The Phoenix in Flight

by Sherwood Smith

  The picture that emerged was fragmentary, but damning. As Cheruld had feared, Galen was to die as well. There were hints of more widespread action, even against the Panarch himself.

  And all of it pointed back to Dol’jhar.

  There was much still unexplained. Why had that message come to him in the first place? Was someone in Dol’jhar’s employ playing a double game? More important, why did so many of the message headers imply the same impossible timing as Byron’s strange message to him, as though they had been received before they were sent? His blurry eyes returned to the Heart of Kronos—had the Ur who’d created it mastered time as well as space before they vanished from the galaxy? What did Dol’jhar hope to gain from its possession? And what would they lose without it?

  That is the heart of the matter. Cheruld smiled sourly at the pun. Without the artifact’s arrival, he’d never have suspected a thing. Whoever had arranged for it to be sent to him for safekeeping had obviously been as ignorant of the implications of its physical properties as Cheruld himself had been until he picked it up. “Heavy but light”... He probably thought of it as a kind of soap bubble. I wonder if he even knew I once studied briefly under a man who’d actually seen the Heart in person?

  Likely not. It wasn’t in his CV.

  Cheruld flexed his trembling hands. No, Dol’jhar had seen only the noderunning talent that had gained him his title, the almost unconscious, intuitive grasp of structure that enabled him to explore the deepest reaches of the DataNet—that, and his connection, through Sara, to Semion and Galen.

  Galen, the Panarch’s second son, the poet, the dreamer with his quicksilver sensitivity, had a core of very real strength. He had quickly won both Cheruld and Sara’s hearts, that summer years ago, during their university days: it seemed only right when Cheruld’s beloved Sara fell in love with Galen.

  Of course Galen would make a better Panarch, but it had long seemed that Semion was the Panarch’s chosen heir; his influence over the Navy more than implied it. So Cheruld had gladly joined the Poets, and not long after, had been promoted into his sensitive position at Qoholeth, the closest Anachronics Hub to Dol’jhar.

  The lies and insinuations and manipulations all seemed so obvious, now.

  He shook his head, then regretted it as pain flared behind his eyes. He was forsworn, but he would have his revenge on those who’d used him. It had taken him three shifts to undo the work of years, stretched his noderunning talents to the utmost in an attempt to negate the web Dol’jhar had spun around him, and he might still win.

  Maybe. Sara, the one person he was fairly certain he could still reach—but even if the tortuous method of communication he’d been forced to use to reach her hadn’t been compromised, given her hatred of Semion, what could he say to convince her to stop the heir presumptive’s assassination? She wouldn’t understand the significance of the Heart of Kronos. Who would? Very few. He needed more time...

  But he was out of time.

  Cheruld’s hands flew over the console again, and a brightly colored space-time graph windowed up on the screen. Red lines signified Dol’jhar’s plots, green the progress of the information he would shortly dispatch to the authorities on Arthelion and Lao Tse, to Galen’s Talgarth, and to Sara on Narbon. Pale blue spheres, fuzzy with the indeterminacy imposed by relativistic communications, indicated the various planets. The red lines fell short of Narbon, and Talgarth; the blue spheres of both Semion’s and Galen’s worlds were transfixed by green shafts of light and life. Both lines reached Lao Tse, where the Panarch’s well-publicized schedule would have him, at the same time. A red line pierced Arthelion ahead of the green. Recalling what he knew of Brandon nyr-Arkad, Cheruld felt only a trace of regret.

  Sara might feel Brandon’s death more keenly. Cheruld had been careful to keep from her the knowledge that his death, too, was part of the conspiracy. His message was phrased to lead her to assume that he’d discovered the plot against Brandon just as he had that against Galen. She must not be distracted by grief from doing what she would hate—they both would hate. Need was greater.

  He closed the window with a stab at the console. As Aegios Prime of an Anachronics Hub, which rationalized the timing errors that inevitably built up in a network based on ship-borne data, he knew too well the fallibility of the graph. At this moment—a concept, he reflected grimly, that itself had no meaning—someone else halfway across the Thousand Suns could demand a graph of the same situation, and get a different answer. The DataNet and all its complex calculations of Standard Time were just a gloss of the unyielding vastness of space-time. But humanity persisted in imposing order on disorder, insisted on comprehension of the incomprehensible... and he could hope.

  It was all he had now.

  But first he had to finish the message to Sara, to try to save the life of the man they both loathed.

  “There’s nothing more I can do. I only hope my message to Talgarth will indeed get through in time. You must tell Semion, regardless of what it costs me or you. Too much depends on us now—only he can mobilize the naval detachment at Narbon with any chance of stopping whatever is intended to follow his assassination—the deaths of the three heirs must be only a small part of Dol’jhar’s plan. It’s the only way we can smash Eusabian’s plot before it starts.”

  He looked down at the holo of Sara on his desk—clear, sea-green eyes under a crown of ruddy hair, exquisitely formed features, the curve of her mouth expressive not only of humor, but her innate good nature. The thought that he would never see her again was agonizing.

  “If I get away, I’ll contact you when I can.” He swallowed convulsively and tabbed COMMIT.

  Now only two things remained. Cheruld pulled a newly-addressed ParcelNet package toward him, his stomach lurching again at the dissonance of its content’s weight and inertia. This box was larger, for he’d put the Heart of Kronos in an Alhaman puzzle-box, hoping that the time needed to open it might give the recipient more warning of the strangeness within, and spare him some small part of the shock Cheruld had felt on first sight of the little sphere. Fatigue and the inevitable nervous tremor made his fingers clumsy as he sealed it and then ejected from the console the message chip he’d prepared with a copy of all the data he’d discovered and a brief note of explanation.

  This was the one action he could take he felt was sure to succeed. His old tutor, one of the few people in the Thousand Suns who might know what to do with the Heart of Kronos, could not, would not, be part of any conspiracy. Once dispatched into the untraceable intricacy of the automated ParcelNet system, the artifact would arrive well after whatever was to happen had happened, and as the old man was long retired from court to his old university, on a planet well outside the Tetrad Centrum, the Heart would be safe from whatever convulsions might follow the fulfillment or frustration of Dol’jhar’s plans.

  Cheruld hissed with vexation as his fingers lost their grip and the chip dropped into the litter of papers and chips on his desk. Blinking sweat from his clouding vision, he retrieved the chip and pressed it into the top of the ParcelNet box, and the memory plastic swallowed it up. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet and crossed the room to the monneplat. It took both of his trembling hands to get the package deposited within it.

  The hatch closed, and Cheruld shuffled back to his desk. He blinked stupidly at the blurred shape of the complex glyph on the console screen that represented the hardest work of his life as a noderunner, and the end of his life as Aegios at Qoholeth.

  He tabbed ACCEPT and the glyph spun into a blur and disappeared. Within minutes, every trace of his activities since would be purged from the system, and there would be no way to undo his work.

  He staggered as the remains of the drug shredded his equilibrium. He fumbled for his valise, and leaned against the door to his suite, sweat dripping down the sides of his face as he took a last look around, at the elegance and quiet wealth he would probably never enjoy again. Then he thumbed the door open and forced himself through.
<
br />   o0o

  “Taking a little vacation, Aegios?”

  Cheruld turned abruptly away from the viewport and the planet below, shock flashing through him, leaving him cold and a little sick. He hadn’t registered for the shuttle under his real name or title, and he didn’t know these two men.

  He glanced up and down the corridor, but there was no one else around. They had chosen their time well. One of them raised his hand and pointed a dull black tube at his face.

  There was a soft click, and Martin Cheruld had just enough time to comprehend that he hadn’t been killed before the jet of gas turned his mind off.

  FOUR

  DOL’JHAR

  Another storm was building, the worst yet as winter yielded to what passed for spring on Dol’jhar, yanking savagely at the tower of Hroth D’Ocha. The motion churned Barrodagh’s stomach into an acid froth that burned the back of his throat. As the culmination of his lord’s paliach loomed ever closer, so the pressure on him grew, oppressing him by the constant sense that he had overlooked something.

  His fingers clenched on the flimsies he was poring over as his console chimed for attention.

  “Speak,” he said, letting none of his impatience into his voice.

  “Tellimag reporting, Rifter fleet liaison department. Tillimar byn-Amal reports a change of command on the Skullwind and requests the command ciphers for Fleet 10.” The other Bori’s voice lightened. “There’s an interesting visual, if you like.”

  “Put it on.”

  Barrodagh’s console windowed up a tableau that surprised a snort of laughter from him. The scene was the bridge of the Skullwind, the Rifter destroyer posted as the flagship of Fleet Ten, now in position for its part in the coming attack. The bulky figure of Tillimar byn-Amal filled the screen, frozen by the circuitry as he held aloft the clumsily hacked-off head of his father, Amal byn-Serafiny, its face frozen in a rictus of pain and surprise.

  Barrodagh laughed again as he noticed that the corpse’s nose had been bitten off. The lurid emotionalism of their Rifter allies was a source of endless amusement to one accustomed to the cool, almost passionless savagery of Dol’jhar. He lingered on the picture, trying to decide which was uglier: the corpse’s disfigured face or the scaly, red-cracked visage of the parricide, distorted with both triumph and a loathsome skin condition.

  “Give him the ciphers,” he said.

  Barrodagh leaned back in his chair as his subordinate signed off, leaving the frozen image on-screen. I definitely backed the right chuqath in that fight. He grinned again: byn-Amal’s disease made him the very image of the scaly chuqaths, the savage scavengers whose battles in the pits of the work-dorms were a favorite amusement of Dol’jharian laborers.

  Now Barrodagh would activate the sleeper on the Skullwind to make sure he received regular and accurate reports on the true state of affairs on board, just as he had from byn-Amal while his father was in command.

  He stretched, his stomach easing in spite of the swaying of the tower; he felt secure in the knowledge that no Rifter was a match for one who had survived twenty years of upper-level infighting in the bureaucracy of Dol’jhar. Rifters prized themselves on their independence, but those now allied with Dol’jhar had discovered how vulnerable a ship dependent on the Urian hyperrelay for power was to Barrodagh’s displeasure. It had taken only one application of the savage Dol’jharian technology of pain to an erring member of the Rift Sodality, combined with the certainty of discovery the episode had demonstrated, to convince all of them to behave during the long wait between the refit of their ships with the Urian technology and the promised orgy of looting that would follow the attack. Byn-Amal’s request was just one more confirmation of Barrodagh’s total control of the situation.

  The console chimed again. The sense of security made Barrodagh feel expansive as he leaned forward and tabbed it to accept a vid connection.

  His good mood vanished when Morrighon’s lumpy face filled the screen.

  “Senz-lo Barrodagh, Morrighon reporting.” Barrodagh almost winced. He was beginning to regret having excused Morrighon from reports in person, since he apparently had little sense of the relative importance of the tasks assigned him. The pain of traversing the high-gee corridors might have deterred much of this foolishness.

  “I’m trying to complete the processing of Thuriol’s queue that you assigned me.” Morrighon paused, probably hoping for an acknowledgement, but Barrodagh said nothing. Knowing Morrighon’s obsessive attention to detail, Barrodagh had told him to organize Thuriol’s message archives. Lacking a security level high enough to read them, all he could do was organize them by date and the code name of the recipient—the perfect job for Morrighon. Others would analyze the resulting mass of data to winnow out whatever else Thuriol might have been up to.

  The whine in Morrighon’s voice intensified. “I am distressed to have to report that once again my duties have been interfered with by those who consider such activities an amusing use of their time.”

  What is it now? The ingenuity that lower-level Catennach in applied to tormenting those even lower in the hierarchy never ceased to amaze Barrodagh. If they spent half as much effort on advancing themselves as they do calculating just how far they can go in sabotaging each other without risking reprimand themselves...

  Yes, but that would leave them free to attempt sabotaging him. Which was why he didn’t interfere.

  He nodded slightly, encouraging Morrighon. He could, of course, just cut him off, but he’d long ago learned that rudeness was a weapon to be reserved for worthy opponents, and furthermore, that even the slightest courtesy to the lowliest was a powerful tool for eliciting useful information about the high-level Catennach who could sabotage him.

  “This time, someone tampered with Thuriol’s archives in an attempt to compromise my work.” Morrighon’s mouth creased in prim triumph. “But they were careless, and I found what purported to be a system acknowledgement of a message, but one of which there is no record, and which furthermore would have been sent after his transfiguration, which is obviously impossible.”

  Barrodagh nodded again automatically, his mind spinning off on another track as Morrighon whined on about other slights and pranks he’d endured in Barrodagh’s service, and then the sense of what the factotum had said detonated in his brain.

  An unrecorded message sent after Thuriol’s death.

  Either that was underlings playing their games... but that was unlikely, not after Thuriol had been subjected to the mindripper. Bori tended to avoid even mention of someone’s name after they’d suffered so terrifying an end, lest they somehow be implicated.

  Or...

  Gods and demons, Thuriol had rigged a revenge worm!

  Barrodagh’s stomach lurched and the back of his throat burned as his motion-sickness returned full force. It took every bit of control developed over decades of deadly bureaucratic infighting to prevent Barrodagh from screaming an interruption at Morrighon as the other man nattered on, oblivious to the implications of what he had uncovered. Instead, he raised a hand, his fingers stiff. Morrighon instantly fell silent.

  Barrodagh consciously lowered his hand, and forced a smile, speaking in a mild tone. “You are quite right, Morrighon. These pranks have gone too far, and I will have them looked into. Please forward the compromised data to me so that we can get to the bottom of this.”

  It was unnecessary to add the word “immediately,” as Morrighon could be trusted to... yes, Barrodagh’s console was already blinking with incoming data.

  “Your efficiency is commendable,” Barrodagh continued. “I will have your Vox Populi account credited with a bonus.”

  Morrighon’s image vanished. Barrodagh tabbed up the relayed data, sick with certainty. The acknowledgement of the revenge worm’s message had come straight from...

  Cheruld. Aegios of the Qoholeth Anachronics Hub, from which Panarchic courier ships, the fastest means of communication in the Thousand Suns, were regularly dispatched to major Panarchic
centers. Arthelion, Narbon, Talgarth, Lao Tse... Worse, the man to whom the Heart of Kronos had been sent.

  Barrodagh stabbed at his console, requesting a secure connection to the hyperwave-equipped vessel stationed at Qoholeth, through which Thuriol’s messages been transmitted to Cheruld. While he waited, his mind spun in wild surmise. The revenge message, whatever it had been, had been acknowledged two weeks previously, but Barrodagh would have heard immediately had there been any interruption in message traffic through Cheruld. Morrighon had said “system acknowledgement,” an automated process. Could Cheruld somehow have overlooked the message? Its content would likely have been quite oblique, to protect Thuriol in the event the worm was discovered before it was triggered. Could Cheruld have misunderstood it?

  You’re grasping at Minea’s tattered hem, he told himself. He had to be prepared for the worst, or he would be swept away by events.

  The console windowed up the face of the Catennach comm officer on the Altar of Dol.

  “Senz-lo Barrodagh,” the woman said as memory supplied her name: Dulathor.

  “I require an immediate status report on Martin Cheruld.”

  Dulathor nodded officiously. “He was observed trying to board an out-system shuttle.”

  Hope died and terror clawed its way up inside Barrodagh. He did get the message! What has he been doing for the past two weeks? At least the Heart of Kronos was still safe in the ParcelNet.

  Dulathor’s lack of surprise meant that she assumed he’d found out about Cheruld’s defection by other means. He would not disabuse her of the notion—the reputation for omniscience he’d long cultivated was a strong disincentive to betrayal. But he needed to know more.

  “I assume you have followed your standing orders?” He let nothing of his urgency into his voice.