The Phoenix in Flight (22 page)

“I don’t have to worry about that now, so I can tell you
this much: the planet has no name, and never will. It is under quarantine,
Class Null—ships skipping into the system are destroyed without warning. For a
time, it seemed better to flame it clean of life, and if knowledge of it ever becomes
general, that will be its fate. The whole matter is under the Panarch’s seal.”

There was a long pause. In the distance a night lizard
uttered its eerie cries, like the sobbing of a woman, a sorrowful counterpoint
to the cheerful song of the leaptoads.

Brandon gazed over the dimly lit grounds, his voice pensive.
“You were one of his closest friends when I was growing up. I remember how
different he was when just you and he were together, different from when he was
surrounded by the Court.”

“Different,” echoed Omilov, faintly questioning.

Brandon smiled, his hands moving aimlessly across the pale
marble of the balustrade, fingertips almost caressing it.

“You know why you two had to stay with me,” Omilov said,
sorting his words. “How often have we discussed the dangers of those days after
your mother was killed. And later,” Omilov added with care. “When the dangers
were a little different.”

“Anaris.” Brandon made a slight shrug, his fingers tapping a
pattern. “My incessant questions were different, then... but you always
answered them, didn’t you?” He laughed. “That’s why I came here, before I—” He
shrugged, then whirled to face Omilov. “Sebastian, when you left
Arthelion—retired—ten years ago, you were at the peak of your career. You could
have had a seat on the Council of Pursuivance—the Chivalate is regarded as a
stepping-stone to that, is it not? You had my father’s ear, powerful friends at
Court and in the Magisterium. Many people spend their lives trying to gain what
you had. You might even have ended up on the Privy Council. But you left.”

Omilov answered carefully, addressing both the spoken
question and the unspoken. “One of the things you must have heard your father
say, probably many times, was that no single person could rule the Thousand Suns.”

“‘Ruler of all, ruler of naught, power unlimited, a prison
unsought,’” Brandon quoted softly.

“Your father lives that and suffers that. Like every one of
his forty-six predecessors, he has to rely on other people, thousands of other
people, most of whom he has never met and whom he can judge only third-hand.”
Omilov found he had pressed his palms together in front of his stomach, fingers
extended outward, a habit when speaking intensely that was familiar to all his
students. He relaxed them with conscious effort. “And like all of his
predecessors, he sometimes makes mistakes.”

He shook his head. “I tried to tell him about a person very
close to him, in whom I believe his trust is misplaced. He would not, could
not, listen: your father’s most outstanding virtue is his loyalty. And I could
not stop speaking the truth to Gelasaar, could not therefore stop hurting our
friendship. Finally—” Omilov hesitated. “Finally a very loyal and able man was
destroyed, and I could do nothing to prevent it, even as I saw it happening. At
that point I knew I could not remain on Arthelion any longer.”

Brandon nodded, and the last traces of pretense and
guardedness faded quickly from his face, like ice under the hot sun of a sudden
spring. “Markham vlith-L’Ranja’s father, Archon of Lusor,” he said abruptly.
“My father condoned—”

The garden flooded with an actinic glare brighter than the
sun, throwing sharp, acid-edged shadows across the grounds. Omilov squeezed his
streaming eyes shut, garish afterimages etched into his vision. His skin
prickled as the air charged with static electricity, then the light abruptly
dimmed and began to fade. A flock of jezeels erupted from a nearby grove of
trees, protesting the sudden onslaught of this strange new daylight.

Omilov’s vision returned slowly. When he could see again,
Brandon was gazing up at a rapidly fading point of light about a third of the
sky eastward of Tira. The night sky looked blurry. Most of the stars were now
invisible, the brighter ones visible only as dim smears of light, the two moons
dim mirrors of watery blue light. From the northern horizon faint streamers of
auroral flame reached south.

“The Shield is up,” said Brandon. “That must have been one
of the resonance generators.”

“An accident?”

“No.” Brandon’s tones were decisive. Though Brandon’s
Academy training had been interrupted, he was better qualified to interpret
this event than a gnostor of xenology.

“No, it must be some kind of attack. If that was one of the
resonators, inner space is now open to fiveskip—it’s a classic maneuver,”
Brandon added with a quirk of self-mockery, “according to what I was taught.”

The door to the terrace banged open and Lenic Deralze
appeared, visibly relaxing when he recognized them. Then his face hardened as
he gazed upward. Osri emerged, followed by some of the household staff, their
faces pale and strained. They had to squeeze past Deralze, who appeared not to
notice them.

As Osri joined Omilov and Brandon, he pointed to the south.
“What’s that?” His eyes widened in consternation as he breathed, “It
can’t
be
the S’lift!”

To the south a long string of faint, blue-white points of
light slowly rose past the bright star that was the Node. A fainter string
could be made out above it. Omilov said, “What is this we’re seeing? That is
the orbital elevator cable, is it not?”

Deralze spoke quietly. “It’s been severed by the defense
Shield, and the emergency thrusters are trying to push it out of Charvann’s
orbital plane so it won’t slice through the Node or any of the Highdwellings.”

Brandon gestured upward. “That other cable is the hohmann
freight launcher—it’s also been cut loose so it won’t drag the Node out of
orbit. I’ve seen a chip of the attack on Alpheios, during the last major
Shiidra incursion...

“Shiidra!” exclaimed someone. “Telos ward us!” The thought
of the vicious, dog-like sophonts and their flattened, ellipsoidal ships, an
ever-recurring scourge of the Thousand Suns, stirred a murmur of nervous
comment from the servants.

“Artorus II smashed the Shiidra out-octant from here over a
hundred years ago.”

Omilov noted with approval that this last was uttered by
Parraker, the majordomo. He was adept at controlling rumor: under his steady
hand the froth of gossip and innuendo that plagued so many house staffs was
notably absent.

“Actually, that particular Shiidra clade simply fell apart,”
said Osri. “They lost only a few ships, along with the single outpost from
which they raided the Panarchy.”

Parraker pressed his lips together ever so slightly, making
his salt-and-pepper mustache bristle a bit, as the murmurs broke out again.
Omilov sighed. Like his mother’s, Osri’s pride made him almost invariably
choose correctness over charity.

“It’s unlikely, without that outpost, that the Shiidra would
choose to attack a planet so far in-octant, and if I remember rightly, there’s
a particularly effective Writ-holder operating out-octant from Charvann.”
Brandon spoke in the formal modality, a rarity for him. The subtle intonation
he used, by placing the matter immediately on a more formal basis, employed the
class consciousness of the staff to enforce belief in his statement. “Whoever
the attackers are, they are human.”

Osri’s face soured. He could not very well contradict the
direct statement of a social superior, especially without supporting evidence,
so he had to remain silent and accept the unspoken rebuke.

Well done, Brandon,
Omilov thought, careful that none
of the rueful amusement he felt showed on his face.

Parraker began to herd the staff back into the house.
Distant thunder rumbled, while the auroral display grew brighter, more slowly
than at first. A wind sprang up, carrying on it a faint electrical smell.

“Why don’t you two join me in the library?” Omilov suggested
mildly, aware of nervous staff ears behind him. “We’ll be more comfortable
there, and perhaps the DataNet will have some information on what is
happening.”

Just as they were entering the house, another bright flash,
less glaring than the first, illuminated the terrace—several smaller flashes in
rapid succession, leaving behind blurry, rapidly fading coins of light in the
sky.

“Ship-to-ship action.” Deralze had taken up a stance
directly behind Brandon; whatever his position had been an hour ago, he was now
on duty. Omilov wondered if he was armed, and concluded ruefully that the
silent, dour man was probably a walking armory.

“It can’t be,” Osri murmured. “Why would anyone attack
Charvann? There’s nothing here.”

“You mean, nothing of military significance.” Omilov
motioned the others into the house. “The Archon once told me there are Rifters
based somewhere out there. He thought they were harmless, but maybe they
decided to change that.”

Brandon glanced up sharply, but it was Osri who spoke.

“Rifters? Riffraff, pirates, and slave-traders, attacking a
major planet?” He made a slashing gesture with one hand. “The Navy will soon
put a stop to that!”

A glance at the remaining staff satisfied Omilov that Osri
had undone some of the damage of his earlier tactless comment. He shut the
door, muting the thunder and the rising wind.

There was a sense of comfort in a night of shocks to find
the library looking and smelling as it always did.
False comfort,
he
thought as the crossed the thick sea-green carpet into the large,
high-ceilinged room, paneled in dark woods. Around three of the walls a
balcony, with spiral stairs at either end, gave access to a second level of
bookshelves.

The fourth wall was heavily draped, shutting off the high
windows that opened out onto the same lawn as Omilov’s study. The room smelled
faintly of leather and wood polish—a comfortable, cozy smell that kept the
outside world at a distance.

“Please, sit down.” Omilov indicated two of the overstuffed
chairs that afforded the best view of the com unit, and as Brandon and Osri sat
down, Omilov called up the DataNet on a small console near his chair. Deralze
took up a stance behind Brandon, from which he could see the com unit and the
room.

They soon found that none of the novosti knew any more than
they did. Most of the feeds were based on the Node anyway, and normal
communications with that and the Highdweller communities had been cut off by
the severing of the S’lift, while the Tesla Shield made all but the military
tight-beams, with their complex purity algorithms, virtually unusable. One feed
was even replaying the chip Brandon had mentioned, of the Shiidra attack on
Alpheios thirty years before, complete with graphic displays of alien
atrocities. With a moue of disgust, Omilov slapped the disconnect pad.

“Irresponsible trash!” he exclaimed. “We can do our own
speculating, if it comes to that. I can’t imagine why even Rifters would try
something so foolish.”

He sat back when Parraker appeared with a tray of brandied
coffees. Omilov pressed a pad on the console to open the drapes. The splendor
of the view—the fluttering auroral display and the lightning-laced clouds now
billowing up over the horizon—drew their attention wholly outward, and time
passed swiftly in a silence broken only by the increasingly frequent bellows of
thunder and the quiet, crystalline noises of their glasses on the glass-topped
tables beside their chairs.

Sometime later there was a gentle chime from the table.
Omilov sat up, startled out of his musings. “Yes?”

“A holocom from His Grace of Charvann, sir.”

Omilov blinked: surely the Archon had more important things
on his mind right now than calling him? With a motion of his hand he invited
Brandon and Osri to join him as he triggered the holojac.

A life-size image wavered into apparent solidity just beyond
their group of chairs: a short, stocky man in his mid-thirties, wearing formal
dress whites; he’d obviously been interrupted in the middle of some high-level
dinner. A single decoration, the blason de soleil, adorned his chest. The white
of his uniform was an effective contrast to his smooth black skin and
tight-curled black hair. His dark eyes expressed concern, but a brilliant smile
lit his face when he saw Omilov.

“Sebastian! I’m glad to see you’re safe. I don’t have time
for the amenities, so I must make this as close to an order as my position
allows: I must see you here in Merryn as soon as possible.”

His gaze moved away, passed Osri as he gave a polite nod,
and froze as he beheld Brandon. Omilov’s concern as to why Tanri Faseult had
thought him in danger sharpened as the Archon’s mouth hardened into a thin line
and he bowed slightly.

“Your Highness. I must request your presence also.” His
voice was severely formal.

Osri’s grim demeanor had altered; his upper lip betrayed the
smugness of self-righteousness as Brandon inclined his head politely.

“We’ll be happy to comply, Your Grace,” Omilov said, “but I
don’t understand—”

“Forgive me, Sebastian, but I don’t have time to explain. A
military escort will be there shortly. Until then.” He sketched a slight bow in
Brandon’s direction, and the image winked out.

Moments later the crashing roar of supersonic flight
announced the arrival of the escort; through the library window they caught a
glimpse of a gleaming predator-shape settling gently onto the lawn, its highly
polished surface darkly reflecting the lightning of the growing storm.

Osri stood slowly, apparently bemused by the appearance of a
military ship on his father’s lawn. Omilov touched his boswell and said,
“Parraker, I must speak to you.” The majordomo appeared at the door in less
time than one would have expected from his dignified bulk. “The Archon has
requested our presence in Merryn. He was not able to give us any information
about the situation. If...” He hesitated, then stated calmly, “If it appears
there is any danger to our area I trust you to supervise the staff, making
their safety your primary concern. In the meantime there is a wooden box in the
wardrobe safe; I must request you to convey it personally to the University and
see that it is deposited in the vaults. You know where the key code is kept.
Thank you, Parraker. I hope we will be returning shortly.” To the others he
smiled. “Shall we join our escort, genz?”