The Thrones of Kronos (3 page)

The words stopped Sinaran as though he’d walked into a wall,
and he swayed, momentarily off balance. No one had told him it spoke!

The karra gazed steadily at him as the vast hall darkened.
Pulses of sound, almost too low to hear, shivered through Sinaran’s body. Light
pooled about the karra’s form, flowing in sheets down the Throne, and creeping
in waves of dim radiance toward where the Sinaran stood.

He forced his gaze to the karra’s face. Horror choked him at
the darkness behind its eyes, wherein flames leapt and flickered.

“My name is Jaspar,” the karra said, and Sinaran knew
himself lost. The karra only named themselves to those they ate. “I will not
ask yours, for that no longer matters. You have willingly entered my demesne,
and you are mine.”

Moira had whimpered in terror as the ghost spoke in the
harsh words of the invaders and the soldier stopped, as from above, thunder
muttered. The horrible greenish clouds twisted, little points and tendrils of
vapor thrusting down from their underbellies, as though they were full of
snakes trying to escape.

Sinaran flicked a glance to left and right. The rest of his
squad was in position.

“The only question is, do I take you now or later?” the
karra said.

Desperation galvanized Sinaran’s muscles, and he jerked up
his weapon.

Blasts of deafening thunder made Moira’s ears ring as
brilliant blue-white whips of lightning crackled down from the clouds. One
struck Sinaran, and a wash of pain like molten metal drilled through every
nerve in a net of agony that dropped him into darkness.

Moira keened as he jerked horribly and collapsed. Adult
voices screamed beneath the battering blast of sound, then the noise stopped.

Silence.

Moira had fallen to a crouch. Slowly she stood up and looked
around. Far off she could see two or three dark bundles on the floor, smoke
rising from them. She smelled burned meat and clapped her hand over her mouth
as her stomach lurched.

“Are they dead?”

“All except this one,” the ghost said, nodding at the
soldier fallen across the edge of the dais.

“You should kill all of them—everywhere,” Moira said
fiercely as relief changed her fear to anger.

“I cannot do that alone, Moira,” the ghost replied, smiling
faintly. “Even in the Palace, where I could kill those wandering my halls, I
must not, or their friends off-planet will come to take their revenge on you.
As for this one here, it is better that one should live to spread fear.” He
stood up. “But we had best speed you to the completion of your errand.”

A hole opened up right in front of the Throne.

“Do you trust me, Moira?” the ghost asked gravely.

She jerked her head in a nod.

“Then follow me.” He melted and whipped down into the hole,
like smoke in reverse.

Moira jumped into the hole and found herself twisting at
high speed down a kind of tubular slide, sort of like the Dragon’s Gut ride at
the Panludium. She was almost enjoying it by the time she shot out of the
bottom in a weird stomach-upping sensation as something turned her upright and
set her gently on her feet.

The ghost motioned her on, silent now, and a few minutes
later a door opened to reveal the garden where she’d been headed before her
detour. She blinked in the unexpected sunlight; she expected clouds and rain,
so real had been the storm in the Throne Room.

Moira turned to thank the ghost, but he was gone.

She picked up her basket and set off to make her delivery.

o0o

Ferrasin, the Dol’jharians’ chief noderunner, frowned as
he shut down the console. He had just extracted a chunk of exactly the kind of
information Barrodagh most prized; why had it come so easily, there at the end
of the session? And what had been that burst of activity? The node map he’d
laboriously managed to construct had lit up all over.

He looked around his office. It was one of the rewards of
his successes at penetrating the secrets of the Palace computer, that vast
distributed web of compute arrays encompassing, at times, a fair percentage of
the total computing resources of Arthelion. How else could they have ruled the
Thousand Suns? There was good reason why the College of Infonetics was based
here.

The tianqi whispered, circulating cool air smelling of deep
forest and sun-dappled clearings into Ferrasin’s office. A large dyplast pane,
roughly set into the wall by his Dol’jharian masters, revealed the bustle of
the computer room, muting its sounds to a faint buzz. The other techs could see
Ferrasin looking through, but of course no one met his eyes.
I’m in as much of a fishbowl as they are,
he thought bitterly. But the other noderunners avoided him unless summoned. He
was on top here.

In a way.

Mastery of the Palace Net had once seemed a fantasy for a
one-time ordinary noderunner. He was good but had begun to lose hope of
descending deeper than Octant depths when the Avatar’s hand reached out for
him. Dol’jhar’s service had been irresistible, his single chance of reaching
his impossible goal.

The longer he labored, the deeper his conviction that his work
was producing results well beyond his best efforts—and he had encountered an
entity that should have been impossible to conceal. For there was an autonomous
intelligence in the Net, wearing the persona of Jaspar Arkad. Ferrasin still
found it hard to believe that the Mandala had so terribly violated its own
millennial ban against machine intelligence, the deepest-held prejudice of
humankind in the Thousand Suns.

And that intelligence had Ferrasin entrapped in a lie. The
work that had brought such rapid promotion was definitely no longer his, but that
of the intelligence that should not exist; worse, it was an exact accountant of
give-and-take.
I got some really good
information this time. What did I pay for it?

The
poing
of his
console delivered the answer.

“Jesserian here. Come to the Throne Room without delay.” The
Dol’jharian commander clicked off without waiting for assent. That, Ferrasin,
knew with bitter conviction, was a given.

It must be those
chatzing dogs again,
Ferrasin thought. Although so far, they’d never peed
on anything in the Throne room, there was always a first time. He knew how they
got around without detection: though the maintenance crew had had strict orders
to close up all the dog doors they found, the computer kept re-establishing
them. Just as its housekeeping nodes regrew the functions furnishing food and
water for the animals. The question was, why?

Ferrasin laughed at himself as he toiled down the peaceful
hallways. Dogs bred here for centuries would know every corner of the Mandala.
As for ‘why,’ they were just dogs. Way down at the computer’s lower strata,
there probably existed some programming order that there should always be
comestibles and access for the animals. It might even go all the way back to
that first Jaspar Arkad, if the history chips taken from the local school were right.

Thinking about that computer… artifact (he hated how his
mind slid from ‘intelligence’), plus listening to those Tarkans and their
never-ending talk of ghosts, had made him more credulous than he’d ever thought
possible.

His mood had regained its normal exasperation when he
entered the Throne Room. But the first whiff of charred meat banished his
self-assurance. Ferrasin fought waves of nausea as he watched grim-faced
Tarkans gingerly carry the mushy, well-cooked remains of their fellows out of
the Throne Room.

Ferrasin listened in horror as the sole survivor, on his
feet in a rigid posture marred by a tendency to sway, related what had
happened.

“How was this done?” Jesserian swung around and glared at
Ferrasin.

Ferrasin swallowed the metallic taint creeping up his
throat.
I won’t throw up!
he thought
as he mentally reviewed his knowledge of sims. “I’d guess ch-ch-charge toroids
in the ceiling, w-w-with a UV laser to trigger the discharge.” Of course his
stutter would be worse than ever.

The Dol’jharian glared at him.

“Artificial lightning,” Ferrasin said, abruptly weary.
“Th-the Kyriarch Banicalaan was a sim fanatic. Sh-she even used t-t-to make it
rain and snow in here. The machines haven’t been used for several centuries.”

“And they still work?” Jesserian was openly scornful.

“No reason why not, if the computer’s taking care of them.”

The commander turned away and dismissed the Tarkan survivor
with a few harsh phrases. The man saluted; the tech saw the pain in his face as
he pivoted smartly, stumbled, and marched away. They were alone on the dais.
The voices of the death detail faded to a chorus of whispered echoes as they
departed.

Jesserian stepped up close to Ferrasin, towering over him.
His body odor was rank, that of an exhausted man running on nervous energy.
“This is your responsibility. You must control the computer.”

The tech heard a faint catch on the initial consonant of the
last word. Jesserian had been about to say “karra,” no doubt. Amusement spurted
behind Ferrasin’s ribs, though enough fear remained for him to keep it under
strict control. For different reasons, the Dol’jharians were as upset by the
intelligence as he was.

“I c-can’t control it,” he replied. “And I w-warned you not
to let Tarkans into the Throne Room. Anyway, you know as well as I do that one
can only bargain with it, unless we destroy it utterly. And if we do that, we
will both be destroyed.”

Jesserian snarled a Dol’jharian curse, but Ferrasin heard in
that an acknowledgment of his words as truth. Just as much as Ferrasin, the
commander owed his present position to the computer. In the months since
Eusabian had left, it had always delivered barely enough information through
Ferrasin to enable Jesserian to avoid the disasters that had ended the careers
of his rank equals here on Arthelion. Now he, like Ferrasin, was supreme in his
sphere.

“But now there are no more
kah-jillalch,
” the Tarkan said. “Scapegoats,” he added, apparently
seeing Ferrasin’s puzzlement. “So your . . . haunting has our progeny in its
teeth. Can you deliver enough to Barrodagh to convince him to avert the
Avatar’s wrath?”

Ferrasin smiled. “If he w-w-were not a Catennach, I w-would
say that I have Barrodagh’s progeny in my teeth.”

Jesserian gave a short bark of laughter and looked at
Ferrasin appraisingly. “You have changed much since the Avatar’s departure. You
still would not fare well in the Karusch-na Rahali, but you are learning Dol’jharian
ways, it seems.”

“I enjoy breathing.”

Jesserian gave that odd, twisting nod that characterized the
Dol’jharians. Then his expression tightened into its normal somber expression.
“So do I, although that could change.”

Ferrasin twitched, his flesh shrinking from the imagined
pain of Eusabian’s vengeance if they were found out. “What will you say?” he
asked.

They quickly came to agreement on their reports and left the
Throne Room. Ferrasin hurried back to his office, mentally rehearsing his
coming interview with Barrodagh, who never forgot a lapse, and who nourished
grudges until he could destroy their cause.

At least the worms I
promised are finished
, he thought as he closed himself in the fresher and
splashed water on his face, then gargled to try to wash the vile roasted stench
out of his head. Then he carefully opaqued the dyplast window in his office and
settled before his console to plan his words carefully.

It was strange to be struggling with another noderunner
hundreds of light-years away. There’d been almost no information in the
Spelunkenbuch about this Tatriman Alac-lu-Ombric—she was a Rifter, after
all—but she was very good. She’d have to be, to be working directly under the
Avatar’s eye, yet under the heir’s command. Barrodagh had no one on the
Suneater good enough, given that Lysanter was in charge of computing as well as
the Urian research. So he had forced Ferrasin into adversarial position to
counter her. Without the Arthelion computer backing him, he wouldn’t have a
chance against her.

He only hoped he’d sufficiently disguised the problems he’d
given the computer: the wideband channel he’d used over the hyperwave for
noderunning on the Suneater could pass all sorts of mischief, if the
intelligence found it.

He’d run mentally through all possible responses when his
console shrilled at him in the special code that announced Barrodagh. He opened
a thread to link him to the hyperwave, using the code Barrodagh had given him, bypassing
Remaliagh, the Bori in charge of communications on Arthelion.

Barrodagh’s face appeared on the screen.

Forcing his stuttering tongue to cooperate, Ferrasin spoke
before the Bori could. “I have two of the w-worms you w-wanted ready. The first
sh-should give you the information you seek, without possibility of detection.
And the second will slowly divert more compute power to your stasis clamps.”

The Bori paused, then nodded jerkily, his cheek twitching.
“You know what I am calling about.”

“Yes, but first, there’s m-more,” Ferrasin hurried on. “The
c-computer yielded partial fleet statistics for Aleph-Null Sud. W-w-we should
be able to access the rest within forty-eight hours.”

Barrodagh’s expression lightened fractionally. “That is
well. It may be enough to spare you the Avatar’s wrath. Now, I want your report
on what happened.” His face twisted, and he rubbed his cheek without appearing
aware of the motion. But he accepted Ferrasin’s explanation of the destruction
of the Tarkan squad without further comment.

After reviewing his next assignments, Ferrasin tabbed his
console. The other man’s motion mirrored his, as each of them accepted the
specially coded transmissions from the other.

The node monitoring the critical port flared into activity.
With a fraction of its attention, the entity that called itself Jaspar again
seized the channel, modulating the transmission with a carefully crafted
message of its own, receiving the return DLs of its own worms at the same time.
There were not many answering yet, but soon it would know enough of this
distant place to act. It already knew one thing: the Enemy himself was there.