Schism: Part One of Triad (44 page)

no longer cared. His father would have sent one of his brothers out to find him. But Father was gone. Maybe forever.

He was too listless to move. The lethargy had often come over him since he stabbed Vitarex.

Murderer.

Prior to that night, Shannon had never fathomed what it meant to take another life. He knew his brothers Eldrin and Althor had ridden into battle, each when they were only two octets of years. Eldrin had killed three people, one with his bare hands. He came home a hero—and deeply troubled. He lost control of his temper more and more often, turning to violence. In the end, when his rages had threatened even his own safety, their parents had sent him to the Obiter, where experts helped him deal with his conflicted life and emotional scars. He had also learned to read and write. The Orbiter had been good for him. Finally he had begun to heal.

Too bad the Assembly had ruined everything by forcing him to marry. At least Eldrin seemed happy now. He certainly loved his little boy. Shannon thought of Varielle and ached. He had initially wondered if he liked her because she was the first woman of his own kind he had met He knew now it was her, just her. But he hadn’t seen her since that terrible night he had gone into Vitarex’s camp. No one would ever love him now. He would never win Varielle, never have a family, never have children.

He thought of his brother Vyrl, who had married at a younger age than Shannon was now. Vyrl and Lily had so many children, with another on the way. Shannon couldn’t imagine it. Nor could he imagine leaving Lyshriol.

Most of all, he struggled to understand Althor, who had slaughtered over three hundred Lyshrioli soldiers with a laser carbine. Shannon knew the remorse his brother had wrestled with after that day. But it never showed. Althor was by nature a warrior; he conquered his inner demons with a success Shannon could never manage. He had worshipped Althor all his life, but he could never be like his warlord brother.

Six years had passed since that day. No one fought battles on Lyshriol now. Everyone seemed stunned, the armies of Dalvador and Rillia, who had fought side by side, and those of their enemy, Avaril Valdoria, their father’s cousin, who hated Eldrinson for inheriting the title of Bard.

Shannon had never met Avaril. Those days of strife had become remote. He had dreaded going to war, and it filled him with immeasurable relief that he wouldn’t be expected to ride into battle when he reached his two octets of years. He wanted to wander the mountains, use his bow for bringing down game rather than men, let his emotions blend with the Archers beyond the Backbone, beyond Ryder’s Lost Memory, far in the north where the chill winds blew.

Instead he had murdered one of die most powerful men in an interstellar empire, and in doing so, he had robbed his family, this world, and the Imperialate of their chance to discover how Vitarex had invaded this Skolian stronghold. In the end, neither ISC nor the Traders demanded Shannon be prosecuted for Vitarex’s death, but it made no difference. Shannon knew what he had done.

For that, he could never forgive himself.

24

Onyx Platform

t was only a blip. Just a little spike of power in a Dieshan power grid. The tech on duty noticed and checked the fluctuations in mat section of the grid.

The spike was in reasonable bounds. He found nothing out of order, so he went on to his other work. He had done this shift for years, taking night duty at the ISC power station high in the Red Mountains West of HQ City and DMA. This grid served only a few defense installations—and the palace they guarded.

He glanced out the window. The palace stood high in the mountains, majestic and otherworldly, with walls of rose crystal. Its onion towers made silhouettes against an intense crimson sunset.

Ruby Palace.

Home of the Imperator.

Half an hour before sunrise, Althor jogged out to the airfield with the other three members of his squadron.

Their Jags waited on the tarmac.

Technically the single-pilot spacecraft were called JG-8 fighters. The name Jag came from “lightning jag,” the nickname test pilots had given the prototype, the JG-1. Al-thor’s adrenaline surged when he saw Redstar. His ship. Only he could fly this beauty. Its onboard Evolving Intelligence had become part of his brain and recognized no other pilot.

The four ships waited on the tarmac like alabaster works of art. On the ground, they were elongated, with wings extended. In flight, they could change according to meir purpose: spread wings for subsonic speeds; wings pulled in tight for hypersonic flight; rounded shape to minimize surface area during interstellar flight or for stealth or battle. The corrugated hull optimized airflow. Its weapons remained hidden in bays.

Secondary Steel, meir squad leader, jogged at Althor’s right. An older man with a distinguished record, he had steel gray hair and regular features. This was his last year in the J-Force; soon he would retire and spend time with his grandchildren. Tertiary Belldaughter ran on Steel’s other side, strapping on her Jumbler gun. After Althor, she was the youngest member of the squad.

Tertiary Wellmark was jogging to Althor’s left. She gazed out at the red line on the horizon that presaged the dawn, her chin lifted, her queue of dark hair rustling. They all wore Jagernaut blacks, with silver conduits, studs, and other equipment embedded in the leather and meir gauntlets. Their boots thudded on the field and their Jumblers hung heavy and black at their hips.

Althor was the newest of the four, proud to fly with Blackstar Squadron, one of the most resourceful squads in the J-Force, though he suspected the Traders used a far less polite term uian “resourceful.” Blackstar had a notorious reputation. He intended to make it more so.

His Jag was luminescent in the predawn light, pearly and white like alabaster.

As he ran alongside it, he trailed his hand along its tellerene hull, a composite threaded with tubular fullerene molecules. Lightweight and fatigue resistant, tellerene retained its strength even at the extreme temperatures of hypersonic reentry. Doped with specialized nanobots, it could repair itself better than many materials, which meant the hull showed fewer of the pits, grooves, and other damage ships took on during space travel. Like their pilots, Jags were top-of-the-line.

He stopped and laid his palm against the unmarked surface. A prong clicked out. When he pressed his wrist against the prong, or psiphon, it snapped into his biomech socket

Connection, Althor thought.

Veri f ied. That response came from his Jag’s EI. Redstar was sentient, its brain inextricably interwoven with his.

The airlock snapped apart. With his enhanced optics, Althor could slow the motion enough to see the outer and inner doors open together. ISC wizards were working on membranes that would act as molecular airlocks, but they hadn’t perfected the technology, so Jags used conventional airlocks with two doors.

Althor swung up into the cabin. It was small, only a few paces across, its deck tiled with white squares mat shed diffuse light. Equipment filled the cabin and bulkhead compartments: a cocoon bunk, survival gear, hand weapons, waste processor, environment suit, propulsion pack, all the necessities to live—and fight—in space. Alone. Jags had to operate autonomously. A squad could spend days or even months on their own. They were the vanguard, the units that supported the behemoths of ISC, the battle cruisers, the fleets, the multitude of other spacecraft, both manned and unmanned, mat made up the majority of the space forces.

The pressure of his boots on the deck activated the cockpit, and it irised open like the shutter on a high-speed holo-cam. Althor squeezed into his pilot’s seat, and its exoskeleton folded around his body, encasing him in a silver mesh. The visor lowered over his head and data scrolled across its display. Panels moved into place around him, and then-translucent surfaces produced holomaps of space and stats on the Jag. A panel to his right showed a holographic representation of the area outside, with his ship as the last in a line of four. Beyond them, the arches and magrails of the starport soared in die sky, silver, white, and cobalt in the dawn.

Aluior barely noticed as the exoskeleton plugged psiphons into his sockets.

Redstar linked to him by sending signals through the psiphons to threads in his body, which carried them to his spinal node. They could also use remote signals, but me prongs offered a more reliable connection.

His mind interpreted Redstar’s interaction wim his node as a voice: Redstar attending.

Acknowledged, Althor thought. He needed no security checks; Redstar knew him.

Some of its components had been developed from his own DNA. It was an extension of his brain just as he was of its mind. If anyone else tried to fly the ship, use its controls, or even board without permission, Redstar would lock up every system, trap the intruder wiUiin, and notify Althor, or if it couldn’t reach him, the nearest J-Force authorities. If Almor ever stopped flying, the J-Force would have to retrain Redstar from scratch. Sometimes a Jag’s EI refused to accept a new pilot and they had to transfer a new brain into the ship.

Redstar growled in his mind. Boosting to Kyle space.

Althor submerged his mind into another universe.

Kyle space obeyed the laws of Hilbert spaces, a matiie-matical formalism known to the Raylicans for millennia, and to the peoples of Earth well before they achieved space flight. Just as a Fourier transform shifted signals from an energy space to a time space, so Redstar had just shifted Althor from real space into Kyle space.

When Althor had a thought, the quantum wavefunction of his brain changed according to the chemical processes produced by his neurons. In quantum terms, it meant the wave that described his brain evolved as he thought. Humans had known for centuries how to express such waves, but it had taken much longer to achieve the computing power to calculate them.

The waves that described Althor’s thoughts at any instant depended on the positions of the particles in his brain. When his mind shifted into the Kyle web, he entered a place where his thought defined his “position.” The more his thoughts matched those of another telop, the closer together they were in Kyle space. It made no difference if the other telop was near him in the real universe or halfway across the galaxy; they would be next to each other in the web. It made possible immediate communication over interstellar distances.

The Kyle web, popularly known as the psiberweb, spanned the Kyle universe. Its nodes provided gateways from the real universe into the web. Only telepaths could use those gates, and each experienced the web in their own way. To Althor it was a grid, vivid red against a deep black background. The presence of his mind distorted the grid into a peak that resembled the diffraction pattern from a circular aperture, as if his thoughts diffracted through the gateway into Kyle space. Circular ridges surrounded the peak, lower in height, like ripples in a lake when a stone dropped into the water.

The peak was his central consciousness, and the ripples were satellite thoughts at the edges of his mind.

An emerald green spark appeared next to him and grew into a second peak, rising up out of the grid. A gold peak appeared next, as close to Althor as the green. Then the blackness itself formed a dark peak, with the red, green, and gold packets arrayed around its powerful shape.

Blackstar Squadron report. That came from Steel, the squad leader, the black peak.

Goldstar up, Belldaughter thought.

Greenstar up, Wellmark thought.

Redstar up, Althor thought. All four pilots were strong psions, but the Rhon power of his mind rumbled compared

to the others. In their four-way link, he had to hold back the full strength of his mind so that he didn’t overpower the others. Their exchange flashed by in a fraction of a second. They had jumped into accelerated mode and would probably remain with it until they finished this run.

A psicon blinked on Althor’s display, a blue circle, the image of a button used to activate the lock on a piece of luggage. He focused on it and a prerecorded thought from Secondary Steel came to him: The security cloak is operating. Our presence in Kyle space can’t be detected by other telops here.

Then in real time, Steel thought, Link.

Greenstar linked, Wellmark replied.

Goldstar linked, Belldaughter thought.

Redstar linked, Althor answered.

In the four months Althor had flown with Blackstar, since his graduation, he had been integrating into the mental link mey formed together as a squadron.

Their minds felt right to him: strong, intelligent, calm, rational. They had been selected for mental compatibility; otherwise they couldn’t function as a unit.

Althor knew he was sitting in his chair, but his perception of reality receded, displaced by his mindscape. He had trained at DMA to operate simultaneously in his universe and Kyle space. Most telops couldn’t manage it, which was another reason so few Jagernauts existed. The thoughts of the other squad members murmured in the background of his mindscape. Wellmark was running checks on her Jag, synchronizing Greenstar with the other three ships.

Althor had Redstar parallel his systems to hers, and Blackstar and Goldstar joined them in doing checks: nav, cyber, weapons, comm, hydraulics, biomech.

Pain sparked in Almor’s head and he pressed his fingertips into his temples.

Jagernauts paid a price for their four-way link; to maintain such a strong connection required concentration and resources. The more people in the link, the more it taxed their bodies, minds, and ships, and that limited the size of a squad to four Jagernauts. Nor could humans sustain that boosted connection for long. But when it worked, the squadron link was a miracle. They could communicate anywhere, under any conditions, instantaneously.

Althor smiled, thinking of the Cheshire cat he had read about in a literary work from the Allied classics. He felt that satisfied to be a member of Blackstar. He didn’t make a big deal about it, though. Some might say that Jagernauts were notorious for their cocky self-confidence, especially Blackstar Squadron. No reason to swell the already healthy egos of his squad mates.