A Prison Unsought (59 page)

But she returned his gaze without flinching, reminding him
that this woman had faced the skipmissiles of Eusabian’s fleet at Arthelion,
had spent thousands of lives in what she saw as fulfillment of her oath of
fealty. He could afford a pang of regret at the necessity of her destruction.

“No, Aegios, I will not,” she
replied, “until so ordered by my superior officer. The Aerenarch is right. If
there is any chance we can rescue the Panarch, we must do so—our oaths demand
it.”

Fierce anger suffused Harkatsus, burning away the regret. He
had command in his grasp! He just had to hold it. “The Panarch is
dead, and with him your career, Captain.”

He snapped his fingers at Vahn. “Solarch, as
representative of the new Privy Council, I order you to arrest Captain Ng for
defiance of the duly constituted order of government.”

Vahn’s gaze arrowed straight to the Aerenarch, sending a
spurt of fear through Harkatsus.
They
can’t do anything! I am now the government!
He reveled in the hopeless
reluctance that Vahn revealed, and reveled in the solarch’s hand moving slowly
to his side arm—

Vahn slowly lifted it from the holster, obviously waiting
for an order that Nyberg could not give, and the Aerenarch would only weaken
himself by repeating. Triumph burned through Harkatsus as Vahn shifted his
stance to step toward the unmoving captain—

And then an interruption startled them all: it was the old
gnostor with the big ears, forgotten at the back of the room by the console.

“No,” Omilov said hoarsely. And in
a stronger voice, “I forbid it.”

Kestian Harkatsus swung around, astonished. Was the man mad?
Silence rang like a shock wave as Omilov tapped at the keys.

Harkatsus drew in an angry breath. “You forbid it? Gnostor,
you should not even be in this room!”

Omilov smiled at him, the smile of a man much younger, and
free with his duty clear before him. “‘It is within the capacity of anyone to
do nothing,’” he quoted, and slapped the console’s ACCEPT tab.

The flicker of a retinal scan danced across the gnostor’s
face, and the dispassionate voice of the computer announced, “Identity
confirmed: Sebastian Omilov, Praerogate Prime by the grace of His Majesty
Gelasaar III.”

Kestian’s breath caught in his throat as the trumpet chords
of the Phoenix Fanfare pealed out, galvanizing all those present and pulling
them physically around to face the console, like puppets on a string.

Suddenly Gelasaar was there among them, the force of his
personality reaching out from the recorded image on the screen like the
tsunami, which, lifted from the body of the sea by the massive shifting of a
planetary crust, sweeps all the works of humankind away before its irresistible
force.

“Hear my words, all those within
sound and sight: obey this my servant as you would me, or be forfeit in your
oath.” His eyes seemed to take them all in a single sweep, and then the
recording terminated.

“Command functions initiated,” the
dispassionate computer voice stated. “Local computing authority terminated,
control established of all station nodes. Awaiting input.”

The silence that followed rang in Harkatsus’s ears. The
Praerogacy Worm, which had been running in the DataNet for more than eight
hundred years, had once again executed its function: Sebastian Omilov was now
master of Ares. There were no fail-safes against a Praerogate; if he desired,
he could open the station to space, or detonate its reactors, and no one could
stop him.

Omilov stepped into the room, conviction lifting his voice.
“His Majesty has placed the high justice and the low within my hands, and here I
grasp it. Upon pain of disgrace,
dechoukaj
,
and death, I command that you lend all your efforts to the rescue of His
Majesty.”

A last, faint pulse of hope lanced through Kestian Harkatsus:
Omilov had not ordered them to obey the Aerenarch—he had merely confirmed his
order. There might still be a chance . . .

Before he could draw breath to speak, a privacy came from Srivashti:
(Don’t be a fool. He couldn’t put Brandon
Arkad on the throne, but he can help him hold it.)

The warning carried all the ring of command, and Harkatsus’
fury boiled over.
(I am the appointed
leader of this council, not you.)
Rage made him reckless, and he spoke
quickly, without considering his words: “Your power, Praerogate, comes through
the Panarch during his lifetime. But he is beyond communication, beyond reach.
He is for all purposes dead.” He raised his voice, ending on a shout: “You
spoke for the old government, but I speak for the new. That ship stays here to
guard us!”

The words bounced against the dyplast walls, then dwindled
into silence. But it was not the same kind of silence; the balance of power was
no longer counterpoised, it had shifted forever. In sick despair he saw the Marine
replace his jac in the holster and turn to the Aerenarch for orders.

“Captain Ng,” the Aerenarch said,
his voice mild, “prepare for departure as soon as possible.” And as the captain
saluted and left the room, he indicated the remaining people with a lift of his
hand: “Genz, let us discuss plans.”

Hope died then, as Harkatsus watched the young man wield the
power that he himself should have had. Then worse came: he knew himself a fool,
a facade for the power-lust of others, as Tau Srivashti stepped forward and
knelt in a graceful obeisance of surrender to Brandon vlith-Arkad.

As one by one the others around him moved to follow suit,
Kestian recognized that this was not an out for him. His role in the theater of
power that was Panarchic politics had been taken. Life, family, possessions
even—all these would remain, but their proper use was now to him forever lost.

He forced himself to breathe, to turn, to raise his shaking
hand to tab the door control.

He walked out, and no one stopped him.

“The Rouge aegios on the Ivory
temenarch,” said Lazoro.

Londri Ironqueen slapped the dwarf’s hand away from the
ancient dyplast cards. “Don’t touch them, you snarky blot. You’ll get them all
greasy.”

Her chancellor cackled and ripped another strip of flesh off
the roasted joint he clutched in one misshapen hand, chewing noisily. Londri’s
stomach lurched; early in her fifth pregnancy nothing was appetizing, but roast
meat was especially nauseating.

Overhead, the sconces crackled as an errant draft toyed with
the oil wicks; the thick shutters were drawn back from the deep, narrow
windows, admitting the predawn breeze, heavy with the scent of the
night-blooming bloodflowers that twined the tower of Annrai the Mad. Londri’s
stomach roiled again at their overly sweet, almost carrion scent.

Lazoro looked more closely at her. “How long this time?”

“Two courses.”

The dwarf said nothing, the only sound the slap of the cards
on the low table between them. All her other pregnancies had ended in
miscarriages by the third month.

Then Lazoro poked at the cards with his free hand. “Now
uncover the Phoenix singularity and move it to the bar, which will free up . . .”

“I can see that better than you
can, lump. They call this solitaire for a reason, you know.”

Lazoro stood up, which made little difference in his height,
and performed an exaggerated bow, whacking his head into the low table between
them. “Your pardon, O Great Queen,” he intoned.

When he straightened up, one of the cards was stuck to his
high forehead, the starburst pattern on its back like a strange caste mark
above his gray eyes. He peeled it off and peered at it owlishly as Londri
snorted a laugh.

“The Nine of Phoenix,” Lazoro
pronounced, flipping the card around to show its face: nine heraldic birds
enwrapped in flames. “Opportunity and strife.”

“Opportunity and strife,” echoed a
booming voice, startling them both. “What else is new, O farsighted one?”

The bulky figure of Anya Steelhand filled the doorway,
shoving aside the hanging with one brawny, spark-scarred arm. The forge master
pushed her way into the room and dropped into a chair, which creaked warningly
under her weight.

“My passion for you, sweet flower
of the forge,” replied Lazoro, grinning broadly, “renewed as always by the
sight of your lissome frame.”

“Bah!” Anya snorted. She grabbed a
flagon, pouring it full of thick, fresh-brewed beer from the pitcher on the
table, and sat down, staring into the drink.

Londri snatched the card from the dwarf’s hands and slapped
it back on the table. He sat down again, his face serious. “You really do have
to decide about the Isolate woman at Szuri Pastures. Aztlan and Comori won’t
wait much longer, and if they tangle, the Tasuroi will move through. You know
they’re stronger than they’ve been in seventeen years.”

Londri fought down a sudden, unreasoning rage, along with a
surge of bile at the greasy scent of meat eddying on a current of the heavy air.
The woman, an Isolate from the Panarchy, had been landed on the disputed border
between Aztlan and Comori. When it was found that her fertility suppression was
temporary, the two houses had nearly gone to war. Londri’s mother had imposed a
compromise: when the treatment wore off, Comori should have her firstborn,
Aztlan the next child, then House Ferric the third.

“The Telos-damned bitch
would
have twins,” said Anya without
looking up.

Londri rubbed her stomach, aware of Lazoro’s concern.
Fertility was rare enough for those born on Gehenna, and child mortality
high—she was the only survivor of fifteen siblings, none of whom had lived
beyond three years. Twins were unheard-of. Now Comori claimed both children,
while Aztlan claimed the second from the womb.

The Ironqueen sighed and walked over to the tall window.
Outside, the stars paled, and fingers of actinic light reached hungrily over
the distant Surimasi Mountains, announcing the onslaught of another day under
the searing light of Shaitan, Gehenna’s primary.

Behind her shuffled irregular footsteps. She knew it was
Stepan, the exiled gnostor who’d joined the Isolates in her mother’s reign; a
sapper-wyrm had chewed half his foot away, six years ago.

But she didn’t turn. She looked instead, past the tangled
stone and timber complexity of House Ferric and over its surrounding wall.
Beyond, the growing light from the sky threw into bold relief the awesome
symmetry of the Crater, a perfectly circular gouge in the high, flat plain that
sloped smoothly to the brooding mountains beyond. The foundation of her
kingdom, and the center of human life on Gehenna, the Crater was the creation
of the hated Panarchists, their jailers, who had steered a metallic asteroid
into the planet centuries before. The metallic remnants at its center—the
treasured iron so rare elsewhere on Gehenna—were the source of House Ferric’s
supremacy; the rest of the asteroid, vaporized and wide-scattered by the
impact, rich in the trace elements necessary to the human body, had created the
Splash.

According to Stepan, it was a wickedly clever prison. “They
could have dusted the planet to add the trace elements we need,” he had
explained. “But this way, there’s just enough metal to ensure that we won’t try
to build a civilization without it—just enough to keep us fighting over it, and
so never a threat to them.”

She turned back to the others. “Why couldn’t it have been a
man? They’re so much easier to share.”

“They’d probably fight just as hard
over a stud that threw twins—no love lost there,” said Stepan, his precise
Douloi accent grating on her ears.

“Easy for you to say. They’re both
staunch supporters of our house, and they’re both right, in a way.”

“Right!” Lazoro cackled, waving his
haunch of roast jaspar. “Right? Since when does that have anything to do with
it?”

The hanging was pushed aside again, revealing the seven-foot
bulk of her general, Gath-Boru. Moving with unlikely grace, he took his place
at the table.

“You know what I mean,” she said finally.

The dwarf had been her mother’s chancellor until her
untimely death twenty-five months before; without him, Londri doubted that the
Lodestone Siege would still be hers. He was almost twenty, the same age as
Stepan.

But Stepan would say sixty, and call it the prime of life.

However you reckoned it, she thought, twenty—what they
called sixty standard years in the Thousand Suns—was old on Gehenna. Deprived
in his youth of the supplements delivered from orbit by the hated Panarchists,
he’d fallen victim to one of the numerous deficiency diseases that were the lot
of so many on this strange planet. But it hadn’t affected his mind.

Lazoro smiled at her affectionately. “Of course I know.
You’re just like your mother. But she learned, and so will you, if Telos gives
you time, that right and might are uneasy partners at best.”

“And as long as I am here,” said
Gath-Boru, his voice deep and resonant from his massive chest, “you needn’t
worry about that.” He filled a flagon with beer. “There’s only one real question
here,” he continued. “Which one of them do we want to fight? Whichever one of
them you decide against will ally with the Tasuroi. Your army is ready,
whatever the decision.”

“You cannot hope to make everyone
happy whatever you choose.” Stepan spread his long, pale hands on the table in
front of him. “The best you can do is minimize their unhappiness.”

“As well to say ‘water’s wet’ or
‘iron is rare,’” Lazoro commented irritably. ‘That’s a tautology of
government.”

The chancellor used his short legs to lean his tall chair
back, bouncing precariously with his toes against the table’s edge. It was a
habit of his when he was vexed; Londri had been waiting for him to tip over
backward since she was a little girl. He never had.

She said nothing as the two bickered. A yawn cracked her
jaws open, intensifying the ache behind her eyes; the onset of dawn signaled
the usual end of the waking day for the inhabitants of Gehenna, and she had had
little sleep in the past few days. Her stomach churned, threatening a return of
the nausea that was never far away.