The Phoenix in Flight (28 page)

One of the soldiers moved his weapon slightly and burned him
down. The tall man’s hair puffed out in a crackling discharge and he crumpled
with awful slowness to the sand. The tall woman with him howled and threw
herself across his body; the soldiers made no further move.

In the silence that followed, Moira heard a soft growl. She
looked down; beside her, Popo stared at the soldier, ears forward, tail up, the
fur around his neck and along his back puffed up. She grasped the back of his
neck—the shock of the man’s death had driven all the commands her mother had
taught her out of her head—and pressed up against his solidity; his trembling
alertness matched her trembling fear.

A series of windbursts startled her as several large
transports scudded over the hill behind the soldiers and landed in a whirl of
sand. As their doors opened, Moira’s vision blurred. A vast thrumming resonated
through her, as though the hand of Telos beat against the blue dome of the sky.
She looked around, seeking the source, as did many in the crowd, but she saw
nothing to account for it.

More black-uniformed soldiers roughly ejected a number of
people from the transports, many in livery, some in the elegant attire of the
Douloi, all with varying degrees of worry or terror in their faces.

“They’re from the Palace,” whispered her father. “But why
have they been brought here?”

Her father’s voice broke the almost-trance of shock. “Who
are the soldiers?” Moira asked. “Why are they doing this?”

“They’re from Dol’jhar.”

She tried the unfamiliar name on her tongue. Dole-chyhar—the
last syllable beginning with a noise almost like the little cough she often got
just as she caught a cold, when she tried to clear the tickle out of the back
of her throat.

The throbbing now possessed the air, modulating the panicky
murmur of the crowd and the sobbing of the bereaved woman. The ground responded
with a tremor of its own; not an earthquake, but a quiver, as though the solid
rock deep beneath them was waking from age-long sleep.

One of the Douloi from the transports, a short man in a
wine-colored tunic edged with old-gold, was arguing with a soldier with a
peaked cap and rings on his sleeves, who kept pushing a piece of paper into his
hands. The man shook his head fiercely, ripped the paper across, and trampled
it. The soldier pulled a large knife from his belt and slashed him across the
throat, stepping back to avoid the spray of blood. He watched the Douloi thrash
on the reddened sand for a moment, then motioned to another man nearby to pick
up the paper.

The man did so very slowly, his face pale and grim, and
after a moment’s discussion, turned to face the crowd.

“Attend all,” he cried, his voice flat with anger. “Attend
all and greet the new Lord of the Mandala, descending in glory, Jerrode
Eusabian, Avatar of Dol, Lord of Vengeance and the Kingdoms of Dol’jhar.” He
motioned jerkily toward the sea. Slowly the crowd of people turned around,
confusion evident in the muttering sound of many voices.

Moira looked up at her parents, who stared into the sky, her
mother’s face as angry as those distant soldiers, and her father looking
afraid.

“They can’t,” her mother whispered fiercely. “They mustn’t.
Not a battlecruiser.” Her hands pressed against each other, her left hand
twisting at the big naval ring on her right ring finger.

Moira followed her mother’s gaze into the sky. There was a
bright, bluish spark high above the sea, nearly overhead. The sound the
grownups made, like the moan of wind during a storm, made Moira glad when her
mother reached down and took Moira’s hand on one side, and her father’s on the
other.

o0o

Jasmein gripped Moira’s fingers tightly until her daughter
made a little sound. Jasmein loosened her grip with a word of apology that went
unheard in the rising rush of sound as overhead the deadly spark of light grew
rapidly in size, resolving swiftly into a silvery egg-shape bristling with
spines and thorns of metal, haloed in the deadly shimmer of defensive energies,
a blood-red fist clutching a sheaf of lightning bolts emblazoned on its side.

The sky darkened as it fell out of heaven toward Havroy Bay,
shouting a god’s anger against the placid sea, growing larger and still larger
until the eye refused its scale, and still it grew. Its massive radiants glowed
white-hot, caverns of hellish energy, radiating shock waves in rings of sudden
cloud condensing from the outraged air. The heat struck down at them like a
hammer-blow from Hell itself, and the throbbing became a torment in their bones
and blood.

In the center of Havroy Bay the sea began to boil, obscuring
the lower half of the battlecruiser in roiling clouds of steam shot through
with the glare of venting plasma. The ship was impossibly huge, filling the bay
from side to side, its bow still invisible seven kilometers overhead.

A searing blast of wind and scalding spray flung itself out
of the bay and bowled over several people. It reeked of burned plastic and fish
soup. Jasmein tightened her grip on her family, though she could not protect
them. Popo howled, and though she was not given to fancies, she knew in that
howl a similar conviction.

Around them, people in the crowd screamed, and some broke
and ran. The soldiers in black calmly burned them down. The people closest to
the shoreline had disappeared in the awful boiling wave. Between drifts of
steam arms and legs were visible, surging nightmarishly in the bubbling water.

Jasmein stared helplessly down at her daughter, agonized
that she must witness this inferno. The wonder that had widened Moira’s eyes
and parted her lips was gone, replaced by shock as she gazed with the same
intensity up at the vast ship now hanging unmoving, blotting out the sky, the
throbbing of its drive fields pounding their bones and making Jasmein’s stomach
clench.

All around them people were vomiting and convulsing
helplessly. Then Jasmein’s hand was tugged downward before Chan freed her
fingers and knelt, his face pressed into the sand, his hands over his ears.

Moira’s mouth had opened. Jasmein could see her sobbing, but
she could not hear her daughter as she crumpled beside Chan.

Jasmein flung herself over them both in a last, and she knew
futile, effort to protect them. Her neck arched back painfully because she had
to see what was coming, even if she could do nothing to fight it. Popo was
howling continuously now, a weird high-pitched moan she’d never heard from him
before.

A golden light blazed amid the blue-white clouds billowing
up from the rapidly evaporating bay. A ring of light opened in the wall of
steam, revealing the minute figure of a man clad all in black, seated in a
golden throne at the end of a beam of dim red light. Lightning played around
him, outlining the spherical shimmer of the defensive shield englobing him, and
whirlwinds of sand and steam spun off ahead. The sand glowed red-hot underneath
his throne as it glided inexorably toward the terrified crowd. It was just like
Haruban the Demon King in the Tale of Years, she thought, and he was headed
straight for the Havroy.

Next to Jasmein, Moira struggled to her feet and screamed at
the man in the throne, but her voice was lost in the tumult of a world gone
mad. The ground rocked underneath mother and daughter. The figure of the Havroy
was briefly silhouetted against the sinister energies radiating from the throne
of the Demon King. Then the bronze figure glowed red, then white, and slumped
shapeless into a hissing tide of blazing foam as the throne passed over it and
settled to the sand in a crackling blast of red-hot sand.

The tall man in the throne stood up and looked around at the
carnage he had created, his face even blanker than the faces of the soldiers.
As he stepped to the ground of his new demesne, a buzzing blackness overwhelmed
Jasmein: her last thought before unconsciousness was,
I will fight you to
the death for what you have done
.

The bridge of the
Lith
stank of sweat and smoke and
blood, with a sour overlay from the vomit and filth expelled in violent death
by the victims of the ruptor pulse. A couple of slubs were washing down the
deck and swabbing the vaporized remains of Alluwan off the bulkheads, while
techs labored at the shattered remains of the unlucky Rifter’s console. On the
weapons console a yellow light blinked as another skipmissile was charged: deep
within the
Lith
a small, complex knot of plasma churned violently in its
magnetic constraints, awaiting the impulse that would send it skipping in and
out of spacetime toward its target, gaining velocity and mass with every
emergence from the strange conditions of fivespace.

But Hreem noticed none of this—the viewscreen dominated his
attention. He watched hungrily as the skipmissile discharged and smashed into
Charvann’s Shield near the southern pole, where the angle between the planet’s
magnetic and rotational axes weakened the complex spacetime resonance excited
by the teslas. Vast rings of iridescent light marched outward from the point of
impact, rippling through the auroral blaze that now covered the planet most of
the way to the equator.

Pili straightened up from his hunched-over intensity and grinned
at Hreem as he sleeked his fine black hair back from his high forehead

“What have you got, Pili?”

“I found the critical period! We’re on automatic now—the
Shield won’t last much more than eight hours now, and in just a couple
Charvann’s gonna be shaking like a joy-bed in a cheap chatz-house.”

“Put a sunburst in the slot, Faseult!” Hreem guffawed at the
screen. “I hope you get a volcano right up your blungehole.” The bridge rang
with raucous comments, with Pili’s high chattering tenor laugh as counterpoint.
“Good work, Pili! That’s another tenth-point for you.”

Pili grinned broadly—with the loot this job would yield, an
additional tenth percent of the take probably represented more money than he’d
made in his entire career on either side of Panarchic law.

Memory disturbed Hreem’s happy contemplation of the coming
fall of Charvann. Hadn’t there been some Panarch a long time ago who’d hit a
planet with a skipmissile after it dropped its Shield? He seemed to remember
they’d done something awful to him for that. And Eusabian would do something
awful to him if he blew up whatever it was the Lord of Vengeance wanted from
this Omilov blit.

“Just make sure you don’t fire one too many when they give
up,” he warned the tech. “I want a continent full of loot and slaves, not
flaming rubble and corpses.”

Eight hours!
Hreem recalled the glittership they’d
intercepted once, full of snooty high-living nicks who’d thought they were
headed for a six-month pleasure cruise through the Heart Stars. What a surprise
for them, when the
Flower of Lith
showed up and put a lazplaz through
their drive! He laughed at the memory of the captain’s face, just before he
burned him down.

“Cap’n?” asked Dyasil.

“Remember that glittership out of Svoboda?”

“Yeah.” Dyasil grinned lopsidedly. “We had some prime fun
with those tilt-nosed nacker-teases!”

“I’m just trying to imagine that multiplied by thousands.”

The bridge crew hooted with delight. A whole planet! It had
been centuries since anyone had sacked a major planet—now it was happening all
over the Thousand Suns.

The tide of comments died away as Norio glided through the
entrance to the bridge.

“Don’t let me distract you, Captain,” he said softly. “I
merely wished to share your joyful revenge on those who have sought your death so
long.”

Hreem turned his attention to the screen as Norio moved up
to his accustomed place just behind his right shoulder and began to gently
trace a path from the back of his neck to his earlobe and back again. Hreem
relaxed into the motion, leaning into it like a cat under a loving hand.

The bridge shuddered as another missile discharged, and
simultaneously Norio flicked his earlobe. A jolt of pleasure radiated out from
Hreem’s groin and a faint sigh escaped his lips.

“Oh yes,” said the tempath as Hreem turned around. “That was
merely to complete the equation.” His eyes glistened, and his lips trembled
slightly. “And share your joy more completely.”

“Cap’n?” Erbee’s voice was tentative.

Hreem glared at him, then relented at his puzzled
expression.

“I got a couple of traces. One’s somebody hangin’ around way
out. Not one of us.”

“Navy?” Hreem’s anticipation of the next missile discharge
drained away and he sat up. The cruiser might have had time to get off some
boarding lances. The
Lith
would be a prime target for one of those
almost undetectable, stiletto-like craft, with their deadly cargo of Arkadic
Marines.

“Don’t think so.” Erbee looked at his console, then tapped a
few pads. His screen flickered with a complex pattern. “It’s got a real old-fashioned
geeplane, judging from its output.”

Hreem shrugged. If it wasn’t Navy... well, most of the Rift
Sodality was still on the outside. Dol’jhar had been picky. “If it’s that
small, we’ve got nothing to worry about. Keep an eye on it. Let me know if it makes
any moves. What else?”

“From Merryn—they’re bouncing quickcode off the Node from
downside, spraying it all over. Can’t read it.”

Damn! There must be lances out there, or some chatzing
thing...
maybe sneak-missiles. That Barrodagh slug said Charvann was
nearly defenseless.
Hreem seethed with frustration.
Just a cruiser!
The
attack was getting more and more complicated, and he was feeling more and more
exposed.

“Alluwan...”
Blunge! He’s meat.
“Metije, double the
watch, and break out the heavy firejacs. Set ’em up in engineering, the missile
room, and outside here.” He jerked his thumb toward the entrance to the bridge.