, it was that the one thing they couldn't stand was anybody hurting dear leader. Even if dear leader had it coming.

But there was also determination through the link. So even though I saw the shiver run through her, I also knew she was set on this course of action.

I didn't even have to say anything as I moved the fighter craft along, though I did start to pick up speed.

Moving through a bunch of obliterated ancient ruins wasn't quite the same as doing a trench run, but it did come pretty close to doing a second Death Star run. Which was the little brother to the trench run that everybody grew up doing in video games back on Earth. Almost like they were training people to fly starfighters from an early age.

I idly wondered if that was part of the reason why humanity had done so much better than the livisk when it came to fighting. Pound for pound, fight for fight, our fighter pilots seemed to be able to outperform the livisk. I'd proved that time and again with my own exploits here in Imperial Seat, and Varis had remarked on it a couple of times.

Apparently their children spent so much time learning martial arts and how to do things like dueling that they didn't have much time for playing video games. Humanity had simply figured out a way to make that kind of training fun.

"I just hope we're able to… Ah, there it is," I said.

"Already?" Varis said, blinking.

"According to the readout," I said, pointing to the flight line Arvie projected on the canopy.

"Damn," she muttered.

"Time flies when you're having fun," I said, moving the fighter in nice and easy for a landing at a platform attached to the upper levels of the reclamation mine. Already I could see somebody running out of a long low building that looked to be made of reclaimed materials, complete with armed troops following behind them.

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