The Thrones of Kronos (35 page)

And that
, Ng
reflected,
is why Koestler is now at the
Suneater, and I am here
.

Koestler would have been a strong voice against the
Panarch’s intent to accompany the Fleet attack on the Suneater. With Vannis
Scefi-Cartano, ex-Consort and survivor nonpareil, already subtly and very
effectively working against his departure from Ares, Brandon could not afford
that.

Politics. The word
should rhyme with sewage,
she thought. Ng almost envied Koestler’s
inability to balance naval efficiency against the larger picture, despite the
fact his lack had tipped the high admiral’s position to her.

“How is the amnesty program proceeding?” Brandon asked.

“Well, the pie-flinger harassments are working well,” Nukiel
said slowly, and everyone there recognized temporizing. “Reports from the Kelly
scouts, as well as VLDA surveillance, reveal the predicted pattern of response:
a heavier concentration of units responding to tacponder alarms, slowing their
patrols.” He smiled, and then, paradoxically, looked younger—it was the smile
of a man happy to be doing the job he’d been trained to, regardless of the
price. “Typical Dol’jharian thinking: make sure they’re never alone so they
can’t accept the amnesty. So still no takers.”

Unless the whole
battle group defects at once.
But the Dol’jharians knew as well as the Navy
did that the kind of Rifters who’d allied with the Lord of Vengeance would and
could trust no one. They couldn’t even use the hyperwave to communicate with their
fellows—the fearsome punishment inflicted on the
Crone of Aravis
ensured that.

“Just as well,” Brandon said. “We’d just have to intern
them, losing personnel to guard duty. The real payoff will come during the
battle. If they think they can surrender, they won’t fight so hard.”

Ng realized that Brandon was speaking for the benefit of
those, like Omilov and Eloatri a few seats away, not familiar with the arts of
war.

“We’ve caught a few stray conversations via EM. The Kelly
scouts are very good at that. Now that we’re linked to the Ares arrays, we
should be able to crack them soon,” Nukiel said.

“Better,” Theron interjected, his thick reddish brows
soaring. “We’ll have a shot at the hyperwave communications.”

“The analysts are certain that the
Fist of Dol’jhar
is now using vernams for its cipher,” Ng said.
“Just as we are here.” The technology of onetime encryption pads—the term itself
was a two-thousand-year-old anachronism—was still the only one known to be
unbreakable. But it was useless if used to communicate with someone who might
sell the pads.

One of the analysts asked a question about hyperwave
communications. Knowing the answer, Ng watched the epistemicians working at
their consoles, their backs to the screen, supervising and directing the computers
as they wove symbolic links from the transcript of this session to the growing
mass of data the Ares nodes were accumulating. In one sense, that task never
ended, could never end, for, in the fissiparous nature of information, the
links themselves became data, reaching deep into the centuries of knowledge in
the Ares system.

She recognized Solarch Reeso Hamun, his dark fingers
occasionally dancing in complex flickers over the keys. She knew the others
from their records: they were evenly divided between the factions contending
the fate of the Suneater, as was proper for a meeting aimed at communication,
not contention. That would follow in less than two days, at the full council.
Meanwhile, of course, preparation for both courses of action were in progress.

“All we can hope to do,” another officer, an encryption
specialist from her uniform, was saying, “is hope to overload their
discriminators, as at Arthelion.” Her voice betrayed her smile. “Now that we’ll
have the Ares nodes behind us, that may be possible, even against the arrays
the Dol’jharians have apparently been building nonstop.”

“And they will have the Arthelion nodes backing them, no
doubt,” Vapet said in his precise voice. “Even if they can’t decrypt the naval
archives.”

“Will they trust the Mandalic system?” asked an analyst.

“Depends on how hard we push them.” Koestler took back
control of the discussion. “And push we must. With the Suneater powering up as
it is, I think it’s time to escalate to lethal encounters. Let them know we
have teeth.”

Brandon leaned back slightly, hands subtly tensing on the
pod arms. But he said only, “We trust your judgment.”

Koestler bowed wordlessly. All accepted that this was the
fulfillment of his loyalty, the keeping of faith that underlay fealty.

But what will be the
fulfillment of mine?
thought Ng.

Afterward, she prowled the corridors, and then fetched up at
the gym, where she knew the duty roster included a Marine dyarch skilled in the
art of fencing.

Tired as she was, she knew her mind would not permit her to
sleep yet. The only relief from the steadily mounting stresses they all shared
was to exhaust her body: and sometimes, if she worked hard enough, her mind
would cut free.

With automatic movements she pulled on her fencing clothes,
and chose the saber to get a harder match.

“Pret.”

Already her breathing steadied as her muscles pulled her
into alert.

“Allez.”

Cautious testing, a feint, riposte as her mind roamed over
the Suneater attack data. Fleet strength. Suneater power. Tactical plans.
Purely scientific data.

Lunge,
attaque au fer
.

She danced back, her breath huffing warm in her mask.

Again she pressed to the attack, knowing that those were not
the weapons and tactics she needed to contemplate.

Balestra, lunge, bind . . .

Her mind shifted to the secret logs of the high admirals,
read and reread so many times she now had entire passages by memory.
There is a pattern here
, she thought as
she danced in again, claiming right-of-way.

The Panarch only came to Ares in times of great crisis; what
countervailing powers did the high admiral have, to balance the proximity of
the ruler of the Thousand Suns?

That’s it, that’s it.

Energized, she finished the bout—two to two—thanked the
dyarch, hustled through a shower, and with her hair still wet, threw herself
into her pod and swiped her console to life.

Follow that trace
.
A holo bloomed above the console: a ghostly image of Ares bright with the veins
of power, air, water, and transport. She stopped as a rush of correlations
brought the idea to light.

Brandon, in one of his rare direct orders as Panarch, had
commanded the recall of the
Telvarna
from the test. Why had he concerned himself? The Rifter captain, Vi’ya, had
been instrumental in the disgrace of the three traitors whose greed and hatred
had given Eusabian the means of his long-sought revenge—but why was a Rifter
allowed into Ares dataspace in the first place?

And Ng remembered the destructive test of the hyper-relay. Brandon
had been present, but other than interpolating a couple of questions at the
beginning, he had remained silent.

He remained silent right until the end. She frowned, trying
to call the scene more clearly to mind. Not that there was anything overtly
different about his behavior. The others certainly had not remarked it, or they
would have said something, even if obliquely, afterward.

There had been, she decided, the most fractional sharpening
of the Panarch’s attention when the first test seemed to mandate an all-out
attempt to destroy the Suneater, and an equally subtle relaxation when the
second test demonstrated that with quantum interfaces, lances could penetrate
the Suneater—perhaps to capture rather than to destroy it.

Neither of which would
I would have seen unless he intended me to.
And after that, he had mandated
the combined session of the Privy Council and the Naval Strategic Council to
decide on a plan of action that now loomed ahead.

And again, only hours ago, that subtle sharpening of
attention when Koestler mentioned the increasing power of the Suneater and the
acceleration of their plans this required.

Ng rubbed her bicep where a badly blocked blow had landed
from the dyarch’s point. This was high stakes fencing she’d been drawn into, a
duel of metaphorical steel, with politics as weapons.

Brandon had justified his choice of a joint council on the
basis of its symbolic value in demonstrating the unity of military and civilian
interests, echoing the similar argument, advanced only through the sentiments
of others so far, that the newfound unity of Rifters and Panarchists demanded
his personal participation in the attack.

But in reality, the civilian cast of the Privy Council made
it a hotbed of sentiment for the exploitation of the Suneater, not its
destruction. The superluminal distribution of power and data offered too many
profit opportunities to be ignored.

Bringing her back around to the Panarch again.

And then the nebulous patterns aligned: this was not a
matter of Navy versus Rifter, or civilian against Navy, or
Suneater-preservationists against Suneater-destroyers.

This is personal.

So it was time to consider individuals.

First, what did Brandon want? That was easy enough: to
preserve the Suneater, and to go with the Fleet as had Jaspar Arkad at the
beginning of that family’s long reign.

Next? Ng skipped over herself, and focused on the civilian
side. Foremost there?

Vannis Scefi-Cartano. Who had expressed no opinion, either
in words or in actions, regarding the fate of the Suneater. She seemed to live
at the Enclave with Brandon in perfect harmony, often entertaining with him
side by side.

Yet Anton Faseult, attending the endless round of dinners,
parties, balls, and concerts offered by the Douloi, had reported a few days ago
that Vannis’s subtle influence could be felt behind all those politicians who
demanded that the new Panarch remain safely at Ares.

Personal
. Ng
remembered that folksy talk from Nik Cormoran of Ares 25, exploring the
Telvarna
Rifters’ former quarters at
Detention Five, and the equally folksy talk about the recovered treasures. He’d
made mention of the Stone of Prometheus.

At the time, Ng had thought the vid mere filler, an attempt
to make news out of nothing. But Cormoran had proved a superlative datadiver.
He didn’t need to make news out of nothing.

Personal. Rifters
.

She tapped at her console. Vast sections of the holo dimmed,
leaving only Detention Five and the Panarchic Enclave still glowing. The
color-coded veins of the utilities woven throughout the fabric of the station
held those two volumes in a brilliant web of light. Then water, power, air,
data, and all other utilities save the trans-tubes and lifts faded out.

Then public transport dimmed and vanished, leaving the
secret byways and adits of Ares illuminated, coded by access authority.

Margot Ng took a deep breath and ran the temporal parameters
back, correlated with personnel codes at the highest level. Then only a tenuous
web of light remained. But it was enough to entangle a Rifter captain and the
ruler of the Thousand Suns with strands far stronger than mono-thread: it meant
traffic, not once, but several times, going both ways.

She whistled, and shut down her console.
Oh, yes. This is personal, all right
.

Wandering back up the steps again, she stopped directly
before the huge viewport that looked out along the length of the oneill into
the glories of space and the fuzz of ships surrounding the overcrowded station.
One of the hardest decisions Ng had ever made was not the launching of the
feint at Arthelion, but afterward—with her fleet crippled and half of them
missing—when she left for Ares with the captured hyperwave. If there had been
any way to remain behind and personally direct the search for the missing
ships—for
Falcomare
, for Metellus,
her beloved of more than twenty years—she would have done it.

I know what Brandon
wants,
she thought, gazing out at the cold beauty of space.
Duty will force him to give into the greater
need, just as I did at Arthelion, but he will be seeking a way to circumvent
the decision to destroy the station.

By now she knew, and trusted, Brandon hai-Arkad enough to know
Vi’ya was another reason—if perhaps the most important—that he was set on
accompanying the Fleet to the Suneater. He would not allow personal interest solely
to interfere with his oath to the people of the Thousand Suns, but he saw his
two goals united, and so was running on a parallel course with Vannis,
straining every wit in suggestion, inference, insinuation and implication, to
marry his personal and political desires with military necessity.

Why did he not come right out and state his wishes?

Inner conviction caused her heartbeat to thunder in her
ears.

He will try to
contrive a way to go to the Suneater itself. With the Marines.

That was it. No words spoken, no sign, but she knew it. And
laughed, remembering how her second, Perthes Krajno—now a captain in his own
right—had said to her just before their return to Ares from Gehenna: “Any first
officer that can’t read his captain’s mind isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.”

Just as Perthes had been able to read her, she was learning
to read Brandon Arkad. She paced back and forth, time forgotten. How would he
do it? For an altruistic ruler of trillions, his options were limited: He would
not want to destroy anyone’s career by issuing commands.

She stopped pacing in front of the viewport, gazing off toward
the portion of the Cap where the cruisers were pitted. The running lights of
Grozniy
glowed, steady and reassuring.