The Thrones of Kronos (74 page)

Lokri’s voice had regained its old bitter drawl, but the
tears were new. He dashed his wrist across his eyes, and looked upward, lips a thin
line.

In silence they rejoined the others.

It seemed Margot Ng had scarcely laid her head on the
pillow when the comm chimed. “Yes?”

“Phisot here—Astronomy.”

The tightness in the officer’s voice brought her fully
awake. Her chrono showed she’d been asleep for five hours. Better than she had
any right to expect, under the circumstances. She got up and began dressing,
leaving the image off. “Your report?”

“We detected a massive blast of neutrinos a minute ago. Off
the scale. Core collapse has begun. Supernova, as we feared.”

The confirmation of the earlier, tentative report was like a
blow to her heart. “How long do we have?”

“No way to tell. This star isn’t anywhere near the right
part of the H-R diagram for this.” Phisot snorted—not a mocking sound, but one
of frustration. “This is the first time humankind’s been up close to a star on
the edge of exploding, and it’s totally artificial. We’ll learn nothing.”

“Your best estimate, then.” Ng tried to keep the impatience
out of her voice.

“Normally it takes hours for the shock wave to reach the
surface and blow the star apart; I don’t expect it will be much different
here,” replied the officer. “But with the effect of whatever forces are being
used to control the star, the velocity of the explosion from then on is
anyone’s guess. We’ll know more when we see the detonation.”

“What about the Suneater?”

She could almost hear his shrug. “Who knows? Gnostor Omilov
thinks it likely it will survive—after all, this is its function. But the
amount of matter dumped into the black hole will power it up beyond anything
we’ve calculated . . .”

His voice trailed off, but she didn’t need him to complete
the sentence. The Rifters’ skipmissiles were already at the edge of the shield
capabilities of a battlecruiser.

And still no word from the Marines. Or the Panarch.

Sitting there alone in the semidarkness of her cabin, she
felt the weight of her responsibilities crash down on her with numbing force.
Again, again.

She dismissed Phisot with thanks and left for the bridge.

She found her alpha crew just arriving, or having arrived,
everyone looking as tired as she felt. Their nervous energy, their wordless
support—they knew what this news meant—didn’t help. She stared at the main
viewscreen, displaying the ever-increasing glory of the accretion disk, growing
brighter as the red giant swelled under the lash of power from the Suneater.

Again.

Perthes Krajno cocked a grizzled eyebrow at her; she
realized she’d spoken the word aloud. She saw in his expression that he
understood. But even that didn’t help. She was alone.

She drew a deep breath. “Communications: flagship to Fleet.
Launch the asteroids.”

o0o

Ivard waited until the footsteps of the others died away
and then emerged from the shadows. He stood alone in the strange chamber, arms
crossed over his chest, his mind bleak with sorrow and grief, yet he still
reached mentally for the Kelly.

The blue flicker of the Archon’s presence within him
steadied and contracted to a point.

An image filled his mind: the impossible verdure of a Kelly
forest, background to the delicate stone and steel tracery of a phratry shrine
interlaced with vines and flowers, their colors almost fluorescent in the
sun-dappled shade. Alien emotions radiated through him, some incomprehensible
despite his closeness to the Kelly. The closest analogues were regret, sorrow,
a deep nostalgia impossible to human beings.

So much was memory that the Archon had shared.

The living contact that had taught him and frolicked with
him, refreshed and sustained him, was gone.

He opened his eyes, tears spilling from them. The blue
flicker was a throbbing threnody of loss, and the emerald band around his wrist
felt cold as ice. Portus-Dartinus-Atos were dead. He was alone.

All around him a riot of color sang and trembled as the
Suneater came to life. Underfoot another sphere of light blossomed among the
stars, and Ivard remembered what Jaim had murmured, apparently unaware that he
had spoken.

“The bright coins in
which our lives are paid.”

He knew what that meant. All the people Ivard loved most
were paying out their lives. Would Brandon die, too, and Vi’ya, and Jaim and
Montrose? Ivard lifted the bag hanging at his throat and opened it, watching
the colored lights wash over the crumpled silk medal and the ancient coin,
artifact of a mythical race of warriors from early in human history.
The Kelly called me more than human.
Did
being more than human mean that he could stop the terrible spending of lives?

It is time to try—or
to pay my own coin,
he decided, and the blue fire glowed within him.

He touched Lucifur’s flat head, then walked into the center
of the chamber and stood before the beam of light, his eyes following it down
until it was lost among the stars. A communications interface?

He opened himself to the alien song of the station around
him, assembling it in a synesthetic gestalt as he had been taught by the Kelly.
He still did not understand, but he sensed the rhythms underlying it.

Still holding his talismans, Ivard stepped into the beam.

o0o

Mandros Nukiel was fighting for his life, tied to a stone
in heaven whose worth outweighed his ship, and if needful, all the lives within
it—for each of them was proxy for trillions of lives held hostage by the alien
construct they sought to destroy.

So he sparred with the Rifter destroyer, cursing the
preternatural skill of its captain and watching helplessly as telemetry from
the asteroid he warded indicated the slow degradation of the engines that would
launch it at the Suneater when the word came.

He ignored the smaller ships supporting the destroyer,
scarcely noticing when two fell victims to ruptor fire when the fog of war
delivered them within range. The rest could do nothing to him, and his
supporting frigates and corvettes could deal with them. It was only the
destroyer that threatened both the
Mbwa
Kali
and the asteroid it shepherded.

“Navigation, new coordinates: 32.5 mark 44, skip 10
light-seconds, random tactical skip after discharge. Weapons, aft ruptor
turrets alpha and gamma, full power, wide dispersion on emergence . . .”

He continued his orders as the fiveskip burred harshly,
noting that the skips needed to save the asteroid from destruction by the
destroyer’s skipmissiles was giving it too large a real velocity on the wrong
vector. He’d have to start unwinding that, and soon.

The communications console bleeped. “Tacponder pulse
incoming, general address, flagship to Fleet: launch asteroids!” The officer’s
voice scaled up as the import of the message reached her.

There was a cheer from the bridge crew, cut short by a sharp
jolt and a spattering of damage lights from the consoles.

“Skipmissile impact, glancing, extreme range, forward alpha
ruptor turret destabilized.”

“Now we can fight that destroyer properly,” Efriq declared.

“Asteroid Control, solution?” Nukiel said, wondering if the
real vector of the asteroid, which it would resume after it emerged from skip,
was now too large.

“Solution calculated, twelve seconds to acquisition.”

Relief washed through him. “Lock and commit.”

The secondary console assigned to remote control of the
asteroid tug, which had been the
Pax Britannia
before it was battered into near scrap in the Ujima system, twittered as the
commands uploaded.

“Locked and committed.”

“Emergence pulse!” Siglnt’s voice was hoarse. “Bearing 44
mark 16, range 7 light-seconds. Coming about to fire on asteroid. Skip-missile
charging.”

Nukiel cursed quietly. That was squarely in the field of
fire of the damaged ruptor turret, severely impairing the power he could
deliver at that range. The only good thing was that the Rifter skipmissiles
were taking longer to charge as they got more powerful. It would be close.

“Weapons—” He snapped out his orders. The ship shuddered
slightly as the other two turrets fired.

A tense silence gripped the bridge. Even the consoles seemed
to fall quiet. On the main screen the asteroid bulked, a misshapen lump of rock
mushrooming like an oversized tumor from the hulk of the converted
battlecruiser.

“. . . two, one . . .” came
the voice of Asteroid Control.

Light bloomed where the asteroid had been.

“Skipmissile impact,” said Siglnt, while simultaneously
Asteroid Control shouted, “Asteroid away!”

A chain-of-pearls wake speared off from the gout of light.

“Wake analysis indicates damage to engines, harmonic
instability.”

“Navigation, take us along the wake, ten light-seconds.”

When the screens cleared, a targeting cross lit up on the
screen, which flickered and cleared to an enhanced image of a cluster of rocks
tumbling and slowly spreading.

“Engines failed at fifteen percent cee, breakup pattern
analyzed—a miss.”

Nukiel slammed his fist down on the arm of his command pod.
All that for nothing. “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s go after that chatzing
Rifter and make him pay.”

o0o

Tallis no longer bothered to pretend he was directing the
battle, for after the death of Anderic everyone on board the
Satansclaw
knew about the logos. So he
slumped in his command pod, watching with a curious detachment as the machine
ran the ship and its weapons.

The rest of the bridge crew was idle as well, except Kira
Lennart, and Mavisu on the engineering console. Mavisu was bringing up the spin
reactors, now that they didn’t need to worry about inspections anymore, but it
was Kira’s work that concerned him most. He opened the secure channel she’d
established, to enable them to communicate without the logos listening in.

(Anything?)
he
subvocalized into the pin-mike, rigidly controlling his unfortunate tendency to
mix up thoughts and speech in that mode. It hadn’t mattered with the logos, not
at first. For that reason, if no other, it was a relief not to have to pretend
anymore—he no longer had to worry about inadvertently revealing his plans to
the machine while giving orders.

(I’m ready, I think,)
she replied.
(I found what I needed in a
book on Barcan culture. If I give the eidolon what he’s fixated on, I think I
can pry him loose once and for all.)

(What’s that?)

(You don’t want to
know.)
Despite the distorting effect of subvocal communications, Tallis
could hear her disgust.

(Then how long?)

(It’ll take only a few
minutes, once you give the word.)

He cut the connection. That wouldn’t be until the logos
disposed of the battlecruiser. Then he checked Mavisu’s progress. The spin
reactors were twenty hours from being on-line.

The squeal-rumble of a near miss from the battlecruiser’s
ruptors jerked his head up in time to see the skipmissile discharge, followed a
few seconds later by a gout of garish light from the main screen.

(SKIPMISSILE IMPACT ON
ASTEROID,)
came the dispassionate voice of the logos in his ear. He’d left
its communications covert, knowing the crew would be upset by its dead-sounding
voice. There was a brief pause.
(ASTEROID
WILL MISS STATION.)

“Communications,” Tallis said, “signal to Juvaszt: asteroid
deflected.”

He wondered what his next orders would be.
The logos’s orders, you mean
. He shook
off the thought. Likely all the asteroids had been launched, so Juvaszt’s only
goal now would be to destroy the Panarchist Fleet, and so he’d undoubtedly
order Tallis to continue the engagement.

That was just as well, he reflected as the fiveskip burred
again in high tactical mode. Doubtless any other order would be disobeyed by
the logos, anyway.

o0o

“Which way now, Yehudi?”

Brandon briefly closed his eyes, listening inside his head.
He could not describe the sensation, so faint it was; no overt communication,
but the awareness of Vi’ya’s presence was something like being aware of a loved
one sleeping in the next room. “That way, I think.”

They headed down the corridor he’d indicated, Brandon in the
middle of the squad. Although they still addressed him by the l’iconnu
“Yehudi,” there was no way they were going to ignore who he really was.
None of them wants to be the one to return
and report my death.

As though summoned by the thought, the ceiling opened ahead
and behind, and two squads of Tarkans dropped down, turning the corridor into a
hell of flame and buzzing antipersonnel weapons.

There was the telltale pucker of a door on their right, although
the frame for its controls had crumpled. Kellem cursed as he triggered his jac
into the adit fistula. The pucker snapped open. They ducked inside, Nail’s suit
dragging one leg. The door snapped shut. Outside they could hear the whine of
the Tarkans’ armor as they deployed for the finishing attack.

“What the chatzing hell is this place?” Nail said, looking
up from the access plate to his leg as he snapped it shut.

Brandon looked around at the chamber, whose walls were
nearly square. Smoke-darkened tapestries hung everywhere, and at one end was an
altar with a skull on one level, and below, a battered bowl. The other Marines
looked around in amazement.

“It’s the Chamber of the Mysteries, the cultic center of the
Eusabian family.” Brandon pointed at the skull. “That must be Eusabian’s
father.”

“Is that why they’re taking so long out there?” Gwyn asked.

“Probably. It’s a death sentence for anyone to enter this
room without permission. They’ll want to make sure.”