The Phoenix in Flight

by Sherwood Smith

  “You will do what you think is right,” Omilov said. “Until then, permit me to handle this in my own way.”

  Osri gave a perfunctory nod. “Very well. I will wish you a good night, then.”

  “Yes, good night, son.”

  Deralze stepped back into the shadows of a corner. Osri passed at a fast walk, looking to neither right nor left. Deralze followed, now convinced that Osri was no threat. By the time his leave ended, Deralze and Brandon would be beyond the reach of the authorities.

  o0o

  Omilov gazed up at the smiling gray-blue eyes in the pleasant round face with its crown of curling reddish hair, but his mind formed an image of the young man in the guest room at the end of the hall. “Ah, Ilara,” he whispered, “should I stop him? What would you have me do?”

  The ever-young face gazed off into a distance where his eyes could not follow, a faint, tender smile curving her lips, her small rounded hands relaxed on the treasured book of ancient poems. She had given her life for duty, victim of a man and a world to whom poetry and laughter were weaknesses to be scorned and crushed, and the Thousand Suns were the poorer for it.

  He thought of her oldest son, hardening inexorably into the same sort of tyrant his grandfather had been. Gelasaar loves Semion, trusts him, and sees nothing. And no one can tell him. Galen has walled himself away on Talgarth, and now Brandon seems to be running away. How much we need you now, Ilara.

  Omilov slipped into unhappy memory of the whipsaw emotions of those days, twenty years past: the euphoric victory at Acheront, the Kyriarch Ilara’s insistence on heading the Trucial Commission, and the horrible misunderstanding of Dol’jharian customs that had doomed her and every member of the commission, victims of the vengeful savagery of Jerrode Eusabian.

  How could Gelasaar show him mercy after that? But Omilov knew that the Panarch had acted as his murdered wife would have had it, yielding to the demands of statecraft for the greater good.

  His eyes blurred as he blinked away the tears, and the portrait acquired a near-numinous aura to him, as if the young woman there were merely between breaths, and might momentarily stir. Then the sense of closeness, of presence, faded, and he was alone. He sighed and quoted softly, from the poet whose works had been closest to Ilara’s heart:

  May’t not be said, that her grave shall restore

  Her greater, purer, firmer than before?

  Heaven may say this, and joy in’t, but can wee

  Who live, and lacke her, here this vantage see?

  TWO

  CHARVANN MINUS THREE LIGHT-WEEKS

  Hreem chaka-Jalashalal lay sated in the aftermath of passion, watching through heavy-lidded eyes as his lover Norio restlessly activated the telltales on the bridge of the Flower of Lith. The big vidscreen in Hreem’s cabin sprang to life with a wide-angle view of the primary crew alert at their consoles, with the top of Hreem’s empty command pod just visible in the foreground.

  The bridge was quiet, the subdued whirring of the tianqi the only sound other than an occasional soft bleep from Erbee’s console: bored by the long wait, the scantech was playing solo-Phalanx again. The long-faced Rifter sucked his lower lip as he stabbed at the computer pads. Irritation surged in Hreem, dispelling the pleasant lassitude.

  Norio’s slender finger stroked down the inside of Hreem’s arm, evoking an echo of the ecstasy just past. “You know he’s alert, Jala. He needs constant stimulation.” The tempath turned his finger over and whispered his fingernail over a qi point with unerring accuracy. Hreem shivered.

  “Yeah. But he’s programmed it to lose. His granny’s pet wattle could beat him, otherwise.”

  Norio’s full lips quirked in a smile. “And you do not set up your opponents to lose?”

  The Rifter captain snorted, and let his irritation leak away. Hreem knew how good Erbee was at sniffing out the faint energy traces emitted by the ships the Flower of Lith preyed on. The buck-toothed Rifter with his vacant, pimply face definitely paid his way, and he’d saved the Lith not a few times when the powerful predators of the Panarch’s Navy had sought them in a deadly game of hide-or-be-zapped.

  At the nav console, Bargun said, “Next drunkwalk leg coming up in 3... 2... 1...”

  The game noise from Erbee’s console fell silent as the scantech straightened up. Hreem felt an almost subliminal pulse as the ship’s fiveskip engaged briefly. He found himself holding his breath until Erbee slumped back into his chair. “No traces,” the scantech said, and resumed his game.

  “Where’s that blunge-face Tallis Y’Marmor, anyway?” said Alluwan at Damage Control. “We’ve been drunkwalking for six hours now on this damn rendezvous watch. You’d think even a maggot-brain like him would be able to find a beacon half a light day across.”

  Hreem hated waiting like this, sitting in the middle of nowhere in particular, no rocks or ice to hide behind, while the signal-sphere of the rendezvous beacon they’d deployed grew ever larger. Even though the ship was skipping a few light seconds every few minutes on a semi-random path, to avoid being an easy target, it still made him nervous.

  Norio tapped at the console. Hreem felt the shift in airflow as a new complex of scents slowly pervaded the room.

  Hreem let out his breath as his anxiety diminished. “You oughta send that combo to the bridge,” he said. Norio was a master with the tianqi, the environmental conditioners fundamental to spaceflight.

  “They’re getting a different mix. More alertness needed up there than here.” Norio smiled and stroked Hreem’s leg. “At least right now.”

  On the vidscreen, Garesh turned away from the Engineering console where she was running some diagnostics. “We oughta just move in on Charvann. We got enough ships to take it. Not like Satansclaw is gonna add much. Tallis Y’Marmor thinks he’s got a big one, but he don’t know what to do with it.” A couple of the crew chuckled. Garesh preened, clearly enjoying the attention her youth and the curves displayed by her tight coveralls brought her.

  “Tell that to Barrodagh,” said Dyasil, the comtech. “He cut us orders to wait for Tallis. You wanna play with Evodh and his mindripper, like Jomsinn on the Basilisk’s Bride? I can show you the vid again, if you want.”

  Nobody answered. Hreem knew they were all remembering the vid Barrodagh had made of that Rifter captain’s fate, looped on the hyperwave for two ship’s days, each time ending with Barrodagh saying, You will attack where you are ordered, when you are ordered. You will not loot any location on the proscribed list, and if you are issued specific instructions or limitations, you will obey them exactly.

  Hreem grimaced. In the long career of piracy and mayhem that had made him one of the most wanted men in the Thousand Suns, he had knowingly killed hundreds of people—that was his business and he lost no sleep over it. Sometimes you held on to enemies you really hated and played a little before you killed them. The Dol’jharian taste for endlessly protracted pain was foreign to him.

  But Barrodagh holds the inner orbit. Hreem’s thoughts touched on the Urian power-relay the Dol’jharians had installed on the Lith’s power deck, pulling energy out of some unknown dimension and delivering it at a rate that gave the destroyer more striking power than any ship the Panarchy could field.

  Unfortunately, that meant letting the spin reactors that normally powered the Lith go cold, since they were unstable when the relay was running. And it took a long time to bring up the reactors again, unless you wanted to take what engineering techs called the Plasma Wager. Too long, as Jomsinn had found out when Barrodagh switched off the Bride’s relay.

  “Anyway,” continued Dyasil, “if Korion’s in-system, we’re gonna be happy to have another hopped-up Alpha Class to back up the Lith and Novograth.”

  Hreem grimaced at the mention of the battlecruiser whose regular patrol included the Charvann system. That was a fear that haunted every jacker: seven kilometers of near-invulnerable hull, yet so stealthy that too often the first sign of one’s presence was the hideous, ripping squeal of a ruptor beam, the
Navy’s most-feared shipkiller, which only a battlecruiser could deliver.

  “Cap’n’s counting on us winning the chance to grab that battlecruiser at Malachronte.” Garesh gave a sweet chuckle.

  Hreem sat up, his fear driven out by a wash of anger. He’d spent many pleasant moments imagining himself walking onto the bridge of the nearly-refitted Maccabeus in the Malachronte Ways, but he strongly suspected that Barrodagh was going to give the battlecruiser to Charterly if he possibly could. I have to get that assignment.

  Norio slithered behind Hreem on his knees and began kneading his shoulders, but Hreem shrugged him off irritably. Garesh was good in the sack, but she tended to forget whose ship the Lith was.

  “Shut your blungehole, you stupid blit,” said Benjamin Piliar at Fire Control, his coarse speech at odds with traces of an underlying precision. When he’d first come aboard with his fine speech and fine clothes, he’d made the mistake of insisting that the rest of the crew use his full name. Hreem had waited a couple of weeks, then renamed him Pili, leaving Norio to reinforce the lesson in how things worked. Pili jerked his sleek head meaningfully at the overhead. “You keep yapping about that battlecruiser and you’ll find yourself putting on a show for the rest of us.”

  Garesh sneered, the ornaments in her white hair clacking as she cursed Pili, but Hreem didn’t miss how she glanced nervously around, as though she could spot the telltales the crew knew Norio had on the bridge.

  “At least Charvann’s not on that chatzing no-loot list. For us.” Dyasil laughed as he stretched his hands over his head and cracked his knuckles.

  Pili sneered, and Erbee gave his weird hooting laugh. Garesh mooed with false sympathy, “Except for the Satansclaw. Poor Tallis!”

  Everybody laughed at that.

  Dyasil hooked a thumb at his console. “Anyway, a show is just what the Cap’n needs, and just what I got for him. There’s some really hot stuff coming in over the hyperwave—nicks everywhere getting what they dished out, only worse. Some of it’s better than any wiredream you ever seen and I’ve been editing up a chip for him.”

  For some reason, the Urian communicator could only broadcast; everyone who had one heard everyone else. Dol’jhar’s codes kept each Rifter fleet from knowing any orders but their own, but now the fleets were sending out uncoded visuals of their attacks from throughout the Thousand Suns—the biggest bragging session ever held.

  “I call it Revenge of the Rifters,” Dyasil said with a grand gesture. He tabbed his console, and a burst of loud, upbeat music filled the bridge for a moment before the tech cut it off.

  Hreem snorted. Dyasil should have been a third-rate wiredream producer somewhere, instead of manning a console on a Rifter destroyer that was on the bonus chips of every naval detachment in the Thousand Suns.

  “Time for me to get back to the bridge,” Hreem said. “Crew’s getting sloppy.”

  “I need to clean up before I join you,” said Norio. “Do not let Dyasil run his vid before I get there.”

  The tempath was as fastidious as a cat, which sometimes annoyed Hreem, but now his mood was too good. The wait for Tallis had stretched from an annoyance into extreme irritation, and below it, the fear that never quite went away, but Norio had done a very good job of dispelling both.

  “Another one for your collection?” Hreem asked.

  “Being with you while you watch the men who have sought your death meeting death themselves?” Norio shivered. “Yes, I think this will be a treasure.”

  Hreem got to his feet, as always ambivalent about Norio’s “treasures.” He found it deeply disturbing yet at the same time exciting the way that Norio not only perceived others’ emotions, but could relive them by watching a vid or holo, as long as he’d been there when the recording was made or viewed. Many of his treasures involved one of Hreem’s “shows.”

  Norio’s brows contracted; he was obviously picking up on Hreem’s mood. “You know I can’t get enough of you, Jala. So bright, so fierce! The crew’s emotions...” Norio shrugged. “Just a garnish to the main course.”

  Hreem didn’t try to disguise the glow of pleasure Norio’s words elicited. That wouldn’t work with the tempath, and it was freeing to know that he didn’t need to. He ignored his comfortable work clothes lying on the deck, and reached for the tunic with the heavy gold braid encrusting the V-collar. The braid caught itself in his chest hair, and it made him itch, but the effect on that chatzer Tallis—on all Hreem’s enemies—was worth it.

  Norio paused at the door, looking back, his dark eyes wide. It was he who had designed the tunic, a wiredream parody of the naval uniform. “It gives you authority,” Norio whispered, then vanished.

  Hreem pulled on his boots, checked the smooth extension and retraction of the heel-claws, then rummaged in his chest for the collection of jeweled family rings he had cut off the fingers of the luckless Douloi he’d jacked. Tallis would hate the sight of those successes, too.

  A lot of his good mood evaporated on the way to the bridge. The rings clattered along the gold braid at the neck of his tunic as he scratched. What if someone else had already been assigned to Malachronte? Of course, Barrodagh wouldn’t tell him, but at least there’d been no mention of Malachronte in the uncoded communications on the hyperwave.

  Hreem paused in the open hatch leading onto the bridge, and glanced uneasily at the Urian communicator, a weird, melted-looking lump webbed to the bulkhead near the communications console and festooned with sucker-like connectors, its substance glowing ruddily from within as it relayed messages across light-years without delay. The Ur must have been really bizarre, if that was their idea of machinery. It looks more like part of someone’s guts ...

  Hreem entered, his boots ringing on the deck plates. He smiled grimly as his crew hastily tabbed away whatever distractions they’d windowed up on their consoles and busied themselves with their watch assignments, as they should have been doing all along.

  He dropped into the captain’s pod and glared at the main viewscreen. The stars stared back at him mockingly, set in a velvet emptiness broken only by the faint circles indicating some of the other ships in the force Barrodagh had assigned him.

  Where the hell is Tallis?

  Hreem drummed his fingers, aware of Dyasil glancing at him with increasing frequency, until his comm gave a quiet chirp. He tapped a pad, and a face windowed up on the viewscreen: Riolo, the Barcan computer tech. The troglodyte’s face looked naked without the red-tinted goggles he habitually wore outside his cabin, where he was calling from.

  “Captain, I found some more information on Gnostor Omilov in the Riftnet mirror from Novograth, which was fresher than ours.”

  “Yeah?” Hreem saw Dyasil’s frustrated look from the corner of his eye. The comtech had been working himself up to offer his chip, and now Riolo had stolen Hreem’s attention.

  “Did you know that he tutored two of the Panarch’s sons? They used to visit him here on Charvann.”

  Hreem sat up in his pod. Barrodagh never said anything about that.

  Dyasil cleared his throat. “Cap’n?”

  “What?” Hreem snapped.

  “That probably doesn’t matter anymore.” At the expression on Hreem’s face, Dyasil hurried on. “One of the vids coming in on the hyperwave was a recording from the last meeting of the Privy Council. Seems like Eusabian had all three sons killed.”

  On-screen, Riolo laughed. “He’ll probably have them stuffed, or their heads mounted on plaques—they call it paliachee.” He gestured. “I think Dyasil has something he wants you to see. I’ll upload my information to your console—there’s a little more, but not much.” The window dwindled and vanished.

  “What’s he talking about, Dyasil? You holding out information on me?”

  “No, Cap’n! But I put together a bunch of the uncoded stuff coming in on the hyperwave, like a serial chip. I thought you’d enjoy watching it with...” He gulped and fell silent.

  “A serial chip.” Hreem kept his voice flat. “Y
ou got too much free time on your hands?” The crew watched intently, their attention divided between the comtech and Hreem.

  Hreem enjoyed the fear on Dyasil’s face. It was good for the rest of the crew to see it, and remember who was captain. Especially Garesh.

  Dyasil’s gaze flicked away from Hreem, and the rest of the crew turned back to their consoles. Hreem swiveled around. Norio stood at the entrance to the bridge in his heavy Oblate’s robe, then came forward with characteristic sliding grace. The bridge lighting sparked highlights from his slicked-back dark hair and accentuated the planes of his sallow, thin face.

  Hreem’s impatience vanished when he saw the silver bowl in Norio’s hands: pozzi fruit, drenched in aromatic liquor. Perfect for watching a chip. Norio always thought of everything. Hreem laughed to himself, and a thrill of enjoyment spiked down deep inside him, expanding his pleasure when he took in the furtive looks Norio’s way from the bridge crew as the tempath took his usual position, standing behind Hreem.

  His mood now expansive, Hreem waved a hand at Dyasil. “We’ve been waiting out here too long, and that blit Tallis is taking his time. Might as well have some fun. Let’s see that chip.”

  Those of the crew who could see the main screen turned in their seats to watch; those too far under the screen along the U-shaped bank of stations around Hreem’s pod looked down at their consoles for a slaved view.

  The starfield dwindled to a window in the corner as a florid title scrolled up the main viewscreen—The Revenge of the Rifters—and the loud theme Hreem had heard earlier. Hreem heard a murmur from the crew at the image behind the title: the glowing remains of a Panarchist battlecruiser with a Rifter destroyer in the foreground. Norio sucked in his breath as a thrill shot through Hreem. He’d already seen the image—Barrodagh had sent it out right after the attach began—but with Dyasil’s music as background it acquired new power.

  The title dwindled into the distance and a stock shot of Arthelion seen from space swung up into view, with the island of the Palace Major clearly visible. Hreem felt the hairs on his neck stir with a superstitious thrill at the sight of the Mandala, the heart of the Thousand Suns whence the Arkads had ruled for nearly a thousand years.