The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

“We’ve inflicted a few losses on the Rifter forces defending the Suneater,” Koestler said as the plot pane flickered again, glyphs indicating the actions and their outcome. “One destroyer, three frigates, and ten lesser ships demolished, and, as you can see, many more with unknown amounts of damage. All this at the cost of a few dragon’s teeth and minor damage to the Smaragdis. More important, we now know to a high degree how each ship responds in action.”

  His smile was predatory. “We can move them around pretty much like pieces in a Phalanx game.”

  “Except that Phalanx pieces can’t kill you,” Lucan Miph said.

  Captain Jumilla chuckled. The Rifters couldn’t seem to stop testing the relationship. But that was easy to understand, after hundreds of years of estrangement.

  Koestler’s brows lifted in mild hauteur. “True, Captain Miph,” he said. “But if you and your cohorts do your part, it’s less likely they will.”

  “My department has prepared something else that will be useful,” interjected Commander Ellibre of Moral Sabotage. “At some point, seeing that the Dol’jharians doubtless know we have a hyperwave, it may be more useful to jam it than to listen, especially if Thetris manages to corrupt the station’s arrays. I’ve UL’d a sample to your consoles.”

  Osri looked down at his screen, then blushed. Captain Jumilla gave a whoop of laughter. “Juvaszt will hate that.”

  “Oh, there’s much more.” Ellibre gave a gloating laugh, brows wiggling.

  The interlude broke the tension between the Rifters and Koestler, and the briefing progressed in relative amity.

  Osri watched the plot plane, but Sebastian watched the participants.

  It was obvious from the manner of question, answer, and agreement that there were those—such as Koestler—who did not trust the Rifter allies, as opposed to the officers like Nukiel, who did. The one thing everyone seemed to accept without question was that the new Panarch was more trustworthy than Eusabian of Dol’jhar. Through all of this the Kelly trinity stood silently, in constant movement, threir reactions—if any—impossible to interpret.

  At length, when the order of battle had been decided, discussion turned to the objectives of the volunteer Marine detachments who would attempt to board the Suneater.

  “One,” said the rangy Meliarch Rhapulo, “secure the landing bay. It’s the only way off again. Two, secure the hyperwave, or deny the enemy the use of it. Three, secure or destroy the arrays, for the same reason. Four, secure the central power source and attempt to shut it down.” He crossed his arms, standing there in the attitude that Sebastian thought quintessentially Marine, though it would be difficult to characterize it more exactly.

  “Shouldn’t the fourth objective be first?” asked Miph.

  Rhapulo tipped his head, casting an inquiring glance Sebastian’s way. They’d already talked about this; the gnostor nodded, and Rhapulo said, “Even if it can be identified, how do you propose to do that? The Dol’jharians were unable to start it up, and even the intervention of the Unity seems only to have sparked a gradual warm-up. You might end up killing everyone on the station, or even detonating the stellar companion.”

  “What about Vi’ya?” Ng asked. “If she can start it, can she stop it?”

  Sebastian spread his hands. “Perhaps, but my guess is she will act as a trigger. My recommendation is as the meliarch has stated. Leave that to the last.”

  “Without the hyperwave, we can deal with them easily, despite their weapons,” Koestler asserted.

  “Very well,” Ng said. “Let’s move along . . .”

  When she delved into more arcane military technical decisions, Sebastian stopped listening. His attention was drawn entirely to Osri’s averted gaze, the tension in his shoulders—almost a hunch. And finally a brief, furtive glance at Brandon Arkad, now Panarch of the Thousand Suns, who sat quietly, his expression at its most bland.

  SUNEATER

  Morrighon led Tat and Sedry into the computer lab.

  “Fasarghan and Nyzherian have been assigned elsewhere for this shift.” He motioned them to follow him to Lysanter’s alcove, which had been screened off from the rest of the lab by dyplast scrims. The other techs did not look up from their consoles, but Morrighon could feel their attention. “Lysanter is aware of our arrangement,” Morrighon said when they were inside the alcove. He smiled. “Barrodagh is, too, but misunderstands.”

  Tat and Sedry tried not to look at each other: Tat was afraid Morrighon would see her guilt, and Sedry worried about poor Tat, who had blanched to the color of old cheese.

  Morrighon noted their lack of questions. Just as well. They didn’t need to know about the elaborate misdirections aimed at Barrodagh concerning the level of Anaris’s burgeoning Chorei powers—it would be disastrous for any hint of the link with the tempath to come to his attention.

  A dual console had been installed in the alcove. Tat and Sedry sat side by side and began setting up their personal interfaces. Morrighon let them work, taking small pleasure in the surety of their movements, then he produced a handful of small metal tubes from his pocket and set them down.

  Tat’s eyes widened. “Brainsuck?”

  “You don’t wish to use it?” Morrighon queried.

  She shook her head. “No, we’ll need it. But I thought—” Her voice trailed off.

  Morrighon enjoyed her discomfiture, then dismissed the emotion. This was no time for personal indulgence. Besides, she had never treated him like the others did. He turned his attention to Sedry, whose gray gaze was steady as she hid the pity she suspected he would resent.

  Not his fault that his mind had been distorted as had his body; she could show him what she suspected he had had little of: respect.

  “Thank you, serach Morrighon,” she said.

  He shifted his eyes away, giving her a curt nod. “I will be outside. You will not be disturbed.”

  He tapped a control on the desk. The wall screen lit with a view of the Chamber of Kronos, focused on the Throne. Vi’ya walked into view, her height foreshortened by the perspective of the imager. On either side of her the Eya’a glided along, their fur fluffed out. Vi’ya halted, frowning at the Throne, her body tense.

  To Vi’ya, it seemed to take forever to reach the Throne of Kronos, and the gaps in her consciousness worsened. It must be a distortion of her senses that the slope up to the Heart of Kronos appeared so steep. She hesitated as a wave of synesthetic anamorphosis attacked. The bright gem-like presence of the Eya’a sustained her, though their excitement drilled into her mental awareness like a hot wire in the sensitive core of a tooth.

  At the top of the steep incline she halted again, grasping the back of the Throne with both hands. Its resemblance to a chair was now unmistakable; if she sat in it, facing the infinite gulf of the well, the Heart of Kronos, embedded at the top of its back, would almost touch the back of her head.

  She would not do that.

  “Now it begins,” Morrighon said to Tat and Sedry, and withdrew.

  Tat worked swiftly, setting up her console, bringing up her links into the system. To her satisfaction, none of her trapdoors had been compromised. From time to time she glanced over at Sedry, equally intent on her tasks until the older woman glanced her way with a slight grin of satisfaction, mingled with apprehension.

  “I think we’re ready,” Sedry said, and just then the station trembled around them.

  “I’m having trouble with the stasis clamps.” Tat frowned.

  “It’s the Arthelion Worm,” Sedry replied, tapping at her console. “We’ll have to work with it—it’s too deep in the system now and won’t relinquish them.”

  Tat reached for the brainsuck. “Arthelion Worm? You know where it’s from? What is it? Have you been able to find out?”

  Sedry shook her head as she took an ampule, holding it in front of her face and regarding it with reluctance. “No.”

  Tat’s shoulders tingled at the disquiet in the plain, lined face. “It frightens me almost as much as Norio.” Then, qui
ckly, seeing Tat’s reaction, she added, “It’s not malevolent. In fact—” She swallowed. “—if one can ascribe volition to a data construct, it wishes us well. But it has its own agenda. We can only hope this runs parallel with ours.”

  The station shuddered under them. Tat jammed the brainsuck ampule into her nose, twisted it, inhaled the acid burn, and fell into dataspace.

  Outside the alcove, Morrighon settled at the nearest console and tabbed it to a view of the Rifters’ quarters. That, at least, the heir had allowed him. Anaris sat with his broad back to the imager, his hands lax on the arms of a chair. Ivard faced him in another chair. Behind Ivard the handsome Rifter lounged, his hands on Ivard’s shoulders. Morrighon couldn’t see the others. There would be little Morrighon could do should Norio strike at Anaris, but at least he would know.

  When he felt that tremble underfoot, he held his breath and leaned forward.

  “Now it begins,” he repeated, this time in a whisper.

  In the crew’s quarters, Anaris felt the Rifters’ attention as an almost physical pressure.

  He could not tell if this was actual perception, mediated by the tempath, or merely his awareness of their suspicion. He studied Ivard, who surprised him by smiling back, radiating confidence, with no trace of fear.

  The other Rifter, Lokri, returned his look unflinching out of startling pale gray eyes as he leaned with insolent grace against the back of Ivard’s chair, his fingers possessive. But Anaris sensed his unease.

  In the Throne Room, Vi’ya tensed herself against the steep incline and closed her eyes, raised her hands, and brought them down on the Heart.

  For a moment there was nothing. Her fingers dwelt on its infinitely smooth surface, its affectless lack of temperature, neither cold nor warm. Then, in the depths that opened before her inner vision, something stirred, a presence so vast it shrank her instantly to a sharp, buzzing, dimensionless point of quiddity, drowning her identity in the approach of something beyond personality.

  If it touched her, she would die.

  NOT YET!

  The thought exploded from her, and to her surprise and infinite relief, the presence subsided, leaving behind only a sense of welcome, of question, of a vibration, deep and slow, like the memory of an organ tone in the cathedral on Desrien, like the restless rippling of a rock-ringed pool, green-glass bottomless and cold.

  Now freed, her consciousness expanded through the station, strengthened by that diapason of presence. Wave upon wave of synesthesia assaulted her, until Ivard’s bright glow established a beacon of identity—and purpose—and a complex yet infinitely clear knot of threaded fire materialized in her hands-not-hands, quivering with meaning that connected it to every member of the Unity and her crew, save one, and every part of the vast construct around her, except the deep pool where she dared not go.

  The station trembled again. In the crew’s quarters, Ivard closed his eyes, and Lokri shifted from leaning to a strong stance. Anaris shut out the shiftings and breathing behind him as he made an effort to reach for them inside his thoughts. This was supposed to be a unity, not a collection of people whose distrust was apparent.

  A unity centered on Vi’ya. Her name fired the intensity of memory. He had to make an effort to dismiss that. Is this why she insisted I participate from here, instead of joining her in the Throne Room?

  He had offered to accompany her there, now that he could control his TK. He’d thought it a good idea to attend a session, since all along he’d required Barrodagh to report the scheduling of the attempts. But Vi’ya had been emphatic: there was to be no alteration in the accustomed procedure.

  Despite the danger, Anaris was pleased by the notion that his physical presence would be so distracting for Vi’ya that she might not be able to encompass him and the Suneater at the same time. It creates a promising balance between us.

  The floor jolted. He still sensed nothing. The redhead slipped into a trance state, his head falling back against the rakish Rifter’s body. A long, lean hand brushed Ivard’s hair out of his eyes with a tender gesture.

  Ivard had sunk into the safety of the blue fire deep within him. He felt Lokri’s strong hands holding him, the enfolding presence of the Kelly, the bright, darting glitter of the Eya’a, the steady flame of Vi’ya’s mind.

  Sensation flooded into him as she touched the Heart of Kronos, weight upon weight of color and scent and touch and impulses for which he had no name, nor his nervous system any referents. He felt her flinch, thrusting away some perception that he could not grasp, and then the synesthetic clamor coalesced into a spinning blur. He reached out with his hands-no-hands and touched it, provoking an explosion of rays of crystalline light, some piercing him with sweet thrills of pleasure, others drilling him through with tremulous pain to which he opened himself, passing them along to be reified by the alien experience of the Kelly and the Eya’a.

  Gathering the Unity around him, Ivard spun a web of meaning from the flood of impressions beating on their minds, bringing it into synchrony with the demands of their bodies. He reached further, identifying and celebrating each of his fellow crew members, then wedding them, too, to the web. With them, borne on Sedry’s calm wisdom, came another; Ivard smiled and wove Tat in as well.

  Regret diffused icy cold through the web as he reached one last time for the missing one and was refused. The web was still incomplete. A bright core of raw perception unmediated by conceptual intelligence presented itself to him, as from outside the limitations of flesh he was peripherally aware of a familiar ratcheting purr. Its quicksilver emotions, predatory without guilt, filled the lack and brought with it a selfless loyalty the lost one never could have offered. Lucifur!

  He shifted threads about and rewove them into completeness.

  Then the chair creaked under Anaris, and Lokri’s startled silver gaze lifted in mute question. Anaris heard someone draw a quick breath as he felt gravity release him. He tried to relax. Then, slowly, awareness of the station began to pervade him. He was dizzy, almost nauseated, as his kinesthetic sense expanded into his surroundings. Gradually his sense of bodily identity expanded, yet did not rarefy as the substance of the Urian artifact seemed to meld with his body. Disoriented by the dissonance between what his vision told him and what his body signaled, he closed his eyes. Now he experienced his surroundings exactly as he did his own body, with the same immediacy and imprecision.

  The station twitched again, more violently, and Anaris experienced it as a ripple in his own flesh. Frowning, he tensed and applied a counter-pressure, damping the movement. Then another jolt ripped through him, and another. The door to the chamber squelched open, echoed by sucking noises from the walls. Pain exploded in him as malevolence blossomed in his flesh.

  Such must cancer feel like, he thought, and fought back. If he was a part of this Unity, why could he not sense the others? Pain swamped conscious thought, and time became naught but an equation of agony and the rage that sustained him against it.

  The moment he centered the sensitive and infinitively responsive web around Vi’ya, darkness erupted around it, bringing a tidal seiche of torment that surged higher with inexorable intensity. Ivard cried out, reached for the Kelly, who spun away until only the flame remained, shining steadfast against the looming, hungering dark.

  Lucifur yowled.

  Ivard almost lost his place in the web, but steadied himself against the hands upon his shoulders, the pulse beating strongly behind the flesh where his head rested. Strengthened by that human contact, now nameless but remembered deeply in sensation and past experience, he reached again for the flame.

  Vi’ya took the knot, teasing out the thread linking them to Anaris, bringing in his strength but letting no communication flow back along the path. The station seemed to fit itself around the Unity like its own body, a body with many minds and but one will.

  Vi’ya’s inner eye took one last look at the pool, dangerous and beckoning, holding answers she had never thought to ask. But even as she did so, dar
kness stained it, spreading swiftly, blotting out and absorbing the vibration and the green-glass peace. She cried out, clutching at the knot that communicated anguish to every part of her. She heard the chatter of the Eya’a, saw the blue-fire flicker of the Kelly, and across a great distance, groped for the solid strength of Anaris, who, locked in the Unity’s pain, made it all unknowing his own.

  She reached for the others, regaining strength by regaining identity. She melded their strengths into the Unity: flashing pride and newfound love from Lokri; rock-steady, grim determination from Montrose; sorrow and loyalty and generous power from Jaim; even the wordless, savage innocence of Lucifur—and then, surprising her, an echo of the green-glass peace from Sedry, and a calmness she could not understand. The harmonics resolved into music as a new presence made itself known: female, warm, welcoming closeness, replacing the one who had refused the Unity.

  But still the darkness expanded, towering in negation of life and love. She threw the Unity against the malevolence as she reached toward that strange echo of the power at the heart of the Suneater—and thence toward Sedry, the Unity’s link to the human artifacts that controlled the substance of the station.

  Now!

  o0o

  It took Tat longer than usual to orient herself. Vast obelisks of data rose all around her, echoing the arrays in the lab around her body that she no longer sensed. A shimmering construct of gem-like rays darted before her: Sedry. She followed her along a twisting path that changed before and after them.

  She found herself in a vast open space, megaliths of data all around her, as if cradling a site for rituals of power. Light blossomed before her, painfully bright. Throwing up a sieve of gloom to save her virtual vision, she saw a bird of flame, glittering and powerful, perched upon a nest of writhing sticks and threads. The scent of costly spices tickled her nose. She rarely experienced smell in dataspace; this was a powerful construct.

  The bird’s gaze shot filaments of light that pinned her against a megalith. The Sedry-gem interposed itself, spun a cloak of darkness out, behind which Tat sensed an interchange of data not meant for her to know. The cloak spun back into the gem, and the bird rose up, its wings spanning the vast monument around them, shadowing them as it hovered. Under it a path appeared.