Schism: Part One of Triad (Saga of the Skolian Empire)

by Asaro, Catherine

  Fire Annihilator, Althor thought. He and the Solo hurtled by each other, appearing to flip over as they passed, their time dilated relative to each other. They fired at the same instant, their Els compensating for the relativistic effects that became so dramatic at these speeds.

  Quasis jump, Redstar thought.

  Althor’s head swam from the jumps. The Solo had hit him dead-on and Redstar’s quasis system was weakening. The Jag could take only one or two more hits.

  One of Steel’s taus exploded a Solo, and its pilot’s death reverberated in Althor’s mind, though less violently than when one of his shots succeeded. He wasn’t as focused on Steel’s target.

  The Wasp caught Wellmark’s tau with an Annihilator shot. As her missile exploded, the Wasp went into quasis and remained whole, speeding onward, a rigid body in motion. Althor waited until it dropped out of quasis—and fired both his taus into its abdomen.

  Wasp in quasis, Redstar said.

  Damn! He had just wasted his only taus.

  Then, suddenly, the Wasp’s quasis collapsed. Antimatter plasma spewed outward and its abdomen exploded in a swath of destruction that wiped out the head and thorax as well. Althor went rigid as he felt the crew of the Wasp die—

  Blackstar exploded.

  Wellmark’s mental scream ripped through their link, Althor’s mindscape went dark, and Belldaughter’s cry reverberated over his comm. Althor reeled, his link with the squad shattered. His mindscape tried to reform, sparking with erratic lights, jagged and unstable. Stats poured through it too raggedly for him to absorb. In real space, alarms blared in the cockpit and emergency lights flashed on his controls.

  Wellmark’s thought cut through the chaos. Squadron, regroup! Orient to Greenstar.

  Althor’s Jag answered when he couldn’t. Redstar reoriented.

  Goldstar reoriented.

  Invert! Wellmark thought.

  Althor vomited when Redstar inverted. His Jag hurtled through superluminal space, following a trajectory downloaded by Greenstar to Redstar. His exoskeleton whirred as tiny scrubber bots embedded in its mesh cleaned him up.

  Wellmark’s thought came raggedly. Report.

  Althor clenched the arms of his pilot’s chair. I’m here.

  And I. Belldaughter’s thought shook.

  We have to go back, Wellmark’s struggle to project confidence felt tangible in their link. We only put out one Wasp. If we don’t destroy the other two, they will demolish Onyx.

  Althor took a deep breath. Six Solos remained and two wasps. Their chances of taking out all those ships were slim to none, and they all knew it. But they had to try.

  Do either of you have any taus left? Wellmark asked.

  I’ve both mine, Belldaughter thought.

  None here, Althor answered. MIRVs gone, too. I’ve Annihilators.

  I’ve two. Wellmark paused for a fraction of a second. Belldaughter and I will release our remaining MIRVs as we come out of inversion. Althor, cover us with your Annihilators while we go after the Wasps. She took a breath he sensed rather than heard. If that doesn’t work, we’ll all try Annihilators.

  Understood, Althor thought. Belldaughter echoed his reply. None of them could risk thinking about what the loss of Steel meant to their squad. If they survived this battle, they could mourn him properly.

  Go, Wellmark thought.

  They blasted out of inversion preceded by their last MIRVs. The Onyx stations were firing Annihilators at the Wasps and Solos, but the ESComm ships had disabled most of their defenses.

  Wellmark and Belldaughter each went after a Wasp and Althor blasted the Solos that dogged their progress. Redstar hurtled through a complicated evasion pattern with killer accelerations. The quasis jumps made him so ill he could barely think. The ESComm ships followed just as bizarre evasion patterns against his shots.

  Quasis jump, Redstar thought. Then: Solo quasis failed.

  Althor’s beam stabbed the Solo dead on. His forward holomap lit with a flash of light—but it was too much for one Solo—

  Got it! Wellmark shouted mentally. One Wasp down—

  Greenstar exploded.

  Althor screamed as his map lit with a burst of light.

  Althor! Belldaughter’s frantic thought exploded. Answer!

  Ah—no. The thought tore out of him.

  Wellmark!

  She’s gone. His mind reeled.

  We have to keep going.

  Yes. He struggled to focus. Five Solos and one Wasp. The stations can deal with the Solos if we get that Wasp. The thought ripped out from a torn place in his mind left by the deaths of Steel and Wellmark.

  I still have both taus, Belldaughter thought. Cover me?

  Yes. He hung on to the arms of his chair.

  Althor went after the Solos with manic intensity, knowing they surely had pilots more experienced than himself. He was so ill from the quasis jumps that he gave up trying to think and acted on instinct. Redstar backed him up with every evasive maneuver in its memory. Belldaughter hit the Wasp with her first tau, but it went into quasis and survived the blast.

  Quasis jump, Redstar thought. Annihilator strike on my starboard hull. It is unlikely I can withstand another hit.

  Weapons? Althor asked.

  You have enough Annihilator fuel for one more shot.

  One shot. Gods. Belldaughter only had one tau left. One more chance with the Wasp. That was it.

  Belldaughter. His thought came in jagged bursts. I’m going to hit the Wasp with my last Annihilator shot. He couldn’t be the only one losing quasis. I’ll weaken its shields. Then you fire your tau.

  If you use your last shot on the Wasp, the Solos will obliterate you.

  Doesn’t matter. He gripped the arms of his seat. Redstar, get the damn Wasp.

  Engaging inversion engine.

  What the hell? He no longer had the coherence to question why Redstar threw him back into inversion. They dropped out almost immediately—practically on the Wasp. Redstar fired and caught the ESComm spacecraft dead on, simultaneously blasting it with relativistic exhaust as they hurtled past.

  Wasp in quasis, Redstar told him. Then: Althor, I took another hit …

  Althor groaned. Alarms were blaring all over the cockpit, red lights flashing, displays melting. But even as his mental grid unraveled, an explosion ripped through its fabric.

  I got it! Belldaughter shouted. I got the Wasp.

  Thank the saints. Althor’s response barely registered.

  Gods almighty, Althor invert! Those Solos are coming at you!

  Tell my family I love them.

  Download, Redstar thought.

  What? Althor had no idea what it meant. Download what?

  His spinal node answered. Download commenced.

  What the blazes?

  Damn it! Belldaughter shouted. You CAN invert. You have one engine left. Her thought was like hands gripping his shoulders, shaking him. Invert!

  Redstar’s response came dimly. Inverting … But it was too late.

  Althor drew in one final, strangled breath—and passed from life into death.

  25

  The Stairs

  Eldrinson snapped awake. Before he was even fully coherent, he was pulling himself up, dragging his inert legs across the mattress. He couldn’t see if darkness cloaked the world outside the windows, but he felt the sense of slumber that filled Castle Windward. It was night, late night, a terrible, terrible night.

  His heart pounded and his pulse raced. He thought he would explode. Something was wrong. Wrong. It crashed through his mind. He pulled himself to the nightstand and reached out to hit the panel that would alert Jase Heathland, his doctor.

  Then he stopped. What he felt had nothing to do with his own health. One of his children was in trouble. He knew it without doubt. Jase could do nothing. His dread came from vague impressions, nothing he could isolate or identify. It terrified him; if something happened to Roca or the children on Lyshriol, he would feel it clearly. This came from farther away. Much fa
rther.

  Althor. Eldrin. Althor. Soz.

  Althor.

  “Althor.” The name tore out of him. He had tried to repress his dread for his children, to deny they could come to harm, but faced with the certainty that his worst fears had been realized, he couldn’t hide. He had to find Althor, help his son, escape the confines of his crippling injuries and blindness. He pounded his legs. “Move. Move, damn it!”

  His legs did nothing, just as they had done nothing this past year despite endless exercises and tests from Jase and the other healers. Furious at himself and at the refusal of his body to cooperate, he heaved himself to the edge of the bed. He tried to slide off, but he had too little control even for that simple effort. He fell off and hit the floor, his impact cushioned by the throw rug that covered the stone.

  Clenching his fist, he struck the floor with his fist, tears of fury in his eyes.

  Roca stayed at the blueglass table in the long hall where the staff at Castle Windward ate each day. This early, more than an hour before dawn, the hall was empty. She sat in a high-backed chair, one elbow on the table, her hand supporting her head, her other hand limp in her lap. Tears ran down her face.

  A stir came from across the hall. Roca lifted her head to see Jase enter. He came over to her, but then hesitated when he saw her face.

  “I’m sorry.” He spoke awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  Roca wiped the tears off her cheeks. “It’s all right.”

  “Do you mind if I sit?”

  She indicated the seat nearest hers. “Please.”

  He settled into the chair. “Can I help?”

  Roca felt as if she were dying inside. “No.”

  “Did Eldrinson do something?”

  She gave a shaky laugh. “Would that it were that simple.”

  Jase’s forehead furrowed. “What’s wrong?”

  “ESComm attacked Onyx Platform. They claim it was retaliation for ISC ships violating their territory and preying on their civilian transports.” She spoke leadenly. “They’re lying. It is an act of war.”

  He stared at her. “We’re going to war?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Was Onyx Platform destroyed?”

  “No. They lost only a few lives.”

  “But how?”

  “They had help. A Jag squadron arrived in time.” Another tear ran down her face. “There were only three casualties. Only three. The squadron leader. The next in command.” Her voice broke. “And the youngest squad member. He was just commissioned a few months ago.”

  Jase went very still. “Councilor Roca—”

  She didn’t know where to put this grief. It was too big. “Now he lies in a coma. The doctors can’t help him. He is brain dead.”

  His face was ashen. “Althor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, gods, no. Councilor, I—I’m sorry.”

  “Why must those I love insist on going to war?” The words tore out of her. “What madness drives them?”

  “They have courage.”

  “Courage?” Bitterness filled her voice. “They’re heroes. Eldrin fought with his bare hands to save men on the battlefield. He was sixteen. My husband endured pain I can’t even imagine but he never broke, never told Vitarex his identity. He stopped an Aristo from taking a Rhon psion. Shannon rescued him and faced Vitarex on his own, a fourteen-year-old boy against a Trader Aristo. And Althor. He saved gods only know how many millions of people.”

  An unbearable sympathy showed in Jase’s eyes. “Your children learned their courage from their parents.”

  “I don’t want them to be heroes. I want them to live. I want for them long, happy, healthy lives.” She was breaking inside. “Instead they leave home to die.”

  Eldrinson gritted his teeth and pushed up on his elbows. Driven by his anger, by his inability to help those he loved, he dragged himself across the stone floor on his stomach. The throw rug bunched up under him and he yanked it away. He couldn’t even relax his fists to grab the floor. He kept pulling, unsure what he was doing, where he thought he could go. What would he do, crawl down the stairs and drag his crippled body to his son in some incomprehensible place? He would die for his children if it kept them safe, but nothing, nothing he tried had stopped them from running, riding, flying to their deaths.

  When he had seen what the war had done to Eldrin, he had sworn he would never take his sons in combat again. Then Althor had insisted. Back then, Eldrinson had believed it would have been morally wrong to deny his son. A man had to make such decision. As the Bard and commander of the Dalvador army, he should have been proud his son wanted to ride at his side. Then Althor had changed history. For all that his son had hidden his anguish and guilt from his family, Eldrinson knew how it had crushed him. Eldrinson decided then: never again would he see his children go to pain and death. But they kept insisting on it, and they did it to defend him, making it even worse, that they would die for him, their father, when it should be the reverse.

  He kept dragging himself, blinded as much by grief as by his eyes, the hateful eyes that were supposed to see, the legs that were supposed to walk, but that never worked because his deficient, failed brain could do nothing but give him bone-wracking seizures.

  His fist rammed into a vertical stone surface and he stopped, breathing hard. He barely felt the scrape where his knuckles had hit. Pressing his palm against the stone, he realized he had reached the bench that ran around the inside of the window alcove. He crawled into the alcove until he reached the place on the bench where he so often sat, either by himself or with Roca.

  Roca.

  His eyes burned. He had failed his wife most of all, the mother of their children. He grabbed the bench and hauled himself up, sideways to the windows he could no longer see. Putting out his hands, he hit the shutters. With a few moments of fumbling, he opened them. In his youth, he would have felt air blast across him, but now glass filled the windows, a wedding gift from Roca, who had brought light into his life.

  Eldrinson stared out the window, his palm flat against the pane. He saw only blackness. He thought of opening it, of letting himself fall out into the abyss these windows overlooked, with the walls of the castle plunging straight down into the chasm that circled Windward. But he couldn’t take his own life, not as long as any of his family lived. He could do nothing to help them, but he wouldn’t add to their pain.

  “See!” He shouted the word. What did he have to do to make his brain accept these false eyes in his head, these false legs on his body? He had become less than human, a creature of technology created by strangers who made it impossible for him to deny the truth, that he was no more than a primitive farmer who couldn’t even learn to read and write.

  “Walk.” He hit his thigh with his fist. “Move, damn it!”

  Nothing.

  If a heart could have burst from sorrow, his would have done so. But it remained steady in his chest, mocking him with its health even as it broke.

  Ever so faintly, light appeared.

  Eldrinson froze. He should have seen the sky, the spindles of the Backbone Mountains, and the precipitous cliffs outside the castle, a spectacular, wild landscape. Instead he saw darkness.

  Except … for a faint, vague light.

  Gradually the light brightened. Shadowy outlines formed within it, a jagged line in the far distance. A strange feeling came to Eldrinson, a pressure slowly building within him, a sensation he couldn’t identify except that it hurt and he didn’t know why.

  The sky continued to lighten.

  The sky.

  The shadowy forms were mountains.

  He was watching the dawn.

  He recognized this new pain now. Hope. He didn’t want to hope he would see, that he would walk, that his children would come home, that he could be a true protector for his wife and family, for if he hoped, it could all be crushed, as this past year had crushed so much within him, both physical and emotional.

  Eldrinson watched the s
uns rise.

  The world outside came as blurs of color. He couldn’t distinguish the mountains clearly, but he saw their outlines, the contrast between the peaks and the reddening sky. Dawn continued to come, despite his conviction that it would never again arrive. Valdor lifted its gold orb above the horizon with Aldan eclipsing him.

  He slid his hand along the border carved into the window frame. The details were lost and colors blurred—but he could see the outline of its engraved vines.

  Eldrinson looked around his room. It remained all shadows, dim in the early light. The bed across the room—yes, he could make it out. The door in the wall was shadowy but he could discern its purple color. His mood surged, hard to define, hope and jagged edges, shock for Althor, disbelief for his eyes.

  And his legs?

  Eldrinson grasped one of the shutters that stretched from the bench up to the domed ceiling high overhead. Leaning his weight into the shutter and clenching his hands around the glasswood frame, he slowly pulled himself up. His legs immediately buckled; all that kept him from falling was his grip on the shutter. He hung from it, gritting his teeth, fighting his frustration.

  “Think,” he muttered to his brain. “Think to my legs. Jase says I can do it. So do it.” Again he put weight on his legs. Again they buckled.

  “Walk.” His voice cracked. “Walk, damn you.” Furious, he pushed away from the shutter and took a step. Immediately his legs folded and he collapsed. He hit the floor hard, barely catching himself on his hands.

  Swearing, berating every god or goddess he had ever even half believed existed, he grabbed the bench where he had been sitting and struggled back to his feet. Without taking the time to think, lest he convince himself he couldn’t do it, he took a step.

  Again he collapsed.

  Once more Eldrinson hauled himself to the bench and back to his feet. The room surrounded him, blurry, hard to see, but miraculously visible. He lurched forward in a jerky, uncontrolled step.

  Another.

  And another.

  And he walked.

  Eldrinson lurched across the room. When he reached the door, he fell against it, aware of his heart pounding in his chest, his strained breathing, his shaking legs. A shout welled within him, but he held it back, for with the joy came pain. He grasped the doorknob and rubbed his other palm across his face, smearing his tears.