A Prison Unsought
Page 62
“The Hand of Telos has five fingers
Forth from the first came first the word
The echo of that act still lingers
Yet to the proud a sound unheard.”
Recognition flickered in Morrighon.
“That’s it,” said the Panarch, gesturing with one hand. “So much of your teaching was more than words.”
Morrighon watched, fascinated, as the talk wandered off into abstruse philosophy. He would never understand the Douloi. Wasn’t this exactly what the prisoners had done every night on the Samedi?
Yes. They had. The vague sense of familiarity sharpened into urgency. He grabbed his compad, nearly spilling it onto the deck in his haste. He had heard those words before. Moments later the pad delivered up the same verse, from a transcript of the prisoners’ talk.
He looked up at the screen. The gestures weren’t just graceful punctuation! He turned to Anaris. “Lord, the Panarch is talking in code!”
Anaris’s head turned sharply, eyes narrowed. Morrighon held up his compad to Anaris, who scanned rapidly, then motioned to the Tarkan at the weapons console. “Destroy that shuttle, now.”
“Sneak-missiles triggered,” reported Weapons. “Homing.”
Aboard the Grozniy, “EMF burst from inner moon,” Wychyrski sang out, her voice strained, but clear in the bridge cadence.
The image of the Panarch smeared out in a static burst and vanished.
Sebastian Omilov gasped, one hand to his chest.
Then: “Missile strike on shuttle.” Wychyrski’s voice thinned. “Severe damage to stern, possible engine loss.”
“I have a vector on the corvette,” said Rom-Sanchez. “He’s pulling away from the inner moon, heading for skip radius.” He grimaced. “He’s out of ruptor range.”
Ng’s first reaction was to chase and destroy the corvette, but then she could not save the shuttle. Fighting down her rage, she said coldly: “Let him go. Time to tractor range?”
“Seventy-five seconds.”
She glanced at the Aerenarch, whose expression had hardened with suppressed emotion; sweat lined his brow.
The screen cleared, revealing the shuttle’s bridge now filling with smoke.
“We’re almost there, Father.” Brandon’s hand grasped the back of the command pod.
“Sixty seconds to tractor range.” A secondary screen showed the shuttle, tiny against the blue-white limb of Gehenna, the Knot flaring violently behind it.
From off-screen Matilde Ho said something Ng couldn’t quite catch. The Panarch nodded, not taking his eyes off Brandon.
“There’s not enough time, son. The engine is going critical.”
“Fifty seconds, Father, just fifty seconds.”
The Panarch’s image wavered. He held up the Phoenix Signet, distorted into greater size by its proximity to the imager.
“I cannot give this to you now, but it is yours nevertheless.” He coughed; the smoke thickened and swirled around his hand holding the ring to the imager, only the Phoenix clear. “Remember the Oath of Fealty: ‘In life and in dying, until death take me or the world end.’ It is your oath too—”
The screen blanked, then flickered to a view of the planet. Above it a stunning sphere of light bloomed, beautiful in its symmetry, its intricate internal detail slowly fading as it dissipated.
No one spoke, no one moved until the silence was broken by the voice of Sebastian Omilov, choked with grief.
“Out of light were we born, and to light shall we return. The Light-bearer receive him.”
Ng clenched her jaw against the tide of reaction, fighting for control. She knew that everyone on the bridge was waiting for her next words.
She forced her trembling legs to bear her weight, and turned around. She bowed deeply, the same bow she had made once before, twenty years ago in the Palace Major on Arthelion.
Then she spoke.
“Your Majesty, what are your orders?”
Copyright & Credits
A Prison Unsought
Exordium 3
Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge
Book View Café 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-509-0
Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge
First published: Tor Books, 1994
Cover illustration © 2015 by Sherwood Smith
Production Team:
Cover Design: Pati Nagle
Proofreader: Judith Tarr
Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Digital edition: 20150501vnm
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The Phoenix in Flight
Ruler of Naught
A Prison Unsought
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A Stranger to Command
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Fleeing Peace
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A Posse of Princesses
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Mearsies Heili Bounces Back
Poor World
Hunt across Worlds
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Sherwood Smith writes fantasy, science fiction, and historical romance for old and young readers.
Dave Trowbridge wrote high-tech marketing copy for over thirty years, which made him an expert in what he calls “pulling stuff out of the cave of the flying monkeys,” so science fiction comes naturally. He abandoned corporate life for good in 2013, but not before attaining the rank of Dark Lord of Documentation. He much prefers the godlike powers of a science fiction author (hah!) to troglodyte status in dark corporate mills, and the universe is slowly coming around to his point of view.
Dave lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains with his writer wife, Deborah J. Ross, a retired seeing-eye German Shepherd Dog, and two cats. When not writing Dave may be found wrangling vegetables — both domesticated and feral — in the garden.
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