The Thrones of Kronos (28 page)

“There,” she said with satisfaction, turning back to Nukiel.
“Our dear captain and a couple o’ blunge-eaters had the idea the Dol’jharians
might like to know where you are. We had a different idea, and now I’m captain,
and they’re vapor.” She grinned and sketched a salute. “Captain Jumilla and
Crimson Skull
reporting for duty,
Commodore. Permission to come aboard?”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Nukiel feelingly. “Permission
very gladly granted. And welcome to the Suneater Staging Cloud.”

A soft whimper escaped from Tat Ombric’s aching throat,
and she bit down hard on her lower lip.
I
can’t panic!

Everything was going too fast. Between the old threats and
the new one caused by that howling sound, she didn’t know how she was going to
live out the next twenty-four hours.

Something’s waking up.
Tat tensed her muscles against the images this thought conjured up, and she
jumped when Lysanter entered the lab and moved up behind her, humming
tunelessly.

He was in a good mood? She couldn’t believe it.

She bent over her console, sick with dread.

“Again, Tat,” Lysanter said.

Obediently she tabbed her console, repeating the
wide-spectrum record of the hideous scream that had erupted from the hyperwave.
On her screen the waveform shimmered: it was almost as though she could read
it, for the sight triggered a vivid auditory memory of the terrible sound, an
inhuman death rattle.

The humming resolved into something that almost resembled
human sounds. “Hmmm. Haah.” Then, revealing that he felt he had solved the
problem, or saw a way to, Lysanter began to whistle very softly between his
teeth.

A fresh surge of tension flared through the room. The other
Bori techs looked up and Barrodagh’s two goons twitched, bodies tense; for
Bori, whistling was a harbinger of horror, because of the way the Dol’jharians
reacted.

Lysanter sensed the sudden tension, glanced up, and cleared
his throat.

Silence fell.

Tad let her breath trickle out. Fortunately there were no
Tarkans in hearing. She had looked up the reason Dol’jharians hated whistling, and
wished she hadn’t. She didn’t believe in spirits, but the idea of
Utburds
, the whistling ghosts of infants
exposed to die, had come to haunt her dreams.

“. . . and monitor the load closely.”

Lysanter was addressing her! “Yes, gnostor. What bias do you
want?”

He looked at her oddly. “Correlators and high-speed memory
access, of course. I’ve an idea that requires an enormous pattern-search
space.”

She mumbled an assent and began setting up her console,
gathering the power of the arrays around her and linking the modules that would
give Lysanter the tools he needed.
I’ve
got to stay alert!

As Lysanter vanished in the direction of his office, Tat’s
mouth twisted at the irony. His immediate needs and her long-term needs at this
moment coincided. The tools he required to match the spectral pattern of the
howl, she could use for decryption and deep noderunning. She pulled in even more
arrays—Lysanter, busy now, would not notice.

Then she stood and stretched the tension out of her back and
arms, extending and wiggling her fingers. To either Fasarghan or Nyzherian,
both of whom watched her closely, it would look like the standard ergonomic
sequence, exercises that satisfied the body’s need for the large muscle
movements suppressed by datadiving.
But
they aren’t watching my fingers.

Her workmates saw the
Cover
me
signal. They would set up their consoles to justify the extra computing
power she was demanding—temkin modules, all of them.

“Sound and fury, signifying nothing,” another Rifter
noderunner had said of such modules once. She wondered where Mgee was now.

She sat down. Tapping quickly at the keys, she waited in a
tangle of emotions for the familiar signature. When it came, she caught her
breath. It had grown, branching out in code of almost fractal complexity.

It had begun as a duel with Barrodagh’s noderunner. She’d
finally identified him as Ferrasin, on Arthelion. Initially she’d enjoyed
diving against another noderunner over light-years in real time! She couldn’t
read the communications between him and Barrodagh, but whenever he sent code,
she pounced on it as soon as it was activated and learned a lot about her
opponent in the process.

And at first, he’d been an easy one. Then, somehow, he’d
gotten steadily stronger. Now his code was almost impossible to deal with. Were
it not for this present emergency effort, she could never have marshaled the
resources to defeat his latest.

Not that Morrighon would accept any excuses. Maybe he wasn’t
as twisty as Barrodagh—mentally, anyway, she qualified—but he was just as
dangerous. Maybe more so, seeing whom he served.

She checked Lysanter’s threads. As she’d expected, their
computational demand was growing at a predictable rate, leaving her free to
concentrate on her covert efforts.

Then one of Ferrasin’s constructs yielded its secret.

Unease crawled through her guts: it was a nark into her own
interface program, the one Lysanter had directed her to produce for the Avatar.
Whomever it reported to would know the direction of the Avatar’s thoughts as he
accessed areas of interest.

Well, there was nothing she could or would do about that; it
was undoubtedly for Barrodagh, and cutting off his access to the interface log
would be fatal.

I don’t blame him,
though,
she thought. Surprises could be deadly when they involved
Dol’jharian lords.

The neuraimai continued their patient unraveling, and shock
clawed at her when she saw what they’d uncovered.
I’ve seen that coding before
.

Once, on a dare, Tat had played Suraki in the DataNet—seeing
who could plunge the lowest, like the duel game of that name that Highdwellers
played, but with a console and code, rather than low-gee wings up near the spin
axis. In either case, going too low was the danger.

Both she and her opponent—it was Mgee, she remembered—had
almost been caught. The phage that trashed their probes had carried a similar
signature.

It’s the Mandala
.

No doubt Barrodagh was getting the information he’d sought.
But so are the nicks.

She, and everyone on the station, knew the Panarchy was
massing for an attack, even though no news reached them from the Rifter fleet
guarding the Suneater. But now, only she knew that in some form or other, they
were already here.

It can’t be Sedry
Thetris. Can it?
She didn’t think any noderunner could do work like this
from the crippled console in the Rifters’ quarters, although it was likely the
ex-commander had already done what she could about that. Tat would have—any
noderunner would. But this had come over the hyperwave. It couldn’t have
anything to do with Sedry.

Surreptitiously she saved the signature and neuraimai
matrices into her compad and checked on Lysanter’s work. His array demands had
peaked and leveled. She might have enough time.

Her heart pounded and her stomach boiled. There was no going
back from this point, but she might never have another chance. Quickly she UL’d
the trapdoors she’d laboriously created, using her temporary power to set them
deep into the system. A few minutes later, sweat-soaked from tension and with a
racking headache, she tabbed ACCEPT and then set about undoing her traces.

Now she could get back in from any console, and if she
worked slowly enough, the extra load would go unnoticed. Of course, if she was
detected, then a small part of the array load on the Suneater would temporarily
be diverted for the operation of the mindripper—with her as the subject.

Now what?

She looked at the chrono. Five minutes past her shift break,
but Lysanter was not releasing arrays. Why?

Other worries crowded out the question. She’d have to find a
pack going down to Recycling, so she could get Dem before he wandered off. She
had to get him safely back to their chamber, or at least to the Bori area.

Lysanter’s voice made her jump. “That’s all for now,
Tatriman. You can release the array capacity borrowed from quantum interface
and stasis control, but I shall require the rest for a bit longer.”

He sounds really scared.
Anxiety gnawed at her, mixing fear at finding out what he’d discovered with
the need to know.

Lysanter hustled back to his office, his face tight with
strain, lab coat swinging. As she reassigned arrays and other resources, she
extended a probe into his work area, disguising it as a scavenger. His results
weren’t hidden, but she couldn’t see why he was so upset at what seemed to her
a simple correlation with an activity that had to be very familiar to the
inventor of the quantum interfaces. But there was a pointer to a note he’d made
and then erased, not yet reclaimed; that lay a bit deeper.

Tat hesitated, but she’d never seen Lysanter actually
frightened before. Even at that horrible scream. It was now or never. The note
would be gone in moments. She took a deep breath, and used her new trapdoor for
the first time.

She almost wished she hadn’t, for what she discovered swept
away all her comforting hopes about the Rifters, Thetris in particular, while
at the same time making it even more urgent that she commit to them. She
cleared her console and hurried out.

First Dem, then to talk to Lar. He knew the Rifters better
than she. They had to decide: was it time to trust them?

o0o

Lysanter dropped his head into his hands, trying to think.
He’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. What to do?

The sound in the hyperwave chamber echoed again in his mind,
this time proleptic of what might be his destiny all too soon. How could he
have been so confident of something he saw so clearly now had been a completely
unwarranted assumption?

He sat almost paralyzed for a time, his mind circling
uselessly, until a soft chime from his console interrupted him, and the
squinty, misshapen face of Anaris’s secretary windowed up.

“What was that sound?” Morrighon asked. His tone was mild,
merely interrogatory.

Lysanter had never heard a threat from Morrighon, who simply
assumed obedience, which the scientist understood as a growing confidence that
was deliberately dividing him from Barrodagh. And Anaris was now in charge of
the Suneater fleet as well as all other external operations.

Well, this discovery certainly fell within that remit.

“I am not sure,” replied Lysanter, “but I have a
hypothesis.”

Morrighon waited.

Lysanter fussed purposeless over his desk without speaking,
willing him to understand.

And he did. “Come to my office.” His image flickered away.

A few minutes later Lysanter stood in front of Morrighon’s
desk. “Senz-lo Morrighon,” he began.

What was bothering the
man?
Morrighon thought with weary impatience. Lysanter had never used that
honorific before. He motioned the scientist to take a seat. “That’s not
needful, gnostor.”

Lysanter plopped bonelessly into the chair. “Perhaps it is,”
he burst out. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“Related to that sound?”

“Yes.” He actually gulped—his throat bobbing as he swallowed
drily. Morrighon waited, impatience sharpening to alert.

“I can’t be sure…” Lysanter stopped, his throat working
again, as if he couldn’t get the words out. Morrighon held up one hand.

“Wait one moment.” He ran another scan of his office. Still
clear. He motioned the scientist to continue.

“I can’t be sure, but that sound may …
may
… indicate that the Panarchists have a hyperwave.”

Morrighon stared at him, all his calculations overturned. No
wonder the man was so terrified. If Eusabian found out . . .

No, if Eusabian found out without proper preparation. That,
he and Anaris could encompass. And in so doing, bolster the Heir’s position
even further. But first he had to understand exactly what Lysanter meant. He tabbed
an auto-message to his secretary Farniol: no contact for any reason save a
summons from Anaris. Nothing else on the station could possibly matter as much
as this.

“Tell me everything,” he said, softly. “Do not worry. You
have done right in coming to me. The Heir will be pleased, and he will protect
you.”

Lar resisted the urge to check his chrono yet again when
the door slurped open and Tat and Dem shot through.

Relieved, Lar collapsed back into one of the bunks. “Never
thought I’d want to hear that noise,” he said in greeting, then shock burned
along his strained nerves when he saw Tat’s face.

“Late shift. Lysanter,” she said, her voice too bright. “Na!
Hot and sticky—need a shower.”

“We both do,” Lar said, his brows contracting at the tension
radiating off her.

Together they got Dem cleaned up, then Tat swept for narks.
The one in the bedroom had been reactivated, she indicated with a forefinger as
they bundled Dem safely into bed, where he dropped straight into sleep. Then
they retreated to the shower, and under the cover of its hiss, both started to
talk at once, dropping automatically into the quick patois that mixed Bori,
Uni, and words from the many other languages heard at Rifthaven.

“Don’t be late again,” Lar said. “Or if need, signal?
Leastways if chatzing Karusch-na Rahali starts up.”

“Already?” Tat said blankly. “Lords hunting Bori after all?”

“Grays. Menials, talking talking talking, ready to do,” Lar
said. “Alzhiagh says timing is approximate, this far from Dol’jhar: lords say
when. And we shouldn’t even see
them
.
We safe enough from the lords. Underlings our danger. Start early, and lords
let them because they’re getting crazy-bad. Why you’ve got to remember to move
only with a pack. Only safety is numbers.”