The Phoenix in Flight (69 page)

o0o

As the
Telvarna
passed the Shield generator—a
flattened sphere transfixed by the S’lift at one hundred kilometers
altitude—Osri glimpsed a gaping, scorched-edge hole in it.

Vi’ya began to pull the
Telvarna
in toward the cable.
“Ready, Marim?”

The little Rifter’s fingers danced over her console.
“Detuning the teslas now.” She watched her screen intently, head cocked. On the
main screen the cable drifted closer, features on its surface a mere blur. The
planet below still filled the rear screen.

“Getting a response from the cable,” she said. Then she
slapped a pad on her console. “Got it! Induction successful. You two were
right!”

The cable swelled alarmingly on the screen. Osri yelped in
surprise. The engines wound up to a scream. They were accelerating at fifteen
gees right up the cable, barely far enough away from it to miss any carrier
they might encounter. A carrier flashed by so fast it was only a flicker.

Osri’s alarm peaked when Vi’ya pulled her hands away from
her console, and turned to Marim. “Good work. We’ve got about seven minutes
before the Node.”

What is keeping us off the cable?

Osri opened his mouth, but all that came out was a croak.

Brandon stared at the screen in growing amazement, then
laughed aloud.

Marim laughed. “Told ya, Schoolboy!” She stretched with
gloating ostentation, then relented. “Nothin’ to worry about, until we reach
the Node. I’m usin’ our shields to induce a tesla field in the S’lift. Every
time we try’n drift into it, the field in the cable converts the drift to a
vector along our flight path. Nothin’ to it!”

Osri shook his head, unwilling to express what he had to
admit was intense admiration. Not only did the momentum conversion of the
induced tesla field keep them off the cable, it corrected their course as well.
It was a brilliant maneuver, worthy of the Academy’s finest.
The Academy’s
finest, cashiered for insubordination.

He remembered the conversation with Brandon in the booster,
and his father’s hints about the L’Ranja affair. His comfortable certainties
cracked more deeply as he began to perceive the cost to the Panarchy and the
Navy that the destruction of the L’Ranja Family had represented.

Vi’ya said to Brandon, “Keep your eyes open when we slow to
maneuver around the Node to the hohmann. They may have had time to post some
ships.”

The Krysarch nodded.

With the resonance field down, the hohmann will take us
past radius,
thought Osri, his respect intensifying almost to admiration.
This was one for the textbooks.

“No sign of that cruiser up there,” reported Lokri.

“There’s a destroyer standing off the Node, but it doesn’t
seem to be paying any attention.”

“We’ll wave to ’em as we scoot by,” Marim crowed.

Osri stared at the screen. There was nothing for him to do
now, but he knew the captain would not allow him to leave. He gnawed at his
knuckle, wondering what the charlatan Montrose was doing to his father...
hoping for the first time that the big Rifter wasn’t actually the quack Osri
had assumed.

The Node changed from a twinkle of light to a slowly growing
disk hovering beyond the vanishing point of the S’lift cable. Minutes beyond
that, he knew, lay escape. But to where, and under whose command? Brandon’s
profile held no answer for him.

o0o

Barrodagh accompanied Eusabian in silence, followed by two
Tarkans in standard uniform. He couldn’t read his lord’s mood with certainty,
but knew from experience that it would take very little to provoke a deadly
response.

The Bori’s office lay along their path. He began considering
how he would detach himself from the Avatar and deal with the aftermath of the
raid. The longer he remained in sight of Eusabian, the likelier he was to be a
target of his anger.

Rapid footsteps approached.

The two Tarkans spun around, firejacs ready, then relaxed
marginally. It was Ferrasin, accompanied by a gray-clad guardsman. He stopped
in front of the Avatar, his blubbery face beet-red and sweaty with exertion as
he struggled to catch his breath.

“The K-k-k—” His mouth worked, but he couldn’t get the words
out. Eusabian was frowning deeply. The Dol’jharian nobility barely tolerated
physical defects in the out-worlders in their employ.

With a heroic effort Ferrasin stopped, took a deep breath,
and began speaking very slowly, stuttering only minimally. “Your pardon, Lord.
The computer. Says that K-krysarch Brandon nyr-Arkad. Entered the Palace. This
evening. From an adit in the Rouge quadrant. I think he was on that ship. The
alert was posted for.”

It wasn’t Hreem?

With the slowness one experiences in nightmares, Barrodagh
saw the beginnings of a vast, unstoppable anger distort Eusabian’s features.
Through a singing in his ears he heard the tech continue, “I t-tried. To tell
senz-lo Barrodagh’s secretary. But he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Barrodagh knew what must be done: this news had changed
everything. He grabbed his compad, but it too was covered with green goo. He
scrubbed frantically at it with his sleeve and managed to uncover Danathar’s
tab; he almost sprained his finger stabbing at it. “Get me Juvaszt on the
flagship instantly!”

The response came within seconds, but it felt like hours to
Barrodagh.

“Kyvernat Juvaszt here.” He added with affront, “Show
yourself—”

“Destroy that ship,” Barrodagh screamed.

There was a moment’s silence. “The Avatar ordered—” The
uncertainty in Juvaszt’s voice was evident even through the slime-plugged
speaker of the compad. “The Node—our forces there—”

Eusabian grasped Barrodagh’s arm with a merciless grip. The
Bori gasped with pain as the Avatar pulled the compad up to his face, wrenching
Barrodagh’s shoulder cruelly.

“This is the Avatar of Dol,” he said. “Destroy that ship.”

“Thirty seconds to radius.” Osri’s throat hurt. His voice
came out with a tremor.

Nobody smiled. The maneuver around the Node had been a
gut-clenching experience. Even Vi’ya had a thin line of sweat at her hairline
after the hull-skimming acrobatics past the edge of the Node and back to the
hohmann cable. Now they were on the Whoopee again, accelerating flat out toward
escape.

The tenno grid rippled violently on the Krysarch’s console.
The hair on Osri’s arms prickled.

“Cruiser signature,” Brandon stated. “Missiles on the way,
intersect course at radius.”

“Sgatshi!” Marim snarled. “They’re gonna zap us despite the
S’lift!”

“Jaim, give me overload now.” Vi’ya’ s voice was cold, but
strain showed in her narrowed eyes.

The engines roared and the ship started quivering.

“No,” Brandon said to Marim. “So far it’s by the book. If
they’d decided to sacrifice the Node they’d use ruptors. They’re trying to pick
us off neatly. The
Telvarna
can handle it.” He triggered a
counter-barrage, and streaks of light reached out ahead, dwindled, vanished.

“Overload status. You’ve got fifteen seconds. Fiveskip’s up
and ready,” came Jaim s voice.

“Ten seconds,” Osri put in. He was sure no one on the bridge
was breathing. Ahead and off to the port side coins of light blossomed as the
cruiser’s missiles met the
Telvarna’s
response.

Osri’s screen showed a graphic of the skip cavity resonance,
the same image now reflected in Vi’ya’s eyes as her hand hovered over her
go-pad. It was flattening with dreadful slowness toward the stability that
would permit the leap into fivespace.

Osri’s ears rang with the awful squeal that heralded the
edge of a ruptor pulse. Even as the sound slid down the scale toward the lethal
subsonics that would disintegrate the ship, Vi’ya’s hand slammed down on the
go-pad. The waveform on Osri’s screen convulsed, on the edge of inversion. Then
with a sickening, head-bloating lurch the
Telvarna
leapt out of
fourspace into safety.

o0o

Rifellyn ran shaking hands through her hair and settled back
into her seat, staring out through the dyplast port of the Node control room.
On the main screen the flaring radiants of the fleeing ship dwindled to a point
and vanished as it fled up the hohmann cable.

They’d relaxed when the Avatar had decided to spare the
ship, and thus the Node. Their relief had made even more shocking the sudden
appearance of the ship itself, racing by only meters from the control-room
viewport.

Rifellyn could still feel the hammer-like impact of panic
that had swept the room; the ship had been so close that the expanding gases
venting from its radiants had not had time to dissipate
in vacuo
before
impacting the hull of the Node. She could still hear the rumbling hiss in her
imagination. It was the first and, she hoped fervently, the last time she had
actually
heard
a spaceship in flight.

As she waited for her heart to slow, she noticed the
Panarchist tech she’d had brought in under guard that morning gazing at her in
challenge. Despite her words to that unspeakable Bori in the Palace, she’d not
given up on extracting technical information from the Node’s original
operators. Her own techs had finally broken into the databanks the day before,
making the personnel records available. It had been a simple matter after that
to identify hostages for good behavior. She’d had several Panarchist techs
brought back to the Node, who now cooperated, albeit slowly. She had hopes of
soon restoring the discrimination circuits of the defense systems to full
operation.

A movement from the Dol’jharian communications monitor
distracted Rifellyn. The man had jolted upright at his console, his face long
with horror. He slapped a key on his console, and everyone in the control room
heard the voice of Juvaszt on the
Fist of Dol’jhar.

“The Node—our forces there—”

Rifellyn comprehended the kyvernat’s words even as her mind
insisted it couldn’t be happening. Then the unmistakable voice of the Lord of
Vengeance filled the room.

“This is the Avatar of Dol. Destroy that ship.”

Rifellyn leapt to her feet, shouting, “Disengage the hohmann
cable!” She didn’t know how long the disengage sequence would take—the specs
varied from Node to Node, but they had very little time. Juvaszt would use his
ruptors. The shock wave propagating down the cable would tear the Node apart.

Before anyone could react, the Panarchist tech stood up,
twisted his probe-tool to a new setting with a decisive movement, and plunged
it into the exposed circuit nodes he was working on. There was a chattering
squeal, echoed from around the control room, and all the consoles went dead.

Rifellyn stood paralyzed by shock for a moment. “You fool!
You’ve killed us all.”

The tech smiled. “I hope so. That will save the hostages, at
least—your masters will mark it off to unfamiliarity with the equipment.”

The guard assigned to the tech triggered his jac and burned
the man down. He slumped against the console, his lifeless eyes transfixing
Rifellyn—the mocking smile twisted into a triumphant leer.

Rifellyn turned hopelessly to the main screen. Beyond the
vanishing point of the cable the blue streak of a ruptor pulse fluoresced. The
control room was a bedlam of shouts and screams as the techs and guards fled,
but she just stood, staring.
What does it matter now? There’s no place to
go.

Bleak regret corroded her mind. She’d known the nature of
her employers, but the prospect of the power they had promised had been so
sweet, and she had always assumed that as long as she was fast and clever, their
savagery would be aimed at other people. She remembered what her husband had
said, years ago, when he left her upon finding out to whom she’d sold herself.
With
them loyalty flows only one way.

Looking at the body of the tech before her, she finally realized
what he had meant. She walked over and closed the man’s staring eyes, and was
still crouched in front of the body when the shock wave tore the Node apart and
her life fled into the vacuum.

o0o

The long wait was beginning to get on Anderic’s nerves. The
Bori secretary was a real tilt-snoot. He’d rebuffed each of Anderic’s attempts
to begin a conversation.

The comic chip had palled, and Anderic was restless and
bored. The occasional flickers and shadows in the corner of his vision didn’t
help any, either.

The door burst open and Barrodagh stormed in, followed by a
huge, red-faced young man in sloppy clothing and a terrified expression, and a
grim-faced Tarkan. Anderic goggled at the Bori’s appearance. His hair was
standing up in ragged spikes, covered with a crust of vile green glop, his
clothing crusted with the same substance. Bits of it flaked off and fell to the
floor as he moved.

Barrodagh launched into an impassioned tirade at the
secretary in some language that Anderic didn’t recognize, but assumed was Bori.
The secretary’s face gradually turned a sickly shade of gray. His eyes darted
nervously to the Tarkan standing in front of the door. Even through the
language barrier his replies lacked force to Anderic’s ears, while the
sweaty-faced blit relaxed in direct contrast to his tension.

Anderic was enjoying the evident humiliation and fear of the
secretary when the argument was terminated by Barrodagh’s flat-handed gesture.
The secretary shouted and tried to flee, but the Tarkan strode forward, grasped
his neck, and with a brutally efficient movement, crushed his larynx.

The grinding crunch was surprisingly loud. Anderic grew
uncertain.
What’s going on here?
He glanced at the Tarkan, whose gaze
rested on him impassively.
Am I next?
Anderic’s belt felt light where
the comforting weight of his jac would normally lie.

Barrodagh watched with a satisfied expression as the
secretary writhed at his feet, choking his life away. Before the secretary’s
heels had stilled their frantic drumming, the Avatar’s aide turned to the
Rifter.