The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

“Yeah, but at least it was human once.”

  Though how much it is now is debatable. She’d seen something of the environment the logos had constructed to distract the image of its programmer, leaving the machine free to pursue its own, inhuman goals. She was sure even Barca wasn’t that weird.

  “Well, I’ve told you everything I remember about Ruonn,” Tallis insisted, referring to the Barcan noderunner whose data-image was part of the logos. His hair fell forward, hiding his anxious eye; Kira was glad he’d taken her suggestion and started wearing an eyepatch again. Luri panicked every time the ill-fitting false eye popped out—which it had done frequently in the low-gee they favored for sex. “I thought you said you’d already managed to contact him in there,” Tallis muttered.

  Lennart sighed. Tallis was a very wearing companion when he was fearful. He listened not to what others told him, but to whatever interpretation his anxiety placed on their words. “I broke the eidolon out of the shell Anderic’s worm locked it up in, but it fell right back into sex dreams and ignored me.”

  “Sex dreams?” asked Luri, looking up from the proteus she was idly toying with.

  Lennart was tired of the discussion and saw a way out.

  “Yeah. Barcan sex dreams. Dozens of women that make you look flat-chested, and Ruonn with a nacker that would make an Alainean Megathere run away screaming.”

  “Oooh!” Luri exclaimed, her eyes widening. She gave the proteus a decisive twist; it promptly lengthened and expanded alarmingly. Then she turned toward Tallis, licking her lips.

  “Get that thing away from me,” the captain snapped, his voice cracking.

  “It’s not for you,” Luri cooed, eyeing Kira, who snickered. Well, she thought, Tallis certainly wouldn’t be ready again for a while. And Luri, with her single-minded focus on sex, was an expert at judging her partners’ limits, both psychological and physical. Kira rolled toward Luri, then stopped as the console lit.

  Tallis squirmed over to the console. “What?” he yelled.

  “This is the Fist of Dol’jhar.”

  Tallis sat up so fast he whacked his temple on a bulkhead. Luri leaned over and covered his hair and ear with kisses as the Dol’jharian continued. “A transponder pulse in your sector.” The nav console bleeped as the coordinates came in automatically. “You are to respond without delay.” The connection lapsed.

  Tallis clutched his head in frustration, accidentally knocking Luri back onto the bed in a welter of silken sheets.

  “He said, ‘without delay.’” Kira pulled Tallis around to face her. “Let the secondary crew take this one. You can’t be on the bridge all the time.”

  Tallis nodded, tabbed the console, and issued instructions.

  The fiveskip burred into action. Tallis sank back and sighed, and Luri pounced on him, reaching for Kira.

  They stopped as the ship trembled. Had something hit them?

  Tallis bolted from the bed, his one good eye distended with terror. “What—”

  He slapped the light control, and was answered by a jet of foam from the firestop in the bulkhead. Cursing loudly, the captain rushed to the bain to wash the fluid off his face. Through the doorway, Lennart saw him reel back as a blast of air shot from the spout, splattering the foam in every direction. Then a foul jet of brown steam erupted from the disposer. Lennart heard a faint scream from a nearby cabin.

  Tallis echoed it with a howl of misery and stumbled back into the room as the two women watched, dumbfounded. He pounded on the console. “Bridge! What the chatzing hell is going on?”

  A ripe, fruity blat answered him, followed by a maniacal quacking sound: “Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck!”

  Then the ruckus ceased as quickly as it had started. The console came to life with the panicky voice of Esbart on the bridge. “Captain! There was a sneak-missile waiting—sprayed us with worm-data. You better see the message it left.”

  The screen flickered, revealing the face of a Panarchist naval officer, craggy and forbidding. Kira recognized him. Any Rifter would have: Jeph Koestler.

  “We could have killed you just now. Next time maybe we will. Unless you join us.”

  The message went on to offer amnesty and how to accept it, along with a promise of spare parts for the engines.

  Kira divided her attention between the screen and Tallis, who looked terrified. Terrified of choice, she decided. It was agony for him, being offered a way out of the trap the Satansclaw had become.

  For it was a very dangerous way, and not only because of the Dol’jharians. She thought again of the Barcan construct that held the Satansclaw in an apparently indissoluble web of code. Even if we decide to take the chance, will the logos allow us?

  The message ended. Esbart’s face windowed up again and the DC-tech commenced a litany of scrambled systems.

  Tallis just stood there, apparently drained of volition. Luri reached up to stroke his arm, but for once he was completely unresponsive. With a sigh, Luri turned to Kira, her soft hands pulling insistently at her shoulders.

  Kira shook her off. She didn’t want to think about the work ahead, cleaning up the mess the missile had made of dataspace on the Satansclaw. Even worse was what the logos might have done to take advantage of the scrambling.

  Another brainsuck session. The walls already tended to crawl from her overuse of the drug, but she didn’t stand a chance against the logos otherwise.

  Kira sighed. It was already too long a war, but she didn’t know what would be worse: more waiting or the real thing.

  But I don’t have to choose.

  The nicks would do that for them all.

  EIGHT

  SUNEATER

  Barrodagh almost didn’t bother with Marim.

  The chef had been surly, the silver-eyed comtech urbane. They were quite ready to talk about Rifthaven, or how much they loathed Hreem the Faithless, and they’d offered him endless anecdotes of the chaotic madness of Ares’s reef of refugee ships. All useless.

  The youth with the Kelly ribbon embedded in his arm had been the worst. He’d talked randomly of sights and smells, until Barrodagh had felt queasy trying to force some logic onto his cheerful ramblings, and had Lar send him back.

  Marim, the thief, he had left for last. There was nothing in the records of interest about her—and during the last few days, while the Telvarna’s crew members had been trying to bait him (he was sure) by engaging in lengthy and noisy sexual gymnastics, it was Marim’s voice he’d heard most when listening to the recordings made by the telltale.

  The rising incidence of Panarchic harassment, Eusabian’s boredom-induced forays into the computer—Ferrasin’s worm wasn’t fast enough to warn him real-time, and whatever it was Morrighon was up to had almost moved him to assign Marim’s interrogation to one of his more trusted functionaries. But he was nagged by a bone-deep conviction that the slightest deviation from thoroughness would bring death, or worse.

  He tapped into the telltale when Larghior arrived at the crew’s quarters. “Senz-lo Barrodagh wants Marim this time,” Larghior said. His voice was even, pleasant, and Barrodagh did not trust him for a heartbeat.

  Unlike Larghior, Marim appeared to have no subtlety. “That chatzing little blunge-eater! Doesn’t he ever sleep?”

  “It’s now rec period for most of the station.”

  “Probably can’t even find bunny-partners for pay,” the languid comtech said, to raucous laughter.

  “Well, he isn’t gettin’ me, either,” Marim said emphatically. “Too skinny and much too ugly.”

  Barrodagh heard the door suck open, which meant Larghior and Marim were on the way. Inured to insult, he listened for a little longer, in case the tempath spoke. She did very rarely; Barrodagh wondered if she slept all the time, or if she, too, had some kind of drug cache. As the crew nattered briefly, mostly trading insults, he made a mental note to ask Lysanter for the results of the physical tests on Vi’ya.

  Finally the tempath did speak—to tell them to shut up so she could sleep, because she faced anoth
er test the next day. Barrodagh frowned, wondering again what that strange conversation between Vi’ya and Anaris in the Throne Room had meant.

  This Vi’ya was a lot more dangerous than he’d thought, and not just because of her considerable tempathic abilities. A Dol’jharian who had spent years away from the home planet, like Anaris, she had learned the art of Panarchist dissembling. The only hope that Barrodagh had that she wouldn’t throw in with Anaris against him was the reward she wanted. That could only come from Eusabian, if she powered up the station—and of course then Eusabian would hold the whip hand over everyone.

  And so will I, Barrodagh thought, smiling grimly as the outer door sucked open.

  Marim came in alone. A small female—as small in stature as a Bori—with a quantity of curling yellow hair, she had a sharp, appraising gaze and an insolent grin.

  “Your captain,” Barrodagh said, “has stated her price for her service. You are here because I want it understood that anyone—anyone at all—who serves us will be rewarded. You know,” he added, “that we have the wherewithal.”

  It was his standard Rifter speech—mention money, and remind them who had the power—and he saw, for the first time in any of this crew, a flicker of interest.

  It wasn’t obvious, and her distrust still made itself manifest in her attitude of bravado, but it was by learning to read those tiny physical signals—that sometimes people themselves were not even aware of—that Barrodagh had survived the deadly competition of the Catennach.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said, stretching slowly as she sat back in her chair.

  If I thought you did, I’d have you on the mindripper, he fumed, further irritated by her obviously fake yawn. He said, “It is not just information that earns rewards, but service. As your captain is striving to prove.”

  Her pink, pointed tongue moved slowly round her lips, then she cocked her head. “Service?” she repeated, wriggling slightly.

  “What are your abilities?” Barrodagh countered.

  “I can run pretty much any pod on the bridge of any ship under destroyer size,” she said. “Nav not so nacky—not like Ivard. Same with piloting. But engineering, communications, and of course DC.” She wrinkled her nose and wriggled slightly again. Barrodagh’s skin crawled. Did she have some kind of parasite or disease? “But I don’t think I could run Damage Control in this chatzing hellhole. What would damage even look like?” She grinned—and again the wriggle.

  Barrodagh realized with a stunning amazement that she was pantomiming sexual invitation!

  He laughed, and once he’d started, it was for a long time almost impossible to stop. Her jaw-dropped amazement sent him into belly-trembling gusts: just as he could not remember ever having been intrigued before, he wondered if she had never been turned down before.

  Fighting to control the laughter, he sensed the horizon of hysteria perilously near, and how easy it would be to skim right off the edge. A brief, unusual spurt of empathy for Lysanter, who had been unable to control his mirth when Barrodagh had told him that the underlings were afraid of their disposers, helped him to force the spasms to chuckles, and then the chuckles to unsteady breathing.

  Marim looked as annoyed as Barrodagh must have looked to Lysanter. “The station is under our control,” he said, gulping down another breath and forcing his diaphragm to stop fluttering. “But I understand you wish to be permitted outside your chamber.”

  The anger narrowing her blue eyes eased, and she lifted her chin, revealing wary interest.

  “As you may know, we are working extra-long hours to make the station ready for Lord Eusabian’s control. Our workers do require recreation time, something I haven’t the leisure to organize. If there were someone who knew how to make the area assigned for recreation more attractive for our workers, it would be considered an appropriate service.”

  “That’s all?” Marim asked. “Just—get games goin’? No narkin’, right?”

  Wrong, Barrodagh thought grimly as he shook his head in mendacious negation. But I will wait for you to come to me about that. He gave her the rec hours and then summoned Lar to take her out again. She was grinning with anticipation as she left. And I think you will, he thought. If I know anything at all of human nature, I think you will.

  His compad bleeped. “Tallis Y’Marmor reporting direct, per flag order.”

  Barrodagh sat up. What was so important that Juvaszt relayed a direct contact?

  Moments later he had his answer.

  “You did well to report this, Captain,” Barrodagh said finally. “It will be remembered.” The words did not seem to cheer Tallis, nor did Barrodagh expect them to; he knew that Tallis was no more loyal than any Rifter. Only fear sufficed to rule them.

  Barrodagh tabbed off the connection and DL’d the vid into his compad. He would have to tell Eusabian immediately, which actually was all to the good. It would balance the demonstration Lysanter had arranged, which was next on his agenda.

  Feeling almost cheerful, despite the fear he’d learned to live with, Barrodagh locked down his console and left.

  It wasn’t often one got such a direct view of the struggle for succession. And Morrighon won’t be there.

  o0o

  The smoke from the incense rose in a straight column through the still air, its sweet-sour scent hanging heavy in the room. Subtle curves and flutings twisted in its diaphanous substance, drawing Anaris’s eyes upward until they met the empty gaze of his grandfather’s skull above the family altar.

  But this time he was not kneeling before it, nor had he done so since his elevation to heir. He wondered if some whisper of his Chorei evocation of Urtigen’s ghost, in the Fist of Dol’jhar above Arthelion, had reached his father’s ears.

  He has to know. Eusabian, garbed in the black vestments of the eglarrh hre-immash, knelt in meditation as the ceremony drew to its conclusion. The ceremony to placate Urtigen’s restless ghost, whom the Avatar had murdered in his struggle for the succession, was a central pillar of his father’s authority. Delegating it to an acknowledged heir would grant too great an advantage in the aftermath of that evocative incident.

  Especially now. This time the eglarrh coincided with the prolepsis of the Karusch-na Rahali. Anaris sensed the heightened emotions of the Tarkans around him; in truth, he felt it himself.

  Eusabian rose and bowed over the glowing coals in the copper sacrifice bowl before him. Then he poised the sacrificial lancet over his left wrist and began the penultimate invocation.

  “Darakh ettu mizpeshi, Urtigen-dalla. Darakh ni-palia entasz pendeschi, pron hemma-mi ortoli ti narhh. Visit us with your mercy, great Urtigen. Visit not with vengeance your lineage, take instead this my blood that once was yours.”

  He plunged the lancet into the vein, twisting it to release a stream of dark blood into the bowl. Pungent smoke puffed up from the coals with a hiss, writhing about the skull of Urtigen. The smell of burning blood reached directly into the forebrain of every man and woman present, evoking a complex of emotions. To Anaris it defined what it was to be Dol’jharian, causing an ambivalence he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, resolve.

  The stasis-clamp control console in the far corner of the chamber began to issue clicks; the clamps were installed as thickly as in the Avatar’s own chambers. Anaris heard someone’s breath catch as the floor trembled and the dense tapestries that disguised the surfaces of the Suneater rippled.

  Eusabian did not react overtly, but Anaris saw wariness and anger in his sudden stillness; anger intensified, the heir was sure, by the fact that no one uttered the ritual words that had greeted his own TK evocation of Urtigen’s ghost: Urtigen mizpeshi! The mercy of Urtigen.

  No, everyone here knows it is the Suneater. Or the karra, as the Tarkans present no doubt believed. If anyplace was likely to be infested by the omnipresent demons of Dol’jharian myths, the Suneater was it. Morrighon had told him that the grays called it the Maw—no doubt the Tarkans thought the same, but their discipline ensured that none would utter t
he word.

  But what had caused this latest manifestation? Was the station somehow sensitive to the emotions of those present? It had, after all, ingested three tempaths so far. Two and a half, anyway. Norio’s head had been cut off and thrown into space.

  Anaris laughed inwardly: a tempathic Suneater might make the Karusch-na Rahali rather interesting. He brought up the mental image of Vi’ya, tall, strong, and fearless, evoking a different type of anticipation. She would make it even more interesting.

  Eusabian spoke the words of dismissal. “Chupkun immashen enach t’gall. Etarr! The sacrifice is accepted. Go!”

  The Tarkan commander Chur-Mellikath rose with his subordinates, bowed, and filed out. The solemnity of their departure was marred by an especially rude sound from the door as it opened.

  Anaris, too, rose, but paused at a gesture from his father.

  “Urtigen mizpeshi,” Eusabian said, his gaze narrowed and intense. When Anaris said nothing, only returning his gaze unflinchingly, the Avatar continued, “Not this time, I think.” Then he laughed, a single expulsion of breath. “Nor the last.”

  Oh yes, he knows. The confirmation unsettled Anaris, which Eusabian had apparently anticipated.

  “Come.” He gave Anaris no chance to reply as he strode to the door. “Lysanter has something that will interest you.”

  There was no further opportunity for Anaris to balance his father’s revelatory thrust with any sort of response, for the door sloonched open to reveal two Tarkans, Eusabian’s honor guard, most honorable of positions among those unquestioning soldiers. They were never far from him—no more than a door ever separated the Avatar from their ferocious loyalty.

  And any hint of Anaris’s Chorei nature in their hearing would undo all of his careful work to suborn them. Which was probably the point of Eusabian’s comment, he thought wryly.

  When they reached Lysanter’s lab, the scientist ushered them into a small adjunct chamber as the Tarkans took up their stations inside its door. Barrodagh was waiting, along with two other humanoid figures, bulky and utterly still. These had to be the two Ogres Barrodagh had brought in from Hreem’s ship.