The Thrones of Kronos (66 page)

And then what? The Rifter weapons would rapidly become
irresistible as the station powered up. The Fleet risked a terrible beating
until the Marines could wrest control and shut down the Rifter ships. Her only
course of action now was to delay the start-up as long as possible, perhaps
even until the Marines arrived, so that the interval between power-up and
shutdown was as short as possible. For she was sure one of those at risk in
those naval ships was Brandon. He would not have stayed on Ares.

They left the transport at the usual place. As they walked
down the last corridor toward the Chamber, Vi’ya felt the presence of the Heart
of Kronos stronger than it had ever been. She wondered if the Unity’s last
probe, and the struggle with Norio, had brought it to some new level of
activity.

The flash of fear and hatred from the nearest Tarkan guard
was like a hot needle through the eyeballs.

Eusabian waited inside, flanked by two Ogres. His dirazh’u
writhed in his hands. But she barely spared him a glance, for Anaris was there
as well.

Never before had her tempathic sensitivity been so profound.
His emotions were as clear as speech: anticipation, wariness, triumph. He did
not want his father there, yet he looked forward to wresting control of the
Suneater from him. The only problem he foresaw was the timing.

Eusabian’s hands did not pause in their curse-weaving as he
looked across at Barrodagh. “Begin.”

He would not demean himself by addressing Vi’ya directly—an
observation which she found amusing, and oddly steadying. Where she expected
danger was not from him, but from his son, from whom she had to guard even her
thoughts.

“Go on,” Barrodagh said testily, motioning Vi’ya forward. He
did not dare to come near her, she noticed. From beyond him, near the bank of
instruments, Lysanter nodded at Vi’ya, his thought encouraging.

The Eya’a were already standing at the base of the upwelling
of the station’s substance that now resembled a throne in every respect. Its
substance seemed to pulse with hidden power, as though moiré patterns below the
threshold of perceptions were chasing through it.

Anaris watched Vi’ya follow the Eya’a, stepping directly
onto the Throne. Cautiously he probed at the weird mental barrier, which was
more a door than a wall—a door that could be opened, but not by him.

He sensed her awareness of him, then it turned away. She
stood still for several minutes. Anaris felt an internal flutter, exerted his
will, and the soles of his boots pressed up against his feet and regained their
contact with the floor. He could control his TK, so far.

Eusabian made a slight movement. Lysanter said hastily,
“Increased activity detected by stasis arrays, centered here.”

The Avatar returned his gaze to the Throne as Vi’ya stepped
up to it. Anaris could sense the care with which she moved, an appearance
heightened by the darting gestures of the Eya’a, who appeared unconscious of
the danger of the well before the Throne.

In the crew’s chamber, warmth spread down into Sedry’s hands
and along her spine, filling her with energy. She knew it was time. She twisted
the brainsuck ampule, inhaled sharply, and fell into dataspace.

For Vi’ya, the Chamber of Kronos vanished as a surge of antonymic
force overwhelmed her, a synesthesia of opposites: sun-core heat and the
deathly cold of interstellar space, the fierce x-rays of gravity-kindled fusion
and the muttering embers of a dying sun, fervent birth, heat death, hope,
despair. Succor, contact. Trapped, alone.

Whipsawed by oscillating emotions more intense than any
she’d ever experienced, she reached out for the Unity, panicked briefly at her
solitude. Then, with a sensation she imagined similar to that of a paralytic
regaining contact with her body after spinal regeneration, the various minds of
the Unity flowered around her like newborn suns, and the Chamber of Kronos
snapped back into being around her.

It was no longer possible to reach the Heart of Kronos: the
back of the Throne was now too high. Vi’ya stepped carefully around it and
faced the Heart, aware of the gulf yawning behind her. She was not afraid of
falling—few Rifters were—but very aware of her fragile hold on the physical
reality around her. Patterns in the Throne, suggestions of light beneath the
surface, almost like carvings . . .

I’m not ready for
this!
Wordless reassurance flowed from the Unity, from the Kelly’s tender
laving of infinite understanding to the astringently bracing anticipation of
winning that belonged to Anaris. It was the awareness of Anaris’s presence, and
the effort it took to keep him walled from herself and the others while still
drawing on his strength, that kept her focus fragmented now.

Vi’ya turned around and sat down carefully. She leaned
forward and put her chin on her hands, staring into the infinite well in front
of her, peripherally aware of the Eya’a standing to either side of the Throne.

From his vantage, Anaris watched Vi’ya gaze into the gulf
before her. He glanced over at the monitor relaying the view of an imager
looking down the well. It showed nothing unusual.

The wait that commenced was far longer, but this time
Eusabian did not move, perhaps because of Lysanter’s ceaseless flow of activity
at his instruments, and the quiet comments he exchanged with his techs about
the increasing activity of the station, which as yet was revealed only in his
instruments.

The wait appeared to be agony for Barrodagh. He hissed and
muttered over his compad, and his facial tic intensified until Anaris half
expected teeth to fly out of his mouth or one eye to pop out with every
convulsion of his cheek. Then his head jerked up. Eusabian’s black gaze lifted
expectantly.

“Lord, Chur-Mellikath reports first arrival of quantum
interfaces on the outer surface. All have been removed.”

“How long until the lances impact?” the Avatar asked.

“Juvaszt estimates fifteen minutes to first impact.”

Eusabian switched his gaze back to the Throne. Barrodagh
watched him with the manner of one hungry for more attention. Anaris wondered if
the Bori had any reality outside of his interactions with his father. There was
no doubt more to Morrighon than that, which was all to his advantage—and
carried commensurate risks.

Vi’ya still had not moved.

Anaris envisioned the lances arrowing in, their radiants
flaring: the penultimate move in a duel between himself and Brandon that had
begun years ago in the Mandala, and had nearly culminated in Anaris’s first Karusch-na
Rahali when he had attacked Brandon, then a slim youth in his mid-teens, Anaris
not much older.

This was the first time Brandon had struck back. Anaris
entertained a brief fantasy of encountering Brandon among the Marines, ending
their duel in hand-to-hand combat. The vivid image of Brandon’s broken,
bleeding face beneath his bare hands gave Anaris an atavistic thrill that
echoed the sexual drive for dominance of that long ago day.

Anaris laughed at himself. Much more likely, Brandon was far
away, lounging half-drunk in some sybaritic Douloi refuge, trusting in his
underlings to deal with his enemy. He would not invest the Avatar with such
importance; his government would not let him.

He shed the fantasy, shut his eyes, and reached for Vi’ya.

With deliberate care Vi’ya gathered the subsidiary members
of the Unity around her, their contributions finding place in her mind and
spirit: pride and passion from Lokri, grim determination and anamnesis from
Montrose, loyalty and sorrow from Jaim, enthusiasm and curiosity from Ivard,
innocent savagery from Lucifur.

The vertigo intensified, for there were three gestalts that
found no easy fit within her psyche.

Tat, whose strength came from a closeness to others that
Vi’ya had never tolerated. Then an echo from the Eya’a, whose collective
consciousness entailed a closeness beyond that demanded by any human culture,
and Tat’s mind melded into the Unity.

Sedry, whose calm, unjudging acceptance of those around her
had seemed too trusting. Then an echo from the Kelly, triplicate wisdom, their
long ancestral memory suggesting the strange trans-human doctrines of Sedry’s
faith, both yielding that same acceptance of every sort of personality their
respective races had to offer. Warmth flowed through her as Sedry’s mind found
its true place within the Unity.

At the last, strengthened and balanced, she turned her
inward eye to Anaris and dropped the mental shield. There were no words, just
the intensity of dual awareness that was imbued with sexual power.

Vi’ya heard again the screaming of the locator and
comprehended on a fundamental level that she would never escape Dol’jhar. Not
as she had sought to, for rejection of the evils of that world did not require
rejection of the strengths that they had bred in her. Yet rejection there must
be, as strong as the impelling attraction: there were still no words, because there
was not, and never would be, trust.

A brief vision of New Glastonbury flashed across her mind,
and now she understood its architecture: a prolepsis in stone of the Unity.
Arches within, buttresses without, all supporting a dynamic structure of opposing
forces.

Anaris was the buttress, supporting from the outside.

The Unity at last complete, Vi’ya leaned back in the Throne.
Her head touched the Heart of Kronos—

—and she fell into the Dreamtime.

Silence rang through
the Isle of the Chorei, the song of hope stilled as stars rained from the sky
and the light failed. The annihilating wall of steaming water roared, but she
could not move, enwrapped in chains whose icy, ashen, bloody weight drained the
strength from her body. Her surroundings flickered, unstable, jagged rifts of
intolerable color ripping through her perceptions. Vi’ya was dizzy, as if once
blind, now given sight, but without the experience to interpret the messages
from her newborn eyes.

Much as she might touch herself after a deathly nightmare,
for reassurance of her bodily reality, Vi’ya reached again for the Unity. Brief
stasis, silence seething with the power underlying the illusion of space and
time, then, like a seed crystal touching the surface of a supersaturate, the
mind of the Unity flowered around her, reaching out.

And touched a god.

Anaris felt the Unity as a psionic explosion at the back
of his head. The chamber flared with light, only some of it external to his
mind.

The station howled, a sound so loud it shivered through the
bones of his skull. Desperately he fought for control, trying to keep his feet
on the deck. His vision dimmed as his kinesthetic sense again expanded to
encompass the station, imbuing his skin with agonizing sensitivity. He was
aware of himself only from outside, as a vector of forces within the Chamber of
Kronos, near a radiance that grew until it filled his head and left no room for
anything but the grim struggle to remain standing—and the need of the Unity for
his strength.

Power fountained up all around him. But with the surge of
power came malevolence, battening on the energy all around. He sensed the Unity
throwing itself against the familiar enemy as something vast stirred under them
all, uneasy, hesitant. The malevolence fought back, the forces balancing in
agonizing tension. Movement was impossible. Time stopped, and pain began.

Sedry stood on a vast
plain, dim and darkling. A statue rose before her, a noble figure whose beauty,
androgynous and trans-human, stung her eyes. Fury and agony possessed her as
she saw the chains enwrapping it, rusty and ashen, weighing down its mighty
wings, binding it to the dusty ground. Its gaze sought her out; she trembled,
exposed, knowing that more than a fraction of its attention would unmake her
utterly.

But from the figure
flowed a sense of peace, long-suffering patience, and sorrow. She knew the
power to free it was not hers.

Sedry made her way
among the dolmens and menhirs of the hierophantic altar of the Phoenix; it was
empty of presence. A bleak wind wound through the massive stones, carrying the
reek of dust and decay. Overhead the stars began to flicker and dim, one by one
blooming in actinic fury and then vanishing in rosettes of bloody light.

She heard the deep
coughing of a lion. Heat lightning flickered on the distant horizon, briefly
silhouetting a vast form prowling hungrily beyond the sarsens. She sensed it
approach. A red light kindled behind her, illuminating a monstrous visage. No
natural being, but some unholy get of scorpion and lion and bird of prey—a face
of madness, talons, claws, with segmented stinger upraised, a drop of venom
gleaming at its tip.

The thing pushed its
enormous shoulders between two upright stones. The slab spanning them grated,
spilling dust, as they shuddered, cracks crazing through their substance.

Sedry felt rough stone
at her shoulder. Afraid to turn her back on the monster, she spotted a small
glowing coal on a rude stone altar. She leaned, blew, and it blazed up, singeing
her face as flame limned the form of the Phoenix, towering above her in a glory
of power.

The monstrosity moaned
in anger and withdrew its head. Then, to her horror, she saw Vi’ya and the
others of the Unity gathered around the statue, pulling at the chains. The
sudden clank was loud against the wind and the silent death of stars high
overhead. The monster snarled in wrath and advanced upon them, but they were
intent upon the prisoner.

In a frenzy of fear
Sedry ran to the edge of the charmed circle of stone, then stopped, helpless,
knowing she had no weapon against the horror.

o0o

Surreptitiously Romarnan straightened his aching body.

A hell of twisted shapes and shadows formed the outer
surface of the Suneater, sharpened by the glare of the singularity, the flare
of jacs as Tarkans destroyed the quantum interfaces discovered by Romarnan and
his fellows, the harsh voices of their Dol’jharian overlords barking orders, of
sweat and the stink of an ill-maintained suit, and over all, the fear.