Ivard said, “Anyway, we joined a gang, and Trev—he was our leader—had a cousin who’d gone with a Rifter crew. When they landed he got us in with them.” Ivard grinned. “Captain was a Shiidra’s blungehole, which is why he always needed more crew. But it got us off-planet, and I learned plenty while servin’ as a scrub-slub. Watched everything, especially the command crew. Loved the numbers on the screens.” He paused, his gaze far away. “At first it was fun not to know what they meant. Then I started figuring what they meant. I could, oh, see ’em.” His fingers formed a loose circle. “In four dimensions. Then captain found out what I was doin’ and brigged me for it. Jumped ship soon’s we reached Rifthaven. Couple more bad hitches, then we got hiked by that slime-spitter Jakarr. But we liked the rest of the gang, so we stayed on.” He shrugged awkwardly, looking embarrassed as he stole a glance at his sister. “I know I yak a lot.”
“How about the rest of the crew?” Brandon asked. “Where did they come from?”
Ivard’s blush darkened to crimson. As he struggled for words, Greywing said quickly, “Isn’t done. They want to talk about themselves, you ask them.”
Brandon looked her way as Ivard gave a jerky, grateful nod. “With us anyway. Some outfits, captain wants to know. Markham said a person’s character and skills, not past mistakes, should sync ’em in or not.”
“Markham talked about his past, though, didn’t he?” Brandon asked.
“A little. We all knew where he came from. He talked nick, same’s Montrose, and sometimes Lokri when he’s—”
Ivard stopped when an urgent bell-tone interrupted them. A surge of emotion burned through Greywing’s nerves: they were just about to emerge into realtime over the Krysarch’s planet—the Mandala.
“Time to go to the bridge,” she said.
As they ran, Greywing understood by the furtive glance Ivard cut her way that he was scared she was angry. He knew she didn’t like him talking about their past. As well there are some things he doesn’t know, and isn’t going to, she thought grimly, remembering what she’d had to do to get away—and again to rescue him.
Shaking off memory, and the anger that came with memory, she made straight toward her pod and hit the control to light it. As her fingers tapped out an automatic status check, she tracked Brandon, who moved to the empty fire-control pod and then just stood there, staring down at the console. Greywing wondered what he was thinking. Would he see that the Telvarna had a lot more firepower than most ships its size, and had obviously been refitted fairly recently? Did he recognize Markham’s as the hand and mind behind the redesign?
Marim got up from her pod and sauntered near. “What’s the matter, you lost?”
Brandon tensed, his brow furrowed as if he was trying to remember where he was, and who with. He’s fighting his own shades, Greywing thought, feeling a curious sense of satisfaction in that.
Then he gave Marim that polite nothing-smile. “On the contrary. I think I could run it blind.”
Vi’ya sat down in the captain’s pod.
Marim leaned on Brandon’s console. “Markham was Fire Control before he took over. Told us what we’d had was as modern and quick as a pre-Hegemonist surveyor craft. Had this rewired to his own specs. Pretty, eh?”
“Yes—”
The emergence signal sounded, and Brandon dropped into his seat. Marim hopped back to her own pod and scanned her board.
Vi’ya spoke. “We’ll make a peaceful approach to your Arthelion. Relay the field ID to Ivard, echo to Lokri. Lokri, reactivate the transponder, original registry, charter status, auto-query for landing at the field the Arkad specifies.”
The screens cleared from skip and Arthelion appeared, remote and lovely, just as it had appeared in countless holos—as it looked in my dreams. Greywing felt a frisson of... what? Trepidation? Longing? She hated remembering how she’d planned to escape to the Mandala in order to get justice for those at home who didn’t, or couldn’t, escape.
Vi’ya’s fingers moved on her console, and the screen shimmered to a close-up. The Krysarch gazed up at the viewscreen, his straight-shouldered figure tense.
Ivard hissed in a breath, and when he caught Greywing’s eye, he pointed at the screen, which showed now a gentle sprinkling of clouds covering the archipelago wherein lay the Palace Major.
“The Mandala.” Ivard’s said, his voice was high with awe and fear. “We can’t land there.”
“Why not? Just a dirtball like any other.” Marim stretched her arms up over her head and crackled her knuckles. But Greywing heard the forced bravado in her voice.
“The Magisterium has done its job well,” Lokri drawled, at his most hateful. “When every fool believes in all that nonsense about the Mandala, the nicks are more protected by legend than by mere weapons.”
Ivard reacted like he’d been hit. Furious, Greywing considered just what she could say to strike at Lokri with equal force. But then the comtech spoke again—as if he hadn’t said anything of importance, “Incoming query.”
Lokri’s console twittered for a moment, then bleeped. “Message incoming.” He tapped a key and the comm came to life.
“YST 8740 Maiden’s Dream, no system pass. Stand by.”
Vi’ya had directed Ivard to use one of the system’s lesser fivespace attractors for final approach, bypassing the checkpoint at the lagging major Trojan, as was the Unalterable right of any ship that cared to spend the extra fuel and nav effort.
The comm came back to life. “YST 8740 Maiden's Dream cleared for approach. Query transfer to near orbit: fast or slow?”
Vi’ya tabbed her console. “Fast. Standard contract accepted.”
“Stand by for orbital insertion. Estimated time to orbit, 12.5 minutes.”
Lokri lifted his head. “Never’ve had to pay to land or leave, have you, Arkad?”
Brandon gave him a look of mild surprise. He’s humoring Lokri, Greywing thought. Like you would a bad-tempered child.
Greywing saw her brother about to ask a question. “Well, we do,” she said to Ivard—to keep Lokri from baiting him. “If we don’t pay for the ride through the resonance field to high orbit, they can sell the ship out from under us.” She waited for the Arkad to say, Of course we wouldn’t sell anyone’s ship out from under them, but he didn’t. His expression was still curious, as if he were on tour and not going home.
There was no sense of acceleration as the lunar-based tractor seized the ship in a modified geeplane field and accelerated it at hundreds of gravities toward Arthelion.
“Maiden’s Dream?” Brandon said presently.
Marim snorted a laugh. “Don’t know what the owner before had in mind, but I say it’s ’cause it’s long and lean and real good at slipping in and out of tight places.” She hooted at her own joke, and Ivard turned red and snickered.
One way to get him to stop looking like a squashed timtwee, Greywing thought. Jokes about sex. In the last year or so any mention of sex was funny to Ivard. Did that mean he was ready to bunny? By the time I was his age, I already knew it wasn’t any joke. Greywing squashed the distraction of memory.
“We got lots of names for Telvarna,” Marim went on, “but that’s the safest one t’use around the nicks, ’cause it’s the only registered one.”
“We’ve never used it as long as I’ve been around,” said Lokri. “So we’re just another vessel, coming in nice and polite, on lawful business.”
“Long’s they don’t ask us what that business is,” Greywing replied, giving Brandon a doubtful look.
He lifted his hands. “I doubt they will. The field’s only used by charter vessels—it’s generally understood that most traffic is high-level incognito. Perfect for us. If we need it, I have a Royal override, but I think it would be better not to use it if we don’t have to.”
They fell silent, watching the planet slowly grow larger in the viewscreen. Vi’ya began running a series of checks through each of the consoles on the bridge, keeping the crew busy.
Finally the
com spoke again. “Tractor disengaged. Prepare for course download. Wait for further instructions after orbit acquisition.”
There was a brief squeal of code before the sound cut off. “It’s all yours, Ivard.”
Ivard glanced anxiously at Vi’ya, who gave him a confirming nod. Then he stabbed at a keypad. “Course locked in and executing.”
Marim looked perplexed. “Feels awful weird turning over the Telvarna to some machine.”
“Panarchists won’t have it any other way,” said Vi’ya, “especially here, at the center of their power. There are no doubt heavy weapons tracking us at this moment, set to trigger on any deviation.”
The others looked at Brandon, who motioned assent with a gesture. “There hasn’t been an accident for over a century,” he said.
“Makes me feel real good,” Marim cracked.
“Would they really zap an innocent ship?” Ivard looked amazed.
“Innocent ship?” Marim hooted, looking around with wide eyes. “Where?”
Ivard hunched his head down like a timtwee again and Brandon spoke quickly, as if to protect Ivard from Marim’s derision. “Marim’s right, Ivard, though not the way she means. A ship can do an awful lot of damage to a planet—not to mention the Syncs— even without bad intentions.”
Had the Arkad really done that out of kindness? Greywing considered Brandon. “Think of it this way, Ivard,” she said to her brother. “Telvarna masses maybe twenty thousand tons. Escape velocity for Arthelion would be over eleven kilometers a second...”
Ivard’s eyes widened, his innate grasp of spatial relationships and the physics of spaceflight suddenly making the situation quite clear.
Now the planet was rapidly swelling on-screen, the Highdweller Communities forming a delicate necklace of light around it. A scattering of other lights indicated other ships in orbit.
When Greywing saw an anomaly on her screen, she hit a tab that windowed up a magnified view of one of the dots of light along their course on the main viewscreen. The familiar egg-shape of a battlecruiser took form, its numerous protrusions of weapons and sensors a mere fuzziness at this distance.
Greywing gritted her teeth against letting any sound escape. She turned to Vi’ya for orders.
Marim sat back with her arms crossed and one foot propped on her console. “Sure feels strange not to be running from that chatzer.”
Only Lokri laughed.
o0o
Brandon felt the crew’s tension in their silence. He knew he contributed to it, try as he might to hide his extreme ambivalence. Duty had forced him toward Ares. He’d found himself unexpectedly reprieved, though at the cost of Lenic Deralze’s life. Now duty drew him back full circle, for someone must report that attack on Charvann directly to the Mandala and convey the Heart of Kronos to safety.
Only what was that about Ivory, and plots?
The others either hadn’t heard Deralze, or dismissed his words as the hallucinatory mumblings of a dying man. Their tension probably arose out of coming to terms with the reality of the Mandala, which centuries of legend and tradition, carefully nurtured by the Magisterium and the College of Archetype and Ritual, had endowed with a mystical hold on the imaginations of all the peoples of the Thousand Suns. Even Lokri, despite his words, stared with unblinking gaze at the planet looming larger every moment.
Everyone except Vi’ya. She alone seemed entirely unaffected by their approach to the heart of the Tetrad Centrum, the densely interconnected center of the Panarchy, home of the oldest cultures with the strongest ties to Lost Earth. I wonder where she comes from? He couldn’t place the accent that sometimes flattened her formal diction, and at other times shaded her consonants with a throaty emphasis. Yet it had a disturbing familiarity.
Vi’ya tapped at her console and magnified the view again. The viewscreen shimmered and the image of the battlecruiser rippled as the enhancement circuits cut in. Then the picture became mercilessly clear, revealing the blazon on the ship as a stylized red fist clutching a handful of lightning bolts, surrounded by angular script in a wreath of flames.
Vi’ya spoke softly, her voice almost a hiss. “The Fist of Dol’jhar.”
The shock splintered Brandon’s thoughts, and for a moment he could only stare at the viewscreen. Two voices echoed in his mind simultaneously, memories separated by years.
My father is the Avatar of Dol, and you would not live a day on Dol’jhar...
You should ask rather what Eusabian of Dol’jhar wants with you...
Brandon shut his eyes, remembering the first time he met Anaris, son of Eusabian, speaking that planet’s name with exactly the same intonation.
The thought seemed to come from far away: The captain of this ship is Dol’jharian.
Inexorably the memories stitched sense together. The Rifter Hreem had demanded the surrender of Sebastian Omilov in the name of Eusabian of Dol’jhar, and then destroyed a battlecruiser with a single shot.
Arthelion has fallen.
The sense of shock obliterated memory and present, as if the ground had opened beneath him, propelling him end over end into free-fall. Markham did not know what, Deralze? What did you die trying to tell me?
He blinked away the tears that blurred the flagship of his mother’s murderer hanging in orbit above his home. Fury, anger, loss stripped away sound and sense, leaving him once again the thirteen-year-old boy whose mother had been ripped from life by the violent hand of an enemy: Where is the justice?
Vi’ya’s voice broke the spell. “That ship was confined to Dol’jharian orbit by the Treaty of Acheront, was it not?” she asked.
Brandon had to draw air into his lungs before he could recover the sense of her words, and command brain to think, voice to shape words, lips to speak them. She was Dol’jharian, that much he knew, but there was nothing in her tone and her manner of triumph, falsehood, threat, or intent.
“Yes.” He swallowed, and made a greater effort. “Yes. It... appears that Charvann was not an isolated action.” He thumbed away the moisture from his eyes, and forced out the impossible phrase. “Arthelion has fallen.”
Then he forced himself to turn in his pod, and witness the effect of his words.
Marim’s eyes and mouth rounded. Lokri grinned mirthlessly, and Ivard looked back and forth between Brandon and the viewscreen, his pasty skin mottled with emotion.
Vi’ya’s countenance was unreadable, but her body expressed tension. The tapping of her fingers on her console was the only sound on the bridge other than the whisper of the tianqi.
“Ivard, confirm,” she said finally, and then keyed the intercom. “Jaim, engine status?”
“Never been better,” came the reply. “What’re you thinking?”
Jaim had to be watching on a screen slaved to the bridge. Not for Rifters the rigid compartmentalization of naval discipline.
Vi’ya gazed across the bridge at Brandon, her eyes narrowed. “The only thing we can do is wait until our assigned orbit takes us around the planet from the Fist and then blast out.” She paused. “Lokri, can you tell if the resonance field is up?”
Lokri glanced over at Marim, who turned a thumb up. “We can set up a low power test with the fiveskip cavity. Check it that way. It’ll take a few minutes.”
“Do it.”
Brandon turned back to his console, but he didn’t see it. Again memory replaced the now, this time himself at fourteen, Galen nineteen, back to visit after his first year away at Talgarth’s university. They were walking around the fish pools practicing Kelly-sign when several adults appeared, all dressed in formal clothing. One started talking in an officious voice with a thick accent.
Brandon’s attention was not on the adults, but on the only object of real interest, the single boy among all those adults. A tall boy somewhere between Brandon’s and Galen’s ages, dressed entirely in black, with high black boots and some kind of weapon at his waist. This boy stood arrogantly, his black eyes unblinking and scornful.
“The hostage...” Galen
had said on an indrawn breath.
The emotions of that day were back, as strong as if Brandon was again fourteen. He and Galen had been talking about the hostage not two days before, wondering what it would feel like to be forced to live on some other planet among your enemies, because of some peace treaty. He stared back at the Dol’jharian, son of their mother’s murderer, who sneered at them as if they stank, and his sympathy withered. Yet they’d been strictly ordered to make this Anaris welcome.
Brandon smothered a laugh at the perfect compromise. “We’ll welcome him,” he whispered to Galen. “Kelly style.” And as Galen grinned and the adults all stared, Brandon danced a perfectly correct Kelly welcome dance, prancing up to poke at Anaris’s face and stomach.
Galen made a move to join, but halted when the boy yanked free his knife and slashed at Brandon, who fell back on the grass, astonished at the boy’s speed. Then he forgot the knife when he saw the boy’s face, which had changed into something altogether strange.
Eyes distended, face crimson, the boy glared in what they found out later was an attempt to quell them with a Dol’jharian grimace of fear and command. At the time, Brandon had yelled, “He’s choking!”
As the adults looked at each other for clues, Galen moved, faster even than Anaris. With his greater strength he got his arms around the newcomer and pressed his fist hard against his middle in the lifesaving move they’d all been taught.
Anaris whooped like a sick crane, then vomited up whatever he’d eaten last, all over the man with the accent.
Brandon had collapsed, helpless with laughter. Through his gasps, he heard that voice, cracking with anger, in that accent, My father is the Avatar of Dol!
That day had begun years of unrelenting enmity on Anaris’s part, ending only with the hostage’s departure a year or two ago. Brandon remembered with ironic bitterness his celebration the night Anaris’s shuttle had lifted at last from Arthelion, beginning the journey to return the Dol’jharian to his home planet after nineteen years. I thought we were rid of him forever.
The Phoenix in Flight Page 39
