The Phoenix in Flight (17 page)

So Sebastian Omilov would enjoy the semblance of peace while
he could.

Osri stirred. “You said you’d only
seen
this sphere,
Father?”

“The Guardian has never let anyone touch it, and since he is
obviously a sapient being, he is protected by the Covenant of Anarchy. We could
not force him. I don’t think any of us would have... but someone has.” Omilov
touched a control in the arm of his high-backed chair; the lights faded and the
stars leapt forth in spangled glory above their heads.

“I remember a little about it,” Brandon murmured. “It’s
called the Heart of something?”

Omilov picked up the artifact and held it in his cupped
hands, his face and the stars above reflected in bizarre distortion in its
surface. “The Heart of Kronos, the Eater of Gods.”

o0o

It was second moonrise when Deralze moved silently along the
corridor behind the gnostor’s son, who had just emerged from his room in his
dressing gown.

Through the high window at the end of the corridor the rosy
light of Tira threw Osri’s shadow huge against the wall as he approached his
father’s suite. The quiet slip-slap of his slippers echoed off the glossy wood
floor.

The door to Omilov’s suite opened, and swung shut slowly
enough for Deralze to slip through after Osri. Light glowed in both the
bedchamber and the study. The gnostor favored the old Karelian Renascence
modality—there were no doors on the rooms within the suite, only wide, high
archways. Deralze paused just inside the vestibule, outside of the pool of soft
light, and waited.

Omilov sat in a hideous overstuffed wing chair; the air was
sweetly aromatic from the hot drink he held in his hands. Arching over him in
the dim light was the graceful form of a potted
argan
tree, its silver
leaves tightly rolled up for the night except where the reading lamp shone on
them, glinting off the splayed, hand-shaped leaves that seemed to hover
protectively over the chair and its occupant.

Deralze saw by the angle of the gnostor’s head that he was
gazing up at his hand-painted portrait of the late Kyriarch, Ilara kyr-Arkad.
Osri glanced fleetingly at the portrait, then down at his father as Omilov
smiled at him.

“Night-hobs whispering to you too, boy? Come, have some
dreamberry tea. It never fails to work for me.”

“Night-hobs?” Osri repeated. “Sometimes, Father, I wonder if
you half-believe in the myths and legends you study.”

“Half-believe and laugh about them by turns,” the gnostor
replied, still smiling.

Osri looked impatient. Deralze recalled Lady Risiena, on one
of her rare punitive descents on the family home during Brandon’s last visit to
Charvann. She ignored servants and bodyguards alike as if they were furniture,
so Deralze overheard her saying to her son,
“Your father, Osri, is simply a
child in a man’s body. He resigned his position in the family business so he
could devote his time to playing with the various dirty oddments and bits of
trash he digs up, and though he knows several people high in the Magisterium
and the Council of Pursuivence—though
I’ve
never met them—he has never
exerted himself to ask their help in advancing the family’s interests. So you,
my son, are left to suffer from his selfishness.”

Osri said now to his father, “I must speak to you.”

“And?”

“You have reported the presence of the Krysarch to someone?”

“‘Krysarch,’” Omilov repeated. “It was not so long ago that
you were both here as boys, and you called him Brandon then.” But when Osri
said nothing, the gnostor sighed. “I have reported to no one.”

“Does the Archon know he is here on this planet?”

“I am beginning to believe that no one, outside of
ourselves, knows.”

“Then it is your
duty
to inform the Archon.”

“My duty is to myself,” Omilov said. “I am merely a retired
teacher.”

“But I am not,” Osri said. “I think my duty is clear. I
would have sent a com, but I thought it right to consult you first. This is
your house.”

Omilov rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I suspect you will get
nowhere. I would be very surprised indeed if Deralze has not already blocked
our communications.”

Deralze, smiling to himself, heard Osri’s sharp intake of
breath.

“But that’s illegal—”

“The rules,” Omilov said, “are made to cover ordinary
circumstances. I am beginning to believe that something extraordinary has
brought Brandon here, and it is my intention to find out what. Then I will act
as I see right.”

Osri scowled. “When my leave ends—”

“You will do what you think is right,” Omilov said. “Until
then, permit me to handle this in my own way.”

Osri gave a perfunctory nod. “Very well. I will wish you a
good night, then.”

“Yes, good night, son.”

Deralze stepped back into the shadows of a corner. Osri
passed at a fast walk, looking to neither right nor left. Deralze followed, now
convinced that Osri was no threat. By the time his leave ended, Deralze and
Brandon would be beyond the reach of the authorities.

o0o

Omilov gazed up at the smiling gray-blue eyes in the
pleasant round face with its crown of curling reddish hair, but his mind formed
an image of the young man in the guest room at the end of the hall. “Ah,
Ilara,” he whispered, “should I stop him? What would you have me do?”

The ever-young face gazed off into a distance where his eyes
could not follow, a faint, tender smile curving her lips, her small rounded
hands relaxed on the treasured book of ancient poems. She had given her life
for duty, victim of a man and a world to whom poetry and laughter were
weaknesses to be scorned and crushed, and the Thousand Suns were the poorer for
it.

He thought of her oldest son, hardening inexorably into the
same sort of tyrant his grandfather had been.
Gelasaar loves Semion, trusts
him, and sees nothing. And no one can tell him. Galen has walled himself away
on Talgarth, and now Brandon seems to be running away.
How much we need
you now, Ilara.

Omilov slipped into unhappy memory of the whipsaw emotions
of those days, twenty years past: the euphoric victory at Acheront, the
Kyriarch Ilara’s insistence on heading the Trucial Commission, and the horrible
misunderstanding of Dol’jharian customs that had doomed her and every member of
the commission, victims of the vengeful savagery of Jerrode Eusabian.

How could Gelasaar show him mercy after that?
But
Omilov knew that the Panarch had acted as his murdered wife would have had it,
yielding to the demands of statecraft for the greater good.

His eyes blurred as he blinked away the tears, and the
portrait acquired a near-numinous aura to him, as if the young woman there were
merely between breaths, and might momentarily stir. Then the sense of
closeness, of presence, faded, and he was alone. He sighed and quoted softly,
from the poet whose works had been closest to Ilara’s heart:

May’t not be said, that her grave shall restore

Her greater, purer, firmer than before?

Heaven may say this, and joy in’t, but can wee

Who live, and lacke her, here this vantage see?

Hreem chaka-Jalashalal lay sated in the aftermath of
passion, watching through heavy-lidded eyes as his lover Norio restlessly
activated the telltales on the bridge of the
Flower of Lith
. The big
vidscreen in Hreem’s cabin sprang to life with a wide-angle view of the primary
crew alert at their consoles, with the top of Hreem’s empty command pod just
visible in the foreground.

The bridge was quiet, the subdued whirring of the
tianqi
the
only sound other than an occasional soft bleep from Erbee’s console: bored by
the long wait, the scantech was playing solo-Phalanx again. The long-faced
Rifter sucked his lower lip as he stabbed at the computer pads. Irritation
surged in Hreem, dispelling the pleasant lassitude.

Norio’s slender finger stroked down the inside of Hreem’s
arm, evoking an echo of the ecstasy just past. “You know he’s alert, Jala. He
needs constant stimulation.” The tempath turned his finger over and whispered
his fingernail over a
qi
point with unerring accuracy. Hreem shivered.

“Yeah. But he’s programmed it to lose. His granny’s pet
wattle could beat him, otherwise.”

Norio’s full lips quirked in a smile. “And you do not set up
your opponents to lose?”

The Rifter captain snorted, and let his irritation leak
away. Hreem knew how good Erbee was at sniffing out the faint energy traces
emitted by the ships the
Flower of Lith
preyed on. The buck-toothed
Rifter with his vacant, pimply face definitely paid his way, and he’d saved the
Lith
not a few times when the powerful predators of the Panarch’s Navy
had sought them in a deadly game of hide-or-be-zapped.

At the nav console, Bargun said, “Next drunkwalk leg coming
up in 3... 2... 1...”

The game noise from Erbee’s console fell silent as the
scantech straightened up. Hreem felt an almost subliminal pulse as the ship’s
fiveskip engaged briefly. He found himself holding his breath until Erbee
slumped back into his chair. “No traces,” the scantech said, and resumed his
game.

“Where’s that blunge-face Tallis Y’Marmor, anyway?” said
Alluwan at Damage Control. “We’ve been drunkwalking for six hours now on this
damn rendezvous watch. You’d think even a maggot-brain like him would be able
to find a beacon half a light day across.”

Hreem hated waiting like this, sitting in the middle of
nowhere in particular, no rocks or ice to hide behind, while the signal-sphere
of the rendezvous beacon they’d deployed grew ever larger. Even though the ship
was skipping a few light seconds every few minutes on a semi-random path, to
avoid being an easy target, it still made him nervous.

Norio tapped at the console. Hreem felt the shift in airflow
as a new complex of scents slowly pervaded the room.

Hreem let out his breath as his anxiety diminished. “You
oughta send that combo to the bridge,” he said. Norio was a master with the
tianqi
,
the environmental conditioners fundamental to spaceflight.

“They’re getting a different mix. More alertness needed up
there than here.” Norio smiled and stroked Hreem’s leg. “At least right now.”

On the vidscreen, Garesh turned away from the Engineering
console where she was running some diagnostics. “We oughta just move in on
Charvann. We got enough ships to take it. Not like
Satansclaw
is gonna
add much. Tallis Y’Marmor thinks he’s got a big one, but he don’t know what to
do with it.” A couple of the crew chuckled. Garesh preened, clearly enjoying
the attention her youth and the curves displayed by her tight coveralls brought
her.

“Tell that to Barrodagh,” said Dyasil, the comtech. “He cut
us orders to wait for Tallis. You wanna play with Evodh and his mindripper,
like Jomsinn on the
Basilisk’s Bride
? I can show you the vid again, if
you want.”

Nobody answered. Hreem knew they were all remembering the
vid Barrodagh had made of that Rifter captain’s fate, looped on the hyperwave
for two ship’s days, each time ending with Barrodagh saying,
You will attack
where you are ordered, when you are ordered. You will not loot any location on
the proscribed list, and if you are issued specific instructions or
limitations, you will obey them exactly
.

Hreem grimaced. In the long career of piracy and mayhem that
had made him one of the most wanted men in the Thousand Suns, he had knowingly
killed hundreds of people—that was his business and he lost no sleep over it.
Sometimes you held on to enemies you really hated and played a little before
you killed them. The Dol’jharian taste for endlessly protracted pain was
foreign to him.

But Barrodagh holds the inner orbit.
Hreem’s thoughts
touched on the Urian power-relay the Dol’jharians had installed on the
Lith
’s
power deck, pulling energy out of some unknown dimension and delivering it at a
rate that gave the destroyer
more striking power than any ship the
Panarchy could field.

Unfortunately, that meant letting the spin reactors that
normally powered the
Lith
go cold, since they were unstable when the
relay was running. And it took a long time to bring up the reactors again,
unless you wanted to take what engineering techs called the Plasma Wager. Too
long, as Jomsinn had found out when Barrodagh switched off the
Bride
’s
relay.

“Anyway,” continued Dyasil, “if
Korion
’s in-system,
we’re gonna be happy to have another hopped-up Alpha Class to back up the
Lith
and
Novograth
.”

Hreem grimaced at the mention of the battlecruiser whose
regular patrol included the Charvann system. That was a fear that haunted every
jacker: seven kilometers of near-invulnerable hull, yet so stealthy that too
often the first sign of one’s presence was the hideous, ripping squeal of a
ruptor beam, the Navy’s most-feared shipkiller, which only a battlecruiser
could deliver.

“Cap’n’s counting on us winning the chance to grab that
battlecruiser at Malachronte.” Garesh gave a sweet chuckle.

Hreem sat up, his fear driven out by a wash of anger. He’d
spent many pleasant moments imagining himself walking onto the bridge of the
nearly-refitted
Maccabeus
in the Malachronte Ways, but he strongly
suspected that Barrodagh was going to give the battlecruiser to Charterly if he possibly
could.
I have to get that assignment.

Norio slithered behind Hreem on his knees and began kneading
his shoulders, but Hreem shrugged him off irritably. Garesh was good in the
sack, but she tended to forget whose ship the
Lith
was.

“Shut your blungehole, you stupid blit,” said Benjamin
Piliar at Fire Control, his coarse speech at odds with traces of an underlying
precision. When he’d first come aboard with his fine speech and fine clothes,
he’d made the mistake of insisting that the rest of the crew use his full name.
Hreem had waited a couple of weeks, then renamed him Pili, leaving Norio to
reinforce the lesson in how things worked. Pili jerked his sleek head
meaningfully at the overhead. “You keep yapping about that battlecruiser and
you’ll find yourself putting on a show for the rest of us.”