"By the Blessed Gods," Sinklar whispered. No one could have survived that.
Somehow he got his wits together enough to pull Gretta up. Dazed, MacRuder gaped stupidly while blood ran out of his nose. Another shot ripped past Sinklar's ear. He charged for the far side of the avenue. Acting on instinct, he raised his rifle and blew the door before him apart, shoving his companions into the dark and the unknown.
"We play a deep game, Bruen." Magister Hyde drew an asthmatic breath, brows furrowed as he watched the inset monitor where the chestnut-haired woman systematically demolished boulders with a pulse pistol. "The problem with psychological weapons is their inherent unreliability."
They sat side by side on a stone bench carved into the back of a rocky balcony that clung to the basalt cliff overlooking the Makarta Valley. The misty clouds had failed to defeat the inevitable sun for the first time in days. Now the valley burst with greenery and the sun warmed their retreat.
Bruen nodded soberly. "Circles within circles, my friend."
"Probability is one thing," Hyde interrupted himself to cough, "but the human brain? Hah! For centuries greater minds than ours have quested and poked and prodded, seeking the answers of the psyche. It makes me nervous to be cast in the lot of a god."
Bruen grunted at the monitor where Arta Fera, her lithe form outlined in the evening light, fired the last charge in the pulse pistol. Another of the rocks on the hillside exploded in a gout of dust.
"You think she hit the right one?"
Bruen moved to ease an ache in his hip. "Oh, it was. Look at the expression on her face. See the feral delight? No doubt about it, her instincts are fully developed. Now all they need is channeling, direction."
Hyde's voice dripped with distaste. "Spying! Like Imperial Security agents!"
"Now is an odd time to condemn our ancient pastime, Magister," Bruen countered sourly. Damn it, if only he didn't agree in this instance. If it were anyone but Arta, he'd. ...
I've become a senile idiot! There's no place for sappy sentimentality. She's not your daughter, she's no one, Bruen. A subject, a soldier for the cause.
Wars are not won by generals who dote on their personnel!
"But she is one of ours," Hyde protested.
Bruen dropped his sagging chin into a palm and cocked his head, eying his old companion. He kept his voice soft, serious, forced to conform with what he knew was rational. "Is she really? After we placed her with the Etarians for so long, after we brought her so far, can you call her ours?"
Hyde blinked owlishly. "Well ... er ... she has done remarkably well on the exams. Her training—as you can see—through subliminal quanta seeding has made her the most incredibly talented. ..."
"Tool," Bruen finished, his voice a blunt monotone. He shook his head, unwilling to meet Hyde's eyes. Instead he touched a stud and the holo of Arta Fera reloading her pulse pistol vanished.
Disappointed with himself, his eyes searched the pastoral heaven of the small valley that spread below them. Cattle grazed unmolested among coves of rich thick grass. Trees shrouded dark granite outcrops while multicolored flowers carpeted verdant pastures.
"We've done so much, my friend," Hyde reminded, consolingly. "After all these years, after all the sacrifice. . . ."
"What's one more young girl, eh?" Bruen snorted sourly and rubbed his deep-set eyes. "Where does it stop, Hyde? Almost three hundred years, now, I've watched it. In my lifetime perhaps one hundred billion people have died in pain and misery, their planets blasted by war, scoured by radiation, disease, and climatic upheaval." He looked over, blue eyes mild. "I ask you, do you see any improvement in the human condition? At times I get the feeling we're some sort of malignant experiment."
Hyde placed a reedlike hand on Bruen's shoulder. "Remember our creed Brother.
Life is knowledge and knowledge is energy. Energy is eternal, it can't be destroyed, only dissipated through entropy." Hyde coughed again, grimacing as he spit phlegm into the bushes behind him. "Death is an inevitability, but it isn't forever. Eventually it all goes back to God."
Bruen granted him a wry smile. "Forever, no. The universe continues to expand in places while other areas are drawn to the gravitational wells of the Great Attractors. So we're either at the crest of the expansion or the beginning of the contraction. Either way, the end won't come for another fifteen billion years or so." He pointed a crooked finger at Hyde. "How much suffering can you fit into fifteen billion years before we are all returned to Godhead?"
"Life is more than suffering, Brother. Life is also warm sunny mornings, birds singing, a comfortable—"
"Bah!"
"You're a bitter old man!" Hyde slapped his knees and leaned back, his sagging pale face exposed to the warmth of the sun.
"Almost twenty thousand are dead in Kaspa. And here, you and I sit in the sun and talk of pleasure? Our worlds are about to be plunged into a maelstrom.
Within years, Brother, entire planets will be scorched to molten rock. What madness is ours?"
Hyde coughed again, working his mouth uncomfortably. "All the more reason for us to enjoy those few moments the present provides, Magister. Remember your creed. There is nothing beyond the HereNow. The past is simply stored energy in your mind. The future consists of probability horizons—the bouncing of the quanta toward an expected observation. What you fear is only described by those Quantum wave functions inside your mind. That future isn't real."
"Yet." Bruen paused. "So, like all reality, eventually you can trace it down to nothingness. I still fear."
Bruen caught movement in the valley and turned to see three horses emerge from a stand of trees several hundred yards away. They trotted to a small stream and dipped their heads to drink. In silence and appreciation, he watched them, aware of the thick white pillows of cloud that rose far to the north over Kaspa. Prophetic! Even now, according to his instructions, the resistance shoud be blowing up Regan command concentrations. More blood on his hands.
"I suppose it bothers me that we had no choice." Bruen laced his parchment-skinned fingers over a bony knee. "I don't like the feeling of being a pawn Brother. It appalled me when I watched the old Magisters fall under the sway of the machine. Nothing has changed since those days."
"Only now, you must deal with the machine." Hyde dropped his head, bloated features uneasy.
"I wonder who fools who?" Bruen granted with a dry cackle. "Which of us is really the manipulator, Brother?"
In a lower tone, Hyde added, "You're the only one we've got, Bruen. No one else has your strength. No one else is smart enough, strong enough, capable of dancing with such delicate balance."
"Indeed, well, I've fooled it this far—I think. Energy is forever, eh? Well, Brother, if you find me dead on my pallet one of these days, what are you going to do?" Bruen cocked an eye at Hyde's bulky body.
The Magister coughed and spat again. "Die of my collapsing lungs on the spot so I don't have to place myself under that accursed helmet."
"Not a viable solution."
"Neither is your death." Hyde chuckled and ended up coughing again. "No, I'll kill myself before I sit in the chair and put those terrible wires over my head. The Mag Comm would peel my mind like an onion . . . and all would be for naught."
They sat in silence, Hyde brooding over his inadequacies. Why did it all seem so damned hopeless?
"We still haven't received word of which way the Star Butcher will jump."
Bruen smiled as one of the horses, a dappled gray, dropped its head and lifted its tail, playfully pushing a muscular black to one side. In an instant, they were puffing and bouncing, trotting along in their equine game of tag. Horses had it so good on Targa.
"Predictions tend toward Rega," Hyde tilted his head back and pinched his nose, sniffing at his clogged sinuses. In a nasal voice he continued. "Rega appears to offer Staffa more than the Sassans would. The Lord Commander can't have much empathy with a bat-brained theocracy based on sybaritic sycophancy.
That fat Sassan p
ustulation? A God? Staffa must laugh himself into fits at the idea." Hyde waved his swollen hands. "No. Rega, for all its faults, will at least appeal to Staffa's mutated sense of respect."
"An odd position, Hyde, to be second-guessing that man." Bruen moved to spare the insistent ache in his hip. "Of them all, he's the least predictable."
"Come, Brother," Hyde growled. "Staffa has no secrets. Money and status drive him. So does power. A simple—if brilliant—man. Sassa and Rega know the game is almost up. He who seduces Staffa with the greatest number of baubles and promises gets the whole of Free Space. He who misses the opportunity is lost."
Bruen objected, "You claim Rega has more to offer the Lord Commander than Sassa does. I concur; but consider this permutation. In the end, Staffa will have only one power to deal with. I don't think he'll be happy playing policeman in the long run. His people can't take that drudgery. Staff a knows that."
"So?"
"So Staffa will prey on the winner." Bruen sighed as the horses raced out of sight.
"And it would be much easier to turn and destroy Sassan God-Emperors whom he has no respect for."
Bruen shifted again in an attempt to curry favor from his hip. "It would leave him feeling more comfortable."
"You talk as if the Praetor's creation is a human being."
Bruen touched the stud, the holo forming again to show Arta Fera inside the caverns of Makarta where she placed the pistol in the weapons rack. She stopped, an uneasy frown on her perfect forehead, as if she still couldn't comprehend her talent for destruction.
"Maybe he is. He loved once."
Hyde laughed loudy, ending in a fit of coughing. He wiped his eyes and stared at his old friend. "Becoming maudlin, Bruen?"
The Magister shook his head. "No, Hyde, old friend," Bruen responded sadly. "I just wonder what right two doddering old men like us have to meddle with the future of humanity. Are we saviors, Hyde ... or puppets of evil and death?"
CHAPTER 6
In the darkness, Staffa kar Therma lay on his back. Around him the soft whispers of Chryslas humming presence should have reassured him. Instead he replayed that final moment in his mind when Chrysla's guns blew the Praetor's battleship into slag—and with it, the only woman he'd ever loved.
I killed her. How could I have known? He reached up to rub his eyes with thumb and forefinger. And my son? Does he live? Or did I kill him, too? The Seddi . . . the Seddi . would know.
I What would his son be like? The old question that had plagued him for years nagged at his thoughts. He tried to sort out the emotions—and failed. Attempts at thinking rationally ended only in confusion, and he began to comprehend the conditioning that had been triggered by the Praetor's words.
"I understand now, old man, I was your experiment, wasn't I? That's where the pride in your eyes came from. You took an orphaned boy and used him as a behavioral experiment. With the training machines, you stifled my emotions, turned me into a biologica robot. Rational, logical, without a shred of emotion except the desire to succeed.
"My God, Praetor, what a cunning monster you were." Through the emotional haze, the pieces began to fall into place. But where did the reality lie? Had his brain been normal before, or had the psychological trigger released him from a conditioned state? He took a deep breath, stilling his thoughts, stifling the emotions, as he reviewed what he knew about brain physiology and chemistry.
Based on a complex interaction of physiology and chemistry, the brain created its own criteria for normal behavior. In doing so, it built a network of neural pathways that created memory and allowed it to lea new adaptive strategies.
"And all of that has been overturned by the Praetor's hidden trigger." Staffa balled a fist and smacked the sleeping pallet. "So, what happened? The Praetor's words triggered a neural response that interacted with the brain's feedback to maintain chemical balance. But which state is the real me?"
And there was the real problem. Had the Praetor's conditioning denied him part of himself for all those years, or did the key words, "construct, machine, and creation" trigger an emotional imbalance calculated to destroy him in the end?
The answer lay moldering in the Praetor's grave.
The fact remained that the subliminal cues that stimulated his brain to slow production of corticosteroids, serotonin, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine had been given and the old balance had been upset.
Staffa stood and paced restlessly. The answer had to lie in the Praetor's last words. Sometime, in that discussion, the old viper would have given him a clue. Even amid the destruction of his world, the Praetor couldn't have resisted one final test, but what? Staffa replayed the conversation in the Myklenian hospital word for word. So much had been said, so many meanings tendered. But which phrase held the clue?
Staffa frowned and propped his chin on a fist. He'll bet on my pride and arrogance. Staffa smiled grimly. Yes, that's his way. The words, "no soul" recurred in Staffa's memory; the old man had harped on that. "No responsibility to God? ... I bred that out of you . . . banished it from your personality ... a creature without conscience . . . money and power motivate yo. . . ."
Staffa's expression hardened. "And what else is there, Praetor? How else does a man measure his worth? Power is the only measure ... as you taught me so well."
The eerie squawl of his son's cry pierced the years, wailing, condemning.
Staffa closed his eyes, only to be haunted by Chrysla's sad eyes. He couldn't avoid the gentle censure, the rebuke that lay in that yellow gaze. An invisible fist gripped his heart, squeezing as if to force the life from that throbbing organ.
"I didn't know he'd taken you," Staffa whispered to the specter. "No wonder you disappeared so thoroughly. In all of Free Space, only the Praetr could have bought such secrecy. I should have known, my love. I should have known."
His son's onely cry left his soul shivering. Guilt flooded him and mixed with the grief. Why is this happening to me?
The Praetor had claimed his conscience was reptilian. "And I told him I had no interest in conscience." The man who would unite all of Free Space in order to challenge the Forbidden Borders could only be burdened by conscience. "Don't you see, Praetor? The stakes are so high. As long as humanity is divided, as long as we feud and fight among ourselves, we'll never break this cage that binds us."
He shook his head, glaring up at his memories. "That's the essential point you missed, Praetor. You forgot that you taught me to dream—to aspire to ever greater things. I must rule Free Space."
. . . And you'll finally fail. . . fail. . . fail. . . .
Staffa spun on his heel, powered by a sudden surge of adrenaline. A wicked smile spread across his hard lips. "That's the key, isn't it Praetor?
Throughout that entire conversation, you mocked me, knowing full well that you'd conditioned sentimentality out of my personality—banished, as you so aptly claimed. That's why it surprised you that I loved Chrysla. She could have broken the conditioning in the end. You had to get her away from me. It would have ruined the experiment—tainted your 'greatest creation.' "
Staffa laughed sourly. "My Achilles' heel. Inhumanity. Lack of conscience.
That's why you called me a machine." Staffa's eyes narrowed into slits. "You left me only half a man, Praetor."
But had those three words released all of him? Had they broken the conditioning completely? Anger blended with frustration. "You've got to find yourself, Staffa, or the Praetor will win in the end. If you'd see your dream come true, you must know what it is to be human, as the Praetor said, to 'feel the spirit that breathes within the species.' "
He filled his lungs, holding his breath to still the sudden pounding anxiety in his heart. "Praetor, first, I will find my son, if he lives. And then I will find myself."
"Don't tickle," she warned as his fingers slipped in light caress along the silken cool skin on the backs of her thighs.
Drawing a deep breath, Tybalt the Imperial Seventh let it whistle past his lips. "Why do you do this
with me? You don't love me, Ily."
She turned, flipping a wealth of gleaming black hair over her shoulder so she could face him on the rumpled sleeping surface. Her long legs had wadded the golden sheets to a crumpled pile during the heat of their passionate coupling.
She moved closer, as if drawing on his body heat, and extended a muscular leg over his belly. One of her breasts flattened against his arm. The contrast between the firm whiteness of her skin and his rich black tones absorbed him for a moment.
He gazed into her piercing black eyes so close to his own.
"Maybe I ike the taste of power, Imperial Seventh," her voice came as sultry as the musk of her cooling body. "Maybe you represent the ultimate triumph."
He shuddered slightly as she began nibbling at his chest, her pointed tongue circling his nipple to send chilling thrills down his spine.
"And you never worry about the ramifications of discovery?" he managed, the words taking all his concentration. Thick black hair tickled his skin.
She laughed. "By whom? Your precious wife? The Empress knows already. Neither Mareeah Rath nor her fawning family pose any—"
They know?" A tingle of foreboding flickered to life below his heart. He stared through narrowed eyes at the rich Vermilion silks that draped above.
Ily laughed again, exposing white teeth while her eyes crinkled with humor.
"Of course, Lord. Shhh! Don't worry. It's taken care of. No one will cross me Tybalt. No one!" Her expression hardened to emphasize that fact. "Perhaps you might not be in a position to threaten your wife—or her powerful family for that matter." Her tongue traced his upper lip as she moved onto him. Her breath carried a scent
of mint as she added, "On the other hand, the House of Rath fears one of its young lords might be arrested for treason, theft, graft, or any of a number of suitable charges. I'd see him convicted, Tybalt—and condemned to death."
A warm relief washed through him, replacing that momentary fear. "And should the Council suspect? The petty—"
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