The Thrones of Kronos (60 page)

Yearning struck at her, stronger than she had ever felt it.
Sedry began to weep for something whose lack was sweeter than any fulfillment.

Then she felt Vi’ya’s presence, and heard her voice.

Now!

The hungering dark swooped down. She spoke the first word of
power given her and the bright web fell out of the sky, constraining
malevolence in its fabric. Pain shot through her, timeless striving.

Repelled but undefeated, the dark withdrew, waiting and
prowling beyond the megaliths reconstituted in smooth granite graven with runes
of unknown import.

There would be another time for it, and for her. Exhausted,
Sedry sank to her knees before the pool; helpless, she fell on her side. With
her last strength she reached to touch the water.

When Sedry awoke, her blurring eyes took several seconds to
focus. Her eye sockets ached, making the effort almost too much. But she didn’t
recognize the silhouette crouched near her, and so she gritted her teeth and
made the effort.

A pungent smell assailed her nostrils, aiding her in
regaining a grasp on the here and now. Something pressed against her lips, and
she obediently opened her mouth, swallowed, then choked on the harsh, burning
liquid that went nova in her throat.

The cup bumped against her teeth, and she took another sip;
surprisingly the liquor diminished the vertigo and helped her eyes to focus.

She found that she had collapsed against a chair. Forcing
herself to sit, she blinked, then stared at first without comprehension into
Morrighon’s face.

He gazed back at her.

“Tat?” she said. Her voice sounded old.

“Sent her back to their dorm with her cousin.”

Reality began to reassemble, one painful awareness at a
time. “No one knows I’m here. Right?”

“I have someone to take you back to your quarters.”

She pressed the heels of her hands against her temples,
almost wishing her skull really would crack and her brains spill on the floor.
That would hurt a lot less than how she felt right now.

But fanciful thinking could come later. One danger had been
averted—leaving the way for more to take its place. She forced herself to look
up and to meet Morrighon’s eyes, which were on a level with her own.

“Is this going to get me into trouble?” she asked directly.

Morrighon hesitated. His gaze dropped, then lifted to meet
hers again. “No. Not if it is never acknowledged. First shift is still an hour
off, and the way is clear for you to return.”

“Will it make trouble for Tat?”

“Exhibiting remarkable skill has its rewards and its
dangers,” he said. “That’s true anywhere, is it not?” He rose to his feet. “If
you are back in your quarters and nothing is said, life will return to normal.”

If she hadn’t ached so much, she might have laughed. Normal?
Life in the Suneater had not even remotely resembled anything one could call
normal, not once since their arrival, and it had only gotten worse. What kind
of fanciful thinking was Morrighon indulging himself with?

But as she stood up straight and looked down at Morrighon’s
bent form and lopsided face, a wavefront of intense compassion impacted her,
and she could neither move nor speak.

You never chose your
birth, nor whatever happened afterward to so twist your body. If whatever you
chose subsequently seemed normal by comparison, who is to blame you?

Morrighon poured a splash of liquor from a slim flask into
the cup and silently held it out, and this time she took it with her own hands
and raised it to him, a salute in gesture but also a kind of sacrament.

You should have been
beautiful to your mother, as you are in the eyes of Telos. Would it have set
your path toward the light?
Closing her eyes, she drank.

A shudder at the harsh, unfamiliar flavor, but the burn
enabled her to move again. Morrighon silently took the cup from her and led the
way from the center. Outside, a silent Catennach Bori sat waiting in one of the
little transport vehicles, a load of some kind of supplies sitting on the back.

Very swiftly the vehicle traversed the ovoid corridors; the
breeze felt good on Sedry’s aching face.

They were nearly to the crew chamber when Sedry saw a flash
of brown in a side tunnel. Lucifur? She tried to call out, but choked on the
residual burn from Morrighon’s liquor, and was too tired to try to make him
stop.

They halted and Morrighon triggered the door. Sedry hitched
herself off and went inside, turning to nod her thanks, but the transport was
already driving away.

Lieutenant Yeo Wychyrski leaned back in her pod, watching
the hyperwave monitors, and once again thanked the Sanctus Ernest King, the patron
figure she had chosen at the Academy as had been the custom since it was first
established over nine hundred years before.

“Ernie, you did it again,” she said, then grinned somewhat
self-consciously at her console, balanced between skepticism and belief. Here
she was, at the heart of the most important battle in the history of the
Thousand Suns, monitoring the transmissions from a 10-million-year old comm,
just because she’d been in Siglnt on the
Grozniy
when its captain, now high admiral, found herself in the midst of the chaos of
war.

If her patron figure hadn’t done it, it was merely random
chance, because though she’d been the youngest cadet to graduate from the
Academy, her sense of superiority on her first assignment had taken a fast dive
when she discovered herself surrounded by other people just as smart. Nobody
cared how young you were, only that you did your job.

So, luck. Yet no warrior trusted Alea, or cared to profit
from her favors, so easily and fatally revoked when least expected.

Wychyrski shrugged.
Look
at High Admiral Ng,
she thought. The essence of a Polloi who accepted no
limits, she’d chosen as her patron figure a fictional character, and look where
it had gotten her. At least, Wychyrski thought Hornblower was fictional; it was
hard to be sure with ancient history.

Alone on the gamma shift, she watched the monitors for a
time. Most of the messages from the hyperwave went straight to crypto for
analysis. A frisson of awe prickled through her nerves as she considered how
strange that pathway was: a real-time link, encrypted via onetime pad, through
the strangeness of the Urian hyperwave to Ares and the massive arrays there.
Still, they hadn’t cracked anything yet. Might never. But they had to try.

Other messages, from Ares, went to High Admiral Ng, or to
the Panarch, or to others, as determined by their headers. Or from them to
Ares. She couldn’t read them, of course, but if she wished, she could trace
their passage—and then she’d be brigged and maybe even shot. Only the machines
retained the routes and histories, should they be needed.

Her console bleeped. An anomaly glowed red on her screen.

Wychyrski leaned forward. That header didn’t make any sense.
She tapped at the console, but the impossibility remained. A very deep Mandalic
header, deeper in fact than she’d ever seen before, originating on the
Suneater.

She tapped a few keys, teasing out the address.

More strangeness. She stared at the console. The message
carried a routing tag from Arthelion.

Then, as she probed further, a wailing erupted from her
console and the screen dissolved into a fractal nightmare. The message was
trapped, eyes-only, forbidding even traffic analysis. Frantically Wychyrski
dumped the data to a holding area, wiped her array space, and held her breath.
After a time that seemed endless, her interface came back up.

She shook her head as her stomach churned. That was too
close for comfort. Now what? With a Mandalic code that deep, there was only one
person on board who could touch it. Except naval discipline was clear: High
Admiral Ng was in charge of everything on the
Grozniy
. Not the Panarch.

Finally she tabbed the comm, and in a voice that surprised
her by how little it shook, said, “Get me High Admiral Ng.”

The message header windowed up on the console in front of
the Panarch, and Margot Ng watched dumbfounded as he began laughing in delight
and wonder.

“A message from my younger self.” She had never seen him
look so carefree, as though the weight of war had however briefly lifted from
his spirit.

At her puzzled glance, he quickly explained about his
long-ago joke on Anaris, the fosterling hostage in the Mandala: the computer
“ghost” that had followed him around.

Ng’s brows rose. “I remember now. You reactivated it during
your raid with the Rifters. But what is that signature doing on a message
originating at the Suneater? Can you open it?” He might find it amusing, but
she didn’t like mysteries of any sort before a battle, especially when they
originated from within enemy control. “Could it be Vi’ya, signaling?”

He shook his head, abruptly serious. “No, I don’t see how.
She never had an opportunity to capture this signature, nor any reason to do
so.”

His fingers tapped hesitantly at the console, which
flickered in negation. He paused.

“But we know that the Dol’jharians have a hyperwave link
from Arthelion to the Suneater, and I imagine that, just as we are using the
Ares arrays, they are using the Arthelion arrays for cryptography—those that
survive,” Ng said. “And there have been some hints in the few messages that
have gotten through from the Resistance that they are relying heavily on the
Palace computer to confuse the Dol’jharians there.”

He looked askance. “So I suppose my construct might have
somehow replicated itself across that link? It was supposed to seek Anaris. But
it was never programmed to send messages to me, so how—” His hands went still
as an image windowed up.

It was Jaspar Arkad.

“The good want power, but to weep barren tears,” the image
said. “The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.”

Brandon stared. Ng had never seen an expression like the one
on his face—a mix of surprise, horror, maybe closer to awe.

Then his expression shuttered.

“To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign,” Brandon
replied, his voice rough.

“Greetings, father and child,” the image said.

Ng’s skin prickled with shock and horror as understanding
hit her. The exchange, with its ritualistic overtones, was doubtless one that
no one save the heir was meant to witness; in the normal course of things it
would have taken place deep within the Mandala upon Brandon’s accession. But
nothing was normal anymore, and the Ban had fallen.

The compressed lines of Brandon’s mouth made it evident that
he was even more appalled than she. She wondered if this was the result of one
of the messages passed in their strange gestural code between Brandon and his
father in the last moments over Gehenna.

“Do not waste time reproaching yourself,” the image began,
as if it could see Brandon’s face. “You merely supplied the seed crystal for my
being.” The image smiled. “We can discuss the Ban at length when you return to
the Mandala. First, you have a rescue to perform. In accordance with your
desires, I followed your old enemy to his stronghold, although there is little
I can do as yet. But I found allies of yours here as well, Rifters it seems,
and they summon you. There is scant time left.”

The console toned. “You’ll find some data there that will be
useful when you arrive. Do not delay.”

The image wavered like a candle flame in a sudden draft and
disappeared. The console toned once more, windowing up the words: AUTODESTRUCT
MESSAGE TERMINATED.

Brandon’s hands wandered aimlessly over the console.

“Is it authentic, Your Majesty?” Ng asked, reluctant to
intrude on his thoughts, but impelled by the necessities of war.

The Panarch’s expression was impossible to interpret. “Yes.”
He straightened up. “How long to launch the lances?”

“Four hours from the word. We must review that data first.”

He glanced back at the console. “Yes. Eight hours, then.”

As the station bucked around them, Marim clutched Hreem
even tighter, welcoming his vicious thrusting as an antidote to her fear. Vi’ya
wanted her to be part of
that?
She
arched her hips up rhythmically, matching the big Rifter’s urgency. A strange
warmth unconnected to her passion pervaded her thoughts, and she heard echoes
of music, then sensed other minds.

“Get out of my head!” she shrieked. The warmth fled.

“Hunh?” Hreem’s voice was incoherent with lust.

“Nothing,” she gasped, and changed her rhythm to distract
him, bringing him to the brink of orgasm, and holding him there as all around
them the station’s convulsions slowly died away.

She felt Hreem climax as the station subsided. In a
lightning change of emotion brought on by the Black Negus they’d ingested, she
started to snicker.

“What’s funny?” he mumbled, glaring at her.

“Did you feel the ship move? They always said that, on this
old serial sexchip. Creche-mates got hold of it once, and we—”

“You blab too much.” Hreem rolled over lazily, and slapped
off the vid. “Still, gotta say, you’re as good as Norio ever was.” He lifted
his voice as he glared at the walls. “Better.”

“Yes better,” Marim said promptly. “The best. Haven’t seen
half yet. I know tricks that’ll—” A sudden yawn took her.

As they lay there for a time in a pleasant stupor, Marim
reflected on how Hreem had so quickly become dependent on her. The thought made
her feel powerful in a way she’d never experienced on the
Telvarna
. Vi’ya, Lokri—neither of them would permit themselves to
be dependent on anyone. A large part of Hreem’s need was based on boredom and
powerlessness, she suspected, two things he was utterly unused to. The question
was whether she could hold on to him when he was back in control of his ship—or
the Suneater.