The Thrones of Kronos (75 page)

Then Brandon heard a sound that he never thought would be so
welcome: a high chittering, dulled by intervening quantum-plast.

“What the Shiidran Hell is that?” Gwyn demanded. “Another
chatzing surprise from this chatzing digestive nightmare?”

Brandon gave a breathless laugh as he triggered his sonic sensors.
He stepped to the wall they indicated. “A surprise, yes, but for the Tarkans.
Help me open up.”

Gwyn joined him; light webbed out of their gauntlets. Even
in his armor, Brandon could see the dyarch flinch as the Eya’a jumped through
with one of their impossibly swift movements.

The squad fell back a step as the little white-furred beings
turned their jewel-faceted eyes to Brandon. Their twiggy fingers semaphored in
eerily exact synchrony:
We-see-you.

Brandon raised his gauntlets and tried to return the
gesture, knowing they were reading his mind.
Vi’ya?
he thought.
Vi’ya?

One-who-gives-firestone
hears Vi’ya.
The voices inside his skull seared high and sharp and painful.
Brandon closed his eyes, fighting the vertigo that threatened to overwhelm him
as his mind endeavored to locate the voices outside his head.

Brandon. I am trapped
right below the Throne Room.

It was her voice. He tried to shape the words for an answer,
but the effort hurt his head and his thoughts splintered; he realized he could
no longer hear her.

He pointed at the Eya’a. “You know what they can do,” he
said, “but they have to see the enemy.”

“We’ll buy ’em the sight,” Gwyn said, his voice grim. The
squad deployed at his command.

“Wait,” Brandon said. He crossed swiftly to the altar and
picked up the skull. “This may slow them down.”

He rejoined the squad. “AyKay,” he said, hefting the skull.

Gwyn triggered his jac against the door’s control, and as it
snapped open, Brandon bowled the skull out of the opening along the deck. The
Marines stormed out after it, yelling fiercely behind a wave of foggers and
multiple blasts of wasps. Behind came the pair of aliens, chittering loudly.

The Tarkans’ battle cries that greeted them abruptly changed
to screams of agony. An armored figure staggered out of the smoke, tearing open
his faceplate. Moments later a gout of bloody pudding-like gore erupted out of
his helmet and he tipped forward. Then it was all over.

“Telos!” Iresc breathed. “Little chatzers don’t need armor.”

The Eya’a walked past, unconcerned by the carnage all
around. Looking at Brandon, they still chattered on that high note, their
fingers semaphoring rapidly.

“We’d better follow them,” he said. As they walked away, he
looked back. The skull sat unharmed amidst the gore, its empty eyes gazing back
at him.

A few minutes later they turned a corner, and the point Marine’s
faceplate was washed by a glare of light. They moved forward slowly, jacs
ready, only a little reassured by the apparent nonchalance of the Eya’a walking
ahead of them.
Who knows what they can
tolerate?
Brandon thought.

Iresc, on point, peered through the opening, froze in
position, then backed away. “Nobody in there,” she said, her voice strained.
“Nobody’d want to be, for long.”

Brandon pushed past her. Every surface in the chamber was a
violent sea of moiré patterns that made his stomach lurch. Directly ahead of
him, beyond a bank of consoles and some sort of transparent dyplast screen, a
huge mound soared up about ten meters, its top a glare of light too bright to
look at.

Brandon checked his suit sensors. Despite the hellish
appearance of the chamber, there were no dangerous radiations—even the
temperature was only about twenty-five degrees. He walked in, half-aware of
Gwyn’s quick commands deploying the others in a defensive perimeter, and paced
carefully around the mound, stopping when he saw the gulf beyond. Then he
stepped to the edge and looked down.

Rings of light raced down the walls of the shaft, drawing
his eyes into infinity; he felt something pull at his mind, and he stepped back
again.

A motion above him caught his attention. Something was
coming down the well.

He retreated further, sensing the Marines flanking him. The
Eya’a stood silently to either side, still and expressionless.

The object was a sphere of some transparent material. It
reminded Brandon of Tate Kaga’s gee-bubble, with a small opaque platform inside.
A tall, heavy-shouldered man stood in the center of this platform, with
another, smaller man crouching at his feet, his face in his hands. As the
bubble came level with the edge of the floor, the standing one turned his head.
It was Jerrode Eusabian of Dol’jhar.

“There’s the logos-loving chatzer himself!” someone shouted,
and a streak of plasma lanced past Brandon from one of the Marines behind him,
splashing harmlessly off the barely-seen transparency of the ship.

The glare of the plasma beam underlit the Avatar’s face,
throwing his strong features into relief, but he did not flinch or change
expression. Only his hands moved, ceaselessly twisting a black silken cord
between his fingers.

Was this some kind of command module, then? A sense of sharp
alarm zinged through Brandon, chased by an almost overwhelming impulse to vault
over the intervening space, so he could get his hands around his enemy’s neck.

But then, clearer than speech and more intimate, came
Vi’ya’s thought:
No one controls the
station. It has awakened, and is autonomous. Eusabian has put himself beyond
anyone’s control, including his own.

Triumph seared through Gelasaar’s last living son, and
Brandon stepped forward. With a deliberate gesture he opened his faceplate and
triggered his interior helmet light to illuminate his features plainly. Then he
started his helmet imager to record the defeat of the Panarchy’s would-be
destroyer.

Eusabian’s hands stopped moving. His eyes widened.

Brandon smiled, lifted his hand, and sketched a Douloi
gesture of dismissal, master to servant.

The cord snapped thin between the Avatar’s hands. As
Eusabian slid inexorably below, Brandon watched the futile rage in his enemy’s
face, and he laughed, and reveled in how his hilarity measured its intensity in
Eusabian’s increased fury.

Then the bubble sank farther into the well, taking the
Avatar out of sight, down to whatever destiny he had chosen by yielding himself
up to the devices of the Ur.

When Eusabian was out of sight, Brandon heard the ghostly
echo of laughter in his mind, and every nerve attuned itself to Vi’ya’s
proximity. She was here—mere meters below him.

“The deck!” he shouted. “Help me!”

Under his direction the Marines’ gauntlets puckered open the
floor, and Vi’ya looked up at him. Brandon extruded a cable from one gauntlet.
Vi’ya hooked it into her belt and walked up the wall as he reeled it in.

There she was, tall and strong and black-eyed. He saw the
impact of her Dol’jharian presence on his Marine squad, who so shortly before
had gazed on the hereditary figurehead of her race. They stepped a pace back,
and she stood alone before him, weaponless, her rumpled flightsuit scorched by
jac-fire, her aspect cool and composed as always, except her gaze was neither
cool nor composed.

“Nice timing,” she said, and smiled.

He smiled back, wishing strongly that the watching Marines,
and the Eya’a, and the Suneater, and the damned servo-armor, would all conveniently
vanish.

Of course she read his thought, and the one after. She said
softly, “One to go.”

Brandon turned to Gwyn, who cleared his throat. “Landing
bay,” he said. “Iresc on point, Kellem cleanup. Let’s move!”

o0o

With the asteroid away, Nukiel could concentrate on the
battle with the
Satansclaw
. The same
obtained for the Rifter captain, and the battle was going badly for the
Mbwa Kali.
Her crew was performing
flawlessly, but the skipmissiles of the destroyer had grown so powerful that
even near misses were devastating to the battlecruiser’s systems.

The bridge jolted as the screens cleared. “Aft gamma ruptor
turret destroyed,” reported Damage Control after a moment.

“Tactical skip, now!” The fiveskip reengaged, sounding even
rougher. The engines were heating up as Nukiel threw the
Mbwa Kali
around as though it were a destroyer.

“We can’t take much more of this,” Efriq said.

“The longer we engage him, the longer someone else doesn’t
have to deal with him,” Nukiel replied.

Efriq shrugged. There was no answer to that, of course. “I
wonder who that Rifter is,” he mused. “Can’t be Y’Marmor. He never had that
kind of talent.”

Nukiel considered the tactical screen. Then he snapped out a
new set of orders.

“Doesn’t much matter. He’s brilliant no matter who he is.”

Then a new glyph on the tactical display caught his eye. For
a moment he couldn’t interpret it—a fleet of small ships? No, the asteroid.
Asteroids now. Shattered and dispersed, both by design and by some odd effect
of the skipmissile impact at the moment of skip, the long, narrow reef now
stretched over several light-seconds. Meanwhile, the battle with the destroyer
had carried the
Mbwa Kali
ahead and
to one side of the reef’s trajectory toward the skip-radius of the Suneater
system, still several light-minutes away. The glyph indicated dead-reckoning,
then changed to the green of a live sensor reading: even to the powerful
sensors of a battlecruiser the rocks were nearly invisible. The destroyer
probably couldn’t see them at all.

The idea blossomed full grown in his mind, as though the
Goddess herself had planted it there. “Hah!” A delighted laugh escaped from
him. “Navigation, belay that. New coordinates coming. Tactical, link to me.”

“What?” Efriq demanded. Nukiel explained swiftly as Rogan
listened also. “Iffy. Very iffy,” Efriq said. “But very clever—just what’s
needed against that chatzer.”

“I agree.” Rogan rubbed her eyes. “But look, we’ll end up
desperately close to radius, even if everything goes perfectly, and with a huge
real velocity inward. That energy sink will shut us down if we cross over, and
even if we don’t get gobbled up by the singularity, chances are the
companion’ll explode before we come out the other side.”

“No help for it,” said Nukiel. “It’s our best chance.”

Efriq shook his head. “So it is. And one for the books.”

“That depends on who’ll write the books. Let’s make sure
it’s the Navy, eh?”

o0o

As the logos harried the battlecruiser closer and closer
to the edge of the energy sink, Tallis, and his crew were seized by a kind of
manic exhilaration. It actually seemed as though they might survive this
horror.

By now the tactics of the logos were clear even to him: it
was forcing the battlecruiser closer and closer to the exclusion zone, cutting
down its degrees of freedom. Of course, the Panarchist captain was free to
decline the engagement, but he wouldn’t. Tallis wished he could, despite the
success he saw coming.
Juvaszt’ll just
order us to another battle.

He tabbed on the command link, rigidly controlling his
throat.
(Estimated time to destruction of
enemy?)
he queried.

(THREE-POINT-FIVE
MINUTES.)

Tallis cut the connection, hit it again to be sure, then
tabbed the link to Kira.
(Time for your
little trick, I think. The logos says less than four minutes.)

(You got it. Be ready,
it may be rough for a bit.)

(You call this easy?)

She didn’t reply.

Tallis glared at the main screen, flinching as a near miss
from the battlecruiser’s ruptors tore at the ship.

“Ruptor strike, aft port side. Minor damage,” DC reported.

They were within light-seconds of the exclusion zone now,
moving at an uncomfortably high real velocity. The stars slewed across the
screen, a targeting cross leaping into existence on a dot of light. A bar to
one side lengthened as the skip-missile approached full charge.

Suddenly Esbart’s console shrilled. “Trash reef on collision
course, closing at point-one-five cee!” the tech screamed.

Tallis cursed, slamming his fist down on the skip tab.

Nothing happened.

o0o

Ruonn approached the
Thrones of the Matria, walking proudly, his enormous shestek cradled in his
hands. The Mater shifted in the central Throne, waves of warm, excitingly
scented water slopping over the edge to lave his feet as he stopped and bowed.

“We honor Ruonn
dynar-Hyarmendil, now Potent.” The Mater’s voice sent thrills of anticipation
through him. “Most welcome was your data, the richest trove ever returned to
the Under.”

He was climbing into
the Throne with her now. She leaned back to receive him, opening to him her
rich vastness. His shestek sent wave after wave of incredible euphoria through
him as he entered her. She grunted with pleasure, the deep sound resonating
through him. He looked down, his desire sharpening at the sight of his immense
shestek buried within her.

Suddenly the Throne
Room shuddered around them. Water spilled out with a gush. Ruonn ignored it,
straining to push deeper into the Mother of Barca, but a horrible pain tore at
him. He looked down again in horror and disbelief

Around his shestek her
opening gaped, red and ringed with teeth.

The
Satansclaw
jolted violently, throwing Tallis out of his command pod, but the fall saved
his life as the forward bulkhead erupted with a stunning roar and several
streaks of light speared through the bridge. Esbart’s head disappeared in a
gout of steam and his body toppled convulsing to the floor. Screams resounded
around him as others were felled by white-hot fragments of the bulkhead and
secondary shrapnel.