The Thrones of Kronos (77 page)

He smiled. Well then, first a bit of attrition on her
escort—and the elimination of the little brain-burners. He looked forward to
her reaction to his landing bay surprise.

o0o

Lar leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath.
The weird rippling motions through the Urian material were almost soothing.
Like being on water. He fought against an almost overpowering urge to close his
eyes and imagine himself on a little boat on Bori, floating between the islands.

And get sucked into a
wall?
Fear jolted him away, and he straightened his aching back. What had
they stopped for? Montrose and Jaim were both standing guard at the mouth of a
slowly shrinking tunnel, with four of the little spidery machines that had
started following them clustered around their feet. Lar stifled a nervous
snicker—he dared not lose control—but the three-legged devices looked like
amorous spiders. No one knew what they were, but they seemed harmless to
humans.

At least they hadn’t seen any Ogres for a while. Though so
far the pass tags had worked, Lar felt like peeing every time they encountered
one of the big killing machines. He fingered the pass tag he’d taken from Tat,
who lay unconscious on the floating gurney they’d pulled from the dispensary
when they searched it. The medtechs they’d rescued had taken charge of Tat and
Sedry, who was on a second gurney; two wounded Bori lay together on a third.

Lysanter knelt, his head bowed over his compad as he keyed
rapidly, a flicker of light indicating its connection to the station’s DataNet.
Then he sighed. “The arrays are down.” He shook his head. “But I’m in.”

“Good,” Montrose murmured. “Status?”

“Bad,” Lysanter returned in an undertone. “Asteroids are on
their way. We have a little over an hour until impact.”

“Let’s get a move on, then,” Montrose said, cutting through
the buzz of worried voices from the Bori they’d rescued. Obediently they
started falling into the teams Montrose had appointed.

“There’s worse,” said Lysanter. “The companion’s core has
collapsed. It’s going supernova, although well after the asteroid impacts.”

A Bori shrieked. The rest started milling about in panic.

Jaim lifted his hand, and everyone was still. “You heard
what he said. The first problem is the asteroids. The
Telvarna
can outrun the explosion. ”

But not the gamma
rays,
Lar thought. He swallowed, his throat dry. Best not to say anything.

Montrose said to Lysanter, “Is there any way to find out if
there are other pockets of people hiding?”

“No,” Lysanter said. “Not unless I scan all the remaining
imagers, and those are not installed everywhere.”

“There are consoles everywhere, though, right?” On
Lysanter’s nod, Jaim said, “Post a notice: report to landing bay for
evacuation. It’s all we can do at this point.”

Lysanter tabbed his compad, then stood up. “Done.”

Jaim gestured to Montrose to take the lead again, which he
did. Lar gripped Dem’s hand and fell in well behind them. His free hand
clutched sweatily at the unfamiliar shape of the jac someone had given him, and
again he felt a wave of shame at how badly prepared he was to do his part in
any fighting needed.

We’re liabilities,
he thought bitterly, looking at Dem’s vacant face. He remembered how many of
them it had taken to defeat the remaining four of Delmantias’s death squad—that
after Jaim had disposed of two of them in the space of a breath.

Lar glanced at Jaim, who walked like a human predator, cat-like,
his face calm, his gaze everywhere. In the three sudden fights they’d had since
the business with Delmantias, it had been Jaim who did the most—and this
despite his broken ribs.
If we live
through this, they’ll probably dump us at Rifthaven, and I can’t blame them
.
The truth was, nobody in the universe took Bori seriously. Including Bori
themselves.

Montrose stopped. Lar’s hand tightened on his jac. The smell
of smoke had intensified to a burn in noses and eyes, and Lar fought not to
sneeze as he squinted down the hazy corridor.

Jaim’s hand went up for silence.

Everyone listened, and heard the rhythmic whine-thump of a
squad of Tarkans moving rapidly down some adjacent adit. Lar’s heart banged
loudly, and the jac felt slippery in his fingers.

He knew they were close to the landing bay. The plan before
Lysanter’s news had been to get everyone there, and if the fighting still kept
them away from Vi’ya’s ship, find a place to hide while Jaim and Montrose and
Lokri searched for refugees.

They started on—and stopped again. Now came the metallic
thump and amplified whine of Ogres. Four of them rounded a corner some distance
ahead. Looking past Jaim and the others, Lar felt his pass tag vibrate, just as
it had each time before, but this time the jacports on the Ogres snapped open
and shut several times, and the machines’ sensory clusters swiveled jerkily.

The three Rifters ducked back into the small tunnel opening
they’d just left, motioning to the Bori to retreat.

“What?” Lokri demanded. “Lar, what’s with your pass tag?”

“It’s working—”

“But something is trying to override the passcode,” Lysanter
said quickly. “And the focus seems to be you three.”

The Ogres advanced, but with a hesitation in their tread.

“Hreem!” The hatred in Montrose’s voice raised the hairs on
Lar’s neck. “He brought the Ogres. He must have activated some special code in
them, and they have our IDs.”

Suddenly Lar knew what he had to do. He pushed Dem toward Tat’s
gurney. “Stay with Tat,” he said, his voice going squeaky. Feeling a weird
mixture of terror and thrill, he stepped around the corner and winced in
anticipation of the imagined rush of flame from the Ogres’ jacs as the machines
turned on him.

His pass tag vibrated again, and, as he’d hoped, the
machines hesitated. He could hear the Rifters retreating down the tunnel and
the panicked running of the Bori behind them. Then the Ogres stalked forward
and he had to throw himself to one side as they thumped past. Their motions
were jerky, as though something was interfering with their programming.

“Jaim, Lokri . . . look!” Lar heard Montrose
say, and he rose from the floor just in time to see the little spider machines
scuttling toward the Ogres.

The spiders swarmed over the two lead Ogres. Jets of flame
sprayed from the armor of the killing machines as the little devices spun shiny
threads around them. Jac-fire sprayed from the Ogres as they fell, one beam
narrowly missing Lar as he cringed against the wall.

But the second two had gained time enough to fall back, and
they shriveled the spiders into glowing fragments. Three beams of plasma lanced
out of the tunnel mouth as the Rifters concentrated fire on the lower joints of
the remaining Ogres, trying to overheat them and bring them down.

The Ogres stepped over their fallen companion and raised
their heads, the deadly jacs projecting from amidst the sensory bulbs and
clusters of their insane faces . . .

And to either side of the Ogres the walls puckered open. Simultaneously
two armored figures lunged through, each holding a flattened ovoid in one
gauntlet, which they slapped against the Ogres’ armor. A double concussion made
Lar’s ears ring. Flame and molten metal sprayed from the Ogres’ sides and they
toppled over.

The two figures turned blank, menacing faceplates toward the
crew, and fear ripped through Lar when he recognized the Sun and Phoenix on the
front of the armored Marines, followed swiftly by giddy relief.

More Marines deployed efficiently to secure the tunnel
intersections all around. Meanwhile, through the clearing haze stepped a tall
figure in black—Vi’ya.

o0o

How long Ivard fought for sanity he could not tell. There
was no room in him for anything save the agony of a million voices, a million
images slashing at the fabric of his mind while he fell endlessly through an
alien space that yielded no place to stand. He grabbed desperately at the
occasional familiar sound or sight: a human face or voice, distorted by the
stress of battle. Once or twice he even recognized the High Admiral, and
another who he guessed must be the Dol’jharian commander, but instantly they
whirled away in a vortex of incomprehensibility, replaced by an irresistible
stream of other voices, other images, not human, some so far from human that he
flinched away.

Only the presence of the Archon’s blue flicker at the center
of his being preserved him from immediate destruction. His thoughts labored
under the impact of the assault upon his senses, and Ivard knew that if the
Kelly hadn’t died, he might have mastered this alien insanity. But slowly, try
as he might to sort the synesthetic chaos he had plunged himself into, his mind
began to come apart, the blue spark fluttering from strand to strand of a
dissolving web, helpless against its spreading dissolution.

Bits of memory began to explode outward, slipping quickly
away, bright sparks lost forever as his personality dissolved. Some, those that
most had made him what he was, orbited the failing flame of his ego for a time,
but they, too, began to recede, gliding backward into a guttering smear of
reddish light, like the distortion of the starfield behind a ship in a Realtime
Run at the edge of light speed.

But like that relativistic distortion, ahead a brilliant
sphere of blue-white light swelled, engulfing him in a radiance that solidified
into the highlight on a silver cup.

“If you are thirsty,
drink.”

It was memory—more than memory, and Ivard understood that
his reckless gesture, here within the Suneater, had plunged him into a place
analogous to the timelessness he had found on Desrien. Holding on to the image,
he seized the cup and drank, feeling the touch of feminine fingers holding it
to his lips. Greywing?

There was no answer, unless it was the strength flowing into
him, pulling the scattering memories back into his core, remaking him. With a
sound like a million chimes, some slow-booming like the breath of stars, some
light-quick like the particles whose dance defines Totality, the synesthetic
chaos snapped into meaning around him, the chaotic tracery of light and sound
assembling itself into the warm-lit safety of New Glastonbury.

But it was not the same, Ivard could see, for the
stained-glass windows were alive and infinitely more complex.

It reminded him of Tate Kaga’s palace, and the memory calmed
him. Now he could deal with the alien images. They had their place, though
their messages were not for him.

Music thundered around him, spilling from vast constructs of
bright metal pipes and wooden-shuttered boxes in the sides of the cathedral
past the central crossing and the white-clad altar.

Before him a man sat on a polished bench before an immensely
complex console: ranks of keyboards over a row of pedals, and row upon row of
large knobs at the ends of protruding rods, some pulled out, some flush with
the console. He lifted his hands from the keys and turned. It was the same man
Ivard had first encountered in the cathedral.

The man moved sideways on the bench. “Sit. There’s very
little time. Look,” he said, waving his hand around at the ranks of pipes.
“First, each tone comes from a different pipe.”

He ran his hands across first one keyboard, then another;
then, quickly pulling and pushing some of the knobs, did it again. The sound
rolled across the spacious interior, coming from a multitude of sources,
filling the space with bright chords whose sound was mirrored in the movement
and focus of the multitude of living windows all around.

The man grabbed Ivard’s hand. “Feel that. There’s a direct
physical link between the key and the pipe.” Ivard pressed first one key, then
a second. The keys felt alive and springy under his touch, with a slight delay
he found disorienting.

“But—” Ivard began.

“Hush, youngling,” the man said. “This is the only way I can
reach you. Soon I will depart.”

Ivard felt the man’s deep joy in that simple statement and
trembled at the knowledge that whatever the Presence was who thus made itself
known to him, Ivard was touching but the penumbra of its thoughts. Any more
would destroy him as utterly as a moth in a furnace.

The image of the cathedral wavered, and as if glimpsing
something far too large for his mind, Ivard saw with a god’s vision. He sat at
the center of a web of mastery thrown over space and time; the core of the red
giant pulsed against his fingers, an accelerating rhythm as the science of the
Ur propelled it toward its death, and at the center of his awareness yawned a
gateway to the Void, to freedom.

“But there are others of your kind, other Children of the
Vortex here,” the man continued, “and they will be destroyed if you cannot
master this, for without your help my departure will mean the destruction of
this artifact, my prison.”

“I never learned to play music,” Ivard protested.

“You didn’t, but you are more than you, are you not? I could
not touch your mind even this much were there not others in and of you.”

The Unity! Grief seized Ivard. “Portus-Dartinus-Atos are
dead,” he said. “The Unity is broken.”

The man smiled. “That is not so.” He held up his hand. “Yes,
the trinity is dead, but there are others. This image—” He once more gestured
at their surroundings. “—comes not from your mind, but from another who shared
this place with you, and to whom what you call music is the breath of life.”

He stood up. “Play, little one, or you are all lost.”

o0o

Montrose moved his aching head enough to perceive Vi’ya’s
angry profile as she walked with heavy tread. Lokri also watched her, his
fingers convulsively gripping his jac.

As soon as Jaim told her where Ivard and Lucifur were, she
had wanted to go after him, and it was only Brandon who had stopped her. No one
heard the quick, low-voiced conversation between them, though reading from
Brandon’s gestures toward the Marines he’d made tactical sense. For now Ivard
had to be left.