The Archon’s voice deepened slightly to an almost theatrical pitch and timbre. “So, Sebastian, do you know this man?”
Now Deralze understood the loud voice, the dress whites: there had probably been no formal dinner. The Archon was using his Douloi arsenal to project competence, and power. Not to the Rifters, who would despise everything the Archon stood for, but for his own people.
A glance at Omilov revealed that he seemed caught off balance by the question. “No,” he replied, his bushy brows puckered in question. “And I would remember had I ever met him. Should I?”
The Archon gestured. “Enough, Bikara.” The man’s image dwindled back to one among the previous array of windows. “You must forgive my weakness for theatrics, my friend. When I was a child I loved courtroom dramas: the sudden, stabbing questions, the exposure of deep secrets.” He put a hand to his chest, pointed dramatically at Omilov with a mock-severe expression. “And where were you on the night of Jaspar sixteenth?” He smiled broadly.
Bikara said, in the manner of someone carrying out an order, “Five minutes, Your Grace.”
“No, my friend, you would not be acquainted with Hreem the Faithless, as that one is called,” the Archon said, serious now. “Though he is well known to any naval captain who ever dreamed of raking in a jackpot bonus. Hreem is a Rifter—one of the worst—specializing in slave-trading, jacking, and anything else that will make him rich with a minimum of risk.” He glanced at the screen.
Rifters? Attacking an Archonate? Again, as he had at the Mandala, Deralze had that sickening sense he’d been outmaneuvered. Not sense. Conviction.
Brandon looked back at him bleakly, the mask of detachment gone. Deralze could see his own question mirrored there: What is Markham’s role in this?
“But what can they hope to gain?” asked Omilov.
“You, Sebastian,” said the Archon quietly.
Omilov stared, his eyes wide with incomprehension. “Me?”
“About two hours ago, a single ship skipped in just outside the resonance field and destroyed one of the resonators. Minutes later, a number of other ships followed.” The Archon spoke low and fast now, not for the staff below, but for Omilov—and, a quick glance revealed, Brandon. “Charvann is not heavily armed. It has not been necessary for centuries. Moments before you arrived the last of our ships was destroyed.” The Archon darted a glance up at the screen. “Bikara?”
“The wavefront is still fifteen minutes from complete coincidence with Korion’s usual patrol area, but probability is ninety-six percent that the signals from the attack have already reached it.”
The Archon turned back to Omilov, his voice rising again, smooth and reassuring. “The battlecruiser Korion is on maneuvers in-system—just the usual reminder to our local Rifters to maintain their good behavior—” He paused at Osri’s slight breath of disbelief.
The Archon glanced his way. “The Rifter situation is not as neat as the serial chips would have it.” He chuckled. “Only a small percentage of Rifters are given to raiding and jacking, and most of those, like our local ones, tend to prey on other Rifters. As long as they behave themselves in-system, we leave them be.”
“You mentioned that there are Rifters in the system once before, I believe,” Omilov said. “But now they are attacking, and they want me?”
“These are not the local set.” The Archon indicated the screen. “And we have no idea why your name was mentioned when they demanded our surrender. No matter. The Korion was scheduled to be in the middle system, no more than two light-hours out. By now they’re almost certain to have detected the gravity pulse accompanying the collapse of the resonance field, and the ones caused by the Rifter ships skipping in.”
He smiled grimly. “Things will be different when it arrives, I promise you. ‘Those of my people he murdered shall have vengeance.’”
“‘And a pyre shall I make of my enemy’s works,’” quoted Brandon in response.
The Archon gave him a considering gaze as Osri’s brows furrowed.
Brandon made a slight, deferential gesture. Deralze’s fifteen years around the Douloi still had not furnished complete understanding of the subtleties of their social interactions. “The Sanctus Gabriel of Desrien,” Brandon said. “He was High Phanist of the Magisterium in the reign of the Faceless One, whose memory be abhorred.” The ritualistic tone of the last words made Deralze’s neck crawl. The horrible deed of that Arkad, dead these six hundred years and more, of whom no image now existed anywhere in the Thousand Suns, was not a comfortable thought under the present circumstances. But the unfortunate planet Vellicor had dropped its Shield.
The Archon’s eyes narrowed as if he’d taken meaning from Brandon’s seemingly irrelevant remark. “In any case,” the Archon continued, “prior to taking down the resonance field, this Hreem person beamed down an insolent demand for surrender... and for the delivery of one Sebastian Omilov and all his possessions into his hands.”
“What? What would any Rifters, local or out-octant, want with me?” Omilov asked.
“You should ask rather,” said the Archon, “what Eusabian of Dol’jhar wants with you.”
Shock flooded Deralze. The Lord of Vengeance. He knew who that was.
One again he wondered who was really backing the Poets, whose plot he thought he’d left behind on Arthelion. But here was more evidence of Dol’jhar’s reach, both in the ships lost above and the damage here below caused simply by the Shield going up: the ruined S’lift, the planet-wide electrical storms of the stabilization phase that would already have sparked massive forest fires.
Deralze threw back his head and stared at the frozen face of the Rifter named Hreem. What did Byron promise you? And who is Byron?
Deralze looked away, at Brandon nyr-Arkad, who stood isolated, tense and still as he watched the images on the screen. “Eusabian of Dol’jhar—” Omilov’s voice choked off. He raised the small box, which had hung unregarded in his left hand since his arrival, and clutched it in both hands. “How did he know?” he whispered.
“Excuse me?” Archon frowned at Omilov’s hands. “What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry, Your Grace,” said Omilov. “A... guess of mine has played out truly, much to my astonishment.” He opened the box. The sphere threw back in brilliant, multicolored distortion the blinking lights and shifting images of the defense room. “I received this only hours ago—an artifact of the Ur, stolen from the Shrine Planet.”
“Quarantine One,” said the Archon.
“Yes—”
“Emergence pulse, Your Grace,” interrupted Bikara. “Signature—it’s the Korion!”
o0o
“You got that Archon yet, Dyasil?” Hreem stood up, the excess energy created by the battle finding no outlet in sitting still. He paced around the bridge of the Lith, staying close to the command pod so he could be seated in a position of command when he spoke again to the Archon.
“Not yet. The Shield’s raising hell with the beam.”
On the viewscreen the Novograth hung against the planet and its auroral crown, angular silver against the warm brown and blue curve of Charvann’s horizon.
“Erbee!” snapped Hreem. “What’ve you got?”
“Nothin’, Cap’n. Bunch of hash from the Shield, crazy-scared chatter from the Syncs. Riolo can’t get through to the Datanet. No ship signs at all.”
Hreem drummed his fingers on the back of the pod. He hated waiting like this, especially in inner space where a ship couldn’t use the fiveskip to drunkwalk, making its position less random.
He glanced impatiently at the image of the Novograth again. It hadn’t changed for a while. The Lith had been on the same heading for some time. Bargun was hunched strangely over his console, and the light from its screen on his face was flickering in a way quite unlike the usual pattern.
Hreem smiled grimly. He’s watching that damned chip of Dyasil’s again. After this is over I think Bargun’s gonna put on a little show for the crew.
He c
at-footed across the deck and then lunged, dealing a savage blow with his fist to the back of the unsuspecting Rifter’s head. Bargun shrieked as his face slammed down onto his console screen. He tried to push himself back up as Hreem raised one foot and flexed out his heel claw.
From Erbee’s console came a quiet bleep, and the Rifter tech yelled, “Emergence! Eight light seconds! A big one!” His voice cracked with terror.
Hreem slammed his foot back to the deck and gasped a breath to yell a command, gaze snapping to the screen, but his voice stuck as, in total silence, the Novograth shuddered violently, bits of hull plating flying off. The ship’s form blurred, and a terrible coronal discharge wreathed it briefly before it fell apart and then exploded in a glaring blast of light that momentarily overloaded the viewscreen.
Almost simultaneously a deafening supersonic screech blasted through the bridge of the Lith, falling quickly to a subsonic rumble that shook the entire ship and knocked his feet out from under him. Pain stabbed his ears, and blood trickled from them down his neck. His limbs twitched in a violent spasm as the edge of a ruptor pulse brushed the ship.
Others were not so fortunate. Alluwan’s console exploded violently and he was momentarily outlined in a red fog as the intense gravity pulse tore through him. Then his chair ripped out of the deck and spun into a bulkhead, denting it with the violence of its impact. There was nothing but a swirling bloody cloud where he had sat, mixed with black smoke from his destroyed console.
Hreem scrambled off the deck and vaulted into the pod, slamming his fist down on the jump pad, but as he had feared, nothing happened—the delicate resonance of the fiveskip was almost always the first thing to go when a ruptor grabbed a ship.
“Erbee!” he shouted. “Find that chatzer! Hurry!”
But Erbee was already screaming out another contact. “Emergence pulse, 1.2 light seconds.” He slapped frantically at his console. “Coordinates to Fire Control!” The main screen windowed up a vision out of Hreem’s worst nightmares: the vast bulk of a cruiser closing in.
“Pili! Target!” The stars swung across the viewscreen rapidly as the ship slewed around. “Ready a skipmissile!”
“Skipmissile charging!”
Hreem clutched at the arms of his pod—at least they still had missile power. Give them only a few more seconds.
Damn you, Bargun... when I... He noticed then that Bargun was beyond reach. A macabre eddy in the ruptor pulse had torn his head off and deposited it neatly on his console, staring sightlessly at his body slumped on the deck nearby, the flickering action from the record chip on the screen under the head imbuing his features with ghastly animation.
On the screen an inward-blinking ring of arrows pointed at a fat blur of light. “Targeting locked on. Skipmissile. Six seconds to discharge.”
“Fire on zero!”
It was rare that one got a second chance against a cruiser, the only ship large enough to mount ruptors. The Lith had never encountered one up close before—the one or two encounters they’d had, their monstrous pursuer had been no more than a distant blip on the rear screens as they escaped into fivespace. Even with the vast power of the Urian relay, Hreem never wanted to see one again—unless it was his own...
Hreem stared at the targeted blur, willing it into inaction for the few seconds more he needed, hardly hearing the screams of pain from the wounded, some of whom had lost limbs to the alternating gee fields of the near-miss ruptor pulse. This was not the sure thing Eusabian had promised, not what he’d imagined in so many pleasant daydreams of power and revenge. He’d never sustained this kind of damage before. Fear blurred his thoughts until he washed it out with rage, as he always did: rage against Eusabian, against the Panarchist Navy, and against his own terror. His heart hammered painfully in his throat as he waited for death or victory.
o0o
Sebastian Omilov barely had time to raise his eyes to the main viewscreen when one of the Rifter ships windowed there shuddered violently, bits of hull plating flying off. The ship’s form blurred, and a terrible coronal discharge wreathed it briefly before it fell apart and then exploded in a glaring blast of light. Other windows revealed similar carnage
As the defense room rang with cheers, Bikara tapped at her console. One window expanded, showing another Rifter ship, elongated and wasp-like, with a jet of gas venting from a rip its hull, wheeling about. Another window bloomed, revealing a fat, egg-shaped ship bristling with antennae, with three large turrets spaced equally around both ends. That must be the Korion, thought Omilov, pleased that he could at least pick that out from the welter of images and arcane glyphs flickering on the screen.
At one end the cruiser’s radiants formed an angular break in its otherwise smooth lines. There was no hint of the Korion’s true size from the picture on the screen, but Omilov knew that it was over seven kilometers long—a battlecruiser was the most powerful weapon of war ever built. Even a shielded planet could not hold out for more than a few weeks against one of these ships, which were the backbone of the Thousand-Year Peace.
For a second or two, nothing seemed to happen. A murmur arose from the assembled monitors.
“What is he waiting for?” demanded Osri, puzzled anger in his voice.
“The dimensions of this mercy are above my thoughts...” said Brandon, as if quoting someone, and Osri glared at him, obviously nettled by the implied rebuke.
Brandon had withdrawn, isolating himself from their conversation, an acceptance of the Archon’s unspoken rebuke. Sorrow contracted Omilov’s heart. He had lost Gelasaar, and now, it seemed, events were conspiring to wrench the closest of the Panarch’s sons away as well.
The Archon did not look at Brandon. He merely waited politely, his demeanor neutral, and as Brandon did not continue, he said, “Korion has nothing to fear from them—three destroyers are the minimum needed to take on a battlecruiser. They’ve lost one and are pinned against the planet. And a well-tuned ruptor is a drive-smasher—they’re going nowhere. Dahawi’s probably dispatching the boarding lances right now—he’s a stickler for Local Justice.”
“What will you do to them—” Osri stopped abruptly. “Pardon, Your Grace...”
All human sound in the defense room ceased as a chain of greenish balls of light grew with blinding speed from the long, narrow snout of the Rifter ship.
In the other windows the cruiser was momentarily sheathed in a flaring ellipse of violet light, then the far side erupted in a graceful flower of shattered metal and a fountain of actinic light. The Archon’s breath rasped in his throat in an inhalation of disbelief. Cracks began to rip outward through the hull and, with awful slowness, a growing glow from within the Korion transformed the battlecruiser into a glaring holocaust that blacked out the entire viewscreen for seconds. When the screen cleared, it revealed a sharp-edged sphere of light which filled with a delicate lacework of fluorescing gas as it dissipated against the stars.
A brief pulse of stunning pain lanced through Omilov’s left arm, radiating down to the tip of his ring finger; he leaned heavily on the railing of the dais, turning clumsily to look at the Archon.
The Archon’s face might have been carved of obsidian—the frozen image of deep grief and disbelief. “One missile... from a destroyer?” The Archon’s voice was edged with pain, his body tight with shock. “A fluke—a defect in the teslas...” His voice was that of a man groping in the dark, fearing what he might lay hands on, but needing something to hold onto.
The activity of the room was slowly recommencing, but now it seemed more frantic, less purposeful. Sudden bursts of loud speech could be heard but not distinguished.
“Your Grace.” Bikara’s voice was soft, hesitant. Her severe features were softened by concern as she looked at the Archon. “There is a communication from the Rifter captain.”
The Archon stared at her, then straightened up. Decision sharpened his voice. “Put it on the screen.”
The Rifter’s harsh face was smudged and sweat-streaked. Twin runnels of crusti
ng blood clung to his neck below his ears, and the collar of his tunic was blood-blotched. Behind him gray smoke eddied, a pink slime clung to every surface. On the deck a woman’s body lay in horrible disarray, its limbs bent sharply in far too many places. The people in the defense room could clearly hear agonized screams, suddenly stilled by a sharp hiss. Hreem glared savagely at the Archon.
“Round one for me, you miserable chatzer. Your precious cruiser is photons now. You want it easy or hard?”
The Archon studied the Rifter’s face for a tense pause, then raised his voice slightly, though Omilov saw his hands gripped tightly behind his back. “A planet is considerably larger than a battlecruiser,” replied the Archon in the patient tones of one explaining the obvious to someone with a severe head injury.
The insult took a moment to penetrate. The Rifter was apparently not very sensitive to tonal invective, but it was plain to everyone on the Charvann end of the beam. “Perhaps you’d like me to draw you a picture?” the Archon continued after a carefully calculated pause.
Laughter rolled across the defense room. Omilov understood that the Archon was talking to the Rifter only for the effect he could have on morale.
Hreem appeared to hear only the surface meaning of the Archon’s retort, but his face flushed purple and his eyes bulged. His ears started bleeding again.
“He looks like an Abilard Polliwog that’s swallowed its own nose-stalk!” a young monitor yelled, to raucous, angry laughter. A corner of the Archon’s mouth twitched.
“Have it your way, Faseult.” Hreem snarled.
The crowd of monitors hissed at the gross insult of an inferior’s use of the Archon’s family name for address—the Rifter captain knew something of Panarchic courtesy, if only to spit on it.
“Just sit down there, waiting for help that isn’t coming. Your Shield’ll be down sooner than you think—and maybe I’ll even stop firing then.” The Rifter grinned and relaxed back into his command pod. “I look forward to seeing how many knots I can put in your legs and arms. More I think than the ruptors put in poor Garesh.” He jerked a thumb at the distorted corpse and laughed, then winced and rubbed one ear. He leaned forward.
The Phoenix in Flight Page 18
