“We would be happy to discuss the situation,” the Allied man said. He indicated the house as if inviting Jinn and her commandos to tea. “If you will please come with me.”
“Thank you.” Jinn could actually be diplomatic when she wanted, though I suspected she preferred a good blast on an EM pulse rifle to negotiation. She sent a message into the link shared by her team: Employ program C.
Four of the team joined her and the others remained with the ship. The Allied soldiers from the forest had surrounded the racer and were keeping watch on the ISC team. They tried to look neutral, but their expressions and body language revealed both wariness and curiosity. The situation intrigued them. Although everyone was armed, no one seemed inclined to shoot.
Jinn and her people accompanied the Allieds into the house. Inside, plush rugs and elegant paneling complimented wooden furniture upholstered in rich burgundy cloth. The Allied soldier pushed back his hood and invited Jinn to sit with him at a glossy table of deep red wood. As they settled into their chairs, he introduced himself as Mikael Fjeldssen.
Jinn spoke plainly. “Major Fjeldssen, the longer your people keep the Ruby Dynasty imprisoned, the less options you leave us.”
“We have no wish to antagonize Imperial Space Command.” He regarded her steadily. “However, we have concerns in regards to the intent of your fleet.”
“Release your prisoners to us and we will leave,” Jinn said.
“We have the matter of the psiberweb to consider.”
Shall I tell him? Jinn asked.
Go ahead, I thought.
She met Mikael’s gaze. “We already have a psiberweb, Major.” Although his body language subtly revealed the increase in his tension, he didn’t show any surprise. “With the Pharaoh, yes? But can one person maintain the Triad that supports the web? I was under the impression that even with three people in the powerlink, the job was difficult.”
So. He had done his security work. ISC kept very quiet about the need for a full Triad. It had worked well with Eldrinson, Kurj, and me; Kurj had strength, I had finesse, and Eldrinson had flexibility. After Kurj’s death, Soz had joined the Triad. She had also had strength, a bit less than Kurj, but with more finesse. I needed them.
Jinn flooded Mikael with verbiage, trying to disguise how close he had come to the truth. “The previous web spanned billions of trillions of nodes, if you include the electro-optical, quantum, biomechanical, nano, and picowebs linked into it. Whether or not a web of that size could be maintained with less than a Triad is irrelevant. A new web can and has been created. So it serves no purpose to hold the Ruby Dynasty, either here or on Lyshriol.”
His expression gave away nothing. “Certainly I will relay your message to my commanding officers.”
Jinn leaned forward. “Our messages have been relayed for days now. We have come to take our people home.”
“It isn’t in my power to make such a decision.” Mikael paused. “However, if you continue to flout our laws and security, you will force us to take steps we prefer to avoid.”
Although his response made sense, his tone had an odd nuance. He was hiding something. It agitated him. He covered well, but not well enough. He didn’t want us to make a certain discovery. But what?
Jinn parried with him a while longer, until finally they brought the negotiations to a close. Jinn even let Mikael convince her that it would be best if her team returned to our ships in orbit. His people would let her go if she left immediately, with an escort of Allied fighters. He gave her a cube with messages from various officials meant to mollify us. It even included a note from my sister Roca telling me that she, Ami, and Kurjson were fine.
The Allieds escorted Jinn and her people to the racer, and the entire ISC team climbed back inside. Allied fighters roared overhead, a subtle reminder that we should vacate the premises. The ISC team settled into their seats and Jinn took the cockpit.
Pharaoh Dyhianna? she asked. Are you there?
I shifted into the racer’s computer system. Right here. Do you have a fix on my sister?
Negative, ma’am. But we know she isn’t in these buildings. My people scanned the area while I spoke with Major Fjeldssen.
I’ll double-check. Using the racer’s sensors, I extended my awareness. I kept nudging Allied stealth shrouds. They were well designed. Effective. A few even required a good bit of finagling before I slipped past them. I’m not picking her up either.
We don’t have time to search, Jinn said. We’re already inviting trouble by taking these few moments to leave.
Damn. I was almost certain Roca was on the AUC. But where? The Centre covered hundreds of square kilometers.
Jinn, I’m going to extend into Kyle space and look for my sister that way.
Got it, ma’am. Jinn linked the nav controls into the central processor where I resided now, directly connecting my search to the ship’s navigation system.
LAUNCHING, the racer thought
As we took off, I extended my mind, reaching for Roca. Had I actually been on Earth, it probably would have worked. But I was too far away, up in orbit on Roca’s Pride. I couldn’t find her even with the psiberweb magnifying my strength.
Our escort of Allied fighters continued to patrol the sky. When Jinn paused, hovering only a few meters above the trees, someone warned her to continue her ascent.
Then, faintly, I caught of sense of golden power.
Roca? It didn’t feel right. But we could delay no longer. I wove a thread from that distant mind into the racer’s nav system. Go.
The racer leapt into action, sheering above the forest. My extended senses detected one of the Allied fighters powering up a laser. Trees bent underneath us—and then we were dropping back down through them. The leafy canopy whipped us like a thunderstorm. We landed with a crash of falling branches—
And the Allieds finally fired.
They could have pulverized the racer. Instead they seared the forest around us, starting fires, blocking our escape. And guess what?
ISC had lied about the racer having no weapons.
They had disguised the system so well, even I had missed it Jinn fired an Annihilator, a high-flux beam of anti-protons. Designed for space combat, it annihilated protons—with drastic results. In space, it could gut a large ship and demolish a smaller one. Fighters rarely used them in an atmosphere. The anti-protons interacted with air molecules, attenuating the beam while showering the ground with radiation and particle cascades.
The beam stabbed the sky in a brilliant column of white light, bending slightly due to the Earth’s magnetic field. When the main flux of the anti-protons slowed enough to interact with the air, they reacted in a great burst of energy. The resulting annihilations created an intense ball of fire at the end of the beam. It dazzled the sky, blazing like a miniature artificial sun above the forest of Sweden.
High-energy particles and radiation rained out of the sky. The gamma radiation attenuated fast and the energetic mesons underwent rapid decay into other particles, including muons, electrons, positrons, neutrinos, and fast neutrons. Enough of it survived to reach the racer, but the composite armored hull and magnetic shields protected the crew inside.
Jinn aimed to warn rather than destroy. She could have easily brought down the fighters; turning an Annihilator on them was like using nuclear weapons to fumigate a house.
“Holy mother!” The voice exploded out of Jinn’s comm. “ISC racer, cease fire!”
Opsister! I mentally Shouted. Back off! You’ll kill the people we came to rescue.
I won’t hit them. I can choose my targets with millimeter precision. Then she added, Someone is coming to us, ma’am.
Using the ship’s cameras, I located several people running through the forest. The fighters in the sky had to make a decision. They could target the racer with surgical precision using lasers or smart missiles, but if they waited any longer to attack, they risked hitting the people running toward us.
The Allieds were jamming our sensors,
and I couldn’t make a clear ID on the runners. I didn’t think the Annihilator shot had produced enough fallout to pose them a serious danger, but to reach us they would have to run through the area around the ship that had taken the worst of it. I hoped they had good health nanomeds patrolling their bodies.
The muscles in Jinn’s face tightened. The runners were close enough now that if the Allieds fired, they would probably kill everyone. Was Roca with them? Ami? Kurjson? If they died, ISC would take it as an indisputable act of war, but the Allieds would achieve their purpose of keeping us from building a full psiberweb. Given that Jinn had fired an Annihilator, on-planet, from a supposedly unarmed craft that had violated who knew how many laws, the Allied response was obviously provoked. Had the situation been reversed, ISC would have crushed the intruding racer. For all that we portrayed the Allieds as the offenders, they had so far acted with a far more peaceful intent than we would have shown.
But we may have pushed them too far. They could kill my sister.
The runners had reached the ship, Open! I thought. In the same instant, Jinn shouted, “Open airlock.”
The airlock whipped open like the shutter on a high-speed camera. A woman scrambled through and threw herself across the deck, out of the way of those coming behind her.
Roca! Without a telepresence link such as I had with Jinn, I couldn’t reach my sister’s mind from so far away. But I called her anyway, in instinct My sister, Skolia’s golden goddess, my heir, lay on the deck in rumpled blue leggings and an over-sized blue sweater, her face flushed.
I didn’t recognize the older woman who clambered in after Roca, her white hair tousled, her lined face pale. Ami came next, a younger woman with brown hair. Kurj’s widow. She held tight to her child, Kurjson, a strapping toddler with gold curls.
Then I saw the man.
He came last, jumping inside just before the airlock snapped closed. As the racer leapt into the sky, I had a good, clear view of him. He filled the cabin with his size and massive physique. Gray lined his metallic gold hair. He had inherited his mother’s gold skin and classic features, but with a strong-jawed, masculine power. His thought thundered in my mind, booming and ragged, roughened with mental scar tissue, its massive force unparalleled, yet, incredibly, also gentle:
My greetings, Aunt Dehya.
Kelric had come home.
30
Never Home
This time I dropped out of the web fast and clean. I was unfastening myself from the Chair even before it finished descending to the floor. By the time the techs reached me, I had pushed out, past the control panels. Standing on my own, I barely managed to hold still while they did medical checks. As soon as one of them indicated they had finished, I took off running, my bodyguards striding with me.
Chad Barzun joined us at the entrance to the Triad Chamber. Ragnar was nowhere in sight, but I knew where we would find him. As I jogged down the ship’s corridors, Chad asked questions, but I could only shake my head, too wound up to answer.
By the time we reached the decon chamber outside the bay where Jinn had docked the racer, my heart was pounding. Ragnar had already arrived with his aides. They greeted us with nods. Floating outside the chamber, clenching a grip, I waited.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Waiting—
The decon chamber opened.
When the woman first appeared in the entrance, I didn’t recognize her. Her presence hit me too hard; I couldn’t take it in. Then my mind caught up with my sight, and I propelled myself forward. As I reached her, she let go of the bulkhead and threw her arms around me. My momentum sent us back into the decon chamber, slowly spinning, but we paid no heed.
So I embraced my sister.
We hugged in silence, unable to speak. It wasn’t until we bumped the opposite wall of the chamber that we separated, each of us giving a self-conscious laugh. I was aware of other people around us, but I could only see Roca. She caught a grip in the wall and put out a hand to keep me from floating away.
“Dehya.” Her voice caught. “It’s good to see you.” Despite her smile, she lacked her usual glow. Dark circles under her eyes gave her a hollow look.
I spoke softly. “I am so, so sorry about your husband.”
“People can’t live forever.” A tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly, as if embarrassed I should see her cry.
“Ah, Roca,” I murmured. I pulled her into my arms again and made comforting noises. She cried more then, her emotions a heart-breaking blend formed from the unexpected joy of our reunion and a deep, abiding grief.
A commotion finally made us separate. Looking past Roca, I saw that Eldrin had arrived. He was embracing a big, gold man in the center of the chamber. Kelric. His “little” brother. They drew apart, and Kelric thumped Eldrin heartily on the arm, sending his older brother spinning away.
Eldrin laughed and caught a grip on the wall. “You’re remarkably strong for a dead man.”
Kelric laughed too. But his appearance stunned me. White streaked his hair, lines showed around his eyes, and his face had a weathered quality, as if he had seen too much life. A worn pouch hung from his belt. He was still huge, with the broad shoulders and well-built physique that had flustered generations of women. In his youth, he had been a stunningly handsome man. Age had added a depth. Now he looked like an Imperator.
“It really is you,” I said, floating forward.
Kelric grinned, his teeth flashing against his golden face. It still caught me off guard how much he looked like a powerful, male version of Roca.
“Tummy hurts,” a young, disgruntled voice announced in Iotic.
Startled, I looked around. Ami was floating nearby, gently holding her son. He seemed uncertain what to think about all these people hugging and crying around him. I smiled at him, and he hid his face in his mother’s arms, then peered out at me.
I still didn’t recognize the older woman who floated near Ami. She resembled a Majda matriarch, with strong features, high cheekbones, and a square chin. But her face had a rugged, weathered aspect that suggested years of hard work with no treatments to delay aging. I estimated her age at about sixty, though she had the lean, fit body of someone younger. Her nose had been broken sometime and never fixed.
She kept glancing at Kelric. I wondered if she was an employee from the AUC in Sweden. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had helped Kelric escape. He had always charmed women out of their good reason, an appeal that came from more than his good looks. He worked an empathie magic, picking up their attraction and giving it back to them multiplied. I didn’t think he realized he did it, but it made people fall in love with him. I hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed when she realized how many others wanted him.
Kelric floated toward me, bringing the woman with him. Her unease washed out as they came up to me.
“My greetings, Kelric.” I glanced at his companion.
“My greetings.” Kelric drew the woman forward. “I would like to present my wife, Jeejon.” He turned to her. “Jeejon, this is my Aunt Dehya.”
Wife? I had no idea how to respond. And Kelric had spoken in Eubic, a Trader language.
Jeejon gulped. “I am muchly honored by your presence, Pharaoh Dyhianna.”
“I am pleased to meet you.” Good gods. She spoke Eubic like a taskmaker. She had been a Trader slave. And Kelric had made her the Imperator’s Consort. Hah! I would love to see the Trader reaction to this.
I beamed at her. “Please call me Dehya. You’re my sister-in-law now.”
She murmured an appropriate response, but her puzzlement showed. I supposed I should have said niece-in-law, given Kelric’s introduction. I hoped she didn’t ask about our convoluted family relationships. This didn’t seem the best time for explanations.
Ragnar and Chad were also in the decon chamber, greeting everyone. For all their obvious gratification at the success of Jinn’s mission, they exuded an almost visible tension. We didn’t have much time; the longer we hulked ar
ound Earth, the more abrasive our presence became.
We may have already stayed too long.
“Del-Kurj?” I lowered my mug of kava and stared at Roca. “Your son?” If I remembered correctly, Del-Kurj was the third oldest of her children, a rangy man with lean muscles and a wild, hard edge. He had been born a few minutes prior to his twin sister, Chaniece.
We were seated around a table in my suite: Roca, Eldrin, Kelric, Ragnar, Chad, Jeejon, Jinn, and myself. My bodyguards stood around the walls, silent and discreet. Ami had taken Kurjson into my bedroom for his nap.
Ragnar spoke to Roca. “Why would the Allieds take one of your sons from Lyshriol to Earth?” A scowl creased his narrow face. “Haven’t they done enough to your family already?”
“You would think,” Roca said tiredly. She warmed her hands on her mug. “They wanted to split up the power centers of the Ruby Dynasty. They brought me and Del-Kurj to Earth because I’m one of the highest-ranking members of the Rhon and Del-Kurj was the eldest of my children on Lyshriol. They took us away from our home only a few months after…” Her face was shadowed. “After my husband died.”
Ragnar swore under his breath. “Bastards.”
As much as I wanted to agree with him, I saw why the Allieds had done it. Put too many of the Ruby Dynasty together and we could cause Earth all sorts of problems, at least from their point of view. With care, I asked, “And they also separated you and Prince Del-Kurj on Earth?”
“Yes.” Roca rubbed her eyes. “Del is in America. They wanted him to help in questioning Seth Rockworth. They had me try it before Del. They were going to send Kelric next.”
I stiffened. “Question Seth about what?”
“Those foster children of his that disappeared.”
I leaned forward. “Then they don’t have the children?”
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