The Phoenix in Flight

by Sherwood Smith

  Brandon didn’t turn away from his screen. “You can ask him yourself. You’ll meet him shortly.”

  “Markham vlith-L’Ranja became a Rifter? Of course you would know that. You were inseparable in breaking all the regulations.”

  “So it seems.” Brandon gave a soft, gasping laugh. Then his voice became grim. “Yes, Markham vlith-L’Ranja, though needless to say, he doesn’t use the inheritance sur-prefix anymore.”

  Distaste mixed with bafflement as Osri thought back ten years to the events at the Academy, where Osri had been an assistant instructor. What Brandon was telling him now—that a scion of a Service Family, even in disgrace, should join with Rifters—was simply incomprehensible. “The son of the Archon of Lusor, a Rifter. I wouldn’t have thought that even of him.”

  “The former Archon of Lusor,” Brandon corrected even more grimly.

  “Lusor. A disgrace and a suicide.” Osri felt himself on safer ground now. He knew that sorry story well.

  Brandon’s voice sharpened. “I suppose you mean that by his action he has deprived the Panarch of his valuable service, eh?”

  “He abandoned duty and honor in that action, whatever the reasons. It was not a Decree Dechoukaj, after all, but the lesser ex gratia regis, which left him with his estates intact. It was quite merciful.” Brandon’s face hardened, and Osri felt that he had to justify his statement. “There are scandals from time to time, and not every House feels impelled to challenge its malefactors under the Dueling Code. That is why the decretal system exists.”

  “You don’t seem to understand just how extensively he was ruined. In the old, clean terms, his services were no longer required. There was literally nothing left for him to do. Tared L’Ranja was a man to whom the word ‘Service’ was more than a synonym for privilege. It would have been better if Semion had challenged him and invoked House-rights to lethal weaponry. Then shot him to death.” His voice rasped with rarely shown anger. “Only then Semion would have been answerable to our father.”

  A soft tone from the console interrupted. The screen displayed an orbit with an unpleasant message overlaid on it: VELOCITY AT ARRIVAL +7.9 KM/SEC. Brandon’s hand lay limp on the edge of the keypad for a moment. Even the drugs circulating in Osri’s blood couldn’t suppress the tremor of fear that those words engendered. They were in a hyperbolic orbit with insufficient delta-V to land on Dis. The passionless equations of spaceflight now left them with two alternatives: a quick death on impact, or slow death in the outer system.

  “What now?” he asked, not hiding his fury. They were supposed to be heading for Ares. Brandon was ignoring orders for his own purposes yet again, and there was nothing Osri could do.

  Brandon shook his head and windowed up the Starfarer’s Handbook on the screen. A spherical projection of Dis appeared, rotating slowly. The words Lao Shang’s Wager scrolled past, but Osri’s head hurt so much he couldn’t focus on the rest of it.

  Brandon started tapping at his console again. The screen flashed: GRAVITORS 89% MARGIN, TRACKING 1.5%. Brandon continued tapping, and the screen filled with graphs as he set up some kind of multivariate analysis that Osri’s drug-fuzzed mind couldn’t follow.

  To distract himself, Osri reclaimed the moral high ground, the one thing he was sure of. “The Archon of Lusor had a reputation for eccentricity, not the least of which was having adopted as his heir a boy from an utterly obscure background, when there were countless excellent families who ask nothing more than to adopt their most promising youth into Service.” He shook his head, and regretted the motion. “I remember actions taken without counsel—and the Archon’s conversation at Court was often at the borders of acceptability.”

  “Your father was a friend to that maverick.”

  Osri said angrily, “You’re not suggesting that my father retired from active service because of L’Ranja’s disgrace? It may have been at the same time, but there was no connection. I should know.”

  “Would you?”

  “I know the reasons he retired, and he never mentioned L’Ranja’s disgrace to me at all. My father detests scandal. It was not until I visited my mother on Arthelion that I even learned of it.” Osri stopped, aware of having intimated that his mother loved scandal—and aware that it was true. “However distasteful it was, she felt I should know.” He felt the justification die right out of his lips, so weak it was, but Brandon did not press him.

  “How much do you know?” Brandon asked, genuine interest in his voice.

  “As much as anyone, which is very little. Aerenarch Semion, in honor of the L’Ranja name, had not wanted it discussed. Apparently L’Ranja had confronted the Aerenarch, leveled accusations, threatened him.”

  “Concerning?”

  “Concerning his son’s dishonorable expulsion from the Academy.” This discussion was getting nowhere, thought Osri, and Brandon’s feigned ignorance was beginning to annoy him. He looked away from one of the moons swelling slowly in the screen. “What is the point of these questions, Your Highness? You seem to be implying that Aerenarch Semion was somehow at fault by refusing to challenge the madman!”

  Osri was shocked when Brandon answered his rhetorical sarcasm with a simple “Yes.”

  “You’re joking,” Osri snapped. “And, if I may add, Your Highness, very offensive I find it.” He heard a movement behind him—slight, just a shifting, but he was reminded of the big, grim-faced bodyguard who had accompanied Brandon. Had this man, too, been somehow suborned? Osri winced, wondering if the entire universe had gone mad.

  Brandon tapped a few moments more at his console. He flexed his fingers, then keyed the big go-pad. The navigation overlay froze.

  He regarded Osri. “Do you really believe I’m joking?” There was no humor at all in his expression; his eyes were disturbingly like his father’s. The forced disadvantage of this irritated Osri the more. “I can assure you I’m not, no more than I was when I was forced to watch my friend Markham stand before the convened Academy to be formally cashiered on trumped-up charges. Because you know the official reasons were trumped up. Wargaming without an instructor got you grounded, not expelled—everybody did it—and they knew everybody did it, they expected everyone to do it, once you’d passed your flight quals. Yet I was forbidden to speak because I was implicated in the part that no one spoke openly about, though everyone did behind their hands: the matter of cheating on tests.”

  Osri studied Brandon, seriously unsettled. His deep respect for the Arkad name, for the almost legendary, much-loved Panarch Gelasaar as well as for his austere, hardworking heir, had been outraged by the events of ten years past, as he understood them. He’d always found it easy to believe that Brandon would cheat on tests, not necessarily because he was a habitual liar, but because he never seemed to take anything seriously. Ever.

  He would not bring up the matter of the tests, which had been sealed by no less a person than Admiral Carr, who took orders directly from the Panarch, so he fell back on the part he was sure of. “Because someone in your position is honor-bound to live by the rules, not to flagrantly break them,” he began, then became aware of the course Brandon had locked in.

  PROBABLE MAXIMUM GEE EXCEEDS HULL RATING. A blinking overlay indicated that the Krysarch had locked out the medical circuits.

  “What are you doing?” Osri gasped. He was fed up with his helplessness, outraged by the Krysarch’s denial of virtually all Panarchic norms of conduct, and enraged by his inability to do anything to influence events. Now it appeared that Brandon was intent on a spectacular suicide. “Why don’t you signal your Rifter friends to pick us up on the way past, instead of digging us a grave at eight kicks?”

  Brandon grimaced. “At the speed we whipped through Warlock’s atmosphere, it was all the teslas could do to protect the integrity of the hull. One of the things that got shaved off was the directional antenna. We could broadcast a distress call, but do you really want to take a chance on who else might be listening? That destroyer chasing us had one hell of a captain, who ma
y have figured out what we’re up to. Our only choice is another ablative braking maneuver.” His mouth quirked ruefully. “Although I will admit this is a lot dicier. If we make it, I think I’ll finally have gotten one up on Markham.”

  “But how are you going to shed eight kicks? Dis is too small to have enough atmosphere for that, and its gee-well certainly won’t do more than warp our course slightly at this velocity.”

  Brandon snorted a short, humorless laugh. “I’m betting on Lao Shang’s Wager. It’s a long smear of hydrocarbon ice that’s been welling up near the equator for centuries, volcanic in origin, if you can call anything that cold volcanic. Because it’s continuously extruding and evaporating, it supposedly stays pretty smooth.” He stretched in his pod and raised a hand to his forehead, pinching the bridge of his nose. He dropped his hand and continued. “According to the Handbook, Lao Shang was a KaoLai adventurer about three hundred fifty years ago, when they were still mining on Dis, who bet that he could skate its length. That’s what we’re going to do—we’ll trade hull metal for velocity and hope the geeplane and the gravitors last long enough to keep us from being pulped.”

  Osri squinted at the screen, trying to decipher their course through a haze of pain. It looked as if they had just enough reserve maneuvering power to come in parallel to the Wager, which was in a long, narrow triangular valley. If it was smooth, they might indeed survive—at least, if they managed to stop before the end, where it narrowed and vanished in a jumble of hills. “What happened to Lao Shang? Did he make it?”

  “Supposedly nobody knows. He never showed up to collect, and they never found any trace of him. Of course it could be they never looked.”

  The painkillers had stripped him of his inhibitions. He surrendered to painful laughter, hearing the hysteria in his own voice as he choked out a response. “There’s no chance of that happening to us. If we don’t make it, we’ll leave traces for half a thousand kilometers. They’ll probably rename it Arkad’s Jigsaw Puzzle when they try to put the pieces back together.”

  “Then I suggest we enjoy our last hours of physical integrity,” Brandon retorted as he levered his pod down. “I’m going to set my trancer for sixteen hours. I suggest you do the same.” He closed his faceplate without waiting for an answer.

  Osri hesitated, but then came the sound of Deralze closing his own faceplate. Was the click and hiss louder than necessary?

  Sleep, Osri decided. Sixteen hours of induced trance, even if those were his last sixteen hours, were better than sixteen hours of grinding anxiety.

  o0o

  The defense room was much quieter; the Shield monitors had been evacuated, their usefulness at an end. The Archonic Enclave was the last site of resistance, and only a necessary minimum of personnel remained, monitoring internal defense systems to make the final assault of the Rifter invaders as costly as possible. No opposition had been offered to their landing when the Shield had been lowered—the Archon had no wish to subject his people to nuclear bombardment in exchange for a few Rifter vessels. “We can do more damage to them here hand-to-hand and leave the noncombatants out of it,” he had said.

  Omilov had refused evacuation; there was no place for him to go, since, as incredible as it seemed, he was the object of this invasion. He sat on the control dais with the Archon and Bikara along with a number of guards, clutching the unfamiliar weight of a firejac to his chest as he tried to imagine the flight of his son and the Krysarch to safety.

  Abruptly the lights went out and all the consoles went dead. The whine of the ventilators spun down the scale into silence and the floor bucked from a nearby explosion. Moments later the sound arrived, a heavy, muted crump. The red emergency illuminators came on, leaving the distant corners of the room wrapped in shadows.

  The Archon grinned at Omilov, a baring of the teeth that mixed militant anticipation with amusement. “You should see yourself, Sebastian,” he commented. “The most unlikely mixture of martial ardor and gentility one could imagine.”

  Omilov smiled back, reflecting that the Archon, by contrast, looked every inch the warrior. “I’m afraid that this is the first time I’ve handled one of these.” He hefted the firejac. “I’m not sure I won’t be more of a danger with it to our people than a threat to the Rifters.”

  “Don’t worry.” The Archon chuckled. “That’s why we gave you a jac. Just make sure it’s set to a medium aperture. If you can handle a garden hose, you can do as much damage as any of us. They’re unlikely to have heavy armor, and nothing else will give them much protection.”

  The Archon glanced at the door as a muffled, rhythmic clanking commenced, then frowned. The noise wasn’t coming from outside the door, but from behind a large metal bulkhead partway down a wall. “They’re coming through the equipment tunnel.” He snapped out orders, and the defenders rearranged themselves to meet the new threat.

  Silence. Omilov could feel the tension rise, peak. His throat spasmed with anxiety, and he wondered if he could really pull the trigger and burn down another human being, no matter how depraved or violent his attacker was.

  A screeching roar arrested his thoughts as a spot on the bulkhead suddenly glowed white-hot and vaporized. Another screech; a vortex of blue-white plasma punched through, hovered, then darted viciously toward the nearest console, which promptly exploded, showering the room with molten glass and metal.

  At the third discharge of the hidden weapon, the bulkhead blew apart and a finned black muzzle nosed through the hole, the iridescent glimmer of a shield playing around it. Some of the defenders fired at it, but their hand weapons had no effect. Then the plasmoid cannon fired again, and the control dais sagged.

  Omilov clutched at the seat in front of him for support, and his firejac slid across the floor and over the edge. An explosion blasted at his ears as the door into the defense room blew open; jac-fire from the defenders met the figures leaping in, but not before they lobbed small black spheres over toward the dais and an overwhelming blast of sound and light smashed Omilov into unconsciousness.

  o0o

  When Osri returned to consciousness, the clock indicated almost eighteen hours had passed—the drugs must have prolonged the effect of the trancer.

  His body still ached in a slow throb, echoed by his head. His medical telltale was green, but he did not feel very alert. He sucked in some water from the tube and blinked a gummy blur out of his eyes as he focused on his screen which now showed Dis huge below the booster, stars blurred by its tenuous atmosphere, which was beginning to sing thinly past their hull.

  Brandon’s console winked and blinked so rapidly that trying to make sense of it sharpened the pain in Osri’s head. With disgust, he recognized the game Phalanx. Typical! Though at least it was second level, which furnished some absorbing mathematical situations, though difficult to play in any meaningful sense on the tiny booster consoles. Third level would be impossible.

  But, a game. There were rumors that Brandon had not been doing much else between his infamous orgies, often betting obscene sums on the outcome. From the speed of the interactions, Osri could well believe it. One thing for certain, Brandon was fast.

  A fine example of an Arkad, Osri thought, turning his attention back to his screen. They wouldn’t know what to do with the game-playing traitor on Ares—except to stick him in a decently-disguised prison cell. Osri enjoyed the image until he remembered the previous conversation, and his stomach churned with the hot acid of righteous indignation. They weren’t going to reach Ares, because Krysarch Brandon was handing them over to a disgraced cheat, now a Rifter.

  If they survived their landing.

  As they crossed the terminator into daylight, the shrunken sun picked out a grayish blotch on the distant horizon. Brandon swiped his console clean and levered his pod back to the crash position. Osri heard Deralze do the same behind him.

  The ship was descending rapidly now. A jagged range of mountains rose, twisted by the battle between the internal forces of the moon and the tidal forces
of Warlock, then fell astern. Before them, Lao Shang’s Wager gleamed dully.

  An overlay popped up over the image on the screen: a short-range radar scan revealing a series of lumps and mounds distorting the surface of the waxy plain. The positional thrusters began a stuttering sequence of discharges, then ceased. The groaning of the engines rose to a crescendo as the computer overloaded the geeplane to cushion the impact, and the moon’s surface rose up and swatted them from the sky.

  The impact was devastating. All three cried out as their suits wrung their limbs, trying to cushion an impact that seemed to go on and on without end. A flare of light washed through the cabin. The air began to fill with smoke. Osri could feel the gee-forces fluctuating wildly as the gravitors attempted to compensate for the savage deceleration. On the screen the surface whipped past and under them at an insane speed; the thrusters burped and stuttered as the computer labored to avoid the worst of the obstacles. It was failing, and the ship started to come apart.

  The viewscreens exploded, plunging the cabin into darkness punctuated by a surfeit of red lights on the consoles. Then a knife-edge of rock tore through the side of the ship in a shower of sparks, opening it to the sky and narrowly missing Osri’s pod. The smoke in the cabin writhed into fantastic shapes as it was sucked out with the air, and the thunderous noise of their ongoing collision with the moon’s surface diminished abruptly. Now it was perceptible only through his suit’s contact with the pod. The ship was spinning wildly, all control lost; through the gash torn in the hull the waxy plain spun around them.

  The ship had slowed when it finally hit something too large to skim over, and abruptly somersaulted. For a moment the gravitors held, so that the ship seemed a point of solidity in a rotating confusion of ground and sky. Then they failed and it was the ship that was gyrating end over end. With one final crushing blow the ship came to rest and Osri blacked out.