The Thrones of Kronos (29 page)

“All right,” Tat muttered, sounding tired. “Find a pack, get
Dem, as planned. What happened? You there?”

“No. Got word by signal—” Lar told her what he knew: the
Bori who had had both his legs broken had been alone, returning from third
shift at Recycling, and the other had been grabbed from the corridor right
outside the Bori barracks area. She had a broken collarbone and a fractured
skull.

“. . . so the others have organized a
solid-front refusal to service the grays’ and menials’ barracks areas. Even
Catennach can’t make us budge.”

Bori were never permitted in the Tarkan areas, the one rule
on this station for which Lar had frequently offered thanks to whatever deities
might be listening.

Tat turned her face up into the stream of water, and Lar
felt a surge of pity. As if anything would drain the terrible tension except
escape—or death. “Your news?” he asked.

Tat’s head dropped, and through the curtain of sleeting
water, she murmured, “That screech? Lysanter thinks the Panarchists may have a
hyperwave. He’s not going to say anything until he’s sure, but when he does,
things’ll get crazy bad. Lar, we have to decide. Right now. We trust
Telvarna
Rifters or not?”

Lar hesitated. Here was yet another knife edge; again their
lives rested on making the right choice.
That’s
the curse of this life,
he thought desolately.
The slightest mistake means death, yet the reward for doing the right
thing is simply continued existence.
He fought the emotions back and faced
the problem. He had obediently carried out all Tat’s little tricks and
stratagems in order to ascertain whether the new Rifters—especially the
noderunner—could be trusted. They’d all either been deflected or else met with
friendly (but penetrating) questions.

Lar could understand someone learning Dol’jharian. He and
Tat had been brain-stuffing the loathsome language ever since they knew they
wouldn’t get quickly out of this Suneater mess. But to learn Bori? No one
learned Bori who wasn’t a Bori—even Bori such as the Catennach tried to
eradicate it from their minds and refused to use it at all. If they had to,
they spoke Uni. Exchanging the tongue of one conqueror for another.

If he and Tat could only get more time, he could have found
out, little by little, if Sedry Thetris, once a nick officer, was to be
trusted. But it seemed they wouldn’t get it.

“Nicks are here. Evidence all over dataspace,” Tat murmured,
right into his ear, so softly he could barely hear her over the rush of water
on both their skulls. “Worse—last attempt by tempath started station powering
up all on its own. Incremental, but who knows how long that will last? Or how
the Avatar will react? We have to decide right now—and act. Now.”

Lar pressed his thumbs round the edges of his eye sockets
and groaned, not caring whether hypothetical narks conveyed the sound straight
to some unseen listener. What could make life any more terrifying?

He tried to balance all the factors. The Panarchists were
already here somehow; Barrodagh was getting rastier by the hour; and jacking
the stress into surreal proportions was the fact the Dol’jharians’ Karushna
inexorably got them hot-eyed and merciless hunting for sex—the more violent the
better. Add to that the Ogres—only two now, toys for the Avatar, Tat said, but
more to come.

She sensed his hesitation. “I planted some trapdoors in the
system. How I got Lysanter’s idea about the Panarchist hyperwave. Maybe do us
some good later.”

“Even against Ogres? Rifters can’t help there, not even
brain-burners.”

“Maybe even there. Lysanter made control tags. Maybe we con
some tags, protect us, Dem, others.”

He sighed, and hit the shower control. “Let’s try it,” he
said. “I know what the
Telvarna
Rifters’re doing now, and Dem is safe here. I’ll go get them—you hide in the
storage alcove off of the rec-area access tunnel.”

Tat’s mouth pressed into a white line. “Better run.”

A short time later, the plans buzzing in Sedry’s mind like
maddened insects vanished in a wink when she and Marim followed Lar around a
corner and the Bori came to an abrupt halt. Sedry gazed up the long tunnel,
wondering what to expect—and saw Tat dashing full speed, her footsteps echoing.

Breathless, Tat labored to sound nonchalant, but her voice
trembled. “I’m off shift. Can I join you?”

Sedry’s brow contracted over a searching gaze, but Marim
barely glanced at her. “Sure,” Marim said cheerfully. “More the better. No one
seems to want to come to the rec area, and I’m bo-ooored.”

“It seems we are off limits to the Dol’jharians,” Sedry
said. “But we’re not walking alone. Do come with us. How are you at L-3?”

“Love it,” Tat said fervently.

Sedry saw Tat signal unobtrusively to Lar to keep Marim
busy. When he signified his understanding—and his approval—relief flooded
Sedry.
Then this is for me, not Marim,
Sedry thought.

“It’s rare that I get a chance to play another noderunner,”
Tat said. Her large light brown eyes were steady, her thin brows in an anxious
line. Her fingers semaphored:
Need to
talk.

And Sedry mirrored the signal.

Tat drew in a low breath as they all scanned the
intersection, even Marim.

No one at all was in the last two corridors, and in the
third, a group of Bori tightly pressed together moved almost at a run, the
oddness of which sent Sedry’s adrenaline pumping again. She wished she hadn’t
asked Lar what was going on.

The real horror was, apparently you never saw the roving
Dol’jharians until they got you. She’d envisioned packs of lip-smacking grays
and Tarkans tromping around in their heavy boots and poking into rooms and so
on. Instead, you didn’t see any of them.
Which
means they must lie awake for days and days and plot who to get and when and
where to do it—while never giving a hint of it to anyone
.

That was the nastiest aspect of it, the loneliness and
secrecy. To a Bori, Lar had explained earnestly, the whole mess was unspeakably
perverted. And though Marim had whooped with laughter, Sedry found it frightening.
And sad.

A spurt of tension-inspired amusement fluttered up from
Sedry’s chest: what truly amazed her was finding out from Lar that the
Dol’jharians considered Bori perverted for keeping sex in the family until its
members deemed themselves ready to essay strangers—and then the entire family
made the invitation.

“How else can one learn without getting hurt?” he had said
in all seriousness. Sedry had kept her own reactions to this revelation of
culturally-supported incest to herself as Lar had added with a moue of
distaste: “But then, Dol’jharians like hurting people.”

As they reached the relative safety of the rec room, Sedry
scanned ahead.

“Blungesuck! We’re alone,” Marim exclaimed in disgust. “May’s
well have stayed in our hole.”

“Shift just changed,” Lar said, rolling his eyes at Tat.

“Here’s a console,” Sedry said, indicating one off to the
side.

Tat nodded, eyes wide with intent: the position afforded a
clear field of vision and a couple of possible lines of retreat.

Lar said something about distractions and headed in another
direction. Marim followed, her fluty voice declaiming how much fun it was to
sit near the door so she could see who came and went.

Sedry seated herself across from Tat, making certain that
Marim could not see her.

“I’ll patch in my compad so we can play larger. I’ve got a
hot set of mods for L-3 here.” Tat pulled up her compad from its tether.

Sedry smiled inwardly at how Tat also found games useful
tools of subversion. Her blood rushed in her ears as a flicker of light wedded
the compad and the archaic console. Tat’s face had smoothed to an expression of
concentration.

On the screen a header appeared. Below it, Tat typed:
Is this yours?

Sedry’s fingers were unhesitating.
No. But that’s a very deep prefix driving it. Deepest I’ve ever seen.

Tat sighed.
Do you
know what it is?

Sedry’s heartbeat thrummed counterpoint to the blood singing
in her ears. Tat had taken the first step in trust. She must reciprocate,
despite the danger. She flicked her fingers in the wait sign and tabbed in her
naval ID while chatting about the game and Tat’s additions.

Fascinated, she watched as something assembled itself around
her code; there was dissonance around the segment denoting her retired status.
The mystery header did not originate from Ares.

More code aggregated around the core she’d furnished. Sedry’s
innards churned, causing a shudder of nausea: whoever had programmed this had
come perilously close—closer than she ever would—to trespassing the ban on
intelligent programs.

Then whatever it was seemed to accept her credentials and
the pattern smoothed into a query, not verbal, but symbolized by an unresolved
pointer. Tat tapped busily, carrying both sides of the surface game to cover
her, but Sedry could do no more here. She linked the pointer to the node ID of
the console in the crew’s quarters, unreachable for now. Tat would have to do
the rest.

I’m not sure,
she
finally typed.
How did you obtain it?

Came over the
hyperwave. Is it from Ares?

Sedry’s heart hammered painfully. She really did feel sick
as Tat rushed on.
Lysanter thinks nicks maybe
got a hyperwave. When Eusabian finds out—

Tat stopped typing—she didn’t need to continue. Tat couldn’t
know how bad this news made things, and Sedry couldn’t tell her. Not without
asking the Unity; maybe not at all.

Sedry’s guts boiled. She liked Tat and Lar and felt a
helpless sense of pity for all the Bori. They didn’t deserve a life in
hell—which would only get worse with the revelation of the Ares hyperwave. But
the Unity, strange echo that it was of her face of Telos, and behind it all the
people of the Thousand Suns, held her first loyalty.

I think I can work
with this,
typed Sedry.

“Chatz. You did it again. Another?” Sedry said aloud,
sending a covert glance at Marim and Lar, who were laughing over their game.
Then she shook her hand, and a couple of bracelets jingled free of her sleeve. “You
win.” Her fingers twitched a jewel from one of them, and she handed that across,
saying, “Same wager?”

Tat took it, her thin brows puckering her high brow in
question.

Sedry typed swiftly:
I’ve
carried this on me since we landed, in case it was needed. Destructive-read
crystal. Top-level phage. It will lift the filters from our console, so I can
dig into the system. I promise it will not lead to you.

She knew, of course, that Tat would run a check on it first.
She would have to in order to adapt it fully to the Suneater arrays. Tat would
understand that Sedry was giving tacit permission.

Tat’s forehead smoothed as she palmed the jewel. “It’s
pretty, but I can’t spend old Rifthaven trinkets. How about wagering food
vouchers? We can eat those!”

The door sucked open on the rumble of Dol’jharian voices.

Working quickly, Tat reset a game as Sedry said loudly, “Sgatshi!
This time the wrath of hell burns within my heart. Let’s have our replay without
the mods.” She grinned, thinking of Montrose and his opera, a taste she was
slowly acquiring. The Queen of the Night was an apt figure for a noderunner.

Tat’s compad slipped on its leash onto her lap, and she
leaned forward, appearing to concentrate on the game.

The grays roamed around, boots thudding, and one gave a
loud, ugly laugh. Tat hunched, recognizing from that sound that they’d probably
been eating the hallucinatory Ur-fruit. She breathed deeply, ready to run if
she had to.

Sedry shut out the sound, bending over the console. Inside
she cheered: The
Telvarna
crew now
had an ally.

o0o

Eusabian did not turn around as Barrodagh entered his
chamber, although he detected a slight movement of his lord’s head as the door
squelched back into its usual pucker.

The Avatar stood before the huge holovid that Barrodagh had
recently upgraded from a static display, hoping to assuage Eusabian’s boredom
to some small degree. As before, it reflected the view from the tower room in
Hroth D’ocha, Eusabian’s ancestral keep on Dol’jhar. The flickering light from
the karra-fires of the distant volcanoes on Jhar D’ocha’s northern border
stirred the ancient tapestries hung all around to fitful life, animating the
orderly gods and avatars of Lost Earth in their eternal dances or battles, the
flutters of light terrible mimicry of the uneasy movements of the Suneater.

Barrodagh shivered. Even though Eusabian’s chamber was
utterly free of those movements, being the most heavily stasis-clamped of all,
he was less comfortable here than anywhere on the station. The elegant
furnishings of the defeated Panarch’s library reminded him of his one encounter
with the ghost that now haunted the distant Mandala, and the contrast with
Eusabian’s brooding intensified his dread. But he knew what Eusabian was
capable of, while the worst the Suneater could offer was death.

He hoped. The rumors were steadily growing weirder.

Barely perceptible motions of the Dol’jharian’s broad
shoulders indicated to Barrodagh that he was curse-weaving, so Barrodagh was
relieved when Eusabian remained facing the holovid, as though looking through a
window.

“What was that sound?” The Avatar’s voice was soft.

“We do not yet know, Lord. Lysanter is analyzing it. It was
not caused by any action of the tempath; she was asleep when it occurred.”

Eusabian stood in silence for a time. Although he could not
see it, Barrodagh could hear the faint whisper of the silken cord in his hands.

“Your report,” the Lord of Vengeance finally said.

First the very good news that Lysanter had revealed.