Ascendant Sun: A New Novel in the Saga of the Skolian Empire (26 page)

At Kelric's thought of Soz, the Kyle singularity behind him stirred his mind. He rose to his feet and turned to the column. Light shifted within its radiant core. Yes, Soz had been in the Triad. Only echoes of her presence remained. She was gone. He swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat, faced with this final confirmation of his sister's death.
But ... two other presences remained.
Aunt Dehya?
he asked.
No answer.
He walked to the Lock. It swirled before him, full and deep.
Come.
Its call formed as neither words nor thoughts, but deep within his mind.
Come.
He stepped into the singularity.

To the ships, the eons, and the humming cars.
Kelric, my boy, listen softly to the tales,
Of children, of ball games, of blowing sails.
Kelric, my hope, named for endless, dreaming Youth
Come now, little boy, don't pull your sore tooth.
The nursery rhyme murmured in his mind. When he had been a small boy, his father had sung it to him, changing the words to fit the adventures of his son, the boy his parents had named Kelricson, after the Lyshriol spirit of youth, because he was their last child.
Father?
His thought rumbled in this place where time and space had no meaning. He had no body. Only thought.
No answer came out of the radiance. He didn't feel his father's mind, exactly, but more a sense of his presence.
A new presence registered, a glimmering mesh that filled space, undulating in an endless ocean of light. If his father was the sea that supported the web, then Dehya Selei, the Ruby Pharaoh, was the web itself.
Aunt Dehya?
he asked.
Kelric?
Her response came like a distant murmur of waves.
Where are you?
Gone
 ... Her unseen presence swirled in currents of light. Unlike Kelric or his father, whose thoughts were here but not their bodies,
all
of Dehya was present. Her corporeal being had become part of this universe. Had she died? Was this only an echo of her life?
I exist,
she thought.
Come home. Our people need their Pharaoh.
He paused.
Your family needs you.
I will try.
Then her presence vanished.
He waited, letting his mind fill space, but no more wisps of her came to him. Gradually he oriented himself. His mind was here, in this otherplace, but physically he still stood within the Lock. Looking through the luminous column, he saw his image in the reflective walls of the chamber. Tall and erect, he stood within the column of light, his face tilted up, his palms turned outward, his body radiant within that luminous pillar.
He thought of his father: the gentle parent who carried him when he was small; the athlete who taught him to run, throw, and catch; the warrior who trained him with bow and sword, though he knew his son would soon leave home to become a star warrior. Kelric had passed him in physical height when he was barely an adolescent, and as an adult he towered over his father. But he never stopped looking up to this man who had made such an impact on his life.
Father?
he thought.
Are you here?
As if from a distant shore, a thought whispered across him:
Come home to us, my son.

Kelric sat on the console stool, staring at the column of light. Although he no longer stood within it, he felt its power coursing through him. His mind had become more. It existed here, but it was also part of that other place now, unbounded by space and time.
So strange. How could Dehya exist
within
that space? No wonder no one knew what had happened to her. Somehow, to escape the Trader commandos who infiltrated the Orbiter, she must have gone
into
the First Lock, mind and body both.

Come back,
he thought, hoping the echo would reach her. It made him remember his father's words:
Come home to us, my son.
His father would be ninety now. He hadn't had access to modern life-extending treatments until he was a grown man. It made a difference even modern medicine couldn't overcome. Eighteen years ago he had already been showing signs of age, silver in his hair, weaker eyesight, a slower walk. Kelric wanted to believe he would always be there, but in that call, he had felt his father's age.
Kelric swallowed. For all that he might command the military of an empire and wield powers beyond spacetime, he couldn't stop his father from getting old.
I will see you again,
he thought.
Then he stood and walked to the singularity. Walked. Easily. His hydraulics were operating again. Gazing into the pillar, he said, "I, Kelricson Garlin Valdoria Skolia, accept the title of Imperator."

Blue light still lit the access tube. He could leave the way he had come. But first he had to disable the Lock.
Instead of entering the tube, Kelric left the chamber by another entrance, a curved arch that opened onto a wide corridor. Transparent columns bordered the corridor, each filled with clockwork machinery made from precious metals. Lights spiraled within the columns. The floor extended out from his feet in a diamond-steel composite. The ceiling arched so far overhead, he only glimpsed its distant vaulted spaces.
The architecture evoked Highton cylinder ships. It wasn't pure Aristo: the Ruby designers had used right angles as well as curves and polygons. But the modern Aristo style had its ancestry here. To a lesser extent, that ancestry also showed in the graceful arches and vaults of Skolian architecture. But when the people of Raylicon split into Eubians and Skolians, their ways of defining spaces had also split. It was more than architecture; it affected their fundamental outlook. Over the centuries, the Eubian style had grown ever more complex. For all the cruelty they created, they also achieved a great beauty, a fractal way of thought unlike anything attained, or even imagined, by Skolians.
We all lost when we split, Kelric thought. We became fractions of a people. They lost a part of their basic humanity and we lost a gift of abstract mental creation.
What of Coba? Isolated for thousands of years, the Cobans had retained both the fascinating complexity of Aristo thought and the elegant simplicity of Skolian creation. So their minds gave birth to Quis. Regret rippled over Kelric. Were the universe a different place, he could have become a mathematician at some secluded institute and spent his time using Quis in an attempt to unravel the secrets of the ancients. He would have loved such a life. But he didn't live in that universe. He had too many duties here.
He strode down the corridor as if he were walking through the eons. He had an eerie sense of coming forward from the past, from the time when the Ruby Empire built its inexplicable machines. No wonder neither his people nor the Traders ever unraveled the ancient Ruby sciences. Skolians no longer had the style of abstract thought they needed to comprehend it. The Aristos would never succeed because they had a cavity where their capacity for empathy should have been. By eradicating their Kyle genes, they destroyed their ability to re-create the very Ruby sciences they craved.
To Kelric, it seemed the Traders lost far more than his people. Aristos had become inhuman in their search for the ultimate state of humanity. Yet he couldn't help but wonder:
What if?
What if a way existed to combine the best of Eube and Skolia? What if they melded the Aristo gifts for abstract beauty with a psion's compassion and capacity for love? It hurt for him to imagine the splendor of that joining because he knew it was impossible. Quis was probably the closest humanity would ever come to such a joining. And Quis was only a game. It wasn't human.
The corridor ended at an archway more than twice his height, with lights running around its edges. As he approached, he searched the area with his mind. He detected no one, not the emptiness of an Aristo, the neutrality of a taskmaker, or the vulnerability of a provider.
He paused at the corridor's end. A large chamber slumbered beyond, shadowed, lit only by the spillover of light from the arch where he stood. On a dais to his right, a giant chair caught glints of light. Its armrests were glimmering silver blocks, half a meter wide and a meter long, packed with webtech. Equipment embedded the massive backrest. The chair's hood contained sensors capable of unsurpassed VR simulations. Silver webbing with psiphon prongs lay on the seat, ready to connect their user to the web. The chair stood like a throne.
His throne.
Had the Lock still been at Onyx and had the web still existed, he would have sat in that chair and linked into the star-flung web that wove his empire together. Instead, he walked past the dais to the consoles on the far wall. He bent over the main unit, scanning its controls. Then he took a psiphon plug and clicked it into his wrist.
The power of the Lock coursed through him.

Attending.
Suspend,
Kelric thought.
Done.
The Lock's subvocal rumble stopped. Just like that. The air dimmed. For all appearances, the Lock had just died.
Sleep well,
he thought. He unplugged from the console and returned to the archway. He stared down the long corridor to the Lock chamber. The lights in the arches, in the columns, even the sparkle of the diamond-steel floor— all had dimmed. Far down the corridor, the Kyle singularity had gone dark.
A sense of easing spread through Kelric, as if a weight had lifted from his shoulders. Incredibly, he had succeeded. His chances of escaping Trader space were small, but he had accomplished his most important goal.
He had made peace possible.
Now it only remained for him to leave, as fast as possible. He turned for one last glance at the throne—
And looked straight into the face of the Trader emperor.

Holo. As his surge of adrenaline eased, Kelric realized he was looking at a holographic image. Jaibriol I had died long before Kelric's birth. Yet there he sat, in the flush of youth. Tall and strong, long-legged and broad in the shoulders, the young man seemed to stare at him. He showed a gentler face than Kelric had seen in other holos of Jaibriol I. In this misleading image, no cruelty marred the classic perfection of his Highton features.
In fact, now that he looked closely, the holo didn't resemble Jaibriol I as much as he first thought. Maybe this was his grandson, the late Jaibriol II, who had sat on the Carnelian Throne during the Radiance War.
"Are you done staring at me?" the emperor inquired.
Kelric froze. Good gods, it wasn't a holo. A living man sat on the throne.
His mind spun with plans: knock out the youth, use him as a hostage, run for the shuttle. None were promising. Any Highton with access to the Third Lock would have ESComm backup. This Aristo could raise an alarm before Kelric even made it a few steps.
Stalling for time, he said, "How did you get in here?"
"I should ask that question of you." The youth gave him an appraising glance. "You were intent on your work. Killing the Lock, I gather." He leaned on his elbow, which rested on the chair's massive arm. It was a classic pose, a study in regal posture.
And yet ... something else was familiar. Was it only the boy's resemblance to the emperor? This youth had the snowmarble skin, ruby eyes, and glittering hair of an Aristo. But that wasn't what tugged Kelric's memory.
Then it hit him. "You're the one who spoke in the broadcast from the emperor's palace."
The youth was also studying him. "You saw the broadcast?"
"From a distance." Kelric paused, still puzzled. The tug on his memory came from more than the broadcast. What?
What?
Quietly he said, "I know you."
The Aristo shrugged, an exquisitely Highton gesture that held a world of innuendo: the suggestion of superiority, ingrained Highton arrogance, the assumption of his right to privilege— all contained in one subtle lift of the shoulders. "I should think all settled space knows me by now."
If nothing else, his arrogance gave him away. "You're a Qox," Kelric said.
Although he laughed, it sounded hollow. "Not
a
Qox.
The
Qox."
Kelric stood for a full five seconds absorbing his implication. Then he said, "The emperor's heir?"
In a deceptively soft voice, he said, "I am no heir. I rule Eube. As Jaibriol Three."
Gods. Did they never die out? How many more Jaibriols were lurking around the galaxy? "Jaibriol Two had no heir."
"Or course he did. Me."
Kelric thought his life had surely become surreal, that he stood here conversing with someone who claimed to be emperor of Eube. An undefined sense of recognition still bothered him. "I know you from somewhere."
Jaibriol gave him a well-crafted smile of condescension. "Perhaps you were dazzled by your time in the Lock, Lord Skolia."
Odd, that Qox used his dynastic title. Jaibriol spoke to him as an equal. Yet the Qox Dynasty had long refused to acknowledge the Ruby Dynasty as their counterparts. In diplomatic situations, they used the expected titles. But they made no secret of their disdain. Here, nothing constrained Jaibriol. Yet for all that his Highton mannerisms were perfect, almost too perfect, his use of the Imperator's title sounded genuine.
Suddenly Kelric knew what bothered him. Jaibriol's mind had no abyss. It wasn't like with Tarquine. Hers felt normal. With Jaibriol, he had a strange sense, as if the young man protected himself with mental barriers so well crafted that even a member of the Rhon could barely detect them. Only a psion could build such shields. Only a psion
needed
them. And Jaibriol III was no psion.
Incredibly, another recognition flared. Quietly he said, "You're Jay Rockworth. The Dawn Corps volunteer on Edgewhirl."
Jaibriol paused, as if considering his answer. Then he moved his hand in dismissal. "This was all in the broadcast."
"That you were with the Allieds?"
"That my parents hid me on Earth. The Allieds discovered it and traded me to Eube."
Gods. No wonder that broadcast had riveted the Aristos. What the blazes had possessed the Allieds to make such a trade? What could Eube possibly offer that was worth giving them a new emperor, especially this vital youth whose presence on the Carnelian Throne would revitalize the war-weary Aristos? Were the Allieds insane?
Softly Jaibriol said, "I had no idea who you were, that day on Edgewhirl."
"Nor I, for you," Kelric said.
Jaibriol hesitated. "Which one are you?"
"Which one?" If Kelric hadn't known better, he would have thought the youth sounded shy.
"In the Ruby Dynasty."
"Kelricson Valdoria."
The emperor froze. He spoke in such a low voice, it was almost a whisper. "Del-Kelric." Grief flowed from his mind, inexplicable, as if he had lost a loved one by that name.
Kelric had no idea how to respond. Where would Jaibriol hear such a name?
Del
was given to Skolian children to honor a beloved relative. Del-Kelric meant
in honor of Kelric.
What could that possibly mean to a Highton lord?
Jaibriol seemed to give himself a mental shake. Once again he became the cool aristocrat. "Where did you come from? You've been dead for years."
Kelric had no intention of answering. "Why were you with the Dawn Corps?" He shook his head. "It makes no sense. You expressed sympathy for the Ruby Dynasty."
Jaibriol shrugged. "Perhaps you remember what you wish."
"No." Kelric wasn't fooled. "And you look familiar. I don't know why. But I
know
you."
The youth stood, rising to his full height, over six feet. He stepped down from the throne and crossed the dais. When he stopped in front of Kelric, only a rail separated them. The dais added enough to his height to bring his eyes level with Kelric's. "Go. Now. While you can."
"You would let me go?"
"Yes."
Kelric didn't believe it. "Why?"
Jaibriol spoke with cool, cultured tones. Yet more underlay his words. Longing? Determination? Hope? In his many-layered voice, he said, "Meet me at the peace table."
"You want me to believe you wish peace," Kelric said, "when you have a Lock and two Keys."
"What Lock?" The youth spread his hands. "It no longer works."
He knew Jaibriol had seen him suspend the singularity. Yet the emperor never even asked if he could bring it alive again.
"We had one Key," Jaibriol said. "We gave him back."
Kelric waited for him to qualify his misleading statement. After several seconds, when the youth remained silent, Kelric said, "Gave who back?"
"Your brother. Eldrin Valdoria."
"Don't lie to me, Highton."
"Why would I lie?"
"It's what you Hightons do. Lie, manipulate, cheat."
That was when it happened. For one instant Jaibriol's mask of cool superiority slipped. In that moment his face revealed a terrified, lonely young man trapped in a situation far beyond his experience. His gaze was so wrenchingly familiar, Kelric's breath caught. Why? Gods,
why?
Then Jaibriol recovered. Once again the emperor faced him. "I've little interest in your imagined list of Highton ills." His disdain was almost convincing.
Almost.
Kelric tried to fathom him. "Eube would never give its Key to the Allieds. Not when you finally had a Lock. Nothing is worth it."
"Not even me?"
That stopped Kelric. "You, for Eldrin?"
"Yes."
Could it be true? It was the one trade he could imagine the Allieds making with sanity. A young, vibrant emperor on the throne would revitalize Eube. But at the price of their Key? It must have ignited a furious debate.
Jaibriol spoke dryly. "You are right, it wasn't a universally popular decision. But it is done. I am emperor and your brother is an Allied prisoner."
Kelric knew better than to let himself hope. More likely, Jaibriol was toying with him while guards waited outside.
"I am alone," Jaibriol said.
Kelric tensed. "Why did you say that?" It wasn't the first time Jaibriol seemed to know his thoughts. Yet no Aristo could be a psion. It wasn't in the genetic lines they protected with such obsessive fanaticism. For the emperor, they would have verified his DNA down to the last nucleotide.
"You didn't wonder if I had guards?" Jaibriol raised his eyebrows. "I find that hard to believe."
"And you just happened to come in— alone— when I was here."
A smile curved Jaibriol's patrician lips. "Ah, well. It would be a great coincidence, yes? But I knew you were here."
"How?"
"Perhaps you could say I felt it."
"Perhaps. I don't believe it."
"I suppose not." Jaibriol rubbed his chin. "I detected your entrance in the station web."
Kelric knew the boy was lying. But why? What did he have to gain? And why did Jaibriol look so hauntingly familiar?
"Imperator Skolia." Jaibriol took a breath. "Meet me when we can discuss peace."
"Why should I believe you want this?"
"Ask for something I can grant as proof of my intent."
It was a fair, if unexpected, question. Kelric considered. "There is a man. A Skolian. Jafe Maccar. Captain of the
Corona.
After a battle at the space station
Chrysalis,
Maccar was sentenced to ten years in an ESComm prison. Unjustly." He regarded Jaibriol. "Pardon him."
The emperor paused. "I will consider it."
His lukewarm response didn't surprise Kelric. He doubted Maccar would see his freedom. If Jaibriol pardoned him, it would undermine ESComm's claim that Maccar instigated the incident.
Jaibriol motioned upward, a gesture that seemed to include all Eube. "It's like a great thundering machine I hold by the barest thread. If I am to find a road to peace, I need your help."
Then, finally, it hit Kelric, what he had known at a subliminal level throughout this surreal conversation, an awareness that grew until it became conscious in his mind. It was impossible. Utterly impossible.
Jaibriol III was a psion.
He felt the youth's mind. Jaibriol did have barriers. They had been dissolving as he and Kelric talked, probably without Jaibriol realizing it. His luminous Kyle strength glowed.
In a low voice, Kelric said, "You're a telepath."
"No." Pain layered Jaibriol's denial. He became pure Highton. Polished. Smooth. Cold. Unreal. "I am what you see. Qox."
"At what price?" Kelric asked softly. "What must you suffer to hide the truth?"
Jaibriol met his gaze. "Was anyone here when I came into the Lock? I never saw him."
What hells did this young man live, ruling from the Carnelian Throne, surrounded by Aristos every day of his life, never knowing surcease? How had it happened? Watching Jaibriol, he knew he would learn no more answers here.
He spoke gently. "Gods help you, son."
Jaibriol swallowed. "Go. Now. While you can."
Kelric stepped back into the arched entrance of the corridor. When Jaibriol said nothing, Kelric turned and started the long walk down the Lock corridor. His back itched as he waited for the gunshot, maybe a neural blocker to disable him, or an EM pulse rifle that would shred his body.
"Lord Skolia," Jaibriol said.
He froze. Turning, he faced the emperor. Would the game end now? "Yes?"
"If you make it to Earth—" Jaibriol lifted his hand, as if to reach toward Kelric. He stood poised, his posture showing the strain of longing balanced with denial. Then he lowered his arm. "Go see Admiral William Seth Rockworth."
So. Jaibriol did have a link to Seth. "I will go." He wanted to ask more, but he dared remain no longer. Turning, he resumed his walk. As he strode down that avenue of the ages, he had a strange sense, as if Jaibriol spoke in his mind: