The Final Key: Part Two of Triad (24 page)

Looking through the front windshield, he could see the city spread out below. The limo was careening down a hill with tall houses on either side. About a kilometer distant, a

column of light stabbed out of the sky and hit the Admiral Starport. Even through the heavy shielding of the limo, he felt the violent explosions as the beam hit the ground. Flames and smoke mushroomed into the air. Nor did it stop there; the beam slashed across the city, leaving a path of billowing smoke and devastation in its wake.

13

The Snarled Mesh

ESComm didn't sneak into Parthonia—they slammed into the star system, blasting at its defenses. Two battie cruisers led the force, mammoths as versatile as any Firestorm. With them came a massive fleet, including Solo starfighters, the ESComm equivalent of Jags, but without the mind links formed by a Jag squadron.

Then ESComm activated the sabotaged Jagernauts. The Traders flooded Parthonia with signals targeted against the faulty bioelectrodes. A substantial portion of the Jagernauts would have malfunctioned if ISC hadn't already repaired them, and that made the difference between defeat and hope. Some Jagernauts still had problems: an inability to engage Els, difficulty in communicating, glitches in input. But every biomech-adept in Selei City was on alert and ready to give treatment. Even with so little warning before the attack, the evacuation went off with relatively few hitches. It was still a nightmare.

For the first time in recorded history, an interstellar force attacked a major civilian center. Chaos didn't immediately erupt. El-controlled vehicles, walkways, flyers, and buildings conducted the evacuation. Their purpose: clear Selei City without a panic. To some extent they succeeded. But nothing could lessen the brutal impact of laser fire cutting through the capital, leaving flames and ashes and death; and nothing

could prepare the people for antimatter beams that annihilated all matter, including air molecules, and created fireballs so intense, it was as if tiny suns blazed above the city.

People flooded every shelter available, seeking protection, however ephemeral. The Annihilators ate away the surface of the planet, but only if they made it through the atmosphere, which attenuated their power in brilliant displays of energy and showered the land with killer radiation and particle cascades. Lasers burned into the earth, and the attacks cut great swaths through the city.

The first strike destroyed Admiral Starport. Thousands of people poured into every other transport facility: flyer pads on roofs; minor ports that served planetary traffic; military bases; but most of all, Selei Interstellar, the primary starport for the city, a major Imperialate hub for space traffic. It was so large, it formed its own city. Refugees flooded its terminals and gates. They crowded every available ship, of every size and class, and spacecraft took to the skies in unprecedented numbers.

Space law required a ship to be out of orbit and well into space, moving at relativistic speed, before it inverted, but now frantic pilots were trying to make the jump into superlu-minal space while they were still in orbit. Some succeeded, though it left their passengers retching or unconscious. Others failed and fell out of the sky with their passengers melted into bulkheads, decks, and one another. A number of ships inverted partway and then twisted into themselves and became plasma, part real and part imaginary, spewed across complex space. Some never made it at all, unable to invert at slow speeds. ESComm blasted them out of the skies like an exterminator fumigating insects.

Over two million people deluged the ports, shelters, and roads out of the city. In all that desperate mass, a black limo was swept along with the rest, caught in the panic. It arrived at Selei International with a million other people. Its sole conscious passenger was dragged out of the vehicle by frenetic officials even as he struggled and protested that his companions in the car needed help.

So it was that a Ruby Heir, third in line to the throne, was

shoved into an aging, decrepit freighter with several hundred other people and launched off Parthonia.

Selei City had one of the densest mesh structures in Kyle space; more telops worked at that governmental seat than in any other. The attacks destroyed Kyle gate after Kyle gate. At the Assembly hall alone, several thousand nodes vanished when lasers destroyed the amphitheater. As the gates into the Kyle web collapsed, they ripped apart the meshes connected to them. The destruction propagated through Kyle space and brought down the nodes of delegates who had been attending the session through the mesh. The delegates were safe, light-years from Parthonia, but the failure of their nodes passed on the damage to other government and military webs.

Had either the Ruby Pharaoh or Imperator been available, the destruction could have been contained in a manner similar to the way backup generators alleviated power outages. But no one knew if the Ruby Pharaoh had survived, and the Imperator lay in a hospital on Diesha, deep in a coma. Just as the failure of backups in an overloaded energy grid could cause rolling blackouts, so the Kyle meshes suffered rolling failures. Most telops managed to protect their spacetime systems—the electro-optic, nanotech, picotech, and quantum meshes that networked Skolia—but they couldn't stop the Kyle space collapse.

Within minutes, ISC lost a substantial number of its Kyle links, and with those went a good portion of its ability to function as a cohesive military force on an interstellar scale.

The Traders had struck a crippling blow.

Eldrin squeezed into a mesh hammock designed to hold crates so they wouldn't bang around the cargo hold. He hinged his hand and clenched his four fingers in the mesh while refugees sandwiched in next to him and into other hammocks hanging from grips in the bulkheads. Others squeezed into the spaces between them on the deck and against the hull. No one would have protection against the g-forces of takeoff or landing; this hold had been meant to

carry robotic components, not passengers. The crew had thrown their cargo onto the tarmac and packed in people, giving up their livelihoods to save lives.

Two children, a boy of about seven and a girl of about four, huddled together in a corner. They were obviously terrified, and it made Eldrin think of Taquinil. When the boy glanced his way, Eldrin motioned them over. The boy scrambled to his feet, drawing the little girl with him, and they squeezed through the crowd to Eldrin, their eyes wide, their faces scrunched up with fear. He wedged them in the hammock with him, one on each side, and put an arm around each. They shivered against him.

"Where are your parents?" he asked in Iotic. When they only stared at him, he tried Skolian Flag. "Are your parents here?"

The girl shook her head, her motions jerky.

"We were in school," the boy said.

"We'll find them," Eldrin assured them, using the same gende tone that soothed Taquinil.

The engines muttered and then roared, bypassing the usual warm-up. With a great shudder and no preparation, the freighter launched. Eldrin grunted as acceleration shoved them against the bulkhead.

When they inverted, he almost threw up. He was dissolving, dissolving, dissolved ...

Suddenly he was whole again. He gasped and sagged forward. Sweat covered his forehead. The distinctive growl of inversion engines vibrated through the hold. They had made it. Eldrin had no idea how long they would be on this freighter, but he doubted they would have medical help soon.

He needed phorine.

"Reestablish contact!" The Weapons officer of Roca's Pride hit the oval table in the conference room with her fist. She was facing off with Brigadier General Devon Majda, the ship's captain. A Fleet officer should have been in command of the cruiser during wartime, but it hadn't turned out that way. Soz had no doubt Devon could do this command, but the general had to convince her bridge crew, most of whom were

present. They were all standing around the conference table with its gleaming holoscreens: the First Officer, who had experience herself commanding a Firestorm; Weapons, Intelligence, Communications, Navigation; and a few minor aides, including Soz.

"We're working to reform our Kyle nodes," Communications said. She had been crawling around inside the guts of consoles, jury-rigging gates from the cruiser into Kyle space. Every portal she had so far constructed had collapsed; right now, Roca's Pride and its attendant flotilla had no links with the rest of ISC.

"We might get several gates working within a few hours," she added. "If we put our best telops on the job."

Hours. Soz felt ill. They had just learned of the attack on Parthonia when they lost interstellar communications. That ESComm raid had to have been a suicide mission; an attacking force that small couldn't take out the entire Parthonia defenses. They were going after the Kyle web, determined to destroy it at any cost. Given the complex, multipronged nature of the attack and the extent of the intelligence ESComm had apparendy amassed on ISC, they must have been planning mis for years, even decades.

"Who are our best telops?" Devon asked.

"Raylor over in Control," Communications said. "Mak in Navigation."

Soz spoke quietiy. "Permission to speak, Captain."

Devon nodded. "Go ahead, Cadet."

"I'm one of your best telops, ma'am." Soz tried to project a confidence she didn't feel. "I can bring Rhon power to the job."

That left the room silent. They all stared at her. Soz could almost feel them remembering the "other" identity of the lowly cadet among them.

"Can you reactivate our Kyle gateways?" Devon asked.

"At least one, maybe two or three." As a Ruby Heir, she had the training. But if this problem was more widespread, fixing a few gates here wasn't likely to help. ISC needed Dehya or Kurj for repairs that extensive. If Dehya reached Safe-landing, she could use the Dyad Chair there, but the last Soz had heard, before they lost communications, no one knew

what had happened to the pharaoh. Kurj was in no condition to save anything, including himself.

"We must regain communications," Intelligence said. "ESComm could be invading and we wouldn't know. We could arrive at Parthonia to find the battle over hours ago, even days, and all the time we were needed elsewhere."

"We aren't without communications," Weapons said. "We've sent ships to Parthonia, Diesha, Metropoli, and four other centers."

"But none have returned yet." Communications raked her hand through her close-cropped hair. "What if Kyle nodes everywhere are affected? If we get ours up, we can't talk to anyone unless theirs are also operational."

Navigations spoke. "Even if we get the interstellar comm working, who will coordinate our forces across space? We have no Rhon psion in the War Room on the Orbiter. Imperator Skolia is in a coma on Diesha."

"Councilor Roca is on the Orbiter," Intelligence said. "She can use the Dyad Chair there."

Soz glanced at Devon, and the general nodded. "Go ahead."

"My mother intended to return to Skyfall," Soz said. "She probably isn't on the Orbiter."

"And that was before the attempt on Imperator Skolia's life," Devon said. "Gods only know where ISC has her now. We're going to have to assume the worst and do our best with what we have." She spoke to Soz. "Work with the bridge team. Bring up any Kyle nodes you can manage."

"Aye, aye, ma'am," Soz said. But she suspected they needed to fix far more than a few nodes.

The Bard sat on the floor in Taquinil's room and rocked his grandson as the boy cried. The house had dimmed lights in response to the boy's anguish and played soft music, but nothing helped. Taquinil clung to him and sobbed, his young face wet with tears.

"It will be all right," Eldrinson murmured. He enveloped the boy in a cocoon of comforting emotions, but fear lurked

at the edges of his mind. Taquinil was at the most sensitive limit of human empathy; any further along that continuum and the boy probably couldn't survive with his sanity intact. But Eldrinson was having trouble maintaining a mental shield for his grandson. His own mind was burning and he didn't know why.

"Grandhoshpa." Taquinil buried his head against Eldrin-son's shoulder. "Make it stop."

Eldrinson layered comfort over his mind, trying, trying to protect him. He didn't know what Taquinil had picked up, but he felt the swirling terror around them.

Gradually his efforts took effect. Taquinil sagged in his arms and his crying trailed off. After another few moments Eldrinson realized the boy had fallen into a fitful sleep. Nothing eased his own fear, however. Something was wrong. The Kyle meshes that intertwined with his family were damaged. People he loved were in trouble. Everyone claimed Roca was fine, the Ruby Dynasty was fine, everything was fine. He wanted to believe them, but he couldn't shake his terror.

Shannon sat with the Eloria. His tribe. They arranged themselves around the campfire, which flickered in glasswood colors: red, blue, green. Clouds covered the sky, hiding the moons, and it was hard to tell how much of the night had passed. The Archers had lived in these shrouded mountains for thousands of years, and they seemed to know the meaning of every moment.

All his life, Shannon had gone into trance alone. It had never occurred to him it could be communal. The Eloria sang together, voices chiming, lilting, hypnotic:

sing your heart.

sing so high.

sing high.

sing low.

sing forever

sing of endless seas.

the endless blue. forever blue. forever blue.

Shannon sailed with them, their thoughts spreading to encompass the dales, the forests, the mountains, the mist, the sky itself. They submerged into a collective mind. It wasn't telepathy, nothing as specific as shared thoughts or images. Nor was it empathy, exacfly. Rather than emotions, they shared trance. They blended with its mind-drenched beauty. They were everywhere and nowhere, existing here and beyond, spread into another realm, one they had no name for except the Other-place or forever blue.

He knew it by another name: Kyle space.

The Eloria created a Kyle gateway. Shannon's brothers had always wondered why he understood the physics so well when he seemed otherwise disconnected from their universe of science and technology. But the misty, fanciful universe of quantum theory had always felt right to him. The Eloria were Fourier transforms, except they transformed thoughts into the Kyle universe, a Hilbert space built out of an infinite, ortho-normal set of Kyle eigenfunctions. The Archers knew none of the theories; they just went into trance.