The techs went to work, running tests much as a pilot ran pre-flight checks on a spacecraft. As the exoskeleton clicked prongs into my body, I closed my eyes. The Chair hummed around and within me. My mind became attuned to everyone in the room, my reception of them magnified. Although the Jagernauts had enough mental strength to feel energy flow through the Chair, they didn't revel in its presence. They knew its power but none of the joy.
Initiate.
DONE.
The Chair's hum surged.
I dropped into nothing.
Kyle space existed everywhere and nowhere. Without a web, it had no organization the human mind recognized. Even my perception of light and dark ceased. This was nothing…
I concentrated, taking the mental equivalent of a step back from a cliff. No precipice existed here, but I embraced the metaphor.
Cliff. Ocean.
A promontory appeared out of the nothing. I was standing on its edge, far above a wild seascape. An ocean of silver and green surged powerfully against the cliff, spraying up fountains of water. Exhilaration swept through me.
WEB NODE ARCHITECTURE ESTABLISHED.
Good.
I gazed across the primitive sea. Raising my arm, I gathered the Rhon power I had honed with over a century of experience and swung my hand in a great arc, palm facing upward. A sky suddenly appeared, boiling with swollen clouds, dark and lowering, torn by gales. Sapphire lightening cracked across the thunderheads.
Activate node.
DONE.
The clouds exploded apart. Shafts of diamond-bright sunlight burst through, turning the sea into a sparkling tumult of water. The waves cascaded ever higher, sending arches of star-bright spray into the streaming light.
So a new psiberweb was born.
BOOK THREE
Transformation
25
The Roaring Tide
They renamed our armada the
Pharaoh's Fleet
in the hope of redefining its purpose as well, from war to a new beginning. We prepared a communiqué to send to Parthonia, the capital world of Skolia, and to Diesha, where ISC had its headquarters. In the communiqué, I relieved Barcala Tikal of his position as First Councilor and Naaj Majda of her position as Imperator.
However, we didn't send it yet. We had another operation to carry out first, and I didn't want Barcala or Naaj warned until absolutely necessary. The less time they had to gather forces, the better. But I did want Barcala in custody soon, not only to stop him from building support, but also to make sure no overzealous Ruby loyalist decided to kill him.
Barcala and I had been friends for decades. I tried not to dwell on how few options I would have if this rebellion succeeded. He would become the deposed leader, a symbol that posed too much danger.
Although Naaj Majda and I had a more distant relationship, I didn't want her assassinated either. Her loyalty to the Houses and her conservatism, steeped in tradition, suggested she might accept a shift of power to the Ruby Dynasty. But she would lose the title of Imperator. I had made Ragnar acting Imperator until further notice, taking that authority away from Vazar, if she had ever really had it. Given her support of Jon Casestar, I had no choice but to leave them in custody, as much as I disliked the situation. Coop and Ryder stayed with Vazar.
Right now we were racing through superluminal space, where mass, energy, length, and even time became imaginary. We were also rotated into Haver-Klein space, hiding our ships in gigantic bottles made from fields that twisted out of the real universe. The only way to hold the ships in formation was to link through the psiberweb, but the fledgling web was too new to handle such a gargantuan job. It needed a central node to hold it together. We had only one node capable of managing the huge fluxes that poured through the web from seventy-five thousand ships.
So I became part of the psiberweb.
Using the web had always been humbling, but this was like nothing I had experienced before. I had no support, no buffers, no other nodes to siphon off the power.
Nothing.
The fleet thundered through my mind like hurricane-driven breakers smashing against cliffs. Power burst through the sky and flooded the mindscape. Seventy-five thousand ships linked through me. Their combined power roared, filling the universe until I knew only an agonizing joy that came in wave after wave of streaming, booming energy.
A thread glowed among the harmonics. I oriented on it, trying to decipher its meaning.
My greetings, Taquinil.
Greetings, Mother. We have done good work here, eh?
We have indeed.
The Allied defense systems are a bit more complex than I expected.
A bit.
Nothing too much.
No. Nothing too much…
Dispersing
Free…
Mother, they are calling you.
Ah, Taquinil, it is as beautiful as you said.
Truly it is. But they are calling you.
An intruding thought rumbled among the orbitals.
Dehya?
Who was that? Not Eldrin.
A different thought came, vital and warm.
Dehya, come back.
That
was Eldrin. I sighed, longing to drift here forever. But his thoughts pulled. I followed, slowly coalescing into real space.
As I coalesced, so did our fleet.
We dropped out of superluminal space at close to the speed of light. The ships were still in their fuel bottles, hidden in Haver-Klein space. We shot past the outer defenses of the solar system. Long hours seemed like seconds as I absorbed endless, endless data from seventy-five thousand EI ship brains. We passed Pluto's erratic orbit, then Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn. At the orbit of Jupiter, we rotated into normal space.
To the Allieds, our entire fleet suddenly just appeared.
So the Pharaoh's Fleet entered the solar system, birthplace to the humans spread across the stars. We came in every size, shape, color, creed, and culture, including many varieties of human that our long distant ancestors could never have imagined.
Earth's lost children had finally come home, after six thousand years.
26
Dialogue of Illusions
The hazy chamber came into focus. Despite my disorientation, I didn't feel the jarring dislocation that had troubled me the other times I returned from psiberspace.
Eldrin?
I thought.
You're back.
Relief suffused his thought.
Yes.
The haze resolved into misty people. Holographic starlight poured into the darkened chamber from the dome overhead. A blur was leaning on the armrest to my right. I focused and it formed into Eldrin.
Greetings, Husband.
Greetings, Wife. I'm glad you decided to exist again.
I smiled.
I too.
I lifted my arm, feeling unreal. Starlight reflected in the silver mesh that sheathed my limbs. I touched Eldrin's cheek with a dreaming brush of my fingers.
"Pharaoh Dyhianna." That came from far away; blowing across an endless plain. I turned my head slowly, floating between realities. A woman stood on the other side of the chair. Jinn Opsister. Good officer, Opsister. A man hovered next to her. Bayliron. The doctor from
Havyrl's Valor.
A fine doctor. I tried to speak, but the words blew away like wind.
Bayliron paled. "Can you bring more of yourself here, Your Highness? We're only reading about fifty percent of your body."
Fifty percent? How odd. If Eldrin hadn't been here, I would have drifted back into the web. But I couldn't; I had too many responsibilities.
Focus.
Coalesce.
"My greetings,"
I whispered. The words still sounded far away, but understandable now.
"Greetings, Your Highness." Jinn also seemed disquieted. "Our honor at your presence."
Another oddity. Usually people only said the honor business when I first appeared somewhere. But I had been in this chamber for days according to my neural chronometer. Then again, maybe I hadn't been here. I didn't know exactly what happened when I dispersed into psiberspace.
"The honor is mine,"
I murmured, whispers on the wind.
"Can she be taken out of the chair?" a man asked.
I recognized that voice. Turning my head, I perceived another blur. It stood about a meter in front of the chair, which was as close as anything could come with all the control panels in the way.
"My greetings, Chad," I said.
The blur resolved into Chad Barzun. "My greetings, Pharaoh Dyhianna."
"Have we arrived at Earth?"
"We're passing the asteroid belt now, above the plane of the ecliptic."
My mind drifted. "How do you know we aren't under the ecliptic?"
He blinked. "Well, yes, it could be either. We're 'above' as Earth defines its northern hemisphere."
"Does Earth know we're here?"
"Very much so. We've an escort. One hundred thousand Allied ships."
I jolted out of my dreamy contentment.
End session.
DISENGAGING,
the chair thought. Its exoskeleton unfolded from my body.
I leaned forward, pushing at panels. As the techs helped free me from the chair, I spoke to Chad. "How have the Allieds taken our appearance?"
"Calm. But stunned." He came around to where Eldrin stood, so I could hear him better. Their proximity created an eerie effect, a slight rippling of their bodies, as if he and Eldrin interfered like waves. Caught in my dream-like state, I felt only a mild curiosity, no alarm at all.
"I saw the record of your communications with Yamada at Delos," Chad said. "Imagine that reaction, multiplied many times."
What I remembered most was Yamada's relief when we left. Enough of our fleet had remained to occupy Delos, though. That way, if this failed, we would still have a negotiating point, albeit a small one. But a great difference existed in our situation here, compared to Delos.
"We're outnumbered," I said.
"To some extent." Chad paused. "The Allied fleets are stretched thin, though. They're spread across Skolian as well as Allied space, helping clean up after the Radiance War." His hawk-like visage blurred. "We've revealed a weakness in their defenses. They thought it was impossible for a fleet to come in the way we did."
"It is impossible," Eldrin intoned.
Impossible? And why did Eldrin sound so odd?
It wasn't hard. It was glorious.
For you, yes. It would kill anyone else.
