A Prison Unsought (82 page)

Below Ng, Lieutenant Mzinga turned to her. “Tractor range in
four minutes.”

The Panarch’s gaze shifted past Ng to Brandon, still
standing silently behind the captain’s pod, and his lips parted.

“My son,” the Panarch said, joy
changing the timbre of his voice.

Ng’s throat hurt. At the edge of her peripheral vision she
saw Brandon give a profound bow. Then he said, “Are you well, Father?”

“I am, my son. The time for
reflection granted me has sharpened my vision. And you?”

Nothing
. Ng
thought, midway between tears and laughter,
not
even danger and the threat of death, can eradicate that inbred Douloi singsong
.

“My travels seem to have led me
full circle,” Brandon said.

“Ah, yes, the Mandala,” the Panarch
replied. “I heard a little of that. How fares our home?”

He means the raid
,
Ng thought, but Brandon’s answer was completely unexpected.

“On the eighteenth, I left the Hall
of Mirrors,” he said, his voice so light it was nearly inaudible. The Panarch
watched intently.

“No sign of the corvette,” said
Wychyrski.

But he’s got to be out
there
. Ng nodded. Eighteenth—the Enkainion! But wasn’t that in the Ivory
Hall? Then all her assumptions splintered: they were talking not in code, but
so elliptically only they could understand one another.

And they do
.
They both know Anaris has to be listening,
and that everything said here will be hashed over by millions, for years and
years.

A burst of static lit the screen, then resolved into a
muddier view of the Panarch, who stepped closer to the imager. “. . . It
was Jaspar’s path, was it not?”

Brandon did not answer, but again made a profound bow. Ng
realized that—somehow—Brandon had explained himself, and his father not only
understood but concurred.
Hall of
Mirrors—repetition—Jaspar
 . . . Brandon left to escape
Semion, but he meant to come back, she realized.
To create a new system, if he saw his brother ruining the old.
The
insight made her almost dizzy.

“Come on, come on . . .”
Ng gripped the pod arms so hard her hands ached.

“Three minutes to tractor range,”
said Mzinga.

Aboard the corvette, Morrighon watched his lord watching the
Panarch and his son talk. Most of it was Panarchic silliness, but Anaris
listened, his profile intent.

A murmur on the bridge, too low through the static, made Morrighon
sat up. He swallowed once, twice, then spoke. “I believe the cruiser is almost
in range.”

Anaris waved his hand negligently.

Morrighon sat back, wondering if he’d gone mad. Why didn’t
he just blow the shuttle up and have done? Reluctantly he returned his
attention to the screen.

The Panarch said, “There is so much I want to tell you, son,
but words are not enough. First, though, I must discharge a debt of honor. The
first decree from the Emerald Throne must be to end the Isolation of Gehenna
and bring the planet fully into the Thousand Suns.”

Brandon bowed a third time.

The Panarch’s eyes shifted. “Sebastian! Do you remember the
poem you taught Brandon about words?”

Morrighon heard a voice, hesitant with surprise:

“The Hand of Telos has five fingers
Forth from the first came first the word
The echo of that act still lingers
Yet to the proud a sound unheard.”

Recognition flickered in Morrighon.

“That’s it,” said the Panarch,
gesturing with one hand. “So much of your teaching was more than words.”

Morrighon watched, fascinated, as the talk wandered off into
abstruse philosophy. He would never understand the Douloi. Wasn’t this exactly
what the prisoners had done every night on the
Samedi
?

Yes. They had. The vague sense of familiarity sharpened into
urgency. He grabbed his compad, nearly spilling it onto the deck in his haste.
He had heard those words before. Moments later the pad delivered up the same
verse, from a transcript of the prisoners’ talk.

He looked up at the screen. The gestures weren’t just graceful
punctuation! He turned to Anaris. “Lord, the Panarch is talking in code!”

Anaris’s head turned sharply, eyes narrowed. Morrighon held
up his compad to Anaris, who scanned rapidly, then motioned to the Tarkan at
the weapons console. “Destroy that shuttle, now.”

“Sneak-missiles triggered,”
reported Weapons. “Homing.”

Aboard the
Grozniy
, “EMF burst from inner moon,”
Wychyrski sang out, her voice strained, but clear in the bridge cadence.

The image of the Panarch smeared out in a static burst and
vanished.

Sebastian Omilov gasped, one hand to his chest.

Then: “Missile strike on shuttle.” Wychyrski’s voice thinned.
“Severe damage to stern, possible engine loss.”

“I have a vector on the corvette,”
said Rom-Sanchez. “He’s pulling away from the inner moon, heading for skip
radius.” He grimaced. “He’s out of ruptor range.”

Ng’s first reaction was to chase and destroy the corvette,
but then she could not save the shuttle. Fighting down her rage, she said
coldly: “Let him go. Time to tractor range?”

“Seventy-five seconds.”

She glanced at the Aerenarch, whose expression had hardened
with suppressed emotion; sweat lined his brow.

The screen cleared, revealing the shuttle’s bridge now
filling with smoke.

“We’re almost there, Father.”
Brandon’s hand grasped the back of the command pod.

“Sixty seconds to tractor range.” A
secondary screen showed the shuttle, tiny against the blue-white limb of
Gehenna, the Knot flaring violently behind it.

From off-screen Matilde Ho said something Ng couldn’t quite
catch. The Panarch nodded, not taking his eyes off Brandon.

“There’s not enough time, son. The
engine is going critical.”

“Fifty seconds, Father, just fifty
seconds.”

The Panarch’s image wavered. He held up the Phoenix Signet,
distorted into greater size by its proximity to the imager.

“I cannot give this to you now, but
it is yours nevertheless.” He coughed; the smoke thickened and swirled around
his hand holding the ring to the imager, only the Phoenix clear. “Remember the
Oath of Fealty: ‘In life and in dying, until death take me or the world end.’
It is your oath too—”

The screen blanked, then flickered to a view of the planet.
Above it a stunning sphere of light bloomed, beautiful in its symmetry, its
intricate internal detail slowly fading as it dissipated.

No one spoke, no one moved until the silence was broken by
the voice of Sebastian Omilov, choked with grief.

“Out of light were we born, and to
light shall we return. The Light-bearer receive him.”

Ng clenched her jaw against the tide of reaction, fighting
for control. She knew that everyone on the bridge was waiting for her next
words.

She forced her trembling legs to bear her weight, and turned
around. She bowed deeply, the same bow she had made once before, twenty years
ago in the Palace Major on Arthelion.

Then she spoke.

“Your Majesty, what are your
orders?”

A Prison Unsought

Exordium 3

Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

Book View Café 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-509-0
Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

First published: Tor Books, 1994

Cover illustration © 2015 by Sherwood Smith

Production Team:

Cover Design: Pati Nagle

Proofreader: Judith Tarr

Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Digital edition: 20150501vnm

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The Phoenix in Flight
Ruler of Naught
A Prison Unsought

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Sherwood Smith
writes fantasy, science fiction, and historical romance for old and young readers.

Dave Trowbridge
wrote high-tech marketing copy for over thirty years, which made him an expert in what he calls “pulling stuff out of the cave of the flying monkeys,” so science fiction comes naturally. He abandoned corporate life for good in 2013, but not before attaining the rank of Dark Lord of Documentation. He much prefers the godlike powers of a science fiction author (hah!) to troglodyte status in dark corporate mills, and the universe is slowly coming around to his point of view.

Dave lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains with his writer wife, Deborah J. Ross, a retired seeing-eye German Shepherd Dog, and two cats. When not writing Dave may be found wrangling vegetables — both domesticated and feral — in the garden.

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