Club Review: Because the immortal Emperor can grant a form of eternal life-after-death, creating an elite known as the Risen, he has ruled the eighty worlds unchallenged for sixteen hundred years. He and his sister, the Child Empress 'forever a little girl' are worshipped as living gods. No one can touch them - no one but the Rix, machine-augmented humans who worship very different gods: AI compound minds encompassing entire planets. The Rix are cool, relentless fanatics, and their only goal is to propagate such AIs throughout the galaxy. They seek to end, by any means necessary, the Emperor's prolonged rule and supplant it with a cybernetic dynasty of their own. They begin by assaulting the Imperial Palace on Legis XV and taking hostage the Child Empress. Tasked with her rescue, brilliant tactician Captain Laurent Zai of the Imperial Frigate Lynx is well aware that failure constitutes an Error of Blood. Yet when the mission goes badly wrong, he declines to commit ritual suicide, and instead takes on a suicide mission: stopping the next thrust of the Rix invasion with just his own ship. While combat rages among the stars, the newborn Rix compound mind expands through the global net on Legis XV and works to break the Imperial blockade. And light-years away, Captain Zai's lover, Senator Nara Oxham, suspects that the mind has discovered the Emperor's hidden weakness: a dangerous secret for which he is willing to countenance the killing of worlds.