The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  The woman inside of the rational being, Ng thought wryly, hated the cold-blooded waiting for the inevitable, a wait made all the worse by the impossibility of communications.

  Again came the ugly image of Metellus Hayashi drifting frozen in space. She covered her eyes with her hands and probed for its meaning.

  If they haven’t killed him, then I—

  All at once it was there—or almost there. Her mind wanted to shy away, but she forced herself to contemplate the enormity of the decision she would probably be called upon to make.

  In the end, it would be on her word whether the asteroids aimed at the station were launched or not. It might be on her word that not only the Dol’jharians on the Suneater would be destroyed but the Telvarna Rifters who had gone ahead to try to wrest control of it, and whatever civilians the Dol’jharians had forced to labor for them.

  And the Marines on the battle lances.

  And among them the Panarch.

  That was it.

  The memory of her own lover, Metellus Hayashi, and how war had sundered them, had prompted her to set up the logistical train that would enable the Panarch to be among those destined to land on the station. It was irrelevant that the choice to follow the logistical train had been his; given the same circumstances, and the same opportunity, she would have done the same.

  The full weight of responsibility was hers. No matter how terrible the battle, how little time there might be to consider the shifting statistics, it would be she who either saved or spent the life of Brandon Arkad, forty-eighth Panarch of the Thousand Suns.

  o0o

  Under the careful ministrations of the young technician, Brandon sat passively while the last piece of his new battle armor was fitted on: the helmet.

  For those seconds he was totally isolated, locked into half a ton of dyplast and battle alloy.

  He breathed deeply of the smell of newness, memory tugging at him. He closed his eyes as subtle prods and pulls of clamps completed the fitting process. Then he had it: the booster field on Merryn, being fitted into his acceleration suit for escape from the besieging Rifter fleet of Hreem the Faithless.

  But this time he wasn’t running away. Vi’ya had given him his life, and thus the Panarchy, and her love, and thus his future. He could do no less than to give them back.

  Brandon waited until a double tap on his helmet indicated it was time to energize the suit to five percent.

  He did, and watched with interest as a moiré pattern splashed across his visual field, as described in the chip the armorer, Meliarch Chaz, had given him with her request that he familiarize himself with its data.

  Not content to view it once or twice, he had made it his business to memorize its contents. So he knew how to trigger the suit’s diagnostic sequence. Delighted, he watched as the moiré mutated into a web of colored lines and vectors blooming across the faceplate. Then swift rankings of glyphs and alphanumerics flickered. So far, it’s not so different from piloting a ship.

  Then a voice said in his ear, “Diagnostic sequence AyKay. May we test the manual controls, sire?”

  “Of course,” he responded. “Whatever we’re supposed to be doing, let’s do it.”

  Chaz hesitated, then said woodenly, “Thank you, sire. First, set your comm to the common channel.”

  Brandon did not wait for her to describe its location—he signed the correct pattern with minute twitches of his fingers.

  “AyKay.” Ah. She had not intended to tell him where the common channel was. She’d expected him to know. “But less actual muscle motion—if you’d been full power and holding a jac, you’d have twisted it into a mobius. Now your medtech.”

  He did so, with mild satisfaction as the diagnostic screen reported a barely elevated pulse rate. But then, Ulanshu Kinesics were required basics for Marines, so that control was doubtless expected. Chaz’s attitude seemed to confirm that, for she merely gave him orders with increasing speed.

  Brandon recognized what each control was; his hesitations were all in finding or triggering them. During this sequence he was too busy to think at all. At the end, when she had pronounced the manual systems AyKay, he filed away as another datum about Marine expectations: “Becoming familiar” with something means learning it.

  “Now we’ll begin with movement sequences, if we may, sire.”

  He turned his head a millimeter as the suit techs departed. He was alone with the Meliarch, who sat in a thick-walled dyplast cubicle at the side of the room.

  Brandon carefully initiated the sequences that permitted movement of the armor, mindful of its terrible strength even when only partially powered. As he did, he assessed his relationship with Lyuba Chaz.

  She’d just appeared one day as he was en route between one military meeting and another, and let him know that the preparations for the lances that were destined to penetrate the Suneater were going on in the aft alpha armory section, and if he wished to view the proceedings, he was invited to appear at five the next morning.

  Once there, he’d only found Chaz present. She said that if he wished to be on one of those lances, she would accommodate him with the necessary armor.

  There had been no discussion of who, or what, or why, but he knew that Margot Ng had to be behind the offer, and it was with a new appreciation of his high admiral that he had encountered her at a soiree later that day. Of course, she gave no hint she knew anything about Chaz, or armor, or even lance attacks.

  He’d met twice with Chaz on Ares after that, once for measurements and then for segment fittings. There could be no margin for error in these fittings. As he’d sat patiently through the laborious process, he remembered watching vids when he was small, in which the heroes would don their fallen comrades’ armor and leap instantly into battle. In reality, the armor was so very personalized even an identical twin might find his or her sibling’s armor an uncomfortable fit.

  And discomfort—the slightest tightness here or loose fit there—could mean death.

  Now he paced lumberingly around the mostly bare room.

  “AyKay,” came the dispassionate voice. “Next, if you will, sire, pick up one of the cubes—biggest one first.”

  He turned, not toward the table where a line of objects lay waiting, but to Chaz. “You don’t need to ask my permission, Meliarch. Just tell me what to do. As if I was a new recruit.”

  “A new recruit,” Chaz said dryly, “would not be permitted to touch the armor until he had had a full year of training, sire.”

  Brandon had reached the table. Moving his gauntlet with care, he reached for the block of dyplast—but misjudged a fraction, and his armored knuckles brushed against it. The cube spun through the air, hit a wall and ricocheted back. He watched until it came to rest, though there was no danger of his being hurt even if it had hit him. Then he bent, and closed his fingers gently around it. The armor whined as he straightened up slowly and carefully. Holding the cube, he said, “Then as the Panarch, I request you to speak plainly.”

  The meliarch hesitated again, then she tapped at her console and stepped down, walking slowly toward him.

  He popped his faceplate and waited until she was right before him, a plain, older woman, lean and strong-looking, her face seamed. She tipped her head back to meet his eyes. Hers were dark with strictly controlled emotion. “What I think, sire,” she said, “is that you ought to give up this mission.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are a liability that could get some good people killed.”

  Anger flashed through him, to be dismissed. He’d asked her to speak, and she had spoken. He couldn’t address a problem until it had been identified. “If what?” he prompted.

  “If you try to fight with a team. Or alone, because they’ll have to drop out and come rescue you. That’s their oath. They take it seriously. As do I. Or I wouldn’t talk out like this.”

  Again a flash of anger suffused him, and he breathed deeply, dismissing it. He was no longer the powerless Krysarch, forced to endure
meaningless lectures on his worthlessness for his own good. He could speak the briefest command and have her ruined, both figuratively and literally. And is there some wish here to bite at the Douloi slummer? Maybe, but to dismiss her on that account would leave him as ignorant as she named him.

  So he said, “Speak further. Help me to understand.”

  And watched as some of her resentment eased. “This isn’t like piloting a ship. My old dyarch, when I first trained, said the worst recruits were the ones who used to pilot shuttles and the like, because they had to unlearn that before they could learn armor. He said, ‘No matter how hot a yacht you got, you are never goin’ to walk it down a smoke-filled corridor, tear open a lock, or bypass a console lock to get a probe into a computer.’”

  Brandon nodded. “If I tell you I do not intend to fight?”

  The resentment was gone now, leaving perplexity. “Then I don’t see why you need to go at all.”

  “Because it’s very possible I may be able to supply some SigInt that would be impossible to obtain any other way.”

  Chaz compressed her lips into a thin seam, then shook her head. “I always followed orders, but I tell you out straight, I was never the kind to see clearly enough to make them. Maybe you do need to be there, instead of on the flagship . . .”

  Her reluctance reminded him that just as he needed to trust her expertise, she needed to be able to trust his.

  “It’s the Rifter tempath, Meliarch. During our efforts against the three traitors, she and the Eya’a learned my mental signature. She may be able to feed me information when we board the station. I won’t be there to sight-see. Or to get in the way of the meliarch who’ll be overseeing our landing attacks.”

  Chaz looked straight into his eyes for a long beat, then nodded and exhaled. “All right, then. You’ve told me as much as you can, that’s plain. And you let me speak plain, which eases my mind even if it doesn’t change anything. I can see you worked on your intro data. What you’re missing now is the weeks of sim training before the recruit ever gets to touch the armor, and then the months of single training, and then the squad training.” She looked at his armor dubiously. “And that doesn’t even include those new quantum interface blunges in your gauntlets, that none of us have ever used before.”

  Brandon smiled. “I will hold in my mind the firm conviction that I am as unreliable as a two-year-old with a loaded jac.”

  She returned the smile, then retreated to her post. “With that as our baseline, we’d best get started, sire. If in a week we can get you around a corner without punching a hole in the wall, we’ll graduate you to three-year-old. How’s that?”

  Bringing his hand up with excruciating care, he saluted. “AyKay, Meliarch.”

  TWO

  SUNEATER

  “My father is bored,” Anaris said.

  Morrighon nodded. Only minutes ago Lysanter had informed him of the Avatar’s intention to watch the opening of the first ship in the new ship bay that the tempath’s last effort had revealed. Anaris must have sensed something of his satisfaction, for his lord’s tone suddenly sharpened.

  “You find that amusing?”

  “No, lord.” That is the disadvantage of the intimacy that means power in the Catennach, he thought. “Merely in the reflection that in this, and only this, Barrodagh’s motives are aligned with ours.”

  In another of the lightning changes in mood that Morrighon attributed to the intensifying stress of the succession struggle—and to Captain V’ya’s influence—Anaris laughed.

  “To keep him amused.” The Dol’jharian stood up, his powerful body dominating the space around him. “That is what we shall do.”

  Morrighon turned toward the door, then paused. Anaris looked back over his shoulder, his expression amused. “Not that way, my little Bori.”

  Shocked into that horrible sense that his bladder was full, Morrighon could only heft his compad in wordless protest.

  Anaris smiled sardonically. “Tatriman’s trace program will work as well in the walls as in the corridors,” he said. “Probably better. And we cannot get there before my father otherwise.”

  He intends to challenge the Avatar soon. The thought added to Morrighon’s misery. So far he’d avoided being subjected to Anaris’s uncanny mode of transport, merely assisting by having Tat craft a worm to eliminate the traces left in the stasis computers by his lord’s TK manipulations, so his comings and goings couldn’t be tracked.

  Now he had no choice, and his brain insisted on remembering the image of the hapless gray thrown into the wall as a sacrifice. It was no comfort that this way, at least, they’d avoid the Ogres now on guard everywhere. Morrighon much preferred their immobile threat to the prospect of being swallowed by the walls.

  Reluctantly he stepped off the dyplast sheet onto the gray-painted floor as Anaris faced the wall. At a gesture, the Bori tapped out the command to alert the worm, which responded by relaxing the stasis clamps to make their exit easier. His stomach lurched, and the urge to pee intensified as the floor humped up under his feet and forced him to sit down against a steep hump vaguely like the back of a chair. He felt it press against his back, the floor squirming under him, as he accelerated slowly after Anaris, who had already entered the wall. His throat spasmed when he feared he’d be smothered into a bubble by himself, then his bizarre conveyance caught up with Anaris as the wall sealed behind them.

  Morrighon sat stiffly, terrified by the closeness of the livid red walls and the liquid way they seemed to ripple around him as he was borne forward and up. The lack of anything his senses could treat as an orienting horizon provoked waves of nausea. He concentrated fiercely on his compad, where a window showed their progress on a schematic of the station—the part of it that was mapped. Anaris was taking them by the most direct route to an area only lightly salted with quantum interfaces and no stasis clamps. Morrighon supposed the heir’s TK enabled him to move swiftly once he was away from those interfering mechanisms.

  The sound of their passage, a sort of soft gurgle, was so like the grumbling of his stomach when he was hungry that bile spurted into his mouth and he swallowed frantically: he had no desire to find out how Anaris would react to being vomited on.

  His compad rescued him by bleeping softly. A window bloomed, revealing the readout of Tat’s new trace worm. Something was out there, its presence betrayed by the stasis clamps and quantum interfaces that the tracer monitored.

  Anaris glanced back. “Is that the tracer?”

  “Yes, lord. Something is following us.” Morrighon swallowed again, his mouth still sour despite this distraction. He checked the compad again; the other module Tat had installed was quiescent. “Not Norio,” he added.

  “I do not need your compad to tell me that. His presence is unmistakable.” Earlier Anaris had explained that whatever Norio had become was slowly growing active again, as if recovering from its struggle with the tempath.

  Tat’s module was derived from the worm Lysanter had bid her craft to track Norio and keep him away from the inhabited areas. He shivered. She had recently reported that it was consuming more computer power as time went on.

  They accelerated abruptly, swinging around on a tight curve. Morrighon clamped his jaws against the nausea; his compad indicated that they were now outside the inhabited area.

  “So there is something else lurking in the Suneater.” Anaris’s tone was musing, showing no sign of his concentration on moving them through the fabric of the station—or rather, Morrighon realized uncomfortably, having it move them.

  Or in the computer system, thought Morrighon, but he said nothing. That would be too close to Anaris’s experiences with the “ghost” loosed on him by Brandon Arkad, on Arthelion.

  Tatriman had insisted that Barrodagh was not able to do that, and she claimed to have fought his noderunner to a standstill. But if not Barrodagh, then who? Lysanter? But then, why would the scientist have revealed the fact that the quantum interfaces could serve as acoustic pickups, or even cru
de interference imagers? Morrighon was sure that the Urian specialist lacked the degree of subtlety to attempt such a finesse.

  They decelerated so abruptly Morrighon pitched painfully into Anaris. The heir’s body was like stone.

  “That was Norio,” Anaris said. “I fear him not, but I doubt you would enjoy our confrontation, and we have no time.” With a stomach-wrenching jerk they accelerated off at an angle.

  Morrighon’s back prickled, and he resisted an impulse to look behind him. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway. But it was obvious from Anaris’s unusual willingness to reveal what was happening that the heir expected Morrighon to do whatever he could to deal with Norio. And that meant working with Tatriman. And Sedry. Did the heir know of the ex-Panarchist’s computer activities? No matter. It might well take both of them to deal with Norio. That would be their next task.

  By concentrating on what he would direct the two noderunners to do, Morrighon managed to hold off the nausea until the bubble slowed to a stop.

  “There is someone nearby,” Anaris said. “We will wait.”

  Morrighon looked thoughtfully at Anaris’s broad back, wondering how he knew, and how he navigated. Either his TK had a telepathic component, or else his assignations with Vi’ya had done something to him.

  Vi’ya. “Lord, I ask only because a misstep on my part due to ignorance could upset all, but do you have some sort of psychic link with the tempath?”

  Anaris glanced back, angry, then thoughtful as Morrighon forced his own gaze down into proper submission. When he spoke, his voice was wry. “I trust Barrodagh has remained unobservant?”

  Morrighon bowed slightly, trying to hide his intense relief. “I have done all I can to ensure that.”

  “Then you need to know this. The link is not just with Vi’ya, but it comprises the Eya’a and a trio of Kelly, hidden on their ship. The red-haired boy is also a part of it.”

  Morrighon wrestled with a haze of new questions. A Kelly trinity, here? He shuddered to think of Eusabian’s reaction: the Avatar, like virtually all Dol’jharians, loathed the very idea of nonhuman sentience. Apparently Anaris did not.