The Thrones of Kronos (71 page)

Rhapulo said, “Marys, we’ve got Tarkans to burn!”

They jogged off. Brandon could still hear the whine-thump of
their armor when Dyarch Gwyn said, “AyKay, Yehudi. Move it.”

o0o

At Chur-Mellikath’s suggestion—offered with every
indication of deference underscored by fear—Anaris held back from the front line
of fighting, trying to use his perceptions to direct the Tarkans against the
in-pressing Marines. That fit in well with his plans, for it enabled him to
maneuver the battle to interpose the Marines between the landing bay and the
Chamber of Kronos, cutting off the Avatar’s escape.

Anaris smiled. His father’s adherence to Dol’jharian ritual
was making this so much easier: the Avatar could not just order the Tarkans to
kill his son. He must be present. And the Ogres were not a problem, for only
those within voice range of his father would respond, and sooner or later the
little Ogre-killing machines would catch up with the two guarding the Avatar.

But not yet. That was an interesting trade-off. Without the
Ogres, whose weight made them instantly identifiable by his kinesthetic sense
of the station, his father would have been invisible. The signature of two
Ogres combined with the lesser but similar distortion of two Tarkans, allowed
him to identify the Avatar easily.

But the effort of tracking all the combatants was rapidly
draining him. And Brandon’s ghost-worm was following him. Although it made no
further hostile move, it blurred his kinesthetic sense of the station, making
it harder and harder to follow his father’s progress. As his fatigue grew, the
sense of something left undone grew with it, nagging him with the conviction
that he had overlooked something important.

During a lull in the fighting, Anaris leaned against a wall,
pressing his fingers into his temples. Was the Unity really broken, or was he
unable to hear it past the pain in his head? He tried to listen on that mental
plane, but of course there was no trace of Vi’ya, much less any of the others.

He rubbed his thumbs around the edges of his eye sockets,
reliving those last few moments in the Throne Room. He’d given her a fair
chance, and he knew she’d make her way to her ship, if she could, despite
Tarkans, Ogres, and Marines. Marines. Would the Panarchists shoot her out of
hand or take her prisoner?

He hoped the latter, and indulged a brief, pleasurable
vision of using his TK to trash her captors. How much she’d hate being rescued!
He grinned, and for the first time in what seemed an eternity, he felt a spurt
of his old energy return.

The comm the Tarkan commander had given him buzzed.

“Lord,” said Chur-Mellikath’s voice, “the Marine cohort
attacking the array lab has broken off the engagement. I believe they intend to
reinforce the attack against the landing bay.”

Anaris stared at the comm. The report made no sense.
Destroying the arrays had to be their first objective. The arrays were critical
to the cryptography that protected Juvaszt’s communications with the Rifter
fleet. Why abandon that attack?

Then, with a sickening shock of anger, he realized what he’d
overlooked: that no one else on the Suneater could have known. The arrays not
only controlled crypto, they controlled the stasis clamps. And he already knew
those were under the control of an inimical construct.
The Panarchists can probably hear every order Juvaszt gives by now
.
Or if not, they soon would.

There was no reason to spare the arrays, and destroying them
would banish Brandon’s haunt. “Destroy the arrays.”

There was a strangled sound from the comm.

“Do it!” he commanded. “They have been compromised by the
Panarchists and they are using them against us.”

“It will be done.”

Although the Tarkan commander did not say so, Anaris knew he
would notify the Avatar, whose fury would kindle even higher at this news—and
at the necessity of confirming his son’s order.

“And notify Juvaszt,” he added.

The booming of amplified battle cries echoed along the
corridor ahead, and a Tarkan squad appeared. Despite their name, they were
retreating—but stopped when they saw him. A harsh screaming buzz filled the air
and something—a Tarkan gauntlet—knocked him to the ground. Several streaks of
light flashed overhead and detonated among the Tarkans. He could feel their
trajectories with his mind. They’d been aimed at him!

The Marines wouldn’t ordinarily waste anti-armor weapons on
an unshielded human. His actions against the first squad, while assuring the
obedience of the Tarkans, had also made him a target for the enemy.

Anaris scrambled back on his hands and feet, his
communicator forgotten, as the Tarkans tried to shield him. The harsh screaming
of the wasps redoubled as another, bigger wave streaked toward them.
Desperately Anaris grabbed the space ahead with his mind and wrenched. The
wasps veered into the floor only meters away, detonating with a stunning blast
of sound and a wash of flame that singed his face. Anaris vomited rackingly,
his vision reddening almost to the point of blindness.

“Fall back!” he shouted, the words trying to split his
skull. “The karra will ward me!” Not looking to see the effect of his command,
he willed a hole in the floor and felt it engulf him as the thunderous
whine-thump of the Marines’ armor echoed from the corridor ahead.

The hole sealed. He heard Panarchist voices overhead,
blurred by the quantum-plast. Around him the substance of the station stirred:
the ghost had found him. He strained, racked by pain, holding the womb of
quantum-plast still around him as the stasis clamps fought him under the
control of Brandon’s construct, waiting for the Marines to peel back his
protection and haul him up to certain death.

But the voices faded. They hadn’t seen him.

He felt the ghost move away. Relaxing slowly, he rested,
gathering his strength to return to the battle. The Tarkans would have to fight
on their own for a while.

o0o

The phoenix drifted
in a wide circle, wings spread, then spiraled down toward the flames . . .

Flame flashed through Vi’ya’s head. It was the incessant
mental chatter of the Eya’a. She opened her eyes. Memory returned, slow and
pain-dragged. The station powering, Eusabian’s order. Anaris’s reaction. The
Presence. She reached out involuntarily, drawn by the memory of that
transforming encounter, but could sense nothing.

No, not nothing. She caught a vivid impression of vast
powers gathering for some intense effort. It was as though its attention turned
elsewhere with a concentration that left no room for anything so small as a
single human being.

A thought brushed the edge of her mind, weighty despite the
fleeting contact that delivered its message, not as words, but as a concept.
Small was not the same as inconsequential.

Then she lost even that sense of Its presence, but the Eya’a
had caught the image, and their high-speed, vivid mind chatter, never before so
intense, nearly overwhelmed her.

She projected her own emotions at them, felt the impact, and
sensed them slowing their thoughts down to the relative crawl-speed of speech.
One-who-gives-firestone.

That was their term for Brandon.

She sat up and rubbed her blurring eyes. Outside the rounded
mouth of her little cave waves of liquescent light churned in patterns that
wrenched at her mind. She turned her back on it. Whether handholds existed or
not in the wall above her cave, she doubted she’d live to use them. The glaring
light revealed the smooth, rounded curve of walls protecting the three of them,
like a womb. An opening existed near the floor, but it was so small only the
Eya’a could fit through it.

There was no escape for her this way, but that did not mean
there was no escape.

Brandon had come. Despite the light-years between them, both
in distance and in the numbers of people who felt their claims ought to
intervene, he had come.

The Eya’a vanished into the opening on their quest to find
Brandon.

Left alone, she lay back down, and closed her eyes—and there
came a flicker of memory: herself, smiling, the touch of lips on flesh.
Vi’ya.

I am here.
She
sent her own thought, freighted with memory, fueled by joy, along the same
mysterious route.
Find me!

o0o

The sense of helplessness Barrodagh felt after the
destruction of his compad was intensified by the difficulty of keeping up with
the Avatar and the two armored Tarkans as they made their way toward the
landing bay. From time to time he prodded helplessly at the device, which he
had plucked reflexively from the floor in the Chamber of Kronos after Eusabian
cast it down, but it was dead: vague flickers and tiny electrical squawks were
its only response, mocking his hopes.

The corridors blurred with drifting smoke that caught at his
throat. Even worse was the iron tang of blood and the foul stench of voided
bowels that attended the horrifying piles of sundered bodies scattered along
their path. He had never bothered to imagine what the Ogres were really like.
Somehow, since they were a Panarchist invention, he’d assumed they killed
cleanly. But these were reprogrammed for Dol’jharians.

The Avatar paid the corpses no mind. He strode onward as
tirelessly as the Ogres, his dirazh’u forgotten in one hand. From time to time
the Tarkans would confer with distant comrades via their comms. Often this
resulted in a change of direction. Barrodagh could hear distant explosions, and
once he felt the deck shudder underfoot.

Despite his hatred of spaceflight, he longed for the
relative security of the
Fist of Dol’jhar.
He even looked forward to their flight on the corvette he’d ordered to warm
up in the landing bay as soon as he received word of the lances. Even more he
looked forward to watching as the corvette blasted the
Telvarna
into smoking scrap, marooning the tempath and her crew of
criminals.

The waves of peristalsis moving slowly down the corridors strengthened.
Sometimes the Avatar and the Tarkans had to duck to avoid the ceiling. It was
as though the Suneater was trying to expel the foreign bodies that had turned
its innards into a hell of smoke and flame and death.

But as the four neared the bay, the stasis clamps were more
thickly clustered, suppressing the station’s movement to mere twitches
underfoot, and Barrodagh began to feel more optimistic.

The Tarkans halted. “Lord,” one said to the Avatar, “Altasz
Chur-Mellikath wishes to report.”

“Speak,” said Eusabian. The Tarkan commander’s voice
crackled out of a voice relay on the armored chest of the guard.

“Lord, the heir has ordered the destruction of the station
arrays, stating that they have been compromised by the Panarchists, who can now
read fleet communications. They are also, he says, using them against us here.”

Eusabian’s hands clenched on his dirazh’u. “Your judgment?”

“The Marines are indeed well informed. It may be so.”

“Do it, then divert those squads to the bay to open my
path.”

“It shall be done.”

Eusabian motioned the guards onward. Barrodagh clamped his
teeth together, trying to suppress the new wave of terror clenching his vitals.
Without the arrays the stasis clamps would be largely ineffective, with only
local influence. He’d be crushed, or sucked into a wall, or . . .

The images kept coming; Barrodagh lost track of time. All
the corridors looked the same, anyhow.

He almost ran into the Avatar’s back as the Tarkans stopped
once again, conferring quietly. Faintly Barrodagh heard the welcome whine of a
ship’s engines warming. One of the guards bowed to the Avatar. “Lord, we are
very close to the landing bay. Chur-Mellikath will arrange a diversion. Then—”

He broke off as something scuttled out of the smoke shadows
ahead. It looked like a miniature Kelly, spidering along on three skinny legs,
glittering lenses held aloft on a thin head-stalk. More followed, a horde
scuttling like insects.

The Tarkans cursed and flamed them with their jacs. Some of
the little machines flared up and collapsed in glowing ruin, but many more
scuttled past, and the Tarkans couldn’t fire at them for fear of burning the
Avatar.

But he was not their target. The spider-things swarmed over
the Ogres despite the flare of their head jacs, efficiently cutting
flame-spewing rents in their armor with some sort of shiny thread they extruded
from their underbellies. The big machines toppled, thrashing and spraying
jac-fire in all directions. The Tarkans jumped in front of the Avatar, ignoring
Barrodagh, who flung himself down in Eusabian’s shadow.

Then, to Barrodagh’s horror, the little three-legged
machines proved themselves just as effective against armored humans as against
the Ogres. Within moments the two Tarkans were dismembered; not flames but
blood spewed from their armor as they were cut apart. Barrodagh could hear a
tinny, questioning shout from their suit comms that suddenly cut off as the
suits’ power failed. There was no way to answer.

Finished with the Tarkans, the little devices peered up at
them with their minute, glassy lenses. Barrodagh’s bladder burned with an
overwhelming urge to pee. He controlled it with an agonizing effort as the
machines scuttled away and vanished, leaving the two men standing in a spreading
pool of blood that sizzled and stank where it engulfed the damaged Ogres, now
twisting worm-like as their arrays discharged their programming and their
energy packs shorted out, raising their armor to red heat.

The Avatar glanced at that heating armor, then strode off
toward the amplified shouts of battle in the landing bay.

They’d reached another corridor when webs of light flickered
out of the stasis clamps lining the corridor. The ceiling flexed down and the
walls puckered in, quickly narrowing to a hole that vanished as they watched.
The Avatar stepped back. For the first time, Barrodagh heard an inadvertent
sound from him, a sudden intake of breath as a shape shot up from the floor
like a quantum-plast stalagmite. The blue glare from the stasis clamps
intensified; the shape writhed and formed itself into the figure of a man
webbed in lightning, the ghost of Jaspar Arkad incarnate in the substance of
the Suneater.