They showed a tall broad-shouldered man with glittering white hair—Lord Corbal Xir, the Aristo next in line to assume the Carnelian Throne. Xir’s mother had been a younger sister of Eube Qox, who founded the Trader Empire. Under normal conditions a Xir could never have assumed the throne. The line of succession went through the firstborn Qox of each generation: Eube, Jaibriol I, Ur, and Jaibriol II.
But Jaibriol II had died without an heir, leaving only Corbal Xir to assume the title. After four generations of Qox emperors, a Xir would sit on the Carnelian Throne—if age didn’t stop him. His contemporaries had all died: Corbal Xir was the eldest Highton, over 130 years old. He was the only Aristo with white hair that Kelric had ever seen. Most Aristos were obsessive about maintaining their youth and appearance, as if their exterior beauty could mask their true nature.
Xir was standing on a dais in the Hall of Circles, the great audience hall in the emperor’s palace on the capital planet of Eube. He stood next to the Carnelian Throne, a glittering chair carved from a diamond-snow-marble composite and inlaid with bloodred gems. Rows of sparkling diamond benches with high backs curved around the front of the dais. Aristos sat on them, rank upon rank of icy human perfection, as hard as diamond cogs in a diamond computer, every one with shimmering black hair, ruby eyes, and snowmarble skin. They waited in triumphant silence, watching the dais.
But it was neither Corbal Xir nor the Aristos that riveted Kelric’s attention, that brought him to such an abrupt halt, hanging on a cable. What stopped him so utterly was the man who stood next to Xir.
At six foot one, the man was half a head shorter than Xir. Wine-red hair tousled in disarray around his handsome, haggard face. He had large eyes, violet, with dark circles under them. The ripped sleeve of his white shirt revealed bruised skin underneath. His arms were bound behind his back and a diamond slave collar glinted around his neck.
“No,” Kelric whispered. He knew that man. Knew him well.
It was his brother Eldrin.
6
Key of the Heart
“Garlin, to your station!” Maccar shot past Kelric, headed for his command seat, which Steil was already vacating. Kelric propelled himself to his console. The instant he touched his chair, it responded, familiar now with his brainwave signature. It pulled him into its grasp and folded the exoskeleton around him like a high-tech glove.
Maccar’s orders came in rapid-fire bursts. “Steil, jettison our cargo. Anatakala, get us out of here. Rillwater, ignore any orders from the Chrysalis. Garlin, don’t let them stop us from leaving.”
Kelric linked into the Corona. A quick check revealed Maccar had already taken payment for his cargo. He could guess what had happened: Maccar and Lady Zarine finished their business before the news of Eldrin’s capture broke. By jettisoning his cargo, Maccar fulfilled his delivery contract without staying at the station. Lady Zarine would be irate at having to pick up crates from space, but she couldn’t claim a broken contract as an excuse to detain the flotilla.
As Kelric worked, Xir’s speech played in his mindscape, as it would soon play across screens throughout settled space, as fast as starships could carry it. Absorbed in his tasks, he caught only parts of the broadcast, but that was enough:
… great deeds of our sterling war heroes, Xir intoned in the Aristo’s melodramatic and overly adjectified style. With unmatched courage, they braved the very halls of corrupt Skolian power, the Orbiter itself, capital of Skolia … ESComm special forces unit removed the Ruby Pharaoh, and also the spawn produced by her iniquitous union with her own brother’s son … captured her depraved consort … Eldrin Jarac Valdoria Skolia, firstborn of the Ruby Dynasty …
Kelric gritted his teeth, trying to ignore the venom that Xir directed against his family. He needed no Aristo propaganda speech to tell him the implications of Eldrin’s capture. With Eldrin, the Traders now had a key for their stolen Lock. Eube had gained indisputable advantage. The balance of power had changed. The sooner Maccar got out of Trader territory, the better.
He didn’t know which was worse, hearing confirmation that ESComm had killed his aunt and nephew or learning of his brother’s capture. As much as he had grieved for Eldrin’s death, Kelric couldn’t rejoice in seeing him now, knowing what he faced. It had to be tearing his brother apart, especially after having watched his wife and son die.
Come to think of it, though, Xir provided no specifics on how the Pharaoh and her son had died. In fact, no one seemed clear about it, not even the commandos who had supposedly “removed” the Pharaoh and her heir. Removed how?
The more he heard, the more Xir’s speech puzzled him. It bulged with inaccuracies. The Orbiter wasn’t Skolia’s capital. That honor went to Selei City on the planet Parthonia. Nor was Eldrin the son of Pharaoh’s brother. He was the son of Roca, the Pharaoh’s sister. Iniquitous? Dehya and Eldrin had fought the Assembly’s coercive manipulations to make them marry. They lost, and so they married, but they had gentled their difficult situation with a deep, abiding love. Kelric doubted Xir cared about the emotional toll they had paid, but surely he must realize how hypocritical his comments would sound even to his own people. The Aristo lord’s dearly departed cousin, Emperor Jaibriol I, had married his own sister, declaring her the only woman with an exalted enough bloodline—his own—to be his wife.
Even if Xir didn’t see the sloppiness of his own propaganda, it was odd he would make so many awkward mistakes. Although outwardly the Aristo lord displayed triumph, Kelric had an empath’s natural ability to read people. He saw what Xir tried to hide: Beneath his self-aggrandizing speech, the Aristo was tired. Drained. If Kelric hadn’t known better, he would have thought Xir felt no triumph at all.
Was Corbal Xir experiencing the same dismay that would sweep settled space as the news spread? Humanity was exhausted, worn out from a debilitating war that had broken two empires. Incredibly, the Radiance War had also given birth to hope. Without their war machines or psiberweb, Skolia and Eube would be forced to the negotiation table, perhaps making possible a peace that had eluded them for centuries.
Now that had changed.
Maccar’s ships accelerated away from the Chrysalis, building up the speed to invert. As Kelric set up his Kyle links with the flotilla, he also monitored space all around them—and so he saw the frigates emerge from the station’s hub.
Captain, he thought. We’re being followed. He focused on the vessels. They appeared civilian. Their appearance lied. Submerged deep in his mindscape, he registered the contained power of their weapons—Annihilators, Impactors, smart-dust, tau cannons—all hidden behind their masquerade as innocuous ships out for a jaunt.
“Anatakala, how soon can we invert?” Maccar asked.
“We’ll have enough speed in eighty-one seconds,” she said.
Kelric swore. Space combat went at relativistic speeds. Energies flared and died in microseconds. Time dilated and length contracted. In that quickened universe, eighty-one seconds was eternity.
Their proximity to the Chrysalis gave them some protection; the Traders wouldn’t start a battle when Maccar could fire on a habitat with millions of people. But the flotilla ships were speeding up at a precipitous rate, snapping in and out of quasis to protect their fragile humans from the crushing accelerations. The Chrysalis soon fell behind, visible only on Kelric’s mindscape, long gone from visual range.
The Eubian ships gained on them, reaching for the flotilla in a grasping formation, like a claw. With grim certainty, Kelric realized they would be within firing range before the flotilla inverted.
Then he felt a mind.
He recognized that mental signature. Knew it. Dreaded it. He suddenly had the sense of standing on a precipice above a mental abyss. An Aristo colonel commanded one of the pursuing ships, a warlord intent on capture and destruction.
Kelric toggled into high-speed combat mode, where his communication with the Corona came in symbols and numbers rather than words. It denoted Eubian frigates by EF and Maccar’s by MF. T
he console boosted his Kyle senses into a heightened state he could endure for only a few minutes. But that was all he would need.
Fragmented thoughts from the Trader ships swept around him like a jumbled whirlpool. His mindscape organized the chaos, filtered the data, and sent the result to his mind, all in microseconds. Then he knew. ESComm personnel crewed the Trader ships. They meant to destroy the flotilla and take the Corona.
He wanted to hate them. But they were human. Taskmakers. They had families, homes, dreams, fears. Most were loyal to the Aristos who owned them. If they served well, they reaped the benefits of the richest civilization in human history. Disobedience or too many failures dropped them into lower levels of the slave hierarchies, where people became cogs in the machinery of servitude with no more value than robots.
It made no difference that he couldn’t hate them: he had to defend the flotilla. But he now knew the people he intended to kill. Turning empaths into weapons was a recipe for psychological ruin. The heightened mental abilities of Jagernauts made them relentlessly effective, but it could also destroy them. It wasn’t coincidence most Jagernauts left active duty at an age far younger than other ISC officers.
He could have shielded his mind. Bolt “talked” to his brain via biooptic threads. Electrodes in his neurons received the message in binary: 1 meant fire the neuron and 0 meant do nothing. Buffers scaled the firing if necessary, for a neuron that went off at less than 100 percent strength. Bio-shells coated the electrodes and neurotrophic nanomeds prevented damage. If he used the system to turn off certain brain structures, he would no longer detect any mental activity except his own. But he rarely used the shield in combat. He couldn’t risk turning off part of his brain during a battle.
Right now he needed every edge. The ESComm vessels were about to fire. As they came within range, he thought, Whip A4.
Annihilators fired, the Corona answered. Hits on EF4, 6, and 8—
Quasis jump.
Data flooded his mindscape: Maccar’s ships had fired their Annihilators in a pattern Kelric had designed and labeled Whip A4. The three Eubian frigates they hit had gone into quasis, but the other Traders returned fire, forcing Maccar’s flotilla ships into quasis.
“—the bloody hell are you doing, Garlin?” Maccar’s words boomed like slow thunder, coming in real time rather than the speeded-up realm where Kelric operated now. Kelric couldn’t stop to answer. With the battle’s accelerated pace, it could be over before he convinced Maccar they needed to fight.
Annihilator hit on MF6, the Corona thought. Impactor hit on Coron—
Quasis jump.
Both the Corona and a flotilla ship had taken hits. Their quasis held at 79—84 percent, but neither would survive many more direct strikes.
Impactor hit on MF8, the Corona told him. Impactor hit on Cor—
Quasis jump.
The Impactors had fired clusters of bomblets that fused on impact like a swarm of enraged H-bombs. When they hit a ship in quasis, it kept going, unaffected, unable to change state. The warheads exploded uselessly against a rigid body. Most of their energy and momentum went into the recoil of their debris, and anything else unfortunate enough to be nearby. But it would only take a few hits before the quasis coils weakened. When quasis failed, a ship underwent the mother of all quantum-state changes and blew up in a dramatic show of flying debris and energy.
Whip pattern 17, he thought. Get the one that hit us.
MF3 Impactors fired, the Corona answered. Hit on EF—
Quasis jum—
Annihilator hit on MF4, the Corona warned. MF4 quasis at 42 percent.
Kelric tensed. MF4’s quasis was crumbling under the assault of antimatter beams from the ESComm Annihilators. Beams were easier to evade than homing missiles, but a ship in quasis couldn’t dodge. So the beams drilled into it, annihilating intransigent particles one by one. The perturbations in the ship’s quantum state would soon become too extreme. The crew would drop out of quasis—in the midst of their ship’s spectacularly lethal matter-antimatter annihilation.
Whip pattern A7. he thought. Cover MF4.
Annihilator hit on EF1, the Corona answered.
Quasis jump.
Maccar’s voice rumbled. “Commander Jaes, get us into inversion.”
“I’ve cut the time to about a minute,” Jaes said.
The Corona thought: Alert: EF2 tau approach—
Quasis jump.
Stats flooded Kelric: MF1 had annihilated a Eubian tau missile just before it struck. The tau’s antimatter-matter explosion, with its burst of high-energy photons and particle cascades, had forced every ship in the vicinity into quasis.
Die for me, little Skolians.
Kelric froze, hit by an attack invisible to any sensor save his own mind. Somewhere on the Trader ships, the Aristo warlord lusted for their fear.
Come, my Skolians. We’ll have you now.
Kelric clenched his teeth. Whip pattern T2.
Tau cannon fired, the Corona answered.
Quasis jum—
Quasis jump.
He reeled with the jumps. His nausea surged, but he swallowed the bile. Maccar’s ships were spreading decoy dust as they fled. The pursuing missiles were so close that whenever the dust detonated one, it forced Maccar’s ships into quasis, delaying their acceleration by crucial seconds.
“——can’t wait longer,” Maccar said. “Invert the ships!” Anatakala answered. “We have it down to fifty seconds—” Alert! the Corona thought. MF4 quasis at 26 per—Quasis jump.
Then: MF4 destroyed.
No! Kelric’s mind staggered as the deaths of the crew on Maccar’s fourth frigate hit his heightened empathic state. Gritting his teeth, he thought, Whip T11. Get them.
Quasis jump, the Corona answered. EF3 destroyed.
Kelric’s neurons knew no boundary between friend and foe: the deaths of the ESComm crew wrenched him just as much as those on Maccar’s ship. Caught by both a tau missile and an Impactor shot, EF3’s quasis had failed. Bomblets ripped through the fragmenting vessel and hit one of the Klein fuel bottles. In a rapid series of collapses, the containment fields ceased to exist and the bottle dumped its antimatter into real space. The plasma exploded outward, annihilating anything in its way, adding to the storm of energy, radiation, and enraged particle reactions that had once been a ship.
Quasis jump, the Corona thought. MF2 has lost starboard decks 2—4.
Kelric caught a sudden surge of anxiety from the Trader ships. He narrowed it to the mind of a lieutenant on the sixth Eubian frigate: quasis coils in collapse—
Whip A9 to EF6, Kelric thought.
EF6 destroyed. Quasis jump—
Annihilator strike on Corona, the Corona thought. Decks 3, 8, 11—14, and 16—19 damaged. I cannot survive another direct hit.
“—vert, damn it!” Maccar shouted. “I don’t care if you’re not ready. Get us the bloody hell out of here!”
Pain exploded in Kelric’s temples. He lost control of the mindscape, and it twisted as if reality had tied itself into a topologically impossible knot.
Then the universe went still.
In a sudden, splintering calm, the Corona bolted into otherspace. Surreal dust streamed past as they raced through the inverted realm of superluminal travel.
“Gods almighty,” Ty Rillwater whispered.
For several seconds no one answered. Then Maccar spoke in a cold voice. “Commander Garlin, those were civilian ships you attacked. Ships hosted by the same Aristo who guaranteed us safe passage.”
Kelric answered quietly. “They weren’t civilian, sir. Nor were they offering an escort. They were ESComm, fully armed, in attack formation, led by an Aristo warlord. They had more ships and firepower than our flotilla. They also had the element of surprise, because they believed we wouldn’t fire without provocation, whereas they were preparing to attack. They intended to destroy the flotilla and take the Corona.”
Another silence followed his response. Then Maccar said, “Anatakal
a, can you verify any of that?”
“We’ve the entire battle on record,” she said. “It shows the frigates were armed and approaching in an attack formation used by ESComm. Their response to our actions suggests their crews had military training. I can’t verify anything else.”
“Commander Garlin,” Maccar said. “On what basis do you make your other claims?”
“I’m a Jagernaut. I’m trained to make that kind of detection. With my mind extended, I picked up crews on the Eubian ships.” Kelric exhaled. “Captain, I’ve gone against Aristo warlords in combat before. You never forget.”
“Are you in a link now with the flotilla?” Maccar asked.
“I lost it when we inverted. I can reform it if you wish.”
“I wish.” Maccar’s words were chillingly calm.
Again Kelric submerged into his mindscape. Pain throbbed in his temples, but he ignored it, knowing that if he made a misstep Maccar would probably throw him in the brig. He had no proof of his claims, but Maccar was no fool. The captain had agreed to Kelric’s stratospheric salary demand for good reason. The abilities of Jagernauts were well known. Feared, but vital.
He rebuilt his connections to the remaining ships. Then he thought, Links established. His console sent his words to the bridge crew.
“What is the flotilla status?” Maccar asked.
Kelric took in data and reported. Five lives had been lost in the destruction of MF4, the Horizon, Maccar’s fourth frigate. One other ship had serious damage and all had taken hits.
The Jade Sea needs to dock for repairs, Kelric thought. The others can continue with us.
“Advise Captain Leefarer,” Maccar said. “As soon as we come within range of a base that can provide repairs, the Jade Sea is released from its contract.” In a quiet voice he added, “Notify all ships that we will hold a memorial at ten hundred hours for the crew of the Horizon.”
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