Skyfall (27 page)

“I will never accept him,” Lahaylia said flatly.

Roca’s frustration welled. “Why the hell not?”

“Everything about him is objectionable: common birth, lack of education, age, lifestyle.”

Roca was acutely aware of Majda listening. But she had to speak. “He is one of the finest men I’ve ever known.”

“You ask too much,” Lahaylia said.

“What, it is too much to ask that my mother be happy for me?”

Lahaylia scowled. “You have duties. How you conduct yourself affects more than this family.”

“Eldri is a Ruby psion.”

“You didn’t have to marry him to bed him.”

“What, now you suggest I dishonor him?”

Lahaylia snorted. “Nowadays women go about compromising men’s honor all the time and no one blinks. These purportedly despoiled fellows seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves.” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “Besides, you wouldn’t have been the first Ruby heir to have a man on the side.”

Majda gave the pharaoh a sour look. “On the side of what, Your Highness? Her marriage to my nephew?” She spoke grudgingly, to Roca. “It is true that you have treated the Skyfall man with honor, as you did my nephew in your visits to him.”

In truth, Roca had never been attracted to Dayj, despite his good looks. It hadn’t been hard to keep her hands off him during their constrained visits. But she could hardly reveal that to Vaj Majda. “Whatever the price,” Roca said, “my marriage is made.”

“And you wish us to stop trying to unmake it,” Lahaylia said.

“Yes.” Roca’s gaze didn’t waver.

Majda spoke. “I will not set myself against Kurj Skolia.”

Damn.
Majda knew perfectly well Kurj would never relent. “To cease an offense,” Roca said, “isn’t the same as setting yourself against an ally.”

“Make your peace with Kurj,” Lahaylia told her. “Then perhaps we can entertain this compromise.”

Roca swallowed. “There is no peace between us.”

Lahaylia’s face changed, revealing a sadness Roca suspected she had meant to hide. The pharaoh lifted her hand as if to reach out to her daughter, but then she lowered it, her restraint taking over. But she couldn’t hide the pain in her voice. “A child and parent shouldn’t be so at odds.”

“No,” Roca said softly. “They shouldn’t.”

But she saw no way to heal the wounds that divided them.

Anger suffused the Imperator’s home.

It vibrated through the stone mansion where Jarac lived, high on a hill of Valley. The house had many windows and spacious rooms to accommodate his large size, filling it with light and air. Given the perfect weather of the Orbiter, the windows needed no glass. The main entrance had no doors.

Today, an inexplicable brooding filled his home. Jarac paced from room to room trying to fathom it. Finally he left. He walked across Valley, past the house Dehya shared with her husband, Seth Rockworth, then past the home where Roca lived with her new son. It wasn’t until he had traversed the length of Valley that he reached Kurj’s house. In some ways, it resembled his own, large in dimension and simple in style. But it had accents: arched eaves, beveled glass, a slanted roof. Its windows were designed so someone inside could see out, but no one could see in. It reminded Jarac of the inner eyelids Kurj often kept lowered.

When Jarac touched the pager at the entrance, the door shimmered and vanished, offering admittance. This surprised him; given his current strained relationship with Kurj, he hadn’t expected his grandson to put him on the list of visitors with automatic permission to enter.

He found Kurj in his office, sprawled behind his desk, studying a document on a screen in front of him, his inner lids lowered. He was clenching a light-stylus in his hand so tightly, his knuckles had turned white.

“Bad news?” Jarac asked.

Kurj jerked up his head. Then he threw the stylus on his desk. “Did you send Banner Highchief to try talking me into negotiating with the Traders?”

“No.”

Kurj stood up, rising to his full height, one hand on his back as he stretched. “She wants me to reconsider my vote on the invasion.”

Jarac felt tempted to say,
So do I,
but that was the wrong approach with Kurj, reminding him of his subordinate position. He had grown more and more restless these past years, impatient for more authority.

Jarac waited.

“I told her I would think about it,” Kurj finally said.

“And have you?”

He crossed his muscled arms. “No.”

They faced each other across the desk. Jarac knew his grandson had more to say. He wished he could find a way past Kurj’s emotional armor, but it had no chinks. The days when Kurj was a laughing child running to him with arms outstretched were long and forever gone.

After a while Kurj spoke in a quieter voice. “When I was a pilot, I participated in an engagement against a Trader frigate. Its Aristo commander had a psion, a youth he had captured by raiding a Skolian commercial liner.” His fingers were pressing his desk so hard, tendons stood out on the back of his hands. “The Traders were using the psion to detect our forces. They had already killed his parents, using them for the same purpose. I picked up the youth’s mind at the same time he detected me.”

“What happened?” Jarac asked, dreading the answer.

A muscle twitched in Kurj’s cheek. “He wasn’t revealing enough about our forces. So they ‘encouraged’ him.” He made a visible effort to speak evenly. “While they were torturing him, I couldn’t break my connection with his mind.”

Jarac felt the horror in Kurj’s mind. “What did you do?”

His jaw tightened. “I blew up the frigate. I couldn’t free that boy, but I could end his agony.” His hand curled into a fist. “And I rid the universe of the monster who had destroyed his life.”

Jarac spoke quietly. “If I could free you from those memories by taking them into myself, I would do it in an instant.”

“You’ve never fought.” Kurj’s voice grated. “You weren’t a military officer when you became Imperator. How can you lead ISC when you don’t burn inside?”

“And what would you have me do? Destroy us in the blaze of my hatred?”

“You have no right to be a man of peace.”

Jarac’s voice took on an edge. “It makes no difference, does it? No matter how hard I work toward peace, we will have a war.”

Kurj fell silent then. Jarac didn’t push. His grandson had said his piece and would add no more. In that rationing of words, he and Jarac were alike.

Then Kurj said, “I received the report on Eldrinson from the medical team that went to Skyfall.”

That caught Jarac off guard. “What does it say?”

Kurj jabbed a panel on his desk and it ejected a copy of the report on Eldrinson. He gave it to Jarac. As Jarac scanned the report, his relief grew. Both psychologists rated Eldrinson Valdoria as above average in intelligence. Tyra Meson called his spatial perception “spectacular.” Both she and Undell considered him competent to sign a marriage contract with Roca. The doctor’s opinion was less definitive, but even he acknowledged that the initial reports on Eldrinson were wrong.

Jarac raised his eyebrow at Kurj. “Even your handpicked doctor won’t judge him incompetent.”

Kurj crossed his arms.

Jarac sighed. “Why don’t you go talk to this man your mother married?” He set down the holosheet. “Perhaps you will find him less objectionable than you expect.”

“How can you accept him? That marriage is a travesty.”

“Roca loves him. He makes her happy. That makes me happy.”

Kurj gave a dismissive jerk with his hand. “All sorts of things make us ‘happy’ that are wrong.”

“You must make peace with this.”

“Why? So you don’t feel threatened by my anger?”

“No.” In truth, it unsettled Jarac to hear Kurj acknowledge what usually went unspoken between them, the tension born of Kurj’s conviction he was better fit to rule as Imperator. They both knew it could be decades before Kurj assumed the title, possibly even centuries, given that Roca was next in line.

Kurj pushed his hand across the short cut of his metallic hair, so unlike Jarac’s shaggy mane. “I would wish that life could have given us kinder roles to play.”

“Yes.” Jarac spoke quietly. “I, too.”

DNA molecules rotated, helices in neon colors wrapped around his neck, choking, choking, choking…

Kurj sat bolt upright, staring into the darkness, his heart pounding. As it slowed, he took a deep breath. His biomech web registered that he had held his breath for more than two minutes.

Callie lay on the other side of his bed, asleep. He leaned over her, brushing back her hair, but he didn’t wake her. Instead he slid out of bed and pulled on the black robe he had thrown over a chair. Then he left the bedroom and walked through his house. It remained silent but aware of him, always aware, never sleeping.

In his office, he brought up the DNA records for his father, Tokaba Ryestar, and compared them to Eldrinson’s genetic map. He
had
to find defects in Eldrinson’s DNA, proof it would contaminate the Ruby Dynasty. A way had to exist to negate this last, damning report. But he had to show that whatever flaw existed in Eldrinson didn’t apply to Tokaba, who had also brought new blood into the Ruby Dynasty and sired a Ruby son. Surely a dramatic and usable difference existed between Tokaba’s DNA and that of a barbarian on a backward planet. He had to prove Eldrinson’s flaws.

Kurj had more trouble than he expected in his investigation. Several systems he needed to access were unusually well secured, challenging his most sophisticated EIs. But gradually he uncovered the story. His conception had involved years of work by a team of scientists. The Assembly had set up an entire program dedicated to that one purpose. Desperate to ensure the Ruby Dynasty would provide heirs for the Kyle web, they had insisted the doctors do whatever possible to make it happen, regardless of what that meant to Roca and Tokaba, even if the failures of Roca’s pregnancies brought them immeasurable grief.

Kurj clenched his teeth, his resentment hot within him. Yet he understood their desperation. He felt it every time he let himself acknowledge how little stood between his people and enslavement by the Trader Aristos. Only a gossamer, indefinable web protected them, one that didn’t even exist in the spacetime universe. But no matter how much he understood their motivation, nothing would ease his anger at the pain his family had suffered as the Assembly sought to control and manipulate their lives.

The more he investigated his birth, the more he understood why his mother called him a miracle child. The odds against his conception had been so high, it made him feel strange, unreal. He followed the trail through ever more abstruse networks, searching out his heredity. Finally he left spacetime and plunged into the Kyle web, becoming a cowled figure striding across a stark grid.

The more he searched, the more puzzled he became. On the surface, Tokaba’s DNA map seemed reasonable, but the deeper Kurj delved, the more anomalies he found. The shade of blue it predicted for Tokaba’s eyes wasn’t quite the same as the true color. His hair should have been a slightly darker brown. He had always joked about how it curled in the fog, but according to his DNA, it should have stayed straight.

Kurj continued to search, probing forgotten nooks in the web, following the oddly confused trail left by the geneticists and Assembly. His cowled avatar climbed down the grid, deeper and deeper, until no light filtered down from above and fluorescent data-fish swam by his body.

Someone had hidden the trail.

At first he thought the files he was searching out had degraded over the years, but gradually he realized someone had deliberately erased them. He sank into areas that even the most adept telops didn’t know existed. In a data-grotto encrusted with corrupted files, he found traces of an encryption scheme used by the Assembly long ago. They had retired it just before his birth. He cast about, searching for whatever it had hidden.

Searching.

Searching.

And finally he found what he sought, the barest trace of a file, one that had languished for thirty-five years. The actual data had been erased, but its ghost persisted like a translucent copy. Laboriously, using all the mental tools at his disposal, he reconstructed the file.

It was a DNA map.

Tokaba’s DNA map.

Tokaba’s
true
DNA map.

In many ways, this vague file matched the robust records Kurj had found at the top levels of the webs. However, it gave the right shade of blue for Tokaba’s eyes and the proper traits for his hair. It matched his physical records in every detail. It lacked only one thing.

The genes of a psion.

Tokaba had none of the complex genetic mutations that created a psion. He manifested no empathic traits because he lacked the genes, either paired or unpaired. He just plain didn’t have them. Tokaba couldn’t be his father. It was impossible.

Impossible.

Nausea rose within Kurj. He refused to believe Tokaba hadn’t sired him. It would kill him.

Inexorable now, Kurj slipped through convoluted mazes in the depths of the web, following tenuous leads that thinned and vanished. He continued to probe, search, and dig. What had the Assembly done? What godsforsaken crime had they committed, to make a Ruby psion out of the impossible?

Finally Kurj found the truth they had kept from him, from his parents, from his entire family. They had sabotaged Roca’s and Tokaba’s fertility treatments. They replaced Tokaba’s sperm with that of another man.

And then Kurj found what the Assembly had hidden.

It was the name of his father.

His true father.

Jarac.

K
urj lost control.

He ripped his mind out of the web so fast, his disrupted neural pathways registered the process as a firestorm of white light. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He had stumbled upon the ultimate treachery. The one moderating force in his life, the memory of his father, was a lie, one on such a monstrous scale he couldn’t comprehend its enormity.

The Assembly had destroyed him. And now, in his rage, he would make them pay. The Skolian Imperialate survived because a Dyad powered the web. Kurj knew exactly how he would achieve his vengeance—he would take into his own hands the power of the web that the Assembly so prized, the web for which they had committed this atrocity. He would become that web. He would control it. He would hold the Assembly hostage to his power.

He would destroy them.

A thought far back in Kurj’s mind warned of danger to his grandparents, but his fury swamped it out. His grandfather was his father. The betrayal went so deep, he thought he would scream with the knowledge.

By the time he became aware of his surroundings again, he was striding through the War Room. The amphitheater was strangely empty, without a single telop on duty. Kurj stopped at a console and accessed its records. An hour ago an immense spike of power had surged through the systems here. Following it, Kurj had sent an order to every telop, officer, aide, page, and tech in the War Room:
Evacuate.

He didn’t remember giving the order. In his mental explosion, he had operated without conscious thought, ridden the magrail across the Orbiter’s interior and come here to the War Room without seeing where or how he went, his mind careening from the shock of his violent withdrawal from the web.

He strode to the Lock corridor.

It began at the perimeter of the amphitheater and stretched back into the wall itself, dwindling to a point as if it reached to infinity. A great arch framed its entrance and its floor flashed, a steel and diamond composite. Set off by pillars rather than walls, the corridor glowed in the otherwise dark War Room. The columns were akin to the Strategy Table, transparent and indestructible. Clockwork mechanisms gleamed within them, active as never before, glittering with light and alive with moving gears, all eerily silent.

He stepped up onto the raised corridor. His boots rang on the floor as he strode toward the infinite point of perspective. The end of the corridor never seemed to come closer, though he passed pillar after pillar.

Suddenly the point expanded into an octagonal doorway. He slowed as he reached the sparkling arch. When he stepped through it, time dwindled. Space became thick. He felt as if he were moving through invisible molasses. A great hum of power filled the octagonal chamber, and a glare of light hid the high ceiling.

The Lock pierced the chamber.

A pillar of light rose out of an octagonal well in the center of the floor, a great column of radiance so bright it made the air shimmer. The Lock was a singularity in Kyle space. It pierced spacetime like a needle, rising from the floor and vanishing overhead in a hazed glitter, back into its own universe. Humanity had lost the technology that created it, but the Lock remained, forever enduring.

Kurj crossed the chamber in slow motion, his steps long and heavy. He stopped at the rim of the octagonal depression.

Then he stepped into the pillar of light.

Tokaba’s voice flowed through his mind. He knew the cadence of that rhyme; his father had often sung it to him. But the poem had been about a child’s playful life, not fire and rage. Kurj had never heard these words—and yet, he knew Tokaba’s voice. It came from his memory, and he wanted to weep for the loss of what it meant to him. Caught in grief and fury, his mind twisted the rhyme into a chant of his anguish.

In this nether land between space and time, braced between two universes, he relived his life in a million instants, so many moments he had thought lost and forgotten.

Then other memories began coming to him, recollections not his own: Lahaylia, Ruby Pharaoh, born into slavery and ascended to rule one of the largest empires in human history; Lahaylia, who built the Skolian Imperialate from nothing and would protect it with the same ferocity she protected her family; Jarac, the only survivor of a dying race from an ancient Ruby colony that had failed over the millennia of its isolation; Jarac, whose Ruby genes had revitalized an ancient family and whose love gave Lahaylia an unexpected gift in the twilight of her life. Together, they had founded a dynasty that commanded, enthralled, incensed, aroused, and mystified the peoples of a thousand and more worlds.

The waves of thought that created Kurj’s mind overlapped with those of Jarac and Lahaylia, blending, interfering, canceling and adding, creating wave patterns for three instead of two. Power flowed through Kurj, filling him with white noise. He stood within the pillar of light, his face turned upward, his body bathed in the radiance of another universe.

The Triad was born.

The mental explosion yanked Roca awake. As she scrambled out of bed, Eldrin cried out, his wail rising in terror. She stumbled to the crib and lifted him into her arms, murmuring as she struggled to focus. Her mind was reverberating from an incredible surge of energy.

Roca strode into the living room, holding Eldrin. He was sobbing now, his simple anguish filling her heart as she tried to soothe him. Starlight slanted through the windows, silvering the room. The console by the doorway had lit up like a festival tree, including the
page
light and its alarm, alerting her to an urgent message. Shifting Eldrin to one arm, she thumped her hand on the pager.

“Roca!” Her mother’s voice crackled. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Roca’s heart was pounding as if she had just run a kilometer. “What happened?”

“Gods only know. Have you seen Jarac?”

“No. He isn’t with you?”

Eldrin went still and silent, his small hands hinged in half as he clutched Roca’s nightdress.

“He went to see you hours ago,” Lahaylia said.

Roca felt the blood drain from her face. She sensed her mother’s dread all the way across Valley—her mother, who never showed fear. “He never arrived. Can’t your EI locate him?” It could monitor every centimeter of the Orbiter.

“No.” Lahaylia took an audible breath. “Something is blocking its signals.”

“That’s impossible,” Roca said.

“I can’t find Kurj either,” her mother said.

Eldrin began to cry again, taking gulps between his sobs. Cradling him, Roca leaned over the console to hear her mother better. She thought of Kurj—

And her mind
burned.

He burned.

Blazed like a flame.

A pillar of flame.

“Gods, no,” Roca said. “It can’t be.”

Eldri sat up in bed, the images of his nightmare flaming in his mind. If it hadn’t been for his medicines, he had no doubt he would have convulsed. His mind was on fire.
Fire.

“Roca!” He jumped out of bed and strode from the room in his nightshirt, pulling on his robe, headed for the shrine he had erected to the sun gods. In his mind, he entreated them:
Please. Don’t let my wife and child die.

The shrine was a small room with a stand of polished granite in the center. Eldri had laid out dried bubbles and goldstone balls as offerings. He threw open the shutters, letting the gales of Windward tear over him. Their chill bit through the heavy cloth of his robe as he gazed at the stars.

“Take me, if you must,” he said. “But don’t hurt them.”

Roca reached the War Room before her mother. She held Eldrin close, shielding him with her mind. He was no longer crying, but he remained wide awake, his mind swirling with formless nightmares kept at bay only by his mother’s arms. Had she put him down now, he would have panicked. Her terror of losing him to forces beyond her control had grown the entire time she had ridden the magrail here. She couldn’t lose her son. Her sons.
What had happened to Kurj?

Impossibly, the War Room was empty. Even this late at night, it should have hummed with activity. But no telops sat at the consoles; no pages hurried among the stations; no techs rode in the robot arms. The only light came from the Lock corridor, its columns blazing. Roca stopped several meters away, holding Eldrin with one arm while she raised the other to protect her eyes against the brilliance. The corridor seemed to stretch forever, diminishing into a point of perspective.

A man walked out of that point.

He was barely visible, a speck forming out of infinity. He seemed to grow as he came forward, until he reached his true size, a giant of gold. His boots rang on the floor as he strode that ageless corridor, his gait never faltering. White light coruscated around his body, and his face had a terrible radiance. Consoles all over the War Room were coming to life, screens activating, panels flashing, comms humming. In the dome far overhead, the Imperator’s throne pulsed with light.

Roca became aware someone else had entered the War Room. Lahaylia walked past her and stopped before the archway of the Lock corridor. Light haloed her body. Kurj reached the end of the corridor and stood in the arch, framed by its dazzling energy, its mechanisms glowing and spinning around him. The power of his mind surged, huge, tremendous, and chaotic.

“Go back.” His deep voice echoed unnaturally. “Both of you. Go back. Go home. Be safe.”

“Kurj.” Roca held Eldrin close. “What have you done?”

He lifted his hand, nearly blinding her with the light it emanated. “I cannot stop what is happening. You must go.”

Lahaylia didn’t move. “Where is my husband?”

Kurj answered harshly. “With my father.”

“Gods, no,” Roca said.
Tokaba was dead.

Eldrin had gone still in her arms, but she felt his nascent mind focused on Kurj. He responded to his brother’s power. Like knew like. But he had no defenses. Roca shielded his mind with hers, lest the outpouring of mental energies overwhelm him.

Light radiated from Lahaylia’s body; whatever surged through Kurj already burned within her. They both called now on the same forces. The Dyad. No,
Triad.

Lahaylia’s voice resonated throughout the War Room. “Your father, Tokaba Ryestar, is dead.”

“I speak not of Tokaba Ryestar,” Kurj said.

“Darr Hammerjackson is also dead.”

“I do not speak of Darr, either.”

Roca went rigid. He had only one other “father”:
Eldri.
Her anger and her fear blazed. “What have you done to my husband?”

Kurj turned his gaze on her, his inner lids glowing like molten shields. “Eldrinson Valdoria will never be my father.”

“Then who?” Roca asked.

His answer dropped into the air like a great weight.

“Jarac.”

He had to have gone mad. “You can’t mean what you are saying.” Roca felt as if she were shattering inside.

“Go.” Kurj braced his arms against the sides of the arch. His voice thundered, unreal in its eerily amplified power. “Go now, both of you, while you are safe.”

“Kurj, listen.” Lahaylia faced him with no sign of fear, though he towered over her, huge and solid, standing on the raised floor of the corridor. Her voice matched his in strength, drawing on the unleashed power of the Lock. She and Kurj were part of a triangle now, aware of space and time in a way Roca could perceive only from the edges of their Triad.

“The power-link is collapsing,” Lahaylia said. “It cannot take the power of our three minds. Yours and Jarac’s are too alike. They interfere. They will cancel each other. You cannot both survive.”

“No!” Kurj let go of the columns and stepped down from the corridor. He faced Lahaylia, the two of them locked in a connection neither could break. Her gaze never wavered. He walked on, past Roca, and her mind felt his passing like the gales of a mental hurricane.

Eldrin cried out and burrowed his head against her shoulder.

The transparent bubble of the observation bay curved out from the Orbiter’s hull. The glory of deep space surrounded Jarac. He stood on a transparent platform staring at the cosmos, his hands resting on the rail of dichromesh glass.

Kurj crossed the bay like a mammoth walking in space. When he neared Jarac, his grandfather turned, his motions slowed by his large size. Jarac’s face was drawn, strained, his eyes reflecting the same agony Kurj felt ripping him apart. Their minds were trying to fit in the same place, two leviathans superimposed on each other in Kyle space.

Two minds.

One space.

Only one could survive.

Kurj’s voice crackled. “Grandfather.”

Jarac’s inner lids lifted, revealing his eyes. Deep lines furrowed his drawn face. His mental power was crushing his grandson. Kurj had always believed himself the stronger of the two, but he knew now he had been wrong. Terribly wrong. Jarac’s mind had more power, more strength, more will than his own. Kurj couldn’t endure against him. Jarac would survive and he would die.