The Thrones of Kronos (92 page)

“How long?” she asked, and knew it must have been quite some
time, for her voice was husky with disuse. As she raised her head, she felt the
weight of her hair, which had always been cut short.

Weeks, or months, I
guess,
she thought.

But the young man didn’t reply. Instead, he gestured, and to
her surprise, she understood him as perfectly as if he’d spoken—every line of
his body, every movement of his perfect limbs, was absolute and sure. She had a
sense that until now she’d seen only clumsy imitations of the human form.

She rose and followed him, amazed to find no stiffness in
her limbs, no scars upon her body. Her last memory was the tunnel walls
slamming together behind her, the Dol’jharian heir looming over her; she put
that memory away.

They walked for some time through the strangeness of the
Suneater. The air was cool on her flesh, the deck strangely affectless
underfoot.

He led her through an adit and she stopped, gasping, for
there was no floor. Instead, below their feet, the hellish fury of sun-hot
plasma raved and swirled, and beyond, as if through white-hot mist, the
singularity glared with almost unbearable brilliance. With a shudder of awe,
she realized that they were in the heart of a supernova. There would be no
escape.

The young man took her hand and led her out onto the
invisible floor, toward a strange vertical beam of radiance lancing down from
the organically groined ceiling far above. She shrank from it, noting how it
dwindled away toward the singularity, visible even against its searing light.

He dropped her hand, and at that moment, a memory surfaced.

“Ivard?” she asked. “You’re Ivard, aren’t you?” For the
first time she noticed the emerald band around his wrist.

But he merely smiled and stepped into the beam, while the
cat sat and began to clean itself, clearly unimpressed.

Her eyes widened as the white-hot gases whipped away
underfoot, leaving the black hole clear to her sight. What had he done? Then
she gasped as blackness dilated at the heart of the singularity. For a moment
she saw stars through the lightless void; then it dwindled and was gone.

And arrowing out from it came two ships. Her breath caught
in her throat—within seconds they were directly outside the station, their
forms inhumanly strange, their movements even stranger, darting about and
changing direction instantaneously, as if stripped of their inertia.

They moved out of sight, and the deck shuddered slightly
underfoot.

She gazed helplessly at the youth in the beam of light, his
face shining with unnamable emotions.

The cat butted her leg and began to purr.

The Thrones of Kronos

Exordium 5

Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

Book View Café edition July 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-541-0
Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

First published: Tor, 1996

Cover illustration © 2015 by Sherwood Smith

Production Team:

Cover Design: Pati Nagle

Copy Editor: Phyllis Irene Radford

Proofreader: Brian Quirt

Formatter: Vonda N. McIntrye

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Digital edition: 20150719vnm

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P.O. Box 1624, Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624

Sherwood Smith
writes fantasy, science fiction, and historical romance for old and young readers.

Dave Trowbridge
wrote high-tech marketing copy for over thirty years, which made him an expert in what he calls “pulling stuff out of the cave of the flying monkeys,” so science fiction comes naturally. He abandoned corporate life for good in 2013, but not before attaining the rank of Dark Lord of Documentation. He much prefers the godlike powers of a science fiction author (hah!) to troglodyte status in dark corporate mills, and the universe is slowly coming around to his point of view.

Dave lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains with his writer wife, Deborah J. Ross, a retired seeing-eye German Shepherd Dog, and two cats. When not writing Dave may be found wrangling vegetables — both domesticated and feral — in the garden.

The Phoenix in Flight

Ruler of Naught

A Prison Unsought

The Rifter’s Covenant

The Thrones of Kronos

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Exordium: Book 1

Sherwood Smith

&

Dave Trowbridge

www.bookviewcafe.com

December 27, 2011

ISBN: 978-161138-059-0

Copyright © 2011 Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

We are the children of conflict. We have been shaped by
struggle: against the Collective and its descendant, the Hegemony; against the
Adamantines, machines turned masters; against the Shiidra, ancient and
implacably hostile; and against the diluting force of interstellar distance. To
the student of humanity, it often seems that what we are depends as much on
what opposes us as on what sustains us.

We are the children of the Exile. No matter how far
diverged by their singular histories, every human culture in the Thousand Suns
resonates to its tragic echoes. How else could it be? All of us—Downsider,
Highdweller, even Rifter—are descended from the many and varied groups who
rejected the sterile conformity of the Solar Collective and chose instead to
flee in primitive starships through the Vortex.

We are the children of a mystery. We do not know what the
Vortex was. Perhaps it was an artifact of the sophonts we call the Ur, or of
the unknown enemy that destroyed them so long ago. The Vortex opened only
twice: once, to bring humankind here from the other side of the Galaxy,
scattering us through both space and time; once more, to disgorge a cybernetic
horror engendered by the Hegemony. We do not know if it will ever open again.
Without it, there is no return to Earth, if Earth even still exists.

Thus we are a deeply praeterite people, fascinated by the
bits of Earthly life our various ancestors carried with them through the
Vortex. In the face of all the forces arrayed against us, these fragments keep
us human, for they are sacraments of the deep realities that made our forebears
choose Exile and remain rooted in the fertile ground of their natural cultures.
Our languages, religions, social and political structures are grounded in these
fragments; to the extent that an innovation departs from these roots, it is
recognized as false, and fails.

We are the Phoenix, ever regenerate from the flames of
conflict, which burn away the dross to reveal the gold of true humanity.
Sundered from the mother of humankind by an immensity of space-time, we yet
remain the children of Earth.

Magister Davidiah Jones
Gnostor of Archetype and Ritual
The Roots of Human Process
Torigan Prime,
A.A.
787

What would we do without our enemies?

The Sanctus Teilhard
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
The Phenomenon of Man
Lost Earth, ca. 200
B.E.

N!Kirr was out of catalepsy into second sleep before he felt
his own mind again. He fled the awareness of his other lives and rose slowly
toward consciousness.

Pushing his way through first sleep, the aged Guardian
folded himself upright, his movements almost involuntary through habit, and
locked his secondary knees against his thorax with the deliberate grace of
twenty millennia.

The air tasted foul, like a moldy
klopt
egg, and
N!Kirr flexed his mandibles irritably. The harsh clatter echoed through a thousand
images of the vault, as he registered the dust-laden sunbeams lancing into the
cool darkness through the Sunset Arch.

Sunset?
he thought. Disbelief wrenched his eyes into
focus, and their iridescent facets glinted as the Guardian peered about,
hissing with vexation. Had he lost a night and a day, then? Where were his
under-bearers, and his acolytes? Such a thing had never happened before!

“They shall have their shells broken for this! Sunset!”
N!Kirr, confused and dizzy, spoke at last, his anger leaking away.

“Sunset,” returned the vault, its echoes blurring the
chattering syllables, and N!Kirr swayed, overcome by a sudden sense of
wrongness. The sunset light was the color of an offworlder’s blood; the setting
Egg was entering Red Victory, one phase of the patient pulse of life that would
one day hatch another demon.

A swarm of acolytes scurried toward him, the edges of
their chelae pale with confusion and fear, but N!Kirr ignored them.
A
successor will see the hatching,
thought the Guardian dispassionately,
in
that timeless instant before the star-born demon shall swallow him and all our
race into its consuming fury.