The Final Key: Part Two of Triad (Saga of the Skolian Empire)

by Catherine Asaro

  They entered the room quietly, but the man in the chair by the bed woke up anyway. Lifting his head, he rubbed his eyes, his blond hair falling back from his face.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Irzon said. She didn’t recognize him, and she doubted she would have forgotten such a distinctive person. He reminded her of the artists in a colony on the outskirts of HQ City, a group of theater types. The graceful quality of his movements made her wonder if he were an actor, a successful one given his expensive clothes. Judged by his tousled hair, he must have been here for hours, even days.

  He stood up and pulled down his sweater, a blue pullover that set off his well-toned physique. He lifted his hand and turned it palm upward in a civilian salutation. “My greetings. I’m Chad.” He sounded older than he looked. And tired.

  “My greetings,” Irzon said. She gave him an apologetic look. “We need to run some tests. It won’t take long.”

  “Do you want me to leave?” The way he had one palm resting on Althor’s arm made her reconsider her assumption that he and Althor were only friends.

  Loriez said, “It would be better if you waited out—” He stopped when Irzon raised her hand.

  To Chad, Irzon indicated a chair with soft cushions across the room. “You can wait there if you like. We won’t be long.”

  “Thank you.” Chad nodded, his motions slowed with fatigue. He went across the room and settled into the chair.

  Loriez raised his eyebrows at her. Normally they only let a spouse or family member stay. She was uncertain about the young man’s relationship with Althor, though. She shrugged at Loriez and tilted her head toward Althor, hoping the doctor would understand. He nodded slightly and made no protest.

  The equipment they needed for their tests was already in place, including the medical Els that monitored Althor’s body and biomech. Soon the two doctors were deep in their tests of Althor’s biomech systems.

  “That’s odd,” Loriez muttered.

  Irzon looked up from the screen she was studying. “Problem?”

  “Not exactly.” He was frowning at a cluster of graphs floating above his console. Data glowed beneath them, symbols flowing across the screen in a river of golden, three-dimensional holos.

  “Did you find tampering?” Irzon asked.

  “No, it’s fine. It’s just—” He indicated a graph. “His node is quiet, but I don’t think it is dormant. It’s … well, it seems to be waiting.” He looked up at her. “I don’t know what for. Maybe it thinks he’ll call on it again.”

  “Can’t it tell he’s—” She stopped before she said dead, aware of the man across the room.

  Loriez motioned at the lines, machines, and aids that surrounded the bed. “His body lives. His brain has no activity, but the tissue is healthy.”

  “We can keep his brain cells alive for years.” She didn’t add that it did little good if the cells no longer functioned.

  “I think his node is waiting for his brain to start again.”

  “Start how?” Irzon asked.

  Loriez shook his head. They both knew it waited in vain. He glanced at the youth across the room, then looked away. Irzon could see the man in her peripheral vision. He was like the node, waiting futilely for Althor to resume a life that was over.

  Loriez tapped a panel, and the graphs vanished. “I’ve sent our test results to HQ. They’ll continue monitoring his node to see if anything comes up.”

  “That should do it, then,” Irzon said. Sorrow weighed on her. As they were leaving, she spoke gently to Chad. “You can go on back.”

  He nodded as he stood up. His expression seemed hollow, as if he had exhausted his emotional resources. He returned to his chair by the bed and resumed his vigil.

  Soz and several midshipmen ran along the corridor, their long strides devouring distance. They jogged into their destination, a cavernous area that resembled a docking bay. It was overflowing with crew members, officers and noncoms alike, most in Fleet uniforms. Devon Majda stood on a platform at one end of the bay, ramrod straight in her uniform, surrounded by her top officers, her hands resting on a Luminex rail.

  A nearby woman spoke in a low voice. “Why do we have to come here? They could have transmitted any announcement over ship’s comm.”

  Soz looked around at the people in the bay. “Maybe for moral support.”

  A man next to them spoke tightly. “For what?”

  “Gods only know,” another man said.

  Just a fraction of the crew fit in here; a Firestorm carried tens of thousands of people. They would be meeting in similar bays throughout the ship, gathering before a holo stage that projected an image of Devon Majda live from here.

  Devon raised her hand and the rumble of talk stopped. Comm spheres floating throughout the bay amplified her voice. “I have a message from Imperator Majda.”

  The silence was so complete, Soz could hear people breathing.

  “Forty-three minutes ago,” Devon said, “First Councilor Meson declared war against the Eubian Concord.”

  “No,” someone said.

  Soz suddenly felt as if she couldn’t breathe. War? Now?

  “As you know,” Devon continued, “we have been on a training run. That has changed. As of this moment, we are on active duty.” She looked out over them. “I have every confidence in the ability of our fine crew and vessel to meet this challenge.”

  Soz’s thoughts whirled. She had spent only a few weeks on this ship. A flotilla accompanied it, including a contingent of Jags, but she couldn’t fly someone else’s fighter. Although she had begun working with the EIs of several Jags, she was nowhere near ready. She hadn’t even been commissioned yet. She would have to serve aboard this cruiser, the antithesis of the one-pilot fighters she was training to fly.

  War. The prospect had never seemed real. It had been remote all those years she imagined attending DMA.

  It was remote no longer.

  Dehya and her bodyguards sprinted to a sleek gold and black shuttle that crouched on a tarmac of the Admiral Starport. It would whisk her to an armored racer in orbit, which would take her away from Parthonia. Fast.

  They scrambled into the shuttle and the airlock snapped closed behind them. Dehya dropped into the copilot’s seat while her bodyguards strapped into passenger seats. The pilot was doing preflight checks. Dressed in the dark green of an army colonel, he was ensconced in his chair and surrounded by panels. Dehya’s exoskeleton folded around her and clicked psiphons into her sockets. They linked her to the EI brain of the shuttle, through the shuttle to the racer in orbit, and from the racer into Kyle space.

  She didn’t need access to Kyle space, however, to reach the person she had been trying, desperately, to contact. Again she tapped the code into her wrist comm that should have linked her to Eldrin—and again it came back with the message: no response.

  “Communication from Imperator Majda, Your Majesty,” the pilot said. “On Kyle.”

  “Got it,” Dehya said. Relay message, she thought to the shuttle EI.

  Incoming, the EI answered. The Orbiter Kyle systems are also linking with your Abaj Jagernauts.

  Jazida Majda’s thought came into her mind. Your Majesty, the energy spikes can sabotage Jagernauts. We’re checking your Abaj now.

  Dehya looked back at her bodyguards. They regarded her with black eyes, secure in their seats, installed in their exoskeletons. Are they affected?

  They’re clean, Majda thought. It’s the webs! That’s how the Traders are infiltrating our defenses. It has some connection to your family’s use of Kyle space, but we don’t know how. We’re cutting ALL Kyle space links with you. Until this is over, you will be in a communications blackout.

  Understood. If the Traders had found a way to reach her family through Kyle space, Skolia was in even worse trouble than she had feared. She tried to get Eldrin again on her comm and received another no response. Sweat ran down her neck. If she didn’t get him now, he would have no way to know she had gone offworld.


  Dehya spoke to the pilot. “Can you raise Prince Eldrin at the palace?”

  “Checking.” He took on the inward expression of someone accessing his biomech web. It would link to the shuttle EI, which would contact her home on Parthonia.

  A voice came out of the comm. “This is the EI Secretary at the palace. Prince Eldrin went to the Amphitheater to meet his wife.”

  Dehya leaned forward. “Who is with him?”

  “His bodyguards, Your Majesty,” the EI said.

  General Majda’s thought crackled in her mind. His bodyguards have received the evacuation order. They will see that he gets offworld—

  “What the holy blazes?” the pilot shouted.

  Majda’s thought thundered. GET THE PHARAOH OUT OF THERE. Then her presence in Dehya’s mind vanished like a doused flame.

  With no warning, no clearance, nothing at all, the pilot cold-started his engines. The craft leapt off the tarmac with a roar, blasting the ground with exhaust, its acceleration slamming Dehya into her seat The pilot’s hands blurred as they flashed over his controls. His node had to be controlling his motion; no one could move that fast on his own.

  “Prepare to invert,” the pilot said.

  Dehya stared at him. “What the hell is happening?” Within moments they would be high in the atmosphere and going at a good clip, but inverting this close to a planet could damage them and possibly Selei City below. She focused her mind on the pilot, but his interactions with the ship were too fast to distinguish. Although her own EI could operate faster, during emergency she couldn’t risk interfering with the link between the pilot and the shuttle.

  When the ship tried to invert, nausea surged over Dehya. They twisted out of real space, hurtling into a complex universe where their mass, energy, and momentum had imaginary as well as real parts. She groaned and her body felt as if it turned inside out. They weren’t going fast enough—

  And the cabin melted around them.

  Eldrin threw clothes and personal items out of his travel bag, frantic. He had put it in here, he knew he had, he couldn’t have lost it—

  There! He grabbed the syringe and stabbed his finger against its miniaturized panel, entering his prescription. An unfamiliar red light glowed at its tip, and glyphs appeared on the tiny screen wrapped around the tube. He ignored them, too agitated to read. With jerking hands, he pressed the syringe against his jugular vein and injected the phorine.

  Alone in the royal suite of the Sunrise Palace, Eldrin sank to his knees and bowed his head. His entire body was shaking. He couldn’t hide from the truth any longer. He had tried to quit, tried many times, determined to succeed. He had failed. His hunger for the phorine was killing him. He needed help, and if he didn’t admit it now, the obsessive craving would wreck his life. The nightmares that had separated him from his family all this miserable, lonely year weren’t due to illness or grief. It was the phorine. His compulsion for it was taking away the family he loved, ruining his music, turning his life into a single-minded nightmare, and he couldn’t bear it any longer.

  It also gave him a window into the gruesome toll Dehya’s work exacted from her, that to survive with her mind intact she needed a dosage of this medicine ten times greater than what he had been taking. What knots did the Kyle web inflict, that such a gargantuan dose barely affected her? Lost in his confusion and loneliness, he hadn’t seen the magnitude of what she faced, every godsforsaken day of their lives, year in and year out, with no reprieve.

  Gradually his pulse calmed. He lifted his head and breathed in deeply, his hands on his thighs. Although his symptoms had decreased, he was edgy and distracted. Usually by now he felt traces of euphoria. Uneasy, he peered at the syringe, studying its glyphs with the painstaking care he needed to read. It was hard, for they were smaller and on a curved surface, different enough from how they would look in a holobook that his mind wanted to interpret them as different words. But he doggedly deciphered their message. The syringe had used up several ingredients it needed to synthesize phorine. It could make no more.

  “No.” Eldrin struggled to his feet and stumbled to a console against the wall. “Etude?”

  “Here, Your Majesty.” This Etude was a copy of his EI at the Ruby Palace on Diesha. “Prince Eldrin,” it said urgently. “You must allow your bodyguards to obey the order they received from ISC.”

  “The what?” Eldrin’s fist clenched on the syringe.

  “The order for them to report to the hospital this morning to have their bioelectrodes tested.”

  He braced his hand on the console. “Didn’t they go?”

  “No, sir. You asked them to wait.”

  He shook his head, trying to clear it. Just before he had come upstairs, frantically searching for his syringe, the captain of his Abaj had said something about ISC and the hospital. Eldrin vaguely remembered telling them to wait until he finished here. His EI couldn’t override his orders because it carried a copy of the Epsilon code that gave Eldrin privacy.

  “Etude, I need you to do two things.” With trembling hands, he clicked the syringe into a slot on the console. “First, have the palace medical system replenish this syringe. Then tell the hospital that I’m coming in with my Abaj. I have to see an expert in treating psions. Tell them it’s an emergency.”

  “Understood.” After a pause, Etude said, “Medical can’t restock two ingredients in the syringe. They’re used to make phorine, which it doesn’t have the authority to dispense.”

  Gods, no. Eldrin dropped into the seat and put his forehead in his hands. “Then get me a doctor,” he whispered. “Tell them the Ruby Consort is going into phorine withdrawal.”

  “Message sent.”

  Eldrin didn’t know how long this reprieve would last. The syringe had given him a lower dosage than usual. Nor was it likely that any but his personal physicians could help. Only those who treated psions would have expertise with phorine, and only a few of those had dealt with the Rhon. Empaths were rare, one in a thousand even for the lowest ratings, scarcer as the rating increased. The weakest telepaths were one in a million. He had heard it estimated that if the Rhon hadn’t been deliberately bred by the Assembly, they would occur no more frequently than one in a trillion.

  Etude suddenly spoke again. “Prince Eldrin, the Assembly is evacuating the Amphitheater.”

  “What?” Eldrin lifted his head. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You’re expected at the starport.”

  “No! Put me through to Dehya.”

  “I can’t. Pharaoh Dyhianna is under a security blanket.”

  He rose unsteadily to his feet. “That shouldn’t cut out me.”

  The door to the royal suite snapped open, revealing his four bodyguards. As they entered, their captain said, “I’m sorry to intrude, Your Majesty. We have orders to take you to the port.”

  “Can you reach my wife?” Eldrin asked. Even if she was under a shroud, these Abaj should have clearance through its security.

  The captain’s face took on the distant expression of a psibernaut linking to a mesh. Then he said, “I can’t get a response.”

  What the hell? “Take me to the Assembly hall,” Eldrin said. “I’ll find her there.”

  “I’m sorry, Your Majesty, but we can’t.” As the captain spoke, all four of the Abaj were moving around Eldrin, taking up a protective formation, one in front, one in back, one to each side.

  “We must go to the Admiral Starport,” the captain said. “We will take the flyer from the roof.”

  Eldrin knew arguing would do no good. He had already pushed them too far, insisting they wait to report to the hospital while he found his syringe. If he didn’t come now, they would force him. He spoke stiffly. “Very well.” He turned to the console. “Etude, let the hospital know we’re going to the port.”

  “Not the Assembly hall?” Etude asked.

  Flustered, Eldrin said, “No, apparently not.”

  “Understood.” Then Etude added, “Good luck, sir.”

  “Than
k you.” Eldrin didn’t doubt they would need that luck.

  Eldrin’s bodyguards couldn’t operate the flyer on the roof of the palace. For some reason they couldn’t link to its EI. The flyer’s responses were scrambled and nonfunctional, and it refused orders. They finally gave up and took Eldrin down through the palace to an underground level where a black hover limousine waited.

  Inside the limo, Eldrin sat in the back, in a seat that faced forward. One of his bodyguards took the end of the seat, and the captain and another Abaj settled into a seat facing him across a wide space. The fourth Abaj “drove” up front, though the limo’s AI actually did the work. The seats were a plush black material that felt like velvet but seemed far more durable. A blue carpet covered the floor, with the emblem of the House of Skolia in gold and white. It resembled the insignia for the Skolian Imperialate: a golden sunburst exploding past a white circle. The Imperialate symbol, however, also had a silver line slashed through it to represent the Dyad.

  It didn’t matter how posh the limo, Eldrin was as stiff as casecrete. He could have watched the news on a screen that swung to wherever he wanted it, he could have rested by reclining his seat into a bed, or he could have had the cover retract on the small pool in the back so he could bathe. But he was too agitated to concentrate, let alone indulge in activities that even after eight years as the Pharaoh’s consort felt decadent to him.

  The limo hummed through the landscaped gardens of the palace. Droop-willows shaded blue stone sculptures that reminded him of Dalvador. But nothing on Lyshriol had such perfection. Everything here was elegant and restrained, from the immaculately tended gardens to the blue gravel paths with no stone out of place. It confined his mind. He was relieved when they left the grounds through the vine-draped archway of a wrought-iron gate. But nothing eased the tension, neither his nor that of his bodyguards.

  The palace was high in the hills above Selei City. They drove down a winding road with no traffic or houses, just willows lush with silvery bells. At the bottom, they encountered a few other vehicles. By the time they reached the outskirts of Selei City, the scatter of hovercraft had turned into a steady flow. The evacuation seemed to be proceeding smoothly, but his Abaj couldn’t get any information beyond their preliminary orders. It disquieted Eldrin that they were having so much trouble, first with the flyer and now with the meshes.