The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  Then his console pinged again.

  “Nukiel here.” Some Z-watch this was turning out to be: no one seemed to be asleep.

  Commander Efriq’s face windowed up. “Commodore, ten minutes ago we detected an emergence pulse, bearing absolute at 167 mark 24, plus 23 light-minutes relative. Signature ID’d the Crimson Skull but the scout detected nothing. I’ve ordered a search by two full Kelly tripods.”

  “Very well. Go to general quarters. Skip to the emergence coordinates, tac-level six, and commence a standard search. I’m coming up.”

  Efriq acknowledged, and the window dwindled to a point and vanished.

  The harsh rasping of the klaxon barely registered as Nukiel finished dressing. He’d been dreading something like this—how could they be sure one of the Rifter auxiliaries wouldn’t double-cross them, jumping to the rendezvous point to confirm its validity, then skipping out to sell the coordinates to the enemy?

  He felt the subtle shudder of the fiveskip, and a short time later the subliminal, visceral pulse of emergence. If this was such a betrayal, the Suneater fleet would have to abandon its position. Reestablishing another would take time, if they were to avoid detection. Rifters. How can we truly trust any of them?

  Nukiel shook his head as he got into the trans-tube pod. He had no choice. The Panarch had made that clear. And Eloatri’s letters had filled him in on the political background. The new Panarch had enough trouble without disaster reports from the Suneater Staging Cloud. They’d make it work, somehow.

  He felt several more skip transitions before the trans-tube decelerated. “We’ve found them,” Efriq said as he entered the bridge. On the screen the angular dragonfly shape of an Alpha-class destroyer gleamed in the light from the distant black hole binary, its skipmissile tube pointed away from Mbwa Kali. A readout on-screen indicated its distance as two thousand kilometers.

  “They’re not responding to our signals. Our beta and gamma forward turrets are locked on.”

  Nukiel nodded and sat down in the command pod. He could sense the irregular subsonic pulses from the tianqi, keying the bridge crew to maximum alertness through the evolutionary lessons of a million years of thunderstorms on Lost Earth.

  “Siglnt, anything?”

  “Low-level pulses characteristic of internal weapons fire, sir, and there’s a ship warming up in the aft port bay. No hypermissile signature.”

  “Very well. Weapons, ruptor at skip-smash level any ship leaving the Rifter vessel. Communications—”

  Two things happened simultaneously. A window popped up on the main screen, revealing the bridge of the Crimson Skull, and a ship darted out of the destroyer’s bay. Nukiel heard the momentary hum of the ruptors; the little ship accelerated.

  “Its fiveskip is gone,” reported Siglnt.

  But Nukiel’s attention was on the face of the Rifter staring out of the screen. A reddish-white weal of blisters marred her forehead, and twin tear tracks carved through the grime on her face. She coughed rackingly as smoke drifted past her.

  “Sorry about the mess, Commodore,” she said when she caught her breath. In the background someone yelled, “Kali hit ’em with a ruptor, but they’re accelerating under geeplane!”

  “Just a moment.” She turned away. “Tyori! Zap ’em, now!”

  A streak of light shot out of the destroyer, impinging on the fleeing ship in a rosette of light that faded slowly into nothingness.

  “There,” she said with satisfaction, turning back to Nukiel. “Our dear captain and a couple o’ blunge-eaters had the idea the Dol’jharians might like to know where you are. We had a different idea, and now I’m captain, and they’re vapor.” She grinned and sketched a salute. “Captain Jumilla and Crimson Skull reporting for duty, Commodore. Permission to come aboard?”

  “Thank you, Captain,” said Nukiel feelingly. “Permission very gladly granted. And welcome to the Suneater Staging Cloud.”

  SUNEATER

  A soft whimper escaped from Tat Ombric’s aching throat, and she bit down hard on her lower lip. I can’t panic!

  Everything was going too fast. Between the old threats and the new one caused by that howling sound, she didn’t know how she was going to live out the next twenty-four hours.

  Something’s waking up. Tat tensed her muscles against the images this thought conjured up, and she jumped when Lysanter entered the lab and moved up behind her, humming tunelessly.

  He was in a good mood? She couldn’t believe it.

  She bent over her console, sick with dread.

  “Again, Tat,” Lysanter said.

  Obediently she tabbed her console, repeating the wide-spectrum record of the hideous scream that had erupted from the hyperwave. On her screen the waveform shimmered: it was almost as though she could read it, for the sight triggered a vivid auditory memory of the terrible sound, an inhuman death rattle.

  The humming resolved into something that almost resembled human sounds. “Hmmm. Haah.” Then, revealing that he felt he had solved the problem, or saw a way to, Lysanter began to whistle very softly between his teeth.

  A fresh surge of tension flared through the room. The other Bori techs looked up and Barrodagh’s two goons twitched, bodies tense; for Bori, whistling was a harbinger of horror, because of the way the Dol’jharians reacted.

  Lysanter sensed the sudden tension, glanced up, and cleared his throat.

  Silence fell.

  Tad let her breath trickle out. Fortunately there were no Tarkans in hearing. She had looked up the reason Dol’jharians hated whistling, and wished she hadn’t. She didn’t believe in spirits, but the idea of Utburds, the whistling ghosts of infants exposed to die, had come to haunt her dreams.

  “. . . and monitor the load closely.”

  Lysanter was addressing her! “Yes, gnostor. What bias do you want?”

  He looked at her oddly. “Correlators and high-speed memory access, of course. I’ve an idea that requires an enormous pattern-search space.”

  She mumbled an assent and began setting up her console, gathering the power of the arrays around her and linking the modules that would give Lysanter the tools he needed. I’ve got to stay alert!

  As Lysanter vanished in the direction of his office, Tat’s mouth twisted at the irony. His immediate needs and her long-term needs at this moment coincided. The tools he required to match the spectral pattern of the howl, she could use for decryption and deep noderunning. She pulled in even more arrays—Lysanter, busy now, would not notice.

  Then she stood and stretched the tension out of her back and arms, extending and wiggling her fingers. To either Fasarghan or Nyzherian, both of whom watched her closely, it would look like the standard ergonomic sequence, exercises that satisfied the body’s need for the large muscle movements suppressed by datadiving. But they aren’t watching my fingers.

  Her workmates saw the Cover me signal. They would set up their consoles to justify the extra computing power she was demanding—temkin modules, all of them.

  “Sound and fury, signifying nothing,” another Rifter noderunner had said of such modules once. She wondered where Mgee was now.

  She sat down. Tapping quickly at the keys, she waited in a tangle of emotions for the familiar signature. When it came, she caught her breath. It had grown, branching out in code of almost fractal complexity.

  It had begun as a duel with Barrodagh’s noderunner. She’d finally identified him as Ferrasin, on Arthelion. Initially she’d enjoyed diving against another noderunner over light-years in real time! She couldn’t read the communications between him and Barrodagh, but whenever he sent code, she pounced on it as soon as it was activated and learned a lot about her opponent in the process.

  And at first, he’d been an easy one. Then, somehow, he’d gotten steadily stronger. Now his code was almost impossible to deal with. Were it not for this present emergency effort, she could never have marshaled the resources to defeat his latest.

  Not that Morrighon would accept any excuses. Maybe he wasn’
t as twisty as Barrodagh—mentally, anyway, she qualified—but he was just as dangerous. Maybe more so, seeing whom he served.

  She checked Lysanter’s threads. As she’d expected, their computational demand was growing at a predictable rate, leaving her free to concentrate on her covert efforts.

  Then one of Ferrasin’s constructs yielded its secret.

  Unease crawled through her guts: it was a nark into her own interface program, the one Lysanter had directed her to produce for the Avatar. Whomever it reported to would know the direction of the Avatar’s thoughts as he accessed areas of interest.

  Well, there was nothing she could or would do about that; it was undoubtedly for Barrodagh, and cutting off his access to the interface log would be fatal.

  I don’t blame him, though, she thought. Surprises could be deadly when they involved Dol’jharian lords.

  The neuraimai continued their patient unraveling, and shock clawed at her when she saw what they’d uncovered. I’ve seen that coding before.

  Once, on a dare, Tat had played Suraki in the DataNet—seeing who could plunge the lowest, like the duel game of that name that Highdwellers played, but with a console and code, rather than low-gee wings up near the spin axis. In either case, going too low was the danger.

  Both she and her opponent—it was Mgee, she remembered—had almost been caught. The phage that trashed their probes had carried a similar signature.

  It’s the Mandala.

  No doubt Barrodagh was getting the information he’d sought. But so are the nicks.

  She, and everyone on the station, knew the Panarchy was massing for an attack, even though no news reached them from the Rifter fleet guarding the Suneater. But now, only she knew that in some form or other, they were already here.

  It can’t be Sedry Thetris. Can it? She didn’t think any noderunner could do work like this from the crippled console in the Rifters’ quarters, although it was likely the ex-commander had already done what she could about that. Tat would have—any noderunner would. But this had come over the hyperwave. It couldn’t have anything to do with Sedry.

  Surreptitiously she saved the signature and neuraimai matrices into her compad and checked on Lysanter’s work. His array demands had peaked and leveled. She might have enough time.

  Her heart pounded and her stomach boiled. There was no going back from this point, but she might never have another chance. Quickly she UL’d the trapdoors she’d laboriously created, using her temporary power to set them deep into the system. A few minutes later, sweat-soaked from tension and with a racking headache, she tabbed ACCEPT and then set about undoing her traces.

  Now she could get back in from any console, and if she worked slowly enough, the extra load would go unnoticed. Of course, if she was detected, then a small part of the array load on the Suneater would temporarily be diverted for the operation of the mindripper—with her as the subject.

  Now what?

  She looked at the chrono. Five minutes past her shift break, but Lysanter was not releasing arrays. Why?

  Other worries crowded out the question. She’d have to find a pack going down to Recycling, so she could get Dem before he wandered off. She had to get him safely back to their chamber, or at least to the Bori area.

  Lysanter’s voice made her jump. “That’s all for now, Tatriman. You can release the array capacity borrowed from quantum interface and stasis control, but I shall require the rest for a bit longer.”

  He sounds really scared. Anxiety gnawed at her, mixing fear at finding out what he’d discovered with the need to know.

  Lysanter hustled back to his office, his face tight with strain, lab coat swinging. As she reassigned arrays and other resources, she extended a probe into his work area, disguising it as a scavenger. His results weren’t hidden, but she couldn’t see why he was so upset at what seemed to her a simple correlation with an activity that had to be very familiar to the inventor of the quantum interfaces. But there was a pointer to a note he’d made and then erased, not yet reclaimed; that lay a bit deeper.

  Tat hesitated, but she’d never seen Lysanter actually frightened before. Even at that horrible scream. It was now or never. The note would be gone in moments. She took a deep breath, and used her new trapdoor for the first time.

  She almost wished she hadn’t, for what she discovered swept away all her comforting hopes about the Rifters, Thetris in particular, while at the same time making it even more urgent that she commit to them. She cleared her console and hurried out.

  First Dem, then to talk to Lar. He knew the Rifters better than she. They had to decide: was it time to trust them?

  o0o

  Lysanter dropped his head into his hands, trying to think. He’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. What to do?

  The sound in the hyperwave chamber echoed again in his mind, this time proleptic of what might be his destiny all too soon. How could he have been so confident of something he saw so clearly now had been a completely unwarranted assumption?

  He sat almost paralyzed for a time, his mind circling uselessly, until a soft chime from his console interrupted him, and the squinty, misshapen face of Anaris’s secretary windowed up.

  “What was that sound?” Morrighon asked. His tone was mild, merely interrogatory.

  Lysanter had never heard a threat from Morrighon, who simply assumed obedience, which the scientist understood as a growing confidence that was deliberately dividing him from Barrodagh. And Anaris was now in charge of the Suneater fleet as well as all other external operations.

  Well, this discovery certainly fell within that remit.

  “I am not sure,” replied Lysanter, “but I have a hypothesis.”

  Morrighon waited.

  Lysanter fussed purposeless over his desk without speaking, willing him to understand.

  And he did. “Come to my office.” His image flickered away.

  A few minutes later Lysanter stood in front of Morrighon’s desk. “Senz-lo Morrighon,” he began.

  What was bothering the man? Morrighon thought with weary impatience. Lysanter had never used that honorific before. He motioned the scientist to take a seat. “That’s not needful, gnostor.”

  Lysanter plopped bonelessly into the chair. “Perhaps it is,” he burst out. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  “Related to that sound?”

  “Yes.” He actually gulped—his throat bobbing as he swallowed drily. Morrighon waited, impatience sharpening to alert.

  “I can’t be sure…” Lysanter stopped, his throat working again, as if he couldn’t get the words out. Morrighon held up one hand.

  “Wait one moment.” He ran another scan of his office. Still clear. He motioned the scientist to continue.

  “I can’t be sure, but that sound may … may … indicate that the Panarchists have a hyperwave.”

  Morrighon stared at him, all his calculations overturned. No wonder the man was so terrified. If Eusabian found out . . .

  No, if Eusabian found out without proper preparation. That, he and Anaris could encompass. And in so doing, bolster the Heir’s position even further. But first he had to understand exactly what Lysanter meant. He tabbed an auto-message to his secretary Farniol: no contact for any reason save a summons from Anaris. Nothing else on the station could possibly matter as much as this.

  “Tell me everything,” he said, softly. “Do not worry. You have done right in coming to me. The Heir will be pleased, and he will protect you.”

  TWO

  Lar resisted the urge to check his chrono yet again when the door slurped open and Tat and Dem shot through.

  Relieved, Lar collapsed back into one of the bunks. “Never thought I’d want to hear that noise,” he said in greeting, then shock burned along his strained nerves when he saw Tat’s face.

  “Late shift. Lysanter,” she said, her voice too bright. “Na! Hot and sticky—need a shower.”

  “We both do,” Lar said, his brows contracting at the tension radiating off her.

/>   Together they got Dem cleaned up, then Tat swept for narks. The one in the bedroom had been reactivated, she indicated with a forefinger as they bundled Dem safely into bed, where he dropped straight into sleep. Then they retreated to the shower, and under the cover of its hiss, both started to talk at once, dropping automatically into the quick patois that mixed Bori, Uni, and words from the many other languages heard at Rifthaven.

  “Don’t be late again,” Lar said. “Or if need, signal? Leastways if chatzing Karusch-na Rahali starts up.”

  “Already?” Tat said blankly. “Lords hunting Bori after all?”

  “Grays. Menials, talking talking talking, ready to do,” Lar said. “Alzhiagh says timing is approximate, this far from Dol’jhar: lords say when. And we shouldn’t even see them. We safe enough from the lords. Underlings our danger. Start early, and lords let them because they’re getting crazy-bad. Why you’ve got to remember to move only with a pack. Only safety is numbers.”

  “All right,” Tat muttered, sounding tired. “Find a pack, get Dem, as planned. What happened? You there?”

  “No. Got word by signal—” Lar told her what he knew: the Bori who had had both his legs broken had been alone, returning from third shift at Recycling, and the other had been grabbed from the corridor right outside the Bori barracks area. She had a broken collarbone and a fractured skull.

  “. . . so the others have organized a solid-front refusal to service the grays’ and menials’ barracks areas. Even Catennach can’t make us budge.”

  Bori were never permitted in the Tarkan areas, the one rule on this station for which Lar had frequently offered thanks to whatever deities might be listening.

  Tat turned her face up into the stream of water, and Lar felt a surge of pity. As if anything would drain the terrible tension except escape—or death. “Your news?” he asked.

  Tat’s head dropped, and through the curtain of sleeting water, she murmured, “That screech? Lysanter thinks the Panarchists may have a hyperwave. He’s not going to say anything until he’s sure, but when he does, things’ll get crazy bad. Lar, we have to decide. Right now. We trust Telvarna Rifters or not?”