The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  The waves of peristalsis moving slowly down the corridors strengthened. Sometimes the Avatar and the Tarkans had to duck to avoid the ceiling. It was as though the Suneater was trying to expel the foreign bodies that had turned its innards into a hell of smoke and flame and death.

  But as the four neared the bay, the stasis clamps were more thickly clustered, suppressing the station’s movement to mere twitches underfoot, and Barrodagh began to feel more optimistic.

  The Tarkans halted. “Lord,” one said to the Avatar, “Altasz Chur-Mellikath wishes to report.”

  “Speak,” said Eusabian. The Tarkan commander’s voice crackled out of a voice relay on the armored chest of the guard.

  “Lord, the heir has ordered the destruction of the station arrays, stating that they have been compromised by the Panarchists, who can now read fleet communications. They are also, he says, using them against us here.”

  Eusabian’s hands clenched on his dirazh’u. “Your judgment?”

  “The Marines are indeed well informed. It may be so.”

  “Do it, then divert those squads to the bay to open my path.”

  “It shall be done.”

  Eusabian motioned the guards onward. Barrodagh clamped his teeth together, trying to suppress the new wave of terror clenching his vitals. Without the arrays the stasis clamps would be largely ineffective, with only local influence. He’d be crushed, or sucked into a wall, or . . .

  The images kept coming; Barrodagh lost track of time. All the corridors looked the same, anyhow.

  He almost ran into the Avatar’s back as the Tarkans stopped once again, conferring quietly. Faintly Barrodagh heard the welcome whine of a ship’s engines warming. One of the guards bowed to the Avatar. “Lord, we are very close to the landing bay. Chur-Mellikath will arrange a diversion. Then—”

  He broke off as something scuttled out of the smoke shadows ahead. It looked like a miniature Kelly, spidering along on three skinny legs, glittering lenses held aloft on a thin head-stalk. More followed, a horde scuttling like insects.

  The Tarkans cursed and flamed them with their jacs. Some of the little machines flared up and collapsed in glowing ruin, but many more scuttled past, and the Tarkans couldn’t fire at them for fear of burning the Avatar.

  But he was not their target. The spider-things swarmed over the Ogres despite the flare of their head jacs, efficiently cutting flame-spewing rents in their armor with some sort of shiny thread they extruded from their underbellies. The big machines toppled, thrashing and spraying jac-fire in all directions. The Tarkans jumped in front of the Avatar, ignoring Barrodagh, who flung himself down in Eusabian’s shadow.

  Then, to Barrodagh’s horror, the little three-legged machines proved themselves just as effective against armored humans as against the Ogres. Within moments the two Tarkans were dismembered; not flames but blood spewed from their armor as they were cut apart. Barrodagh could hear a tinny, questioning shout from their suit comms that suddenly cut off as the suits’ power failed. There was no way to answer.

  Finished with the Tarkans, the little devices peered up at them with their minute, glassy lenses. Barrodagh’s bladder burned with an overwhelming urge to pee. He controlled it with an agonizing effort as the machines scuttled away and vanished, leaving the two men standing in a spreading pool of blood that sizzled and stank where it engulfed the damaged Ogres, now twisting worm-like as their arrays discharged their programming and their energy packs shorted out, raising their armor to red heat.

  The Avatar glanced at that heating armor, then strode off toward the amplified shouts of battle in the landing bay.

  They’d reached another corridor when webs of light flickered out of the stasis clamps lining the corridor. The ceiling flexed down and the walls puckered in, quickly narrowing to a hole that vanished as they watched. The Avatar stepped back. For the first time, Barrodagh heard an inadvertent sound from him, a sudden intake of breath as a shape shot up from the floor like a quantum-plast stalagmite. The blue glare from the stasis clamps intensified; the shape writhed and formed itself into the figure of a man webbed in lightning, the ghost of Jaspar Arkad incarnate in the substance of the Suneater.

  “Ruler of all, ruler of naught.” The specter’s voice was breathy, with weird overtones in it that caught at Barrodagh’s nerves. He began to tremble.

  “Power unlimited, a prison unsought.” The figure of Eusabian’s enemy finished the quote and laughed.

  Hatred and anger seared through the Avatar, the more powerful for his powerlessness. He hadn’t even a jac. Where had this thing come from? Then he remembered the link to Arthelion and the Palace computer.

  “Your heir rests from his labors, giving me time to deal with you, Jerrode Eusabian. Do you remember what my greatson foretold for you, in the Palace I built, long ago, on distant Arthelion?”

  Eusabian clutched his dirazh’u in both hands, drawing strength from the decades of curses woven into it since his father Urtigen had given it to him in the eglarrh demachi-Dirazh‘ul. He would not answer a computer construct.

  “You are impatient.” The specter’s voice boomed from all around them. Through the low rumble of the amplified voice Eusabian could hear Barrodagh’s teeth chattering. “Do not be. Do you not remember? ‘All time will be yours, yet no time will be enough.’”

  Wrath forced the Avatar to speech. “I remember that he is dead, and I hold his Throne.”

  “You held two Thrones, for a time, as my greatson foresaw. But you are at this very moment abandoning this one.” The ghost gestured, indicating the walls around them. Light glared from its hands. “And you will never again see the other, for I will not let you leave, Eusabian of Dol’jhar. Your paliach is ended. You have failed.” It pointed past him, back the way they had come. “I could entomb you here, but it pleases me to stay my hand because your destiny awaits you. Go meet it.”

  His jaw aching with murderous fury, Eusabian stared at the specter. He knew it was a mere computer construct, loosed somehow in the station’s arrays. But it had control of the stasis clamps.

  There was no way he could get around it.

  Until the arrays are destroyed.

  Eusabian took a spiral path away from the landing bay. Barrodagh guessed that he wished to remain in proximity to the ship that was waiting for him when the arrays were destroyed, and with them the ghost’s power. But without the Tarkans, they rapidly lost their sense of direction; worse, nexus after nexus closed before them, webs of bluish light flickering through the walls as the construct chivvied them away from escape. They encountered no one, not even, after a time, any corpses.

  The Avatar began muttering under his breath. The scraps of phrases that reached Barrodagh’s ears made his legs weak with terror. Never had he heard such fury in Eusabian’s voice, and the glimpses he caught of the Avatar’s dirazh’u were even more frightening: a knot of horrible complexity, twenty years of passion and desire thwarted.

  At length they found themselves at the entrance to the Urian ship bay. It was deserted. Several ships, partially dismembered, protruded from the walls, but the one the Avatar had imprinted stood unmarred.

  Eusabian studied it, then turned Barrodagh’s way. “Contact Altasz Jesserian,” he commanded, motioning at the Bori’s compad. “Arthelion must be destroyed, the Palace put to the torch, and every living being put to the sword. Nothing must be left standing: no wall, no creature, no blade of grass.”

  Barrodagh stared at him. The Avatar knew the compad was broken. Otherwise, why had he not commanded Barrodagh to contact Chur-Mellikath? He saw his own reflection in the Avatar’s dead-black eyes: there was no sanity behind that gaze, only hatred and fury.

  “Lord,” he choked, fearing that in the next moment Eusabian’s strong hands would rend him, bone and muscle, just as the Ogres rent their victims. “I cannot.” He hefted the compad in his trembling fingers. “The communicator is broken.”

  Eusabian stared for a wrenching length of time, then stalked toward the Urian sh
ip.

  Barrodagh’s knees locked. Terror nearly overwhelmed his own grasp on sanity. He could not believe the Avatar would actually board the alien ship.

  He cast a yearning glance back at the rest of the Suneater, but to be alone meant only protracted, ignominious death at the hands of the underlings. There was nothing safe for him anywhere.

  A strangled sob escaped his lips as he dropped the useless compad and scuttled after his master.

  o0o

  Eusabian stood in front of the Urian vessel he had imprinted. “If it were launched, where would it go? Another Suneater, do you suppose?”

  He stepped over the yellow line. The ship’s hull puckered open, a gaping mouth moving counter to the hypnotic spinning of the hull. An illusion, Lysanter had said.

  The possibility of another Suneater. Was that an illusion?

  No. Twenty years said it was not, could not be. His destiny did await him, a destiny that would encompass the utter ruin of the Thousand Suns. He would leave no sun unblasted. A hecatomb of trillions would be his tribute to Dol.

  He stepped forward, ignoring a sort of wet squeak from his secretary. The ship received him. Barrodagh’s halting step followed, but Eusabian did not look back. There was no longer room in his mind for anyone but himself.

  The pucker sealed. The walls around them cleared to transparency, leaving visible only the floor underfoot.

  Eusabian resumed his curse-weaving, knot after careful knot entwining all his enemies.

  The ship began to move.

  TWO

  Once again Lysanter muttered praise of Tatriman as he followed the schematic on his compad, still linked to the arrays in the lab. With her programs he was able to detect and avoid the battles tearing up the corridors, even though something was steadily degrading the computing power of the system.

  The schematic paused in the midst of an update. He stopped and tapped at his compad, wresting a portion of the waning power away from other tasks to complete the map. The instruments in the Chamber of Kronos were now useless. Perhaps in the array lab he could find some way of in interpreting what was happening.

  As he headed for a side corridor a hand plucked at his sleeve. “Gnostor,” Dasariol said.

  Lysanter stared in astonishment at the terrified Throne Room techs, following in a clump behind him. “The landing bay is that way.” The woman’s shaking hand indicated the opposite direction.

  “I know, Dasariol.” He indicated the compad. “We’d not get there alive. Pass tags are no good against Tarkan or Marine jacs.”

  There was no further protest as he led them to the array lab, but his professional detachment—the years of denial—vanished like smoke when he saw the carnage outside. Lysanter’s knees weakened, and his mouth went dry.

  The neutrality of scientific inquiry was gone. If it had ever existed. It was I who made it possible for the Dol’jharians to command these Ogre monstrosities. This pile of corpses was the evidence.

  Blood and bits of tissue squelched under his feet as he forced himself to enter the empty lab, but he was too sickened to react. Dimly he heard one of the Bori vomit as he turned anxiously to the arrays. They were unharmed.

  He moved swiftly to his console, linked his compad, and began a series of DLs. He tried to escape into the safe haven of pure science—trying to decide what data to save, stuffing data chips into his pockets at random—when a window from the stellar monitor caught his attention.

  New fear thrilled through his nerves when he saw the radiation readouts from the red giant companion of the black hole. The Suneater was preparing to fulfill its function. How much time did they have?

  But how to escape? He tried scanning through the station. The imagers he could tap told him much: the Marines were pressing the Tarkans heavily, although the defenders still held the landing bay.

  His console bleeped. Something—no, two somethings—were loose in the arrays. One had taken over control of the stasis clamps. The other had eaten most of the array power devoted to crypto. Both had Panarchic signatures, and the fact that they no longer bothered to conceal themselves from even his cursory search told him more than anything he saw on the imagers.

  Now he knew why the attackers seemed to know their way around so well. The worms had compromised the hyperwave. But that, at least, told him where he must go next.

  An image appeared from the Urian ship bay: Eusabian, entering the Urian ship he had imprinted on. His secretary gave one despairing glance around the empty bay and scrambled after him.

  Lysanter watched, fascinated, as the ship’s hull cleared to transparency. It floated up the central mound and slowly sank from sight through the opening in it.

  What will he see? For a few seconds he sustained a profound envy, intensified by the conviction that Eusabian was ill-equipped to appreciate what he was experiencing.

  Lysanter waited impatiently until his compad chimed, indicating that its storage was full. That, and the data chips he’d grabbed, would have to do. He regretted all the data he would have to leave behind. But the success of the Panarchist attack said that someone out there understood at least part of the quantum-information theory that had given him the keys to the Suneater. The data in his compad would be welcome, he had no doubt.

  But will it buy me forgiveness?

  If he survived, doubtless he’d have a lot of time to consider that question. For now, he could start on the answer by saving himself and those with him. He turned to the techs waiting in terrified silence. “We’ll go to the hyperwave chamber,” he said. “The Panarchists will doubtless have had that as a main objective. They are our hope for escape now.”

  As they left, Lysanter heard the whine of Tarkan armor approaching the array room. He and his techs began to run.

  o0o

  “Admiral, communications from the Fist of Dol’jhar to the Rifters have suddenly degraded to Class Four algorithms for all ships.” Wychyrski’s voice was tired but triumphant. “They know. Still onetime to the Suneater, though.”

  “AyKay,” said Ng. “Communications, commence jamming.”

  She did not try to keep the smile out of her voice. The Moral Sabotage specialists had assembled some of the juiciest Rifter broadcasts into a mélange guaranteed to drive the puritanical Dol’jharians wild. Then there were the constant offers of amnesty and other propaganda designed to sap the will of Dol’jhar’s Rifter allies. She wondered how many lives it would save.

  “Siglnt, how long a message from the Marines can you detect if they tap into the hyperwave on the Suneater, given our transmissions?”

  “If they can blip for three seconds, we’ll catch it.”

  As little as that.

  Well, it wouldn’t be the first time so little stood between life and death. Nor the last.

  o0o

  Ever since Anaris’s order had been reported to him and he’d ordered Communications to modify crypto accordingly, Juvaszt had waited, on edge, for what he knew was coming. And wondering, between his constant battle assessments and commands, what was happening on the Suneater.

  But despite his attempts to prepare himself psychologically, Juvaszt felt all the wrath of humiliation when the main communications screen dissolved into a disgusting chaos of overt sexual display and depraved orgies, interspersed with propaganda aimed at prying the Rifter ships away from their allegiance to Dol’jhar. More infuriating was the knowledge that the Rifters were seeing it all.

  He glared at the communications officer, who stared witlessly at him in horror.

  “Kyvernat, the enemy has commenced jamming.” He gaped as on the screen, for all to see, the infamous chocolate vid flared to life. Some of the bridge crew stared, transfixed; others looked hastily away. The Dol’jharian captain ground his teeth as the officer continued. “As we feared, without the station arrays, our discriminators cannot handle the load consistently.”

  Juvaszt bit back a searing reply—that would merely hand the victory to the Panarchists. He looked around the bridge, noting with sa
tisfaction that everyone was now concentrating fiercely on their tasks. In fact this might end up less distracting, for none would dare be caught looking at the communications relay unless it involved their assigned job.

  “Very well,” he said. “Cut the comm watches to an hour and put as many officers on the discriminator consoles as you need.”

  Then he turned back to the battle at hand: supporting, one by one, the Rifter actions against the asteroids the Panarchists had chosen for their attack. If he only had another battlecruiser! If wishes were weapons, we’d all be lords.

  A few minutes later a gout of light from the tactical screen announced the destruction of a Panarchist cruiser. Then a flare marked the disintegration of the asteroid it had been protecting.

  Flushed with the thrill of victory, Juvaszt snapped out the orders to take them to the next action. With the Suneater’s power backing them, he only needed one battlecruiser.

  o0o

  As Hreem and Marim stalked along the corridors, he kept laughing. The look on Riolo’s face before the Ogre ripped his head off! If there’d been more time, it would have been so sweet to make him beg. It would also have been interesting to find out what Barca really sent him for—and why they’d planted him on the Lith.

  Remembering the shock he’d felt when he realized the chatzing little trog spoke Dol’jharian made him burn with anger. Obedience, that’s what he expected from his crew. Obedience, and no chatzing secrets. He didn’t care what they did with, or to, each other in their cabins, or how they spent their part of the take. But no one made plans except Hreem—if they wanted to live.

  And no one crossed him.

  Vaulting over a couple of stiffening corpses in an intersection, he strode faster. Now it was time to get rid of that black-eyed woman and her pet killers. He reveled in the Ogres’ heavy whine-thump, triune sounds of power. Would she beg? No. And I’d be a fool to give her time to chatz with my mind.