The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  Suddenly impatient, Ruonn pushed his compad across the table. “Look,” he snapped, “it’s very simple. You’ll have the manual—a no-port reader—but in addition, here are the failsafe shut-down commands. They are very deeply buried in the system, and they’re not in the manual, so you’ll have to memorize them.”

  Of course, he had no intention of letting the Rifter see the codes long enough to memorize them. He would give him Temkin code when the deal was consummated, for he would not risk Tallis actually shutting down the logos and destroying his eidolon’s chances of returning to Barca with the data that would elevate him to full potency.

  But as he reached for the compad to pull it back, the joy-toy next to Tallis suddenly arched her back, pulling his gaze to her, and his mouth fell open in disbelief as the shiny fabric of her blouse was ripped asunder by an avalanche of flesh, rosy tipped and impossibly extravagant, blooming across the table and drowning him in a sea of scented warmth that engulfed him on the huge satin bed as his shestek pumped impossible pleasure into every corner of his being. Surrounded by houris, Ruonn fell back—

  Tallis turned away from the console, his eyes wide. Luri flushed with excitement as she leaned over his shoulder, her own fleshy avalanche pressed warmly against his ear, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “You never told me about that!” she cooed.

  “That’s because it never happened,” he snapped, pulling away from her insistent hands. “What the hell was that?” he asked Kira Lennart, who sat back from the console, feeling a wash of satisfaction. “And what if the—” He looked around nervously. “—it sees this.”

  “It can’t,” Kira stated, determined not to show her exasperation. “Soon’s I dream-tricked that info out of the eidolon, the logos was locked out of the loop. Right now, it can’t see this console, or this room.”

  “Then we can shut it down!” Tallis crowed.

  “No. Not right away. Even this may make it suspicious, although I think the code will prevent that. But we have to move slowly. I think if we do it when we restart the engines, I can disguise what’s going on long enough to get away with it.”

  “And until then?”

  “Until then, you want to face the Navy without the logos?”

  Tallis shook his head slowly, frustration apparent in every line of his body as the comm bleeped.

  “Esbart here, Cap’n. Signal from Juvaszt. Transponder alert.” The tech’s voice was strained. “This is it.”

  Tallis looked at Kira, his face drawn, accentuating the dark, bruised-looking flesh under his eyes, then he stalked out of the cabin.

  Kira sighed and followed, ignoring Luri’s inviting look. Luri was an idiot. Tallis was an even bigger idiot.

  And I’m an idiot for getting stuck on this ship. Well, live and learn.

  She only hoped she would.

  FER D’LANZ: SUNEATER SYSTEM SKIPRADIUS

  Brandon watched, fascinated, as the Kelly ship released their lance. The connection didn’t separate cleanly, in the fashion of human tech, but pulled apart like taffy. The little ship, resembling a streamlined Kelly, curved away from them, rolling through 360 degrees in a farewell salute.

  “That’s it,” Dyarch Anheles said. “Forty-seven hours to the Suneater. Time to hit the sims.”

  Brandon set up his suit as directed by the instructions flashing on his faceplate. He felt his servo-armor shift slightly as the ship powered it to one percent—just enough to give sufficient feedback for a realistic simulation.

  “AyKay,” said Anheles. “Maunitsu, you take point, Tul and il-Vestros, you handle the vermin and scuttlers. Ophion, take your sub-squad and manage the Kelly tech . . .” He went on for a minute longer, then said, “Your Majesty, if you’ll—”

  Brandon interrupted. “Dyarch, it isn’t going to work if you keep calling me ‘Your Majesty.’ I mean, can you imagine how long it’s going to take every time you have to yell, “Get your Shiidra-chatzing ass moving, Your nacker-flipping, logos-loving Majesty?”

  There was an appalled silence for a split second, then the comm rang with laughter and hooted comments.

  “AyKay, Your . . . well, what am I going to call you? I can’t see myself yelling ‘Arkad’ at you.”

  “How ’bout Yehudi?” called Yevgin Ophion, who Brandon had learned was an irrepressible jokester. Yehudi was Murphy’s sidekick. He—or she, the gender was indefinite and changeable—sometimes interceded with Murphy on behalf of supplicants.

  ‘That’s perfect,” said Brandon. “The little man who wasn’t there. That’s how to treat ‘His Majesty’ on this joyride.”

  “AyKay, Yehudi.” Anheles took a deep breath. “But unlike Yehudi, you’d chatzing better be there when I call your name.”

  “Don’t worry.” Brandon laughed. “You couldn’t lose me if you tried.”

  SEVEN

  GROZNIY

  The bridge of the Grozniy was quiet, a terrible silence born of concentration, of hope and fear, of the strained excitement of a battle whose progress was defined by the whisper of inflowing bits from a thousand sources.

  High Admiral Margot O’Reilly Ng could hear the tianqi sighing, as if expressing the regret she could not permit herself to feel, as, even now, before the enemy was truly engaged, she spent lives to ensure the safe arrival of those dark slivers of vengeance now arrowing toward the Suneater with their human cargo, including the latest ruler of the Thousand Suns. Latest ruler—and perhaps the last.

  She tried to dispel the dark mood. If she permitted herself such feelings now, how would she feel when the battle was truly joined? Except then there is no time for emotions, only for action. Now was a time of feints and misdirection, of thrusts and withdrawals—and of these short, agonizing waits. The waits were the worst because this time the feints were not empty ships filled with vat beef; Juvaszt was no fool, and no bloodless confrontation would distract him long.

  So men and women died, with Ng as chooser of the slain. What was even worse was that she sat far from the battle, protected by the bulk of a battlecruiser so far undetected by the enemy. But the Grozniy, holding as it did the only hyperwave in the Fleet, was too valuable to risk in battle, and all its power and defensive capabilities would be needed if it were discovered.

  So she waited in comparative safety while dragon’s teeth tore at the ships comprising the huge VLDA maintained within the Suneater’s exclusion zone, safe from any capital ships, and costly feints at several asteroids splintered its attention as the Dol’jharians—she hoped—partitioned it to watch the many attacks simultaneously.

  Unfortunately there were three vectors where, for the first twenty hours or so, no array could have been permitted to look, along the courses of the three lance squads. That danger was past, but the pattern remained in the history of the action. Would Juvaszt see that pattern? Of course he will. The real question is, when?

  So far she’d kept him unaware longer than she’d expected. It was uncertain, in any case, what he could do to stop them. There were more than enough quantum interfaces racing ahead of the lances—due to impact in two hours now—to ensure penetration. At least, according to the tactical statisticians.

  “Tactical,” she said, “any change in the Dol’jharian array?”

  “Nothing significant,” Rom-Sanchez replied. “They’re concentrating on the action at asteroid phoenix-sud nine.”

  Koestler’s fleet. That was where the heaviest losses had been sustained so far, on both sides.

  “I still can’t believe that the Dol’jharians don’t just blast the asteroids right off, to prevent us from using them,” Lieutenant Warrigal said.

  “They will if any action starts going against them. But they’d prefer to fight. It’s the only opportunity they have to force us to engage in a situation where we can’t withdraw.”

  Warrigal shook her head. “It won’t much matter if they manage to power up the Suneater.”

  “Exactly. That’s why we both have to slug it out.”

  On the m
ain screen a window bloomed, revealing the sudden appearance of a Kelly scout, and Ng turned her attention back to the battle. Good news or bad, it didn’t matter.

  In two hours, the real battle would begin.

  FIST OF DOL’JHAR

  The bridge of the Fist of Dol’jhar was alive with a triumphal tension. Juvaszt gloried in it, sure that at last the final resolution of the vengeance that had so long eluded his lord, the Avatar, was at hand—at his hands. He breathed deeply of air sharp with electricity and sweat, and leaned forward in the command pod as if to leap upon the prey represented by a mere scattering of flaring points upon the viewscreen and the in-sweeping cascade of data from the ships in his command.

  But a sense of incompletion nagged at him, a vaguely urgent worry that something he’d overlooked lay waiting patiently to ambush him. The flaring eye of the singularity stared at him, winged by the flame of perishing matter about it, a pitiless gaze, awaiting the reversal that, for no apparent reason, he yet feared.

  “Tactical,” he snapped. “Update.”

  As so-Erechnat tur-Jenniskh read out the list of ships damaged and destroyed, the blows far heavier on the enemy than on his fleet, Juvaszt watched the tactical screen, straining to see a pattern. “Run it back, half-hour intervals by five seconds.”

  The tide of battle flowed back, defeating entropy as ships scattered to their component atoms were reassembled in the ship’s computers. He watched the ebb and flow, the thrust and counterthrust. Again and again, in between the reports flowing ceaselessly in from the widespread battle, and the commands he issued in response, Kyvernat Juvaszt studied the tactical history; back and forth, time’s arrow shuttling to and fro.

  And then he saw it: a triple absence that vanished at the twentieth hour of the battle.

  Juvaszt slammed his fist down on the arm of his console, earning furtive looks from several officers. “Communications. Signal to array, these coordinates.”

  The communications officer obeyed, and having sent the commands, hesitated. “Sir, that will turn them inward.”

  “Yes.” Juvaszt glared. Her gaze dropped to her console.

  As he returned to the battle, Juvaszt imagined his commands lancing out via hyperwave, relayed via EM to the far-flung ships of the VLDA, those that remained after the ravages of the enemy’s dragon’s teeth; the slow yawing of the booms and the only slightly faster resolution of the image collated by the relay ships and hurled back.

  Finally the image resolved from fractal blocks of noise into black space, the edge of the accretion disk, the red confusion of the Suneater itself, centered small and sharply focused. And three points of flaring, actinic light. He didn’t need the confirmation stuttered from Siglnt. He knew what he was looking at.

  Lances, in full deceleration.

  SUNEATER

  Finally Tat was sleeping a normal sleep.

  Breathing out a long sigh of relief, Lar levered himself carefully away from Tat’s body. She stirred, and Dem’s arms tightened round her. Lar withdraw from the bed, making sure the warmth stayed under the covers. He kept his eyes on Tat as he sat on the floor and pulled on his shoes.

  What had she encountered in the virtual world? Her fevered mutterings as her body threw off the brainsuck overdose had been worse than anything he’d seen before. For two long days he had stayed with her, on Morrighon’s orders, while she cycled through mental states either terrifying—when she reacted as if electrified, gibbering no words ever spoken before—or awful, when she hunched over, drooling and slack-mouthed, eyes unfocused and open. Her sleep had been violent, but Lar had not wanted to ask for any more drugs; instead, he did his best to force her to drink water, to flush the last of the brainsuck from her system. At last she had dropped into a normal sleep.

  From her disconnected phrases Lar gathered that she and Sedry and the Unity had partially succeeded in restraining Norio, but that there was at least one more problem. He had one way to find out the effects of the virtual battle: gossip in the rec room.

  When he stood up, he saw his brother’s eyes open.

  “She’s scared,” Lar said in the softest possible voice. “Stay with her, Dem. Stay.”

  Dem’s eyes closed, but Lar sensed that he’d understood—as much as he could understand anything. Sometimes his mind was like that of a small child, other times it seemed absent altogether, but all his family feelings were there still.

  Dem’s future was the only dim hope Lar permitted himself these days. He had learned enough about his new crewmates—strange, to think he was crew before he’d ever seen the ship!—to know that Vi’ya was to be trusted. She said, if they won free and made it to Rifthaven, she’d see that Dem got the best medtech available, which meant Kelly surgeons, and she knew he could be cured. How she knew, how it would be paid for, he didn’t consider. He simply held on to that thought during the long nightmare—waking and sleeping—of life on the Suneater.

  When he reached the rec chamber, he stepped carefully past the unmoving Ogre on guard and found the usual mix of groups, carefully segregated: Catennach Bori, in the best seats—Farniol caught his eye and gave a faint nod—their sycophants nearby, then scattered about the rest of the room the lower-caste service Bori like himself, a few Dol’jharian grays, and finally the few whose minds had mostly failed under the strangeness of the station, huddled near the walls.

  In pity Lar looked away from the vacant stares of the latter. They had to be able to function on some level, or they would have been spaced by the Dol’jharians, who did not keep anyone who could not work. But to sit alone like that, in a kind of endless loop of terror . . .

  That’s what comes of destroying our families, Lar thought angrily. He joined the chow line. Strange, how he had grown up steeped in Bori history and lore, but he’d never experienced the slightest desire to visit his home planet. Now, after this enforced sojourn with the Bori not lucky enough to have escaped the conquerors, he kept having dreams of freeing their brethren still on Dol’jhar and returning with them to the archipelagos of Bori.

  The greasy, peppered-cabbage smell of the food brought Lar’s attention back. He discovered that he was next in line. He punched up his share of the eternal stew and bread unfondly called dung and crusties, which was apparently a centuries-old pejorative. The viscid brown glop in his bowl was vivid testimony of how much the Dol’jharians had warped Bori culture. Even Tat, who had left Bori at the age of four, remembered the excellent seafood and fresh fruits and vegetables of an astonishing variety, and all so cheap even the poorest ate well.

  “Larghior.”

  He looked up. Romarnan smiled from two or three down the line, and said, “Grab a table.”

  The tech was slim and tall, for a Bori, and handsome. Did he even know that Tat was interested in him?

  Lar sighed to himself. Poor Tat had never yet ventured out of the family for sex, but she’d made it clear to Lar that she was now ready, and Romarnan would be her choice. Lar had done his part to let Romarnan know—and the Dol’jharian-raised Bori had not responded at all. It was so strange to be part of a people, to speak the same language, but to have completely different customs.

  As the tech joined him, Lar looked up. “No extra shift?” he asked, fighting back the tiredness-driven speculations.

  “No,” Romarnan said. “Because of that long ruction.” He hesitated, then continued in a quiet voice, but not a whisper, which would attract unwelcome attention from the Catennach. They hated any secrets but their own. “Where’s Tat?”

  “Sick. She helped chase the . . . thing . . . out of the main areas. That’s what the ruction was.”

  “Brainsuck?” Romarnan grimaced in sympathy.

  Lar nodded. At one of the game tables, Marim’s laugh rang out, and Hreem cursed loudly. Neither of them cared if they disturbed the Catennach or not.

  Romarnan shook his head. “Ugly Shiidra-spit, brainsuck. She say where the haunt is now?”

  “No.”

  “I hope it didn’t get driven outward.
We’ll have to deal with it when we head outside to chase interfaces.”

  “Interfaces,” Lar repeated, trying to keep his heart from hammering. Are the Panarchists really coming? He and Tat had not yet been able to permit themselves to believe it. When he knew he could keep his voice casual, he said, “Seen any?”

  “None,” Romarnan said. “I don’t think they’re coming. Not that way.” He yawned fiercely over his half-eaten bowl of stew. Then his gaze lifted from Lar and turned fearful.

  The conversations around them ceased. Lar’s back muscles tightened when he saw a pucker forming halfway up the wall at his left. Abruptly it sucked open with a ripe smack, and something like an eyeless worm slithered out partway, waving in the air as if sensing or seeking something.

  At the game table, Marim saw the pucker. She gasped, reached across the table, and crashed a fist on Hreem’s console.

  “Hey, blungesuck!” he shouted, slapping her hand away and reaching for the keys again. Then he turned his head, frowning.

  “What the hell is that?” Romarnan hissed.

  Judging from the expression on the big Rifter’s face as he slowly stood up, it was indeed the—what had Tat called it? “I think it’s Hreem’s sex toy, come looking for him,” he replied, forgetting Romarnan didn’t know anything about it.

  “What!” Romarnan looked nauseated and terrified. “You telling me the Maw chatzes people, too?”

  Near the pucker, people were backing away, but Hreem paid them no heed as he slowly advanced toward the reddish, worm-like thing waving from the hole in the wall. He crouched slightly, his hands curved as if coaxing a kitten to come to him. With a slurping noise, the worm—shestek, Lar remembered—slid a little further out of its hole. One of the Bori sycophants shrieked and threw her bowl of dung at it, splattering the wall.