The Thrones of Kronos (62 page)

“Mandala trumps the Haji,” Stursnie crowed. He wiped his
greasy fingers on his tunic, adding no visible mark to its map of past meals.

The cramped cabin around them moated a foul nest of half-empty
ration packs and drink sacks and less identifiable detritus drifting in the
microgravity of the tiny ship, part of the VLDA deployed around the Suneater.

TealKat slapped his cards down on the affinity dyplast pad
anchored between them. “
Gemma morushka
hai datsenda nafar!
I’m tired of your chatzing cards, tired of your
chatzing face, and chatzing tired of this chatzing array duty.”

Stursnie raked in the torn bits of ration packs they were
using for chips—they were the only things besides the cards that would stick to
the pad. “You wanna be out there dodging dragon’s teeth and cruisers?” He was
unimpressed by TealKat’s anger, which on the average erupted every hour or so
whether or not there was anything to trigger it.

“Anything’d be better than this Shiidra-whizz.” The little
Rifter waved his arms in disgust as he glared at their surroundings, provoking
a slow eddy in the trash reef around him. “Your turn to clean up,” he added
belligerently.

“My turn?” Stursnie repeated. “I done it the last four
times. You want housekeeping, you do it, chatzmouth—”

The console bleeped, then acceleration tugged at Stursnie’s
inner ear as the little ship rotated to a new heading, reorienting the boom
that extended from it to enhance its detector functions. The hull pinged as the
hasty job the Dol’jharian crew had done attaching the boom complained of the
stress. The trash reef swirled into a new set of gyrations.

“What now?” TealKat groaned, swatting at a ration pack that
had stuck to his sweaty bald spot, glued there by the remains of something that
reminded Stursnie of a wattle in imperfect command of its bowels.

“Who knows?” Stursnie blinked, and glanced sideways as a
quick flicker caught his peripheral vision. He shook his head; they really
ought to clean up. “You wanna tap into the array and try to find out, then
watch while they pull your guts out through your eyes or—”

An incandescent streak of light no thicker than his little
finger punched through the air between them, accompanied by a deafening
explosion. The trash reef whirled madly, dividing into two cascades of garbage
toward twin holes that had suddenly appeared in the hull. The ship yawed
violently, and with a grating roar the boom tore loose.

“Where’re the chatzing seals!” he screamed, completely
disoriented. TealKat didn’t answer, unless his sudden projectile vomiting was
intended as a response.

Stursnie dodged the chunky column of bile as it shot past
him, the whistle of departing air loud in his ears despite the ringing in them.

Suck-thwack!
Suck-thwack!
The whistling stopped.

Stursnie looked around, confused, then saw that each hole
had been plugged by a mess of ration packs and drink sacks. Air whined thinly
past the incomplete trash seals, the plastic crinkling and popping as the
hungry vacuum outside sucked at it.

He stared, then, whipsawed by the transition from boredom to
terror, began to snicker, escalating helplessly to guffaws.

“What’re you laughing at, you logos-chatzing blit?” TealKat
nearly choked as chunks of his last meal flew from his mouth, and Stursnie
laughed harder.

He pointed at one of the trash-compacted holes. “Murphy
cleaned up for you!”

TealKat paused in his mopping to snarl, “Find the seals
before Murphy does.”

Ruonn tar Hyarmendil
watched the Rifter captain warily across the little table, ignoring the blare
of noise around them in the crowded Rifthaven club. The lights glowed dim
enough for him to take off his goggles, but he left them on; he didn’t trust
this gajo with his fulsome manners, and there was no sense risking letting him
read his eyes. And this way he could watch the women servitors in the club
without his attention being detected. As one with especially enormous breasts
walked by, her ample flesh undulating hypnotically in the quarter-gee
acceleration, his nacker stirred . . .

“. . . 
but
what if it does get out of control, or I decide to deactivate it and it won’t?”

Ruonn turned his
attention back to Y’Marmor, irritated by the man’s fearful whine and the way
the man’s hands kept wandering up and down the body of the joy-toy he’d hired,
as if to impress the Barcan with his potency. Ruonn suppressed a sneer; she was
far too skinny for his tastes—why, even in quarter-gee she hardly stressed the
fabric of her silky blouse.

Suddenly impatient,
Ruonn pushed his compad across the table. “Look,” he snapped, “it’s very
simple. You’ll have the manual—a no-port reader—but in addition, here are the
failsafe shut-down commands. They are very deeply buried in the system, and
they’re not in the manual, so you’ll have to memorize them.”

Of course, he had no
intention of letting the Rifter see the codes long enough to memorize them. He
would give him Temkin code when the deal was consummated, for he would not risk
Tallis actually shutting down the logos and destroying his eidolon’s chances of
returning to Barca with the data that would elevate him to full potency.

But as he reached for
the compad to pull it back, the joy-toy next to Tallis suddenly arched her
back, pulling his gaze to her, and his mouth fell open in disbelief as the
shiny fabric of her blouse was ripped asunder by an avalanche of flesh, rosy
tipped and impossibly extravagant, blooming across the table and drowning him
in a sea of scented warmth that engulfed him on the huge satin bed as his
shestek pumped impossible pleasure into every corner of his being. Surrounded
by houris, Ruonn fell back—

Tallis turned away from the console, his eyes wide. Luri
flushed with excitement as she leaned over his shoulder, her own fleshy
avalanche pressed warmly against his ear, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“You never told me about that!” she cooed.

“That’s because it never happened,” he snapped, pulling away
from her insistent hands. “What the hell
was
that?” he asked Kira Lennart, who sat back from the console, feeling a wash of
satisfaction. “And what if the—” He looked around nervously. “—
it
sees this.”

“It can’t,” Kira stated, determined not to show her
exasperation. “Soon’s I dream-tricked that info out of the eidolon, the logos
was locked out of the loop. Right now, it can’t see this console, or this
room.”

“Then we can shut it down!” Tallis crowed.

“No. Not right away. Even this may make it suspicious,
although I think the code will prevent that. But we have to move slowly. I
think if we do it when we restart the engines, I can disguise what’s going on
long enough to get away with it.”

“And until then?”

“Until then, you want to face the Navy without the logos?”

Tallis shook his head slowly, frustration apparent in every
line of his body as the comm bleeped.

“Esbart here, Cap’n. Signal from Juvaszt. Transponder
alert.” The tech’s voice was strained. “This is it.”

Tallis looked at Kira, his face drawn, accentuating the
dark, bruised-looking flesh under his eyes, then he stalked out of the cabin.

Kira sighed and followed, ignoring Luri’s inviting look.
Luri was an idiot. Tallis was an even bigger idiot.

And I’m an idiot for
getting stuck on this ship. Well, live and learn.

She only hoped she would.

Brandon watched, fascinated, as the Kelly ship released
their lance. The connection didn’t separate cleanly, in the fashion of human
tech, but pulled apart like taffy. The little ship, resembling a streamlined
Kelly, curved away from them, rolling through 360 degrees in a farewell salute.

“That’s it,” Dyarch Anheles said. “Forty-seven hours to the
Suneater. Time to hit the sims.”

Brandon set up his suit as directed by the instructions
flashing on his faceplate. He felt his servo-armor shift slightly as the ship
powered it to one percent—just enough to give sufficient feedback for a
realistic simulation.

“AyKay,” said Anheles. “Maunitsu, you take point, Tul and
il-Vestros, you handle the vermin and scuttlers. Ophion, take your sub-squad
and manage the Kelly tech . . .” He went on for a minute longer, then said,
“Your Majesty, if you’ll—”

Brandon interrupted. “Dyarch, it isn’t going to work if you
keep calling me ‘Your Majesty.’ I mean, can you imagine how long it’s going to
take every time you have to yell, “Get your Shiidra-chatzing ass moving, Your nacker-flipping,
logos-loving Majesty?”

There was an appalled silence for a split second, then the
comm rang with laughter and hooted comments.

“AyKay, Your . . . well, what am I going to call you? I can’t
see myself yelling ‘Arkad’ at you.”

“How ’bout Yehudi?” called Yevgin Ophion, who Brandon had
learned was an irrepressible jokester. Yehudi was Murphy’s sidekick. He—or she,
the gender was indefinite and changeable—sometimes interceded with Murphy on
behalf of supplicants.

‘That’s perfect,” said Brandon. “The little man who wasn’t
there. That’s how to treat ‘His Majesty’ on this joyride.”

“AyKay, Yehudi.” Anheles took a deep breath. “But unlike
Yehudi, you’d chatzing better be there when I call your name.”

“Don’t worry.” Brandon laughed. “You couldn’t lose me if you
tried.”

The bridge of the
Grozniy
was quiet, a terrible silence born of concentration, of hope and fear, of the
strained excitement of a battle whose progress was defined by the whisper of
inflowing bits from a thousand sources.

High Admiral Margot O’Reilly Ng could hear the tianqi
sighing, as if expressing the regret she could not permit herself to feel, as,
even now, before the enemy was truly engaged, she spent lives to ensure the
safe arrival of those dark slivers of vengeance now arrowing toward the
Suneater with their human cargo, including the latest ruler of the Thousand
Suns. Latest ruler—and perhaps the last.

She tried to dispel the dark mood. If she permitted herself
such feelings now, how would she feel when the battle was truly joined?
Except then there is no time for emotions,
only for action.
Now was a time of feints and misdirection, of thrusts and
withdrawals—and of these short, agonizing waits. The waits were the worst
because this time the feints were not empty ships filled with vat beef; Juvaszt
was no fool, and no bloodless confrontation would distract him long.

So men and women died, with Ng as chooser of the slain. What
was even worse was that she sat far from the battle, protected by the bulk of a
battlecruiser so far undetected by the enemy. But the
Grozniy
, holding as it did the only hyperwave in the Fleet, was too
valuable to risk in battle, and all its power and defensive capabilities would
be needed if it were discovered.

So she waited in comparative safety while dragon’s teeth
tore at the ships comprising the huge VLDA maintained within the Suneater’s
exclusion zone, safe from any capital ships, and costly feints at several
asteroids splintered its attention as the Dol’jharians—she hoped—partitioned it
to watch the many attacks simultaneously.

Unfortunately there were three vectors where, for the first
twenty hours or so, no array could have been permitted to look, along the
courses of the three lance squads. That danger was past, but the pattern
remained in the history of the action. Would Juvaszt see that pattern?
Of course he will. The real question is,
when?

So far she’d kept him unaware longer than she’d expected. It
was uncertain, in any case, what he could do to stop them. There were more than
enough quantum interfaces racing ahead of the lances—due to impact in two hours
now—to ensure penetration. At least, according to the tactical statisticians.

“Tactical,” she said, “any change in the Dol’jharian array?”

“Nothing significant,” Rom-Sanchez replied. “They’re
concentrating on the action at asteroid phoenix-sud nine.”

Koestler’s fleet.
That was where the heaviest losses had been sustained so far, on both sides.

“I still can’t believe that the Dol’jharians don’t just blast
the asteroids right off, to prevent us from using them,” Lieutenant Warrigal
said.

“They will if any action starts going against them. But
they’d prefer to fight. It’s the only opportunity they have to force us to
engage in a situation where we can’t withdraw.”

Warrigal shook her head. “It won’t much matter if they
manage to power up the Suneater.”

“Exactly. That’s why we both have to slug it out.”

On the main screen a window bloomed, revealing the sudden
appearance of a Kelly scout, and Ng turned her attention back to the battle.
Good news or bad, it didn’t matter.

In two hours, the real battle would begin.

The bridge of the
Fist
of Dol’jhar
was alive with a triumphal tension. Juvaszt gloried in it, sure
that at last the final resolution of the vengeance that had so long eluded his
lord, the Avatar, was at hand—at his hands. He breathed deeply of air sharp
with electricity and sweat, and leaned forward in the command pod as if to leap
upon the prey represented by a mere scattering of flaring points upon the
viewscreen and the in-sweeping cascade of data from the ships in his command.

But a sense of incompletion nagged at him, a vaguely urgent worry
that something he’d overlooked lay waiting patiently to ambush him. The flaring
eye of the singularity stared at him, winged by the flame of perishing matter
about it, a pitiless gaze, awaiting the reversal that, for no apparent reason,
he yet feared.