The Thrones of Kronos (27 page)

“Test Two accomplished. Signal from hyperwave.”

From every hyperwave.
What
will the Dol’jharians make of that?

The manipulator withdrew. Again the flash from the rail-gun,
but this time veins of darkness writhed through the flare of energy, dimming
it. There was no light from the port behind them. Portions of the hyperwave
glowed with a wavering luminance like the marsh lights Omilov had once seen in
a swamp; other parts lost the characteristic red glow of Urian machinery,
looking curiously dead.

Cheering sounded from the screen imaging the naval test
center.

It can be attacked
.

And that unreeled a new set of questions: whether the Navy would
hazard Marines on such a mission with the Panarch leading them.

The floor trembled slightly.

Lysanter handed the compad back to Tatriman, hesitating at
the fear blanching her face.

The shivering, uncanny howl that erupted from the station’s fabric
plunged Lysanter into a brief and terrible memory of his indoctrination into
the service of Dol’jhar. Mindripper! He would never forget what Barrodagh had
shown him, long ago, to make clear the consequences of failure.

He shuddered reflexively, though he recognized it was not a
human sound. All work ceased, the Bori techs paralyzed in fear.

The sound stopped.

His compad burred. Lysanter pulled it up from his side and
thumbed an acknowledgment. Barrodagh’s voice ripped out of it, ragged with
anxiety, “What was that?”

“I don’t know, serach Barrodagh,” Lysanter said, motioning
to Tatriman to follow him as he hurried toward the exit. “I will begin analysis
at once.” Had that sound been heard throughout the station, or had Barrodagh
heard it through the spy-sensors he no doubt had in this chamber?

“See that you do. It would be best if you had an explanation
before the Avatar asks for one,” Barrodagh snapped.

Ah! That implied general audibility, as the link Tatriman
had given the Avatar was not real-time. More data! And there was an easy way to
gain more time for his analysis.

“However, just before that event I confirmed that the
tempath’s latest attempt appears to have triggered a very slow, apparently
automatic ramp-up of station power. I am working to measure it accurately
before I deliver a further report.”

Barrodagh actually smiled, although in doing so he looked
much the same as someone else might in pain. “That is well. The Avatar will be
pleased.” He cut the connection.

Lysanter promptly forgot the exchange in the excitement of
this latest manifestation. What new mysteries might this reveal or elucidate?
Was it another delayed effect of the tempath’s efforts? He began humming in
anticipation, gratified in the expectation of new knowledge.

Eloatri and Jep Houmanopoulis withdrew, as the techs
busied themselves with analysis. Omilov stood at loose ends until Osri
approached, and stood beside him, gazing out the port. Omilov gave his son the
quick, searching glance parents learn to use when their adult offspring’s
attention is otherwhere. Osri seemed well, Omilov thought. Rested, less tense
than he had ever seen him.

“Is there anything you want to add to my report?” Osri asked
finally, sounding slightly embarrassed.

“No, son. Thank you. I will present my case at the main
strategy session.”

Osri bowed wordlessly, surprising his father with the
uncharacteristic Douloi gesture, and left.

It’s his relationship
with the Kendrian heir
, Sebastian thought.
While the rest of us look as if we’ve aged a decade from the recent
stresses, my son seems to have shed ten years
. It was a mildly amusing
thought, but only mildly. Omilov hoped that Osri had not inherited his own
disastrous tendency for monogamy. There was no evidence in Fierin’s brief but
spectacular public career on Ares to indicate she was any different from most
Douloi. Omilov suspected his son did not have the experience to know his own
heart; better to have inherited his mother’s restless taste for a variety of
lovers than to live out a life having fallen in love once, forever, with the
wrong person.

Omilov stared sightlessly at the console now echoing the
view of the test site, where suited figures were erecting a lab module around
the damaged hyperwave. Experiments would continue in a shirtsleeve environment,
but still at a safe distance from Ares. He’d have little part in them now. A
few minor tasks remained, but for the most part his work was done. The
decisions were out of his hands—and he knew he had lost.

There are only two of
us who want to preserve that station,
he thought.
Myself and Brandon. And he only wants to save it because Captain Vi’ya
is there.

. . . the ship
groaned and pinged around Mandros Nukiel as the merciless grip of the
singularity slowly sundered its fabric. A wave of nausea boiled thickly inside
him; the gravs shuddered and failed. Now the growing tidal forces plucked him
out of the command pod, rotating him headfirst toward the singularity. He could
feel the pull intensifying on head and feet, away from his solar plexus, as the
black hole crucified him in a web of distorted fourspace.

Nukiel belched agony
as his guts spasmed against the unnatural distortion; he gasped for breath as
the pull on his diaphragm grew inexorably. His vision reddened, his scalp
prickling as the blood pressure in his skull mounted toward the moment when his
brains would explode through weakened cranial sutures.

On the main screen the
accretion disk around the singularity flared in colors he could no longer name,
long skeins of tortured matter writhing out in an aureole of hair around the
crone’s face as she opened her mouth into a swelling black maw whose edges detonated
around him . . .

Mandros Nukiel awoke paralyzed, his breathing harsh. After
an interminable interval, the nightmare released him.

“Lights,” he croaked, sitting up slowly as dim illumination
banished the shadows around his bed and oriented him in blissful normality. He
swung his legs off the bed; the carpet pressed warm against his feet, a
reassuringly familiar touch. Rubbing his hands over his face, he straightened
up.

His conscious mind assured him that the hapless Rifter
ship’s name was but a coincidence, but his unconscious insisted there was no
such thing. Nukiel could not shake the memory of the vision that had summoned
him to Desrien, the Goddess in her aspect as Crone destroying his Highdwelling
home.

He padded to the console, absently pulling on his
shanta-silk robe. The seat chilled his flesh through the thin fabric. The
screen windowed up the message from Eloatri replying to his query about these
dreams. He noted again with gratitude that she chose to speak to him from the
garden of the Cloisters—the bright flowers and emerald grass a visual antinomy
to the background of naked space that had framed her face in his vision. For
the Goddess had worn the High Phanist’s visage.

Eloatri was neither minatory nor reassuring. “As I told you
over Desrien, the Goddess gave us no message for you. But as you yourself
noted, some of the quiddities of the vision that summoned you to us do seem
proleptic of your present situation.”

She smiled wearily. “One thing only is certain: that neither
you nor I can know in which aspect you will next encounter Her.”

He shook his head and let the rest of her now-familiar words
wash over him, noting how the tianqi had shifted to a summery scent in response
to the cues in her letter. Proleptic indeed! He could think of no better
manifestation of the Crone, the Destroyer, than the ravening emptiness of a
black hole.

When the High Phanist stopped speaking, the screen filled
with an abstract interpretation of the Digrammaton. Nukiel tabbed it off and
called up his own response to her, to finish it. The next courier would depart
in less than six hours.

But before he could commence, his console pinged softly.

“Nukiel here,” he responded.

“Asawar reporting. The correlations on the stellar
measurements are complete. You told me to notify you immediately.”

The waning sense of dread occasioned by the nightmare sharpened
when Nukiel saw the tightness around the lieutenant commander’s eyes. The
physics officer smiled wanly and nodded, apparently seeing the commodore’s
reaction.

“As I feared, the diameter of the Suneater primary is expanding,
thus increasing the flow of matter into the singularity. If the output of the
Suneater correlates to that metric, their weapons power is increasing at the
same rate.” Another window dilated, graphically representing Asawar’s message.

“It’s similar to the signature of a Cepheid,” continued the
officer, “but it falls back to a slightly higher level on each cycle. Probably
the result of similar mechanisms.”

“The tempath, do you think?” Nukiel’s voice came out husky.
He cleared his throat. He was not comfortable with a technology capable of
controlling the output of a star—less comfortable, perhaps, with the thought of
a Rifter in turn controlling it.

The officer shrugged. “Who knows? But if the Avatar’s willing
to wait a couple of months, he won’t need her anymore.”

“Assuming the rate of change doesn’t increase.”

The physicist smiled grimly. “What optimism, Commodore!”

Nukiel waved his hand, encompassing his quarters. “How else
should I feel?” He forced a smile. “Good work. Make sure the complete report’s
on the courier. I’ll attach a pointer to it.”

Asawar’s face vanished as Nukiel tabbed his console off. The
commodore stared abstractedly at the screen, now displaying one of the pleasant
evolving tesserae of the Iremqlaah school. He could imagine how this news would
be received on Ares: new strength for the faction seeking to destroy the
Suneater. Perhaps now they could make up their minds. His back channels on Ares
reported a general sense of paralysis, as though there were some invisible
force preventing a timely decision. He couldn’t imagine what that might be, and
was glad not to have to.

He sighed and began dressing, mulling over the changes this
new discovery called for in his report. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep,
and if he did, Telos alone knew what he’d dream.

Then his console pinged again.

“Nukiel here.” Some Z-watch this was turning out to be: no
one seemed to be asleep.

Commander Efriq’s face windowed up. “Commodore, ten minutes
ago we detected an emergence pulse, bearing absolute at 167 mark 24, plus 23
light-minutes relative. Signature ID’d the
Crimson
Skull
but the scout detected nothing. I’ve ordered a search by two full
Kelly tripods.”

“Very well. Go to general quarters. Skip to the emergence
coordinates, tac-level six, and commence a standard search. I’m coming up.”

Efriq acknowledged, and the window dwindled to a point and
vanished.

The harsh rasping of the klaxon barely registered as Nukiel
finished dressing. He’d been dreading something like this—how could they be
sure one of the Rifter auxiliaries wouldn’t double-cross them, jumping to the
rendezvous point to confirm its validity, then skipping out to sell the
coordinates to the enemy?

He felt the subtle shudder of the fiveskip, and a short time
later the subliminal, visceral pulse of emergence. If this was such a betrayal,
the Suneater fleet would have to abandon its position. Reestablishing another
would take time, if they were to avoid detection.
Rifters. How can we truly trust any of them?

Nukiel shook his head as he got into the trans-tube pod. He
had no choice. The Panarch had made that clear. And Eloatri’s letters had
filled him in on the political background. The new Panarch had enough trouble
without disaster reports from the Suneater Staging Cloud. They’d make it work,
somehow.

He felt several more skip transitions before the trans-tube
decelerated. “We’ve found them,” Efriq said as he entered the bridge. On the
screen the angular dragonfly shape of an Alpha-class destroyer gleamed in the
light from the distant black hole binary, its skipmissile tube pointed away
from
Mbwa Kali
. A readout on-screen
indicated its distance as two thousand kilometers.

“They’re not responding to our signals. Our beta and gamma
forward turrets are locked on.”

Nukiel nodded and sat down in the command pod. He could
sense the irregular subsonic pulses from the tianqi, keying the bridge crew to
maximum alertness through the evolutionary lessons of a million years of
thunderstorms on Lost Earth.

“Siglnt, anything?”

“Low-level pulses characteristic of internal weapons fire,
sir, and there’s a ship warming up in the aft port bay. No hypermissile
signature.”

“Very well. Weapons, ruptor at skip-smash level any ship
leaving the Rifter vessel. Communications—”

Two things happened simultaneously. A window popped up on
the main screen, revealing the bridge of the
Crimson Skull
, and a ship darted out of the destroyer’s bay. Nukiel
heard the momentary hum of the ruptors; the little ship accelerated.

“Its fiveskip is gone,” reported Siglnt.

But Nukiel’s attention was on the face of the Rifter staring
out of the screen. A reddish-white weal of blisters marred her forehead, and
twin tear tracks carved through the grime on her face. She coughed rackingly as
smoke drifted past her.

“Sorry about the mess, Commodore,” she said when she caught
her breath. In the background someone yelled, “
Kali
hit ’em with a ruptor, but they’re accelerating under
geeplane!”

“Just a moment.” She turned away. “Tyori! Zap ’em, now!”

A streak of light shot out of the destroyer, impinging on
the fleeing ship in a rosette of light that faded slowly into nothingness.