A world in which there is no room for aught but him.
Morrighon’s attention refocused on the heir as Anaris looked up at the Dol’jharian officer. “Kyvernat Juvaszt, can we monitor the debris of destroyed Rifter ships that you mentioned, in order to prevent the Panarchists from getting more hyperwaves?”
Juvaszt shook his head. “In my opinion, we cannot afford to divert the ships needed, nor can we spare the transponders that might free ships from such duty. More important now is the diversion of as many compute arrays as possible to crypto and communications. The security of my transmissions to the Rifter fleet is paramount for the defense of the Suneater.”
A lance of triumph zinged through Morrighon, to be instantly suppressed lest it be perceived. A swift side glance showed that Barrodagh had also hidden his reaction. He did not give any sign of how cruelly this new development would dash his hopes of more stasis clamps. Tat had captured the recording of a conversation wherein Lysanter had promised more clamps, and Morrighon had been unable to figure any way of preventing it. Until now. The clamps themselves Barrodagh now had, but they were useless without the compute power needed to control them.
“Which must be balanced against the needs of our research,” Lysanter argued, his manner the persuasive one of the utterly convinced. “This new tempath is very strong. I feel we are on the edge of a major breakthrough in our control of the Suneater.”
“Communications are more important,” Barrodagh snarled, taking out his frustration on the scientist. Evidently, if he couldn’t have his stasis clamps, he’d make sure Lysanter was equally frustrated.
“Enough,” the Avatar said, causing instant silence, broken only by the murmur of a ventilator. “My enemy has a hyperwave. All communications will be encrypted at the highest level, immediately.”
The Avatar’s gaze fell again to the complex knot he’d woven, then lifted to Anaris, who returned his gaze steadily. “You have more for me.”
Anaris said, “Gnostor Lysanter has pointed out that if the Panarchists have a hyperwave, then they have quantum interfaces, which are what we use to weaken the substance of the Suneater sufficiently to penetrate them for cables and pipes. This means that a lance attack is possible in addition to the expected asteroid bombardment.”
To his amazement, Morrighon saw, not fear in Barrodagh’s face, but relief. He spoke quickly, interrupting a question from Juvaszt. “We have the means to deal with that.” Barrodagh addressed the Avatar. “I had the rest of the Ogres delivered by Hreem brought to the station on the Kyvernat’s shuttle.” Here his gaze flickered to Lysanter. ”With sufficient array capacity, I would assume it possible to verify their code immediately.”
“That is my will,” said Eusabian, placing it beyond discussion.
Barrodagh relaxed enough to breathe.
Morrighon resolved to have Tat monitor the use of arrays carefully.
“Gnostor.” Juvaszt turned to Lysanter. “Will the interfaces work quickly enough to be mounted on the attacking lance?”
“I do not think so. They would have to already be in place.”
“Then we will also need to establish patrols on the outer surface of the station, to detect and destroy them.”
But Eusabian had already lost interest in the discussion, now that it was descending into technicalities. “The heir shall deal with the external arrangements for defense.” He pulled the dirazh’u into a complicated six-sided figure.
Anaris tensed, and Morrighon saw it without understanding the significance.
Then the Lord of Vengeance reached over and tapped a control on the table between the two wing chairs. The holovid behind him changed to the real-time view of Ares that was maintained by a hyperwave-equipped ship monitoring a VLDA. The cloud of ships around it appeared undiminished, but Morrighon knew that the Panarchists were doubtless using decoys—at the distance from which the array had to watch to avoid detection, a metallized dyplast balloon could simulate a battlecruiser faultlessly, or any lesser ship.
“It is well that they have heard our plans. For I will deny them even hope before the fires of the Ur consume them.”
FIVE
ARES
The clear dyplast wall separating the steep-seated gallery from the Situation Room below clouded over in a fractal swirl, blotting out the oblate holo of stars and infoglyphs representing the Thousand Suns behind it. The swirl slowly resolved into the plot room of the Astraea.
Margot Ng glanced around the room, wondering if the officers, analysts, and tacticians around her felt the same dreamlike sense of unreality in seeing the faces of four naval officers, real-time, from almost five hundred light-years away.
No doubt. She thought she spied a hint of it in the coldly aristocratic Admiral Jeph Koestler, now commanding officer of the Suneater staging point. Beside him stood Commodore Mandros Nukiel, whom he’d relieved, as well as Captains Vapet and Theron.
Of course, thanks to Rifthaven’s gift of the second hyperwave salvaged from Aroga Blackheart’s ship after his unsuccessful attack, they’d been in constant contact with the Astraea since it left Ares two weeks ago. But all that time information also continued coming via courier from the Fleet around the Suneater. The last had arrived only hours earlier, bearing Nukiel’s report on the events of ten days ago. Now those ten days had vanished, eaten by the strange technology of the Ur. To be catapulted into real time like this was dizzying.
The eyes of the four officers focused on the man sitting next to Ng and they saluted. “Your Majesty,” Koestler said.
“Be at ease, Admiral, Commodore, Captains,” Brandon said, gesturing an invitation to informality.
As the officers on-screen seated themselves, Nukiel’s eyes flickered to the side, where Eloatri sat with Sebastian Omilov and his son. He blanched.
Ng saw that blanch and frowned. Omilov belonged in this informational meeting, leading up to the full strategic council, now only forty hours away. But the High Phanist had invoked the Gabrieline Protocol to be present.
“Please bring us up to date,” Brandon said.
“Little new to report since the courier dispatched from here two weeks ago,” Koestler responded. “It’s running more smoothly than I would have credited. Commodore Nukiel deserves kudos.” He turned to the commodore. “It’s your effort,” he said, gesturing.
“The integration of allied Rifters into naval squadrons is proceeding about as smoothly as one could expect,” Nukiel said. “Ship-level operations actually work quite well, despite some rather unusual chains of command on the Rifter side.”
A brief ripple of humor broke the silence. The only constant in the political hierarchy of Rifter ships was that none of them managed command in the naval model.
Nukiel paused. Many there noticed that his dark beard was shot with gray that hadn’t been there months ago. The lines in his lean face had deepened, too.
The real change was his easy acceptance of Brandon’s informality. His command style had always been on the formal side. That couldn’t be the result of his new responsibilities. Command personae only became more pronounced under such stress.
But there are other kinds of stress, thought Ng, glancing again at Eloatri. She still could not assimilate the fact that Nukiel, after rescuing the Panarch and his Rifter companions from the Rifthaven fleet, had risked his career on the strength of a dream by taking them first not to Ares, but to Desrien, the religious center of the Thousand Suns.
“What about personnel integration, ship by ship?” asked Brandon.
Nukiel had been forbidden to descend from Desrien orbit, Ng remembered. What had happened to those who’d actually touched the soil from which the Dreamtime flowered?
Nukiel’s mouth twitched. “That’s the hard part. As expected, the naval personnel posted to Rifter ships seem to adapt well.” He grinned. “Although their reports tend to become less restrained and more, ah, colorful as their tenure increases.”
“And the Rifters on naval vessels?”
Koest
ler said nothing, but his face was cold with disdain. Nukiel glanced at him. “Somewhat more difficult.”
An understatement, I’m sure. But Brandon’s policy of rapprochement with the Rifter over-culture demanded this step, despite the difficulty—and even loss of battle-efficiency—the integration of Rifter personnel into naval vessels entailed.
And that, Ng reflected, is why Koestler is now at the Suneater, and I am here.
Koestler would have been a strong voice against the Panarch’s intent to accompany the Fleet attack on the Suneater. With Vannis Scefi-Cartano, ex-Consort and survivor nonpareil, already subtly and very effectively working against his departure from Ares, Brandon could not afford that.
Politics. The word should rhyme with sewage, she thought. Ng almost envied Koestler’s inability to balance naval efficiency against the larger picture, despite the fact his lack had tipped the high admiral’s position to her.
“How is the amnesty program proceeding?” Brandon asked.
“Well, the pie-flinger harassments are working well,” Nukiel said slowly, and everyone there recognized temporizing. “Reports from the Kelly scouts, as well as VLDA surveillance, reveal the predicted pattern of response: a heavier concentration of units responding to tacponder alarms, slowing their patrols.” He smiled, and then, paradoxically, looked younger—it was the smile of a man happy to be doing the job he’d been trained to, regardless of the price. “Typical Dol’jharian thinking: make sure they’re never alone so they can’t accept the amnesty. So still no takers.”
Unless the whole battle group defects at once. But the Dol’jharians knew as well as the Navy did that the kind of Rifters who’d allied with the Lord of Vengeance would and could trust no one. They couldn’t even use the hyperwave to communicate with their fellows—the fearsome punishment inflicted on the Crone of Aravis ensured that.
“Just as well,” Brandon said. “We’d just have to intern them, losing personnel to guard duty. The real payoff will come during the battle. If they think they can surrender, they won’t fight so hard.”
Ng realized that Brandon was speaking for the benefit of those, like Omilov and Eloatri a few seats away, not familiar with the arts of war.
“We’ve caught a few stray conversations via EM. The Kelly scouts are very good at that. Now that we’re linked to the Ares arrays, we should be able to crack them soon,” Nukiel said.
“Better,” Theron interjected, his thick reddish brows soaring. “We’ll have a shot at the hyperwave communications.”
“The analysts are certain that the Fist of Dol’jhar is now using vernams for its cipher,” Ng said. “Just as we are here.” The technology of onetime encryption pads—the term itself was a two-thousand-year-old anachronism—was still the only one known to be unbreakable. But it was useless if used to communicate with someone who might sell the pads.
One of the analysts asked a question about hyperwave communications. Knowing the answer, Ng watched the epistemicians working at their consoles, their backs to the screen, supervising and directing the computers as they wove symbolic links from the transcript of this session to the growing mass of data the Ares nodes were accumulating. In one sense, that task never ended, could never end, for, in the fissiparous nature of information, the links themselves became data, reaching deep into the centuries of knowledge in the Ares system.
She recognized Solarch Reeso Hamun, his dark fingers occasionally dancing in complex flickers over the keys. She knew the others from their records: they were evenly divided between the factions contending the fate of the Suneater, as was proper for a meeting aimed at communication, not contention. That would follow in less than two days, at the full council. Meanwhile, of course, preparation for both courses of action were in progress.
“All we can hope to do,” another officer, an encryption specialist from her uniform, was saying, “is hope to overload their discriminators, as at Arthelion.” Her voice betrayed her smile. “Now that we’ll have the Ares nodes behind us, that may be possible, even against the arrays the Dol’jharians have apparently been building nonstop.”
“And they will have the Arthelion nodes backing them, no doubt,” Vapet said in his precise voice. “Even if they can’t decrypt the naval archives.”
“Will they trust the Mandalic system?” asked an analyst.
“Depends on how hard we push them.” Koestler took back control of the discussion. “And push we must. With the Suneater powering up as it is, I think it’s time to escalate to lethal encounters. Let them know we have teeth.”
Brandon leaned back slightly, hands subtly tensing on the pod arms. But he said only, “We trust your judgment.”
Koestler bowed wordlessly. All accepted that this was the fulfillment of his loyalty, the keeping of faith that underlay fealty.
But what will be the fulfillment of mine? thought Ng.
Afterward, she prowled the corridors, and then fetched up at the gym, where she knew the duty roster included a Marine dyarch skilled in the art of fencing.
Tired as she was, she knew her mind would not permit her to sleep yet. The only relief from the steadily mounting stresses they all shared was to exhaust her body: and sometimes, if she worked hard enough, her mind would cut free.
With automatic movements she pulled on her fencing clothes, and chose the saber to get a harder match.
“Pret.”
Already her breathing steadied as her muscles pulled her into alert.
“Allez.”
Cautious testing, a feint, riposte as her mind roamed over the Suneater attack data. Fleet strength. Suneater power. Tactical plans. Purely scientific data.
Lunge, attaque au fer.
She danced back, her breath huffing warm in her mask.
Again she pressed to the attack, knowing that those were not the weapons and tactics she needed to contemplate.
Balestra, lunge, bind . . .
Her mind shifted to the secret logs of the high admirals, read and reread so many times she now had entire passages by memory. There is a pattern here, she thought as she danced in again, claiming right-of-way.
The Panarch only came to Ares in times of great crisis; what countervailing powers did the high admiral have, to balance the proximity of the ruler of the Thousand Suns?
That’s it, that’s it.
Energized, she finished the bout—two to two—thanked the dyarch, hustled through a shower, and with her hair still wet, threw herself into her pod and swiped her console to life.
Follow that trace. A holo bloomed above the console: a ghostly image of Ares bright with the veins of power, air, water, and transport. She stopped as a rush of correlations brought the idea to light.
Brandon, in one of his rare direct orders as Panarch, had commanded the recall of the Telvarna from the test. Why had he concerned himself? The Rifter captain, Vi’ya, had been instrumental in the disgrace of the three traitors whose greed and hatred had given Eusabian the means of his long-sought revenge—but why was a Rifter allowed into Ares dataspace in the first place?
And Ng remembered the destructive test of the hyper-relay. Brandon had been present, but other than interpolating a couple of questions at the beginning, he had remained silent.
He remained silent right until the end. She frowned, trying to call the scene more clearly to mind. Not that there was anything overtly different about his behavior. The others certainly had not remarked it, or they would have said something, even if obliquely, afterward.
There had been, she decided, the most fractional sharpening of the Panarch’s attention when the first test seemed to mandate an all-out attempt to destroy the Suneater, and an equally subtle relaxation when the second test demonstrated that with quantum interfaces, lances could penetrate the Suneater—perhaps to capture rather than to destroy it.
Neither of which would I would have seen unless he intended me to. And after that, he had mandated the combined session of the Privy Council and the Naval Strategic Council to decide on a plan of action th
at now loomed ahead.
And again, only hours ago, that subtle sharpening of attention when Koestler mentioned the increasing power of the Suneater and the acceleration of their plans this required.
Ng rubbed her bicep where a badly blocked blow had landed from the dyarch’s point. This was high stakes fencing she’d been drawn into, a duel of metaphorical steel, with politics as weapons.
Brandon had justified his choice of a joint council on the basis of its symbolic value in demonstrating the unity of military and civilian interests, echoing the similar argument, advanced only through the sentiments of others so far, that the newfound unity of Rifters and Panarchists demanded his personal participation in the attack.
But in reality, the civilian cast of the Privy Council made it a hotbed of sentiment for the exploitation of the Suneater, not its destruction. The superluminal distribution of power and data offered too many profit opportunities to be ignored.
Bringing her back around to the Panarch again.
And then the nebulous patterns aligned: this was not a matter of Navy versus Rifter, or civilian against Navy, or Suneater-preservationists against Suneater-destroyers.
This is personal.
So it was time to consider individuals.
First, what did Brandon want? That was easy enough: to preserve the Suneater, and to go with the Fleet as had Jaspar Arkad at the beginning of that family’s long reign.
Next? Ng skipped over herself, and focused on the civilian side. Foremost there?
Vannis Scefi-Cartano. Who had expressed no opinion, either in words or in actions, regarding the fate of the Suneater. She seemed to live at the Enclave with Brandon in perfect harmony, often entertaining with him side by side.
Yet Anton Faseult, attending the endless round of dinners, parties, balls, and concerts offered by the Douloi, had reported a few days ago that Vannis’s subtle influence could be felt behind all those politicians who demanded that the new Panarch remain safely at Ares.
The Thrones of Kronos Page 26