Ascendant Sun: A New Novel in the Saga of the Skolian Empire (3 page)

Jay stiffened. "Of course I do." He indicated the forms Kelric held. "Shall we begin?"
Kelric had no intention of filling out anything. He handed Jay the papers. "I'll come back."
"Are you sure?" As Jay's focus returned to Kelric, his tension faded, replaced by genuine concern. In a gentle voice he said, "You look like you need a place to eat and rest."
His solicitude touched Kelric, as had his earlier kindness. Standing up, he said, "I'm fine. But thank you." He wasn't fine, but he couldn't risk revealing more about himself.
"Come back if you need anything." Jay rose and extended his arm, his hand held sideways. Kelric blinked at it. Just as Jay began to look self-conscious, Kelric remembered the custom. He clasped Jay's hand and moved his arm up and down. It felt odd to touch a stranger.
After Kelric left the Dawn Corps, he sat on a bench outside and watched people go by. Exhaustion weighed on him. Even the thought of walking a few steps was too much. He had used up his depleted physical resources and now he just wanted to sleep. But he had to make plans. He needed to contact an ISC base, one strong enough to protect a member of the Ruby Dynasty.
In normal times he probably could have found passage to ISC headquarters. But in this chaos, with civilization breaking down, he was painfully vulnerable. Nor would it be easy to find officers he could trust. Many in ISC stood to benefit from the current lack of leadership. If he approached the wrong people, he could end up in more trouble than if the Allieds caught him.
Even his claim to his title was tenuous. The Imperator had no coronation. His investment consisted of joining the Triad powerlink, which he couldn't do until he reached one of the Lock command stations used to create the psiberweb.
He stood up— and spots swirled in his vision. Swaying, he dropped back on the bench and sat still, waiting for the vertigo to pass and his nausea to recede. When he felt steadier, he took a deep breath and stood again.
He needed help. Soon. He was the only member of his family free to assume the leadership his people needed.
And he was dying.

The line of men outside the hostel stretched along an ocher wall that bordered the sandy street. Kelric waited in line, hugging his arms around his body for warmth. This overcrowded shelter for homeless men was the only place he had found that offered meals without requiring he give ID or fill out forms.
The hostel was on Porthaven's west side, where the city petered out into a saffron desert. He could look down the street into the barren flatlands and see all the way to the horizon. The curving edge of the small world seemed oddly close.
The setting sun stained the city in hues of blood and fire. Behind him, in the east, the sky had darkened to a brooding dark red, like cooling lava, almost black. Overhead, it glowered a deep crimson, and on the western horizon it flamed scarlet, as bright as fluorescent glaze.
Only the upper arch of the sun, Whirligig, showed above the horizon. Its molten edge rimmed the world like lava ready to pour across the flatlands in rivers of bronzed radiance. Kelric knew the long sunset shouldn't surprise him, given the planet's fifty-nine-hour day. But the evening seemed interminable as he waited, hoping for warmth, a meal, and a place to sleep.
His mind felt clogged. Plugged with the debris of half-formed concepts. The street blurred around him into a dark copper limbo. At his back, the wall was hard. It moved against him ... or maybe he moved against it ... sliding down ...
Kelric hit the ground with a jarring thud. He would have fallen on his side, his arms still wrapped around his body, if his shoulder hadn't hit the legs of a man ahead of him. The fellow swore and swung around, his fists clenching. When he saw Kelric, his fists uncurled and he looked around, his motions frantic for some reason.
Kelric tried to get up. He couldn't do it. He had used up all his reserves of energy. So he sat against the wall, shivering, wondering why no one else seemed cold. Dimly, as if from far away, he heard alarmed voices, someone calling to someone else. Urgent words. He closed his eyes, trying to shut them out. Needed sleep ...
"Sir?" The man spoke in Skolian Flag.
Kelric opened his eyes. The man kneeling in front of him wore the beige uniform of the Imperial Relief Allocation Service, a civilian group run by the Skolian government. The IRAS patch on his shoulder identified him as a medic, and he held a glossy roll of diagnostic tape.
"Do you mind if I examine you?" the man asked.
"No," Kelric said. He was past caring what anyone did.
With a gentle touch, the medic tilted Kelric's head to the side and unrolled the tape along his neck. He studied the holos rotating above it, which Kelric could see by slanting his gaze downward. Glyphs were probably scrolling across the tape, but he had no way to read those.
The medic's face paled. "I think you better come inside."
"All right," Kelric said. It was, after all, why he had come here. Except he no longer had the energy to get up.
Someone in line said, "We've been here longer," and another voice said, "What the bloody hell do we have to do to get in?" Someone else said, "You have to die, jerkoid."
The words bounced off Kelric. Two armed IRAS officers were watching the line now. He regarded them with a sense of floating. The medic was talking again, but he could no longer process the words. He watched the man's mouth move. A humming noise filled his ears, thrumming, buzzing, burring, until it blended with reality and took away his thoughts.
Four orderlies appeared with an air stretcher. They lifted Kelric onto it and laid him on his back. Red sky arched above him, limitless and free. His mind wafted up into the soughing, seductive breezes. Softly, so softly floating. Finally to rest. After so long, finally to rest ...
Far away, as if through layers of muffling cloth, he heard voices shouting. An air-needle hissed against his arm, running feet pounded, air rushed past his face.
Then his mind disintegrated.

Hiss. Stop. Start. Stop.
Phissssss.
Kelric lay in a cocoon of warmth.
The blurs above him resolved into a ceiling, a simple surface, ugly in fact, a dull white. The light fixture was a white half sphere, or what used to be white. Its plastiflex covering had long ago yellowed. He stared at it and listened to the hissing hum.
After a while, he looked to the left. He was lying on a cot, a few hand spans away from another cot. A man slept there under an old blue blanket. Kelric turned his head to the right and saw another cot. The man in this one was singing in a low voice, the same phrase over and over, a tuneless hiss about dead birds. He gave no indication he knew the rest of the universe existed.
Moving slowly, his body protesting with aches, Kelric sat up. The old blue blanket that had covered him slipped down to his waist. Slender insulation conduits threaded its weave. Some had worked out of the frayed cloth and scratched his skin. Bare-chested, he wore only a pair of sleep trousers, clean, but faded to gray from many washings. An antiquated IV patch was attached to his inner elbow. Fluid fed it through a plastiflex tube that stretched to a bag on the wall behind him. It was a crude setup; he couldn't even leave the cot unless he pulled off the patch.
He looked around the hospital ward. Cots crammed the large room, side by side and toe to head, hundreds, all occupied. The place smelled of disinfectant and plastic. For all those patients he saw only two medics, both in IRAS uniforms, a woman near the door and a harried man across the room.
Fatigue pressed on him. Hunger gnawed at his stomach despite the IV. More than anything else, though, he felt relief. After his delirium of the past few days, he was grateful to be coherent. He hadn't realized how bad his condition had become until it improved enough for him to notice the difference. His throat ached, his head throbbed, and fever heated his face. He didn't care. He was alive.
Alive.
So he sat on his cot, barely thinking, content.
After a while the medic across the room straightened up, rubbing his neck. He moved on, squeezing his way between cots, stopping often to talk with patients and check monitors. Kelric watched him, oddly comforted. The doctor had a pleasant face, as smooth as polished wood. Like most Edgewhirl natives, he wore his hair in two braids that fell to his waist.
Eventually he reached Kelric's cot. He spoke to Kelric in Skolian Flag, his voice rich with the Edgewhirl accent. "You look a lot better today."
It took Kelric a few seconds to answer. "I give thanks for your generous care."
Ach
. Too formal. His ability to converse was as rusty as oxidized foil. He had grown up speaking Iotic and reverted to its cadences when he was tired. Almost no one used the archaic tongue anymore except the Ruby Dynasty and a few ancient houses descended from the otherwise vanished nobility of the Ruby Empire. He hoped the doctor didn't recognize his accent; the fewer people who figured out his background, the better.
"Do you mind if I sit?" the doctor asked.
"Please do." Kelric pushed back against the wall, making room. The singer in the next cot had fallen silent, except for an occasional rattling snore.
The doctor sat down, facing Kelric. "I'm Tarjan. I was here when they brought you in yesterday."
"How long?" Kelric managed.
"How long have you been here?" When Kelric nodded, Tarjan said, "About thirty hours."
Kelric sat for a moment. Then he said, "I had an odd sense yesterday when I passed out. As if I were disintegrating." It felt strange to speak so much. Profligate.
Tarjan answered in a gentle voice. "You were dying."
Dying. Kelric shook his head, more to clear it than to deny the words. "Can you fix it?"
He only meant, could they fix him so he wouldn't keel over if he stood up. But as soon as he saw Tarjan's strained look, he knew the doctor had taken the literal meaning, not could he help Kelric back on his feet, but could he heal him.
Tarjan spoke carefully. "Your malnutrition and exhaustion need only food and sleep."
"But?"
"We can't be sure," he hedged.
"Tell me." Kelric was too drained to wrestle with careful words. "I already know I'm damaged inside."
Tarjan exhaled. "Yes. I'm sorry."
"How bad?"
"Of course, one can always hope—"
"Doctor." Kelric crumpled the threadbare blanket in his fist. "How bad?"
Tarjan spoke quietly. "You need a new heart. New liver. At least one new kidney. Preferably two. You're anemic. The lining of your stomach and intestines is degraded. Have you had nausea?" When Kelric nodded, the doctor said, "I'm afraid it may get worse. Also, the nanomeds in your body that provide health and maintenance, and delay aging, are mutating. They're attacking their own host. You." He paused. "You are a Jagernaut, yes?"
"Yes."
Tarjan simply nodded, as if it were perfectly normal to learn that a patient in his charity ward was a human weapon. "I figured that was why you have so much biomech in your body." He regarded Kelric with concern. "The structural supports and high pressure bioplastics that enhance your musculature and skeleton are fraying, eaten by the mutated nanomeds. The micro-engines that control the system are corroded. About the only component with no damage is the microfusion reactor that powers you."
"It's built to survive." With a smile, Kelric added, "Can't have my power source melting down inside of me."
He meant it as a joke, but he felt Tarjan's unease. Kelric had forgotten how uncomfortable Jagernauts made people. That ISC's versatile weapons were also human, empaths in fact, was a fact people all too often forgot.
Tarjan rubbed his chin. "I've seen problems on Edgewhirl similar to yours. Some people can't tolerate the traces of chlorine here. Gradually it poisons them. I'd say you've been dealing with a biosphere even more hostile to your chemistry. Your meds probably counteracted some of the effects, but they aren't operating anywhere near full capacity. The problems must have been accumulating for years, even decades."
"Can you help?" Kelric asked.
"I can treat the anemia. I may also have medicine to slow the mutation rate of your meds." He exhaled. "But you need a full ISC hospital, one equipped to operate on Jagernauts, repair biomech damage, perform organ replacements or regeneration, flush out the defective meds in your body, and reseed you with healthy meds. That's far more than we can do here."
It was what Kelric had expected. "Is there an ISC hospital in the region?"
"Nothing. I checked as soon as we realized the severity of your condition."
"Any ISC base at all on-planet?" There had to be someone on this tiny world who could help him.
"There's a naval base on the Whitecap Coast of the Jadar continent," Tarjan offered. "But they've neither the facilities to treat you nor transportation to take you offworld."
"No ships at all?" When the doctor shook his head, Kelric made an incredulous noise. "What happened to the ISC presence on this planet?"
Tarjan gave him an odd look. "Same as everywhere else. The Glory Invasion."
Kelric had expected a comment on the Radiance War. Glory? Surely that didn't refer to the preposterous name the Trader Aristos had given their capital world. Eube's Glory. It took its name from Eube Qox, the Aristo who had founded the Eubian Concord. What a crock. Then again, no one had ever accused Eube Qox of modesty.
"You can't mean the Eube capital," he said.
Tarjan looked puzzled. "What else would I mean?"
"Are you telling me that Imperator Skolia took ISC into the heart of Eubian territory?" Had his sister gone mad? The Eubian capital was impregnable. "That's suicide."
"Not according to the news broadcasts."
"Why? What do they say?"
"ISC destroyed almost every military site in the system and then got out of there." He paused. "Except for Imperator Skolia and the Imperial Heir, may they rest well."
So that was how his sister and brother had died. No wonder it earned them a ten-story memorial. Kelric couldn't keep his anger out of his voice. "What the hell were the Imperator and Imperial Heir doing with an invasion fleet?"
Surprise at Kelric's lack of knowledge leaked from Tarjan's mind. "Althor Valdoria, the Imperial Heir, had been an ESComm prisoner for two years."
Tarjan might as well have socked him in the stomach. Althor, a prisoner of war? Kelric didn't want to imagine what his brother had endured during two years of ESComm interrogation. Death must have been a blessing. "And the Imperator?"
"She went in to get him. And to avenge the death of her brother, Kurj Skolia."
Kelric just looked at him. Tarjan had no idea his words were like blows. "How did Kurj Skolia die?"
"You don't know that either?"
Kelric wanted to grab his shoulders and shake the answers out of him. "No."
"I didn't mean to offend," Tarjan said gently. He pushed one of his braids over his shoulder. "Two years ago, ESComm ambushed his fleet in deep space. They destroyed all but the bridge of his flagship. When it was over, the Eubian emperor went in to claim Imperator Skolia as his prisoner."
"You mean Emperor Ur Qox?" Eighteen years ago, Ur Qox had been emperor, but Kelric had no idea who sat on the Carnelian Throne now. That sounded like Qox's style, though; come in after the work was done and take credit.
"That's right." Tarjan watched him with puzzlement. "Qox's people believed they had Imperator Skolia defeated."
Kelric knew his brother. Kurj had been called the Fist of Skolia with good reason. "But they didn't."
"No. He rigged the antimatter containment bottles on his ship and sprung the trap when Qox came onboard." Quietly Tarjan said, "The resulting explosion obliterated the ships. Both the Imperator and Emperor Qox died."
So Kurj died taking Ur Qox with him. It helped to know his half brother would have considered it an honorable end. "Then Sauscony Valdoria became Imperator?"
"That's right."
Kelric scowled. "What was she doing with the invasion fleet? The Imperator has no business going into battle." How could she have taken such a chance with her life? It was far more precious than Eube's inanely titled Glory.
Tarjan spread his hands. "I don't claim to know the workings of the ISC mind. I only know the rumors."
"Tell me."
"They say the Triad couldn't support both her and the Ruby Pharaoh. They couldn't both survive. Their minds were too alike, whatever that means. Apparently the Imperator wanted her death to have a meaning."
Kelric knew exactly what it meant. It two minds in the Triad were too alike, they resonated until it tore apart the three-way link. It was how Kurj's father had died: the link shattered when Kurj joined the Triad. It wasn't possible to "resign" from the Triad; a member's neural connections became so intertwined with the link that pulling out left a person brain-dead.
"Is that how the Ruby Pharaoh died?" Kelric asked. "A Triad failure?"
"No one seems to know," Tarjan said. "She's just gone."
"Gone?"
"Apparently. There hasn't been much news."
Kelric frowned. The more answers he got, the less he knew. "And the ISC bases here?"
"ISC pulled in ships from all over the Imperialate for the invasion," Tarjan said.
"How many ships did we lose?"
The doctor gave him another curious look. "They started with eight hundred thousand and returned with seventy thousand. Most of the casualties were drones crewed by EI brains."
Kelric stared at him. "We lost over
ninety percent
of our fleet? With our forces that depleted, we're ripe for ESComm attack."
"There is no ESComm," Tarjan said bluntly. "We destroyed them. Broke their back and put a stake through their heart."
It suddenly hit Kelric that he didn't know the most crucial detail of the war. Caught up in his grief over his family, he had never asked the obvious question. "Who won?"
Tarjan finally gave in to his curiosity. "Where have you been, that you know so little about all this?"
Where indeed? He needed a cover story. He would have to think it through before he said anything, though; better to remain silent than make mistakes now he couldn't undo later.
When it became clear Kelric didn't intend to answer, the doctor said, "We don't know who won."
How could they not know who won the war? "Why not?"
"Both ISC and ESComm are crippled. We have no Ruby Dynasty, they have no emperor. Imperator Kurj killed Emperor Ur Qox. Imperator Sauscony killed Ur Qox's son."
Kelric blinked. "Ur Qox had an heir?"
"Yes. Jaibriol the Second."
Jaibriol the Second. So Ur Qox had named his misbegotten son after his infamous father. If the second Jaibriol had been as brutal as the first, then Soz truly gave her life for the betterment of humanity.
Tarjan spoke tiredly. "Eube is broken, we're broken. Perhaps now, finally, these leaders of ours, what remains of them, will go to the peace table." He gave Kelric a wan smile. "That would be something, eh? Genuine peace negotiations between Skolia and Eube."
"Yes." Kelric absorbed that thought.
Would this be his legacy then, to usher in an era of peace? It gave him hope. Although he had earned his reputation for ferocity as a Jagernaut, he would rather have studied math. Introverted and contemplative, he preferred equations to battles. In his youth he had been a good test pilot, reveling in those solitary flights. But the further he rose in rank, the less he wanted a military career. Choice, however, had never played a role in his life. His education, career, marriages, even his freedom, had been arranged by others to suit the purpose of politics, first among his people and later on Coba.
Before he ushered in anything, though, he had to become Imperator, which meant joining the Triad. To do that, he had to reach one of the three Locks. The Orbiter space station carried the First Lock, and the planet Raylicon had the Second. The Third was at Onyx Platform, a city of space habitats floating among the stars.
"How long before I can leave here?" Kelric asked.
"I'd like you to stay two more days." Tarjan rubbed his neck, obviously trying to ease his knotted muscles. "You need to be here longer, but we don't have the space. I'm sorry."
He felt the doctor's exhaustion. Too many patients: too few resources. Tarjan feared he was turning out people too ill to leave.
Kelric put a scowl on his face. "You expect me to lie here doing nothing for two damn
days
? I think not." In truth, he felt ready to collapse after sitting up a few minutes. But maybe he could ease this overworked doctor's undeserved guilt.
Tarjan wasn't fooled. He smiled. "Don't worry. You'll sleep most of the time."
Kelric didn't doubt it.