The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  “Go,” Sedry said, the words appearing as geometric sparks. “My place is here. A place of power awaits you.”

  Tat darted forward, space melting around her, and she stood at the center of a rayed mandala extending in all directions across a limitless plain lit sourcelessly by a light whose color she could not name. The rays were narrow; raised from the surface; they moved under her feet, as though she stood on the keys of a vast, circular clavisynth.

  All around she felt presences: the Telvarna Rifters, and Anaris, a Kelly trinity, the strange little aliens she never saw but with Vi’ya, even the big cat. They loomed vast on the horizon, watching, waiting, beseeching. She existed someplace far more potent than mere dataspace, and she began to dance.

  First slowly, stiffly, her feet sticking as if in mud. Gradually she found the measures and the rhythms of the dance, spinning, pirouetting, now on her toes, one ray at a time, now flat-footed in chords increasingly harmonious.

  Then the light failed. Black clouds boiled up from all around. Discord struck at her, painful, disorienting, but still she danced, stumbling through the rhythms in loyalty to the watchers all around that she could no longer see.

  In darkness absolute, with knives piercing the soles of her feet, Tat whirled and leaped and stepped.

  As Sedry confronted the Phoenix, horrified by her recognition of what it was, exultant in what that meant to her Rifter comrades and their plans, she perceived that she had crossed into someplace that bore the same relationship to dataspace as a sphere to a circle, a tesseract to a cube.

  Higher up and farther in. Had she heard those words in childhood, or merely thought them? But then, as the Unity reached for her, fitting her into a transcendence that for the first time made sense of a doctrine she’d always parroted but never understood, the selfsame view of Telos that the Kelly found so natural, she heard the voice of the Phoenix.

  “Do you fear me, Sedry Thetris?”

  “You should not exist,” she replied.

  Humor burst from the construct, which she perceived as an exaltation of iridescent bubbles, conjuring up a memory of a long-ago childhood day, chasing the summer-scented effervescence of a bubble tree.

  “Think of it as Original Sin.”

  The comment disturbed her deeply. Did this entity, however it had come to be, suffer that same conflicted knowledge?

  “Who are you?” There, she’d said it—acknowledged its sentience.

  “Both the greatfather of an Arkad and his child. But there is no time to discuss my identity, even here. What would you have of me? I will give it to you, if I can, but my goals are not your goals.”

  Sedry brought her hands together and opened them in a sweeping movement. Images fountained forth, swifter than discourse.

  “I have sensed it,” the Phoenix replied. “But it is now too strong, and still growing. There is more, is there not?”

  Again Sedry gestured.

  “Ah.” She felt its satisfaction as a wash of warmth. Behind her, around her, thunder grumbled, echoing from the megaliths. The light of the Phoenix’ pyre pulled in closer; wings of shadow enwrapped them, towering.

  “I will summon my greatson, then.”

  The Phoenix dipped its head into the flaming nest, bringing forth a red gem. Stretching forth its long neck out of the fire, it touched the gem to her lips, which burned with sweet anguish.

  “As for Norio, speak then, as you will.”

  Its wings swept down, scattering the pyre in a shower of embers as it shot up, dwindling swiftly to a spark in the dimensionless sky above. Around her, the megaliths began to crumble. Obscenities whispered in the darkness, glorying in destruction and the death of hope. Far off, a web of light hovered, like the afterglow of a sunset.

  No! Sunrise.

  Where the pyre had been, a pool glimmered, a soft light shining up from it, glass- clear. The shadows could not touch it. Sedry advanced to peer down into it, and glimpsed her reflection, strangely young. Then it rippled, clearing to a view of the black hole and its accretion disk, but she saw it now with different eyes. Not awesome strangeness, but the homely warmth of a hearth, and an echo, of an earlier, far vaster conflagration. Birth, escape, longing.

  Yearning struck at her, stronger than she had ever felt it. Sedry began to weep for something whose lack was sweeter than any fulfillment.

  Then she felt Vi’ya’s presence, and heard her voice.

  Now!

  The hungering dark swooped down. She spoke the first word of power given her and the bright web fell out of the sky, constraining malevolence in its fabric. Pain shot through her, timeless striving.

  Repelled but undefeated, the dark withdrew, waiting and prowling beyond the megaliths reconstituted in smooth granite graven with runes of unknown import.

  There would be another time for it, and for her. Exhausted, Sedry sank to her knees before the pool; helpless, she fell on her side. With her last strength she reached to touch the water.

  When Sedry awoke, her blurring eyes took several seconds to focus. Her eye sockets ached, making the effort almost too much. But she didn’t recognize the silhouette crouched near her, and so she gritted her teeth and made the effort.

  A pungent smell assailed her nostrils, aiding her in regaining a grasp on the here and now. Something pressed against her lips, and she obediently opened her mouth, swallowed, then choked on the harsh, burning liquid that went nova in her throat.

  The cup bumped against her teeth, and she took another sip; surprisingly the liquor diminished the vertigo and helped her eyes to focus.

  She found that she had collapsed against a chair. Forcing herself to sit, she blinked, then stared at first without comprehension into Morrighon’s face.

  He gazed back at her.

  “Tat?” she said. Her voice sounded old.

  “Sent her back to their dorm with her cousin.”

  Reality began to reassemble, one painful awareness at a time. “No one knows I’m here. Right?”

  “I have someone to take you back to your quarters.”

  She pressed the heels of her hands against her temples, almost wishing her skull really would crack and her brains spill on the floor. That would hurt a lot less than how she felt right now.

  But fanciful thinking could come later. One danger had been averted—leaving the way for more to take its place. She forced herself to look up and to meet Morrighon’s eyes, which were on a level with her own.

  “Is this going to get me into trouble?” she asked directly.

  Morrighon hesitated. His gaze dropped, then lifted to meet hers again. “No. Not if it is never acknowledged. First shift is still an hour off, and the way is clear for you to return.”

  “Will it make trouble for Tat?”

  “Exhibiting remarkable skill has its rewards and its dangers,” he said. “That’s true anywhere, is it not?” He rose to his feet. “If you are back in your quarters and nothing is said, life will return to normal.”

  If she hadn’t ached so much, she might have laughed. Normal? Life in the Suneater had not even remotely resembled anything one could call normal, not once since their arrival, and it had only gotten worse. What kind of fanciful thinking was Morrighon indulging himself with?

  But as she stood up straight and looked down at Morrighon’s bent form and lopsided face, a wavefront of intense compassion impacted her, and she could neither move nor speak.

  You never chose your birth, nor whatever happened afterward to so twist your body. If whatever you chose subsequently seemed normal by comparison, who is to blame you?

  Morrighon poured a splash of liquor from a slim flask into the cup and silently held it out, and this time she took it with her own hands and raised it to him, a salute in gesture but also a kind of sacrament.

  You should have been beautiful to your mother, as you are in the eyes of Telos. Would it have set your path toward the light? Closing her eyes, she drank.

  A shudder at the harsh, unfamiliar flavor, but the burn enabled her to
move again. Morrighon silently took the cup from her and led the way from the center. Outside, a silent Catennach Bori sat waiting in one of the little transport vehicles, a load of some kind of supplies sitting on the back.

  Very swiftly the vehicle traversed the ovoid corridors; the breeze felt good on Sedry’s aching face.

  They were nearly to the crew chamber when Sedry saw a flash of brown in a side tunnel. Lucifur? She tried to call out, but choked on the residual burn from Morrighon’s liquor, and was too tired to try to make him stop.

  They halted and Morrighon triggered the door. Sedry hitched herself off and went inside, turning to nod her thanks, but the transport was already driving away.

  SIX

  GROZNIY

  Lieutenant Yeo Wychyrski leaned back in her pod, watching the hyperwave monitors, and once again thanked the Sanctus Ernest King, the patron figure she had chosen at the Academy as had been the custom since it was first established over nine hundred years before.

  “Ernie, you did it again,” she said, then grinned somewhat self-consciously at her console, balanced between skepticism and belief. Here she was, at the heart of the most important battle in the history of the Thousand Suns, monitoring the transmissions from a 10-million-year old comm, just because she’d been in Siglnt on the Grozniy when its captain, now high admiral, found herself in the midst of the chaos of war.

  If her patron figure hadn’t done it, it was merely random chance, because though she’d been the youngest cadet to graduate from the Academy, her sense of superiority on her first assignment had taken a fast dive when she discovered herself surrounded by other people just as smart. Nobody cared how young you were, only that you did your job.

  So, luck. Yet no warrior trusted Alea, or cared to profit from her favors, so easily and fatally revoked when least expected.

  Wychyrski shrugged. Look at High Admiral Ng, she thought. The essence of a Polloi who accepted no limits, she’d chosen as her patron figure a fictional character, and look where it had gotten her. At least, Wychyrski thought Hornblower was fictional; it was hard to be sure with ancient history.

  Alone on the gamma shift, she watched the monitors for a time. Most of the messages from the hyperwave went straight to crypto for analysis. A frisson of awe prickled through her nerves as she considered how strange that pathway was: a real-time link, encrypted via onetime pad, through the strangeness of the Urian hyperwave to Ares and the massive arrays there. Still, they hadn’t cracked anything yet. Might never. But they had to try.

  Other messages, from Ares, went to High Admiral Ng, or to the Panarch, or to others, as determined by their headers. Or from them to Ares. She couldn’t read them, of course, but if she wished, she could trace their passage—and then she’d be brigged and maybe even shot. Only the machines retained the routes and histories, should they be needed.

  Her console bleeped. An anomaly glowed red on her screen.

  Wychyrski leaned forward. That header didn’t make any sense. She tapped at the console, but the impossibility remained. A very deep Mandalic header, deeper in fact than she’d ever seen before, originating on the Suneater.

  She tapped a few keys, teasing out the address.

  More strangeness. She stared at the console. The message carried a routing tag from Arthelion.

  Then, as she probed further, a wailing erupted from her console and the screen dissolved into a fractal nightmare. The message was trapped, eyes-only, forbidding even traffic analysis. Frantically Wychyrski dumped the data to a holding area, wiped her array space, and held her breath. After a time that seemed endless, her interface came back up.

  She shook her head as her stomach churned. That was too close for comfort. Now what? With a Mandalic code that deep, there was only one person on board who could touch it. Except naval discipline was clear: High Admiral Ng was in charge of everything on the Grozniy. Not the Panarch.

  Finally she tabbed the comm, and in a voice that surprised her by how little it shook, said, “Get me High Admiral Ng.”

  The message header windowed up on the console in front of the Panarch, and Margot Ng watched dumbfounded as he began laughing in delight and wonder.

  “A message from my younger self.” She had never seen him look so carefree, as though the weight of war had however briefly lifted from his spirit.

  At her puzzled glance, he quickly explained about his long-ago joke on Anaris, the fosterling hostage in the Mandala: the computer “ghost” that had followed him around.

  Ng’s brows rose. “I remember now. You reactivated it during your raid with the Rifters. But what is that signature doing on a message originating at the Suneater? Can you open it?” He might find it amusing, but she didn’t like mysteries of any sort before a battle, especially when they originated from within enemy control. “Could it be Vi’ya, signaling?”

  He shook his head, abruptly serious. “No, I don’t see how. She never had an opportunity to capture this signature, nor any reason to do so.”

  His fingers tapped hesitantly at the console, which flickered in negation. He paused.

  “But we know that the Dol’jharians have a hyperwave link from Arthelion to the Suneater, and I imagine that, just as we are using the Ares arrays, they are using the Arthelion arrays for cryptography—those that survive,” Ng said. “And there have been some hints in the few messages that have gotten through from the Resistance that they are relying heavily on the Palace computer to confuse the Dol’jharians there.”

  He looked askance. “So I suppose my construct might have somehow replicated itself across that link? It was supposed to seek Anaris. But it was never programmed to send messages to me, so how—” His hands went still as an image windowed up.

  It was Jaspar Arkad.

  “The good want power, but to weep barren tears,” the image said. “The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.”

  Brandon stared. Ng had never seen an expression like the one on his face—a mix of surprise, horror, maybe closer to awe.

  Then his expression shuttered.

  “To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign,” Brandon replied, his voice rough.

  “Greetings, father and child,” the image said.

  Ng’s skin prickled with shock and horror as understanding hit her. The exchange, with its ritualistic overtones, was doubtless one that no one save the heir was meant to witness; in the normal course of things it would have taken place deep within the Mandala upon Brandon’s accession. But nothing was normal anymore, and the Ban had fallen.

  The compressed lines of Brandon’s mouth made it evident that he was even more appalled than she. She wondered if this was the result of one of the messages passed in their strange gestural code between Brandon and his father in the last moments over Gehenna.

  “Do not waste time reproaching yourself,” the image began, as if it could see Brandon’s face. “You merely supplied the seed crystal for my being.” The image smiled. “We can discuss the Ban at length when you return to the Mandala. First, you have a rescue to perform. In accordance with your desires, I followed your old enemy to his stronghold, although there is little I can do as yet. But I found allies of yours here as well, Rifters it seems, and they summon you. There is scant time left.”

  The console toned. “You’ll find some data there that will be useful when you arrive. Do not delay.”

  The image wavered like a candle flame in a sudden draft and disappeared. The console toned once more, windowing up the words: AUTODESTRUCT MESSAGE TERMINATED.

  Brandon’s hands wandered aimlessly over the console.

  “Is it authentic, Your Majesty?” Ng asked, reluctant to intrude on his thoughts, but impelled by the necessities of war.

  The Panarch’s expression was impossible to interpret. “Yes.” He straightened up. “How long to launch the lances?”

  “Four hours from the word. We must review that data first.”

  He glanced back at the console. “Yes. Eight hours, then.”

  SUNEAT
ER

  As the station bucked around them, Marim clutched Hreem even tighter, welcoming his vicious thrusting as an antidote to her fear. Vi’ya wanted her to be part of that? She arched her hips up rhythmically, matching the big Rifter’s urgency. A strange warmth unconnected to her passion pervaded her thoughts, and she heard echoes of music, then sensed other minds.

  “Get out of my head!” she shrieked. The warmth fled.

  “Hunh?” Hreem’s voice was incoherent with lust.

  “Nothing,” she gasped, and changed her rhythm to distract him, bringing him to the brink of orgasm, and holding him there as all around them the station’s convulsions slowly died away.

  She felt Hreem climax as the station subsided. In a lightning change of emotion brought on by the Black Negus they’d ingested, she started to snicker.

  “What’s funny?” he mumbled, glaring at her.

  “Did you feel the ship move? They always said that, on this old serial sexchip. Creche-mates got hold of it once, and we—”

  “You blab too much.” Hreem rolled over lazily, and slapped off the vid. “Still, gotta say, you’re as good as Norio ever was.” He lifted his voice as he glared at the walls. “Better.”

  “Yes better,” Marim said promptly. “The best. Haven’t seen half yet. I know tricks that’ll—” A sudden yawn took her.

  As they lay there for a time in a pleasant stupor, Marim reflected on how Hreem had so quickly become dependent on her. The thought made her feel powerful in a way she’d never experienced on the Telvarna. Vi’ya, Lokri—neither of them would permit themselves to be dependent on anyone. A large part of Hreem’s need was based on boredom and powerlessness, she suspected, two things he was utterly unused to. The question was whether she could hold on to him when he was back in control of his ship—or the Suneater.

  She nuzzled her lips up against his ear. “What’s that trog of yours doin’ with the Ogres, anyhow? You got a surprise for old Eusabian?”