The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  He smiled. Well then, first a bit of attrition on her escort—and the elimination of the little brain-burners. He looked forward to her reaction to his landing bay surprise.

  o0o

  Lar leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath. The weird rippling motions through the Urian material were almost soothing. Like being on water. He fought against an almost overpowering urge to close his eyes and imagine himself on a little boat on Bori, floating between the islands.

  And get sucked into a wall? Fear jolted him away, and he straightened his aching back. What had they stopped for? Montrose and Jaim were both standing guard at the mouth of a slowly shrinking tunnel, with four of the little spidery machines that had started following them clustered around their feet. Lar stifled a nervous snicker—he dared not lose control—but the three-legged devices looked like amorous spiders. No one knew what they were, but they seemed harmless to humans.

  At least they hadn’t seen any Ogres for a while. Though so far the pass tags had worked, Lar felt like peeing every time they encountered one of the big killing machines. He fingered the pass tag he’d taken from Tat, who lay unconscious on the floating gurney they’d pulled from the dispensary when they searched it. The medtechs they’d rescued had taken charge of Tat and Sedry, who was on a second gurney; two wounded Bori lay together on a third.

  Lysanter knelt, his head bowed over his compad as he keyed rapidly, a flicker of light indicating its connection to the station’s DataNet. Then he sighed. “The arrays are down.” He shook his head. “But I’m in.”

  “Good,” Montrose murmured. “Status?”

  “Bad,” Lysanter returned in an undertone. “Asteroids are on their way. We have a little over an hour until impact.”

  “Let’s get a move on, then,” Montrose said, cutting through the buzz of worried voices from the Bori they’d rescued. Obediently they started falling into the teams Montrose had appointed.

  “There’s worse,” said Lysanter. “The companion’s core has collapsed. It’s going supernova, although well after the asteroid impacts.”

  A Bori shrieked. The rest started milling about in panic.

  Jaim lifted his hand, and everyone was still. “You heard what he said. The first problem is the asteroids. The Telvarna can outrun the explosion. ”

  But not the gamma rays, Lar thought. He swallowed, his throat dry. Best not to say anything.

  Montrose said to Lysanter, “Is there any way to find out if there are other pockets of people hiding?”

  “No,” Lysanter said. “Not unless I scan all the remaining imagers, and those are not installed everywhere.”

  “There are consoles everywhere, though, right?” On Lysanter’s nod, Jaim said, “Post a notice: report to landing bay for evacuation. It’s all we can do at this point.”

  Lysanter tabbed his compad, then stood up. “Done.”

  Jaim gestured to Montrose to take the lead again, which he did. Lar gripped Dem’s hand and fell in well behind them. His free hand clutched sweatily at the unfamiliar shape of the jac someone had given him, and again he felt a wave of shame at how badly prepared he was to do his part in any fighting needed.

  We’re liabilities, he thought bitterly, looking at Dem’s vacant face. He remembered how many of them it had taken to defeat the remaining four of Delmantias’s death squad—that after Jaim had disposed of two of them in the space of a breath.

  Lar glanced at Jaim, who walked like a human predator, cat-like, his face calm, his gaze everywhere. In the three sudden fights they’d had since the business with Delmantias, it had been Jaim who did the most—and this despite his broken ribs. If we live through this, they’ll probably dump us at Rifthaven, and I can’t blame them. The truth was, nobody in the universe took Bori seriously. Including Bori themselves.

  Montrose stopped. Lar’s hand tightened on his jac. The smell of smoke had intensified to a burn in noses and eyes, and Lar fought not to sneeze as he squinted down the hazy corridor.

  Jaim’s hand went up for silence.

  Everyone listened, and heard the rhythmic whine-thump of a squad of Tarkans moving rapidly down some adjacent adit. Lar’s heart banged loudly, and the jac felt slippery in his fingers.

  He knew they were close to the landing bay. The plan before Lysanter’s news had been to get everyone there, and if the fighting still kept them away from Vi’ya’s ship, find a place to hide while Jaim and Montrose and Lokri searched for refugees.

  They started on—and stopped again. Now came the metallic thump and amplified whine of Ogres. Four of them rounded a corner some distance ahead. Looking past Jaim and the others, Lar felt his pass tag vibrate, just as it had each time before, but this time the jacports on the Ogres snapped open and shut several times, and the machines’ sensory clusters swiveled jerkily.

  The three Rifters ducked back into the small tunnel opening they’d just left, motioning to the Bori to retreat.

  “What?” Lokri demanded. “Lar, what’s with your pass tag?”

  “It’s working—”

  “But something is trying to override the passcode,” Lysanter said quickly. “And the focus seems to be you three.”

  The Ogres advanced, but with a hesitation in their tread.

  “Hreem!” The hatred in Montrose’s voice raised the hairs on Lar’s neck. “He brought the Ogres. He must have activated some special code in them, and they have our IDs.”

  Suddenly Lar knew what he had to do. He pushed Dem toward Tat’s gurney. “Stay with Tat,” he said, his voice going squeaky. Feeling a weird mixture of terror and thrill, he stepped around the corner and winced in anticipation of the imagined rush of flame from the Ogres’ jacs as the machines turned on him.

  His pass tag vibrated again, and, as he’d hoped, the machines hesitated. He could hear the Rifters retreating down the tunnel and the panicked running of the Bori behind them. Then the Ogres stalked forward and he had to throw himself to one side as they thumped past. Their motions were jerky, as though something was interfering with their programming.

  “Jaim, Lokri . . . look!” Lar heard Montrose say, and he rose from the floor just in time to see the little spider machines scuttling toward the Ogres.

  The spiders swarmed over the two lead Ogres. Jets of flame sprayed from the armor of the killing machines as the little devices spun shiny threads around them. Jac-fire sprayed from the Ogres as they fell, one beam narrowly missing Lar as he cringed against the wall.

  But the second two had gained time enough to fall back, and they shriveled the spiders into glowing fragments. Three beams of plasma lanced out of the tunnel mouth as the Rifters concentrated fire on the lower joints of the remaining Ogres, trying to overheat them and bring them down.

  The Ogres stepped over their fallen companion and raised their heads, the deadly jacs projecting from amidst the sensory bulbs and clusters of their insane faces . . .

  And to either side of the Ogres the walls puckered open. Simultaneously two armored figures lunged through, each holding a flattened ovoid in one gauntlet, which they slapped against the Ogres’ armor. A double concussion made Lar’s ears ring. Flame and molten metal sprayed from the Ogres’ sides and they toppled over.

  The two figures turned blank, menacing faceplates toward the crew, and fear ripped through Lar when he recognized the Sun and Phoenix on the front of the armored Marines, followed swiftly by giddy relief.

  More Marines deployed efficiently to secure the tunnel intersections all around. Meanwhile, through the clearing haze stepped a tall figure in black—Vi’ya.

  o0o

  How long Ivard fought for sanity he could not tell. There was no room in him for anything save the agony of a million voices, a million images slashing at the fabric of his mind while he fell endlessly through an alien space that yielded no place to stand. He grabbed desperately at the occasional familiar sound or sight: a human face or voice, distorted by the stress of battle. Once or twice he even recognized the High Admiral, and another who he guessed
must be the Dol’jharian commander, but instantly they whirled away in a vortex of incomprehensibility, replaced by an irresistible stream of other voices, other images, not human, some so far from human that he flinched away.

  Only the presence of the Archon’s blue flicker at the center of his being preserved him from immediate destruction. His thoughts labored under the impact of the assault upon his senses, and Ivard knew that if the Kelly hadn’t died, he might have mastered this alien insanity. But slowly, try as he might to sort the synesthetic chaos he had plunged himself into, his mind began to come apart, the blue spark fluttering from strand to strand of a dissolving web, helpless against its spreading dissolution.

  Bits of memory began to explode outward, slipping quickly away, bright sparks lost forever as his personality dissolved. Some, those that most had made him what he was, orbited the failing flame of his ego for a time, but they, too, began to recede, gliding backward into a guttering smear of reddish light, like the distortion of the starfield behind a ship in a Realtime Run at the edge of light speed.

  But like that relativistic distortion, ahead a brilliant sphere of blue-white light swelled, engulfing him in a radiance that solidified into the highlight on a silver cup.

  “If you are thirsty, drink.”

  It was memory—more than memory, and Ivard understood that his reckless gesture, here within the Suneater, had plunged him into a place analogous to the timelessness he had found on Desrien. Holding on to the image, he seized the cup and drank, feeling the touch of feminine fingers holding it to his lips. Greywing?

  There was no answer, unless it was the strength flowing into him, pulling the scattering memories back into his core, remaking him. With a sound like a million chimes, some slow-booming like the breath of stars, some light-quick like the particles whose dance defines Totality, the synesthetic chaos snapped into meaning around him, the chaotic tracery of light and sound assembling itself into the warm-lit safety of New Glastonbury.

  But it was not the same, Ivard could see, for the stained-glass windows were alive and infinitely more complex.

  It reminded him of Tate Kaga’s palace, and the memory calmed him. Now he could deal with the alien images. They had their place, though their messages were not for him.

  Music thundered around him, spilling from vast constructs of bright metal pipes and wooden-shuttered boxes in the sides of the cathedral past the central crossing and the white-clad altar.

  Before him a man sat on a polished bench before an immensely complex console: ranks of keyboards over a row of pedals, and row upon row of large knobs at the ends of protruding rods, some pulled out, some flush with the console. He lifted his hands from the keys and turned. It was the same man Ivard had first encountered in the cathedral.

  The man moved sideways on the bench. “Sit. There’s very little time. Look,” he said, waving his hand around at the ranks of pipes. “First, each tone comes from a different pipe.”

  He ran his hands across first one keyboard, then another; then, quickly pulling and pushing some of the knobs, did it again. The sound rolled across the spacious interior, coming from a multitude of sources, filling the space with bright chords whose sound was mirrored in the movement and focus of the multitude of living windows all around.

  The man grabbed Ivard’s hand. “Feel that. There’s a direct physical link between the key and the pipe.” Ivard pressed first one key, then a second. The keys felt alive and springy under his touch, with a slight delay he found disorienting.

  “But—” Ivard began.

  “Hush, youngling,” the man said. “This is the only way I can reach you. Soon I will depart.”

  Ivard felt the man’s deep joy in that simple statement and trembled at the knowledge that whatever the Presence was who thus made itself known to him, Ivard was touching but the penumbra of its thoughts. Any more would destroy him as utterly as a moth in a furnace.

  The image of the cathedral wavered, and as if glimpsing something far too large for his mind, Ivard saw with a god’s vision. He sat at the center of a web of mastery thrown over space and time; the core of the red giant pulsed against his fingers, an accelerating rhythm as the science of the Ur propelled it toward its death, and at the center of his awareness yawned a gateway to the Void, to freedom.

  “But there are others of your kind, other Children of the Vortex here,” the man continued, “and they will be destroyed if you cannot master this, for without your help my departure will mean the destruction of this artifact, my prison.”

  “I never learned to play music,” Ivard protested.

  “You didn’t, but you are more than you, are you not? I could not touch your mind even this much were there not others in and of you.”

  The Unity! Grief seized Ivard. “Portus-Dartinus-Atos are dead,” he said. “The Unity is broken.”

  The man smiled. “That is not so.” He held up his hand. “Yes, the trinity is dead, but there are others. This image—” He once more gestured at their surroundings. “—comes not from your mind, but from another who shared this place with you, and to whom what you call music is the breath of life.”

  He stood up. “Play, little one, or you are all lost.”

  o0o

  Montrose moved his aching head enough to perceive Vi’ya’s angry profile as she walked with heavy tread. Lokri also watched her, his fingers convulsively gripping his jac.

  As soon as Jaim told her where Ivard and Lucifur were, she had wanted to go after him, and it was only Brandon who had stopped her. No one heard the quick, low-voiced conversation between them, though reading from Brandon’s gestures toward the Marines he’d made tactical sense. For now Ivard had to be left.

  The few Tarkans they encountered fell swiftly to Vi’ya’s anger; Montrose shuddered at their amplified screams, remembering the horror under the Palace on Arthelion.

  But it was not Tarkans that resisted their progress so much as Ogres. The Dol’jharians seemed to have thrown their entire reserve against them, and the Marines’ supply of Kelly triskels was dwindling fast.

  “Looks to me like they’re after the brain-burners,” the dyarch in charge of Brandon’s squad said after one encounter. Montrose saw Vi’ya’s eyes narrow, but she said nothing.

  Anaris wants Vi’ya separated from the Eya’a, Montrose thought. Was this a bad sign—or a really bad sign?

  “Those that Hreem didn’t get to,” Lokri drawled.

  Vi’ya halted, one foot in the air before she placed it carefully back down. The Eya’a chittered briefly. Montrose stopped as something fluttered at the back of his mind, a faint touch, a sound—

  “KetzenLach,” he exclaimed. Memory propelled him back to Desrien and the man at the great organ in New Glastonbury.

  “Ivard,” Vi’ya whispered, her eyes wide, her gaze fixed far beyond the confines of their corridor.

  As Montrose leaned against the wall to regain his balance, Vi’ya frowned. “I can’t reach him.” She closed her eyes, thumbing her temples in a gesture the crew had been seeing every day for months. “He is . . . with . . . the Presence.”

  Brandon’s blue eyes narrowed as he watched her. The other Marines waited, the Bori whispering in the background.

  “Thirty-one minutes,” the dyarch said.

  Vi’ya straightened and walked on swiftly. Everyone else fell in with her pace. One corridor, two, smoke-filled and scorched, then the Marines halted. Montrose could hear orders crackling out of the faceplates before they closed them.

  “They’re going to stage a feint while the two squads in position take care of the corvettes,” Brandon said quickly. “Then we’ll come through the back of the bay, with the Telvarna between us and the Dol’jharians.”

  They waited a short time, then Montrose heard the crump of heavy jacs and a couple of shuddering explosions, followed by a whisper of amplified shouts muffled by the intervening quantum-plast.

  Then Brandon raised a fist. “They did it!” His head bent as he listened to his helmet comm; through
the open faceplate they heard the twitter of voices. Then he looked up. “Follow me.”

  Montrose hefted his jac, noting that the charge registered just below half. He ran with the others down a short passageway, toward a pucker braced open by metal rods. Montrose looked through, his heart lifting when he spied the familiar shape of the Telvarna, with the actinic light of the accretion disk, visible beyond through the e-lock, glinting off its scarred hull.

  Vi’ya vaulted up the ramp to the aft port lock and tapped at the access console.

  Nothing happened. She punched at it again—and this time there was a reaction. The antipersonnel ports snapped open and the snouts of the projectors within swiveled to cover her. She stepped back a pace and stared upward in silent disbelief.

  For a moment no one moved. Then a voice rang out from beyond the Telvarna, unamplified but clear—and familiar. “The ship is mine. I suggest we discuss the next move in the game.”

  “Anaris,” Jaim said, his teeth showing.

  Before anyone else could react, Brandon took the ramp in a quick leap, and side by side he and Vi’ya came down. Montrose saw that he was grinning, a mixture of anger and anticipation. He raised his hand to dog down his faceplate, then paused.

  “Meliarch,” he said, “I’m taking command.” There was a barely perceptible hesitation, then the meliarch nodded silently.

  “Follow my lead,” Brandon continued. “We’ll let Anaris choke on his own assumptions.” He slapped his helmet closed and motioned the Marines forward.

  Anaris watched in satisfaction as the Marines cautiously deployed around the Telvarna, the light from the black hole and the red giant beyond glinting off their armor. They stayed close to the hull so its main weapons couldn’t be brought to bear. At his orders, the weapons on the two corvettes remained quiescent—the bulkhead punches the Marines had placed against their hulls ruled out their use, unless he wished to lose their engines.

  It may come to that, he thought. Only one ship was needed to get him off the Suneater. If he could be sure the Telvarna would be left functional, he wouldn’t hesitate.