Ascendant Sun: A New Novel in the Saga of the Skolian Empire (5 page)

The merchant ship grew on the shuttle's view screen like a glittering pipe, a promise to Kelric of the future, yet also a promise of peril, as it prepared for the plunge into Trader territory.
Maccar called his vessel the
Corona
. The glistening cylinder had one end open to space. A large half sphere capped the other end. It was a good-sized ship, though not huge by interstellar standards, about 1.5 kilometers long and .25 kilometer in diameter. The sight made Kelric's breath catch; it had been far too long since he had boarded anything other than the crotchety schooner. He savored the sense of homecoming this gave him.
A docking tube extended down the center of the cylinder, its diameter wide enough to swallow a shuttle. Magnificent spokes radiated out from the tube to the cylinder in a design chosen to maximize stability. The spokes didn't actually touch the docking tube; instead, they connected to huge rings that circled it. It allowed the cylinder to rotate grandly in space, while the tube where shuttles docked remained stationary.
Kelric found the
Corona
beautiful in all its pitted, rugged glory. The familiar design welcomed him, as if to say,
You weren't gone so long after all.
Lights glittered along its hull, strobing from antennae, cranes, flanges, pods, observation bays, and the robot crawlers that monitored its myriad surfaces. Huge thrusters circled the open end of the cylinder. His excitement surged as if he were a sailor too long separated from the sea and sailing ships he loved.
They approached the cylinder's open maw. It grew on their holoscreens until the ship dwarfed them, looming around the shuttle. The hub at the end of the docking tube opened like a giant flower pod. Even knowing space had no atmosphere to transmit vibrations, Kelric imagined he felt the power thrumming in the merchant vessel. Their shuttle sailed into the pod, and the great petals closed around them.
In the pilot's seat, Maccar glanced at him. "Ready to board?"
Kelric grinned. "Aye, sir."
The captain's mouth quirked in a smile. "Then let's go."
They exited the shuttle into a round decontamination chamber. Electromagnetic radiation bathed them while monitors and airborne nanomeds examined their bodies for contaminants. If these meds resembled the ones Kelric remembered, they were cousins of the species he already carried in his body.
Nanomeds were designer molecules. Each type had its own task, such as catalyzing a reaction, repairing broken bonds, or ferrying other molecules. Each med carried a picochip, a tiny computer that worked on quantum transitions. The chip directed the industrious med and helped it replicate. Nanomed sex was rather prosaic; they just built more of themselves from excess molecules hanging around the neighborhood. It took energy, but not prohibitive amounts. Picochips in a particular series could chat among themselves using chemical messages. That let them form a crude picoweb which could interact with the picowebs of other series.
Decon meds had one goal: search and destroy. Like nano-thugs cruising the cellular neighborhood, they relentlessly analyzed anyone who entered their decon chamber, seeking contaminants that might endanger the ship. They compared what they found to their databases of allowed and forbidden species, and ran tests on unknowns. Then they tackled unwanted invaders and rumbled with them until they disposed of the intruder or fell apart trying. If any decon meds remained intact after they finished their work, they disintegrated into pieces the body could use or flush out of itself.
The meds in Kelric's body kept up his health, repaired his cells to delay his aging, and attacked unwanted chemicals. Both decon and health meds had to meet certain standards and should recognize one another as acceptable species. But what if standards had changed? For all Kelric knew, the decon meds might attack his mutated meds or the medicine Doctor Tarjan had given him to slow the mutation rate. His meds might retaliate with their own thuggery. The last thing he needed was nano-gang warfare in his body.
He floated with Maccar in the chamber, trying to relax. The captain monitored the decon process on a palmtop computer he unhooked from his belt.
Fortunately, the nano-thugs approved of Kelric. They only cleaned out a few species of bacteria. He and Maccar left the chamber, drifting weightless in the docking tube. They boarded a magcar, and it raced off into a smooth-sided tunnel like a glittering bullet hurtling down a shiny bore.
The car took them to the far end of the ship, where the hemispherical section capped the cylinder. They disembarked into an air lock. After they cycled through the air lock, they floated into the hemisphere, an area about one quarter kilometer in diameter. The ship's bridge.
Maccar's command chair hung "above" them, though up and down had no real meaning here, without gravity. The chair faced the forward curve of the hemisphere and had its back to the cylinder, giving a sense that the captain looked forward into space and the unknown. Of course, without the holoscreens on, they saw only the interior of the bridge. It glinted silver and black, studded with equipment. Consoles ridged its curve, their controls and screens glittering in a rainbow of lights.
Most captains spun the bridge for at least a portion of each shift, to provide a break from the weightless environment and to help stabilize the counter-rotating cylinder. Although the result bewildered some spacers, Kelric enjoyed the strange effects. If you imagined the cylinder's rotation axis extending into the bridge, it passed through the center of the hemisphere and pierced the hull forward of Maccar's chair. The pull of gravity increased with distance from the rotation axis. So right on top of the axis, you had no weight at all no matter how fast the ship rotated.
As you walked away from the rotation axis along the hull, gravity increased. "Down" always pointed radially out from the axis, so the inner surface of the hemisphere turned into a steep slope. Consoles jutted out like terraces. The slope gentled as you moved farther away from the point where the axis intersected the hemisphere, toward the back of the bridge, until at the "equator" where the bridge met the cylinder, the ground became level and gravity was full strength. If you looked "up," across the quarter-kilometer diameter of the bridge, you could see other crew members blithely walking around upside down on the "sky."
Right now Maccar's chair was suspended in the middle of the hemisphere, near the rotation axis, so even during rotation it would have almost no weight. However, the massive chair served as the terminus of a similarly massive robot arm that could easily move within the bridge.
Kelric and Maccar propelled off a bulkhead and flew through the bridge. They controlled their progress using cables that stretched across the hemisphere. Kelric exhilarated in the freedom of escaping gravity's tethers.
Members of the bridge crew were at their stations running preflight checks, each person secure within the exoskeleton of a console chair. Maccar introduced Kelric to them all: Nadick Steil, the executive officer, second in command, a stocky woman with brown hair cut short around her head; Larra Anatakala, the navigation and tracking officer, a gaunt woman with long legs and arms; and Ty Rillwater, the communications officer, whose small size and soft yellow hair made her look like a child compared to the others.
The weapons station was located between Communications and Navigation. However, Maccar took Kelric to a different console. Unique on the bridge, this one had psiphon capability. If the psiberweb had still existed, it could have boosted Kelric's mind into psiberspace. Even without the web, he could still use it to jack his brain into the
Corona
's EI brain.
The station curved around its command chair, bringing its mobile control panels within easy reach of whoever sat there. Maccar took an auxiliary seat across the console while Kelric slid into the control chair. The exoskeleton folded around Kelric and its sensors studied him as if he were a new processing unit. It shifted position at his neck, back, wrists, and ankles. Then psiphon prongs clicked into the sockets in his neck and lower spine, the strong, silvery pins inserting through holes in his spacer's jumpsuit designed for that purpose. But when the prongs tried to insert into his wrists and ankles, they hit his guards.
Kelric pushed the exoskeleton up his arm, uncovering his wrist guard. He worked the psiphon prong under his guard and tried bending it into the socket. Apparently it wasn't flexible enough. Or maybe the meds that tended the socket no longer worked. In any case, the prong wouldn't click into place.
Maccar reached over to a comm panel on the console. "I'll have a bosun remove the guards."
Startled, Kelric glanced at him. "No."
The captain raised his eyebrows. "No?"
"I can't remove the guards."
Maccar considered him. "What was your Jagernaut rank?"
The non sequitur puzzled Kelric. "Tertiary."
"That's about equal to a Fleet rank of commander, isn't it?"
"About." He wondered what the captain was getting at.
Maccar leaned forward. "Understand me, mister. I don't give a kiss in hell how much of a loner you were as a Jag pilot. If I hire you, I expect the same adherence to the chain of command from you as from my other officers. If you have a problem with that, I don't want you on this ship."
Kelric stiffened. Of course he knew his position in a chain of command. Still, he wondered at his response. Had he become so used to his aristocratic civilian life on Coba that he had forgotten military discipline? He wouldn't have thought so, yet his automatic response to Maccar's implicit order had been a refusal.
He felt Maccar's mental debate. The captain was weighing his doubts about his prospective weapons officer against his need for Kelric's expertise. Before Kelric had a chance to respond, Maccar said, "I can't gamble, Commander Garlin. Where we're going, I can't take any risks."
"You won't be taking a risk," Kelric said. Maccar's use of the title
Commander
disoriented him. But it made sense; even if he had wanted his military rank known, which he didn't, using Tertiary on a civilian ship was inappropriate.
"And if you decide you can't follow another command?" Maccar started to unfasten the clasps that held his safety web in place. "The shuttle can take you back to Porthaven."
"Wait." Kelric didn't want his job interview to end before it even began. "You won't have any problem with my following orders, Captain. Call the bosun." Then he thought,
Ixpar, I'm sorry.
Maccar glanced at the wrist guards. "Why don't you want to take them off?"
"They're from my wife."
The captain stiffened. "Hell's road, man, I thought they looked like marriage guards. They're old enough. How many thousands of years did it take us to get rid of the laws that let women make us property? Don't you know the origin of Trader slave restraints? They're a variation of the Ruby Empire marriage guards. Except Traders put them on both men and women. Why? Because they show
ownership.
How can you wear that kind of symbol?"
Of all the comments Kelric had expected, that wasn't one of them. How to answer? Even on Coba, only Akasi princes wore the marriage guards. As the husband of a Manager, he had been such an Akasi. In the star-spanning culture of Imperial Skolia, the custom had mostly vanished. Even the Imperial noble houses dispensed with it more often now than not.
The houses were still the most conservative facet of Skolian culture, though. Kelric's first marriage had been arranged long before he ended up on Coba. His wife, Admiral Corey Majda, had been matriarch of the oldest house. Her assassination left him a widower at twenty-four. They hadn't had children, so her title and lands went to her sister, Naaj Majda. Kelric had received a widower's mansion and stipend. He had been too blind with grief to care about the inheritance, besides which, his Ruby Dynasty titles and wealth outranked even the House of Majda. But with that history, Coba hadn't surprised him.
None of that mattered. He didn't care what symbolism Maccar thought the guards embodied. They were all he had left of Ixpar. She had never considered him a possession— and she had literally gone to war to uphold that principle.
All he said was, "They don't mean to me what they do to you."
Maccar studied him. "You're a hard one to fathom."
Uncomfortable, Kelric rolled the psiphon prong in his hand.
After considering a moment longer, Maccar summoned a bosun. A man in a gray jumpsuit soon appeared, carrying a tool kit. He anchored himself at the station by attaching his safety tether to a ring on the console. He fastened down his tool kit, then unclipped a problade, a programmable blade made from thorium phosphide, a substance harder than diamond.
Kelric extended his arm. The guard glinted in the cold light. The bosun measured the thickness of the gold with calipers, then programmed the blade so it extended just enough to cut through the metal. As he set the blade against the guard, Kelric had to hold himself back from yanking away his arm. This was the final symbol of his losing Ixpar and his children.
Maccar watched intently, his focus more on Kelric than the work. As the bosun put his thumb against the problade's switch, Maccar said, "Wait."
The bosun paused. "Sir?"
Maccar indicated the prong on Kelric's exoskeleton. "Can you drill a hole through the guard so the prong will fit in his socket?"
The man lifted Kelric's arm, slid his guard around a few times, and rubbed his thumb over the engravings. "It should be possible."
"Go ahead then," Maccar said. "No need to remove them."
Kelric swallowed. He nodded to Maccar, unable to voice his gratitude. Maccar probably didn't want to hear it anyway. The captain had been testing him.
The bosun drilled the holes so they were almost invisible in the engravings. He did both Kelric's wrist and ankle guards, making sure the prongs fit through the gold and snapped into place. When Kelric was fully installed at the console, Maccar dismissed the bosun from the bridge.
Kelric settled into the command seat.
Attend,
he thought.

Corona attending.
The ship's response rumbled in his mind with more force and clarity than he had expected.
Your system needs an upgrade. Shall I provide?
Kelric almost grinned. He had hoped the
Corona
's EI could upgrade him. Otherwise his lack of knowledge about modern systems would probably keep him from passing this interview.
What can you do?
I can replace 68 percent of your software with current versions,
it answered.
I can also provide assistance as you incorporate the new code. The rest of your systems are either unfamiliar or too dated for me to work with.
Excitement brushed Kelric.
Can you get back my link to Bolt?
Define Bolt.
The JGP12 computer node in my spine.
I can replace 84 percent of the corrupted code in the JGP12 node. However, it also has physical damage I cannot repair.
My meds can carry out your instructions,
Kelric pointed out. The boundaries separating hardware, software, and biotech had long been blurred. With a Jagernaut, who could say where machine left off and human started? Some experts questioned whether Jagernauts were even
Homo sapiens
, suggesting they formed their own species. Kelric didn't buy it; he was perfectly capable of breeding with other humans. Still, he obviously had aspects to his physiology most humans lacked. If the
Corona
interfaced with those systems, it could direct physical as well as software repairs within him.
If I use your nanomeds,
the
Corona
answered,
it will draw them away from the repair of your body, allow the mutations freer reign, and possibly encourage more.
Surely it won't be too serious for a few minutes.
It will take far more than a few minutes to do repairs.
The
Corona
paused.
Even then I cannot guarantee the results. I would advise against prolonged redirection of your med series.
Kelric didn't want to risk slipping back into a critical state. Doctor Tarjan's help had bought him more time, but he still needed treatment. He had to accomplish his goals before his systems started to fail again.
Do you have other suggestions for fixing my node?
he asked.
Yes. Replace the JGP12 with JGPP146+ local neural node cluster.
They put entire clusters in humans now? That had been too risky in his time. The idea of a network in his body, with who knew how much more power than Bolt alone, both intrigued and disconcerted him. However, unless procedures had changed drastically, he doubted be could simply request such an upgrade.
How would I get the cluster?
he asked.
You must proceed through ISC channels, with appropriate clearances.
No surprises there, unfortunately.
Go ahead with whatever upgrades you can safely do, then.
Turning his focus to Bolt, he thought,
Allow access to the
Corona
.
Normally he wouldn't have to tell Bolt; the node should be following the exchange and would know to let in the
Corona.
With Bolt's damage, though, he wasn't sure of anything about it right now.
Proceeding,
the
Corona
thought.
Although Kelric could no longer access Bolt's chronometer, he knew his accelerated exchange with the
Corona
had taken only a second or two, if that long. Maccar was watching him with an appraising gaze.
Software upgrade complete,
the
Corona
thought.
Proceeding to psiware.
At first Kelric noticed nothing unusual, only a sense of mental pressure, as if his head were underwater. Then, with no warning, pain stabbed his head like a lance.
"Ah—!" He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples.
Warning,
the
Corona
thought.
Errors in neural sectors 53AF, 93—
Stop the upgrade!
He gritted his teeth, trying not to shout the words.
Stopped.
Can you fix the damaged sectors of my brain?
Kelric asked.
No. I'm deleting the partial copies of the replacement code.
"Commander?" Maccar asked. "Are you all right?"
Kelric took a breath. "Your ship's EI and my biomech web have a slight incompatibility." Some "slight": The portions of his brain that interfaced with the psiber capabilities of other computers had taken damage when his ship crashed on Coba. His brain needed as much work as the rest of him— if he wasn't past repair.
"Can you operate with the
Corona
system?" Maccar asked.
"Yes." A person needed no unusual neurological abilities to use the console's mundane cyber functions. It did require a direct mind-to-machine interface, however. Implanting such an interface in a human being was no trivial procedure, and the training to master its uses required clearances and connections available to very few people.
Activating the console's psiber functions was even more complex. On the scale that quantified Kyle mutations, a psion had to rate at six or more to access psiberspace. The higher the rating, the larger a person's KAB and the more extra neural structures they had packed into their brain. A rating of three made someone an empath. At six, the first signs of telepathy showed. The scale was exponential: one in a thousand humans was a three, and one in a million a six.
Kelric had trained for both cybernetic and Kyle work. With his injuries, though, he wasn't sure how far he could push his brain in its mental acrobatics. He laid his head back into the chair's curved headrest, and its visor lowered over his eyes and ears. Smooth, streamlined, and light as a sponge, it made the VR helmets of eighteen years ago barbaric in comparison.
Blackness surrounded him.
Activate mindscape,
he thought.
You don't have clearance,
the
Corona
informed him.
"Captain, I need to enter the
Corona
system." Kelric's voice echoed oddly within the visored cavity.
Maccar shifted in his seat, leaning over the console, it sounded like. "Account, Garlin K., Commander. Password, 'probation.' "
A wry smile tugged Kelric's mouth. Probation. Maccar apparently had no use for subtlety.
"Account created," the
Corona
said.
"Link it to the unit installed in the console," Maccar said.
"Done," the ship answered.
Activate mindscape,
Kelric thought. He wondered if Maccar designated all his crew members as "installed units." Somehow he doubted it.
A landscape formed around him, made by white grid lines on a blue background. It gave him the
Corona
's representation of cybernetic activity throughout the ship. Hills indicated systems buzzing with computer-human action, and valleys denoted quiescence.
Show all states,
Kelric thought, asking for everything the
Corona
could tell him about itself, rather than just its cybernetic activity.
Priority: weapons.
New displays replaced the grid, schematics of the ship and its combat systems. Three-dimensional graphs, tables, and hyperlinks swamped him with data. He moved through the
Corona
like a stealth ghost, studying it. Then he expanded his survey to the dreadnought and eight frigates in their escort, which orbited Edgewhirl in formation with the
Corona.
According to the displays, Bolt was taking in data as fast as the
Corona
supplied it, almost at light speed.
He recognized the basic systems. It would take time for him to become proficient here, to process his upgrades and learn his new functions. But he could manage.
"Are you into the
Corona
?" Maccar asked, a disembodied voice.
"Yes." He concentrated on the captain. His mindscape responded by forming a schematic of Kelric and the console in white grid lines. Then the scene solidified into a virtual reality so authentic it was indistinguishable from real reality. He was on the bridge of the
Corona
, looking at Maccar across the console. The only indication it was a simulated Maccar, rather than the flesh-and-blood captain, was a slight sharpness at the edges of his body.
The psiphon prongs that had plugged into Kelric's sockets were linked to his biomech web. It let the console send messages straight to his brain, bypassing the need for VR helmets and suits. Sight, smell, sound, touch, even taste: he experienced them all through direct neural stimulation. This setup produced better quality VR than those he had known even on his Jag starfighter, which had claimed the best machine-to-mind tech of its time.
With his brain juiced up straight from the console, he didn't need the visor. It still served a purpose, though, intensifying the simulation. It also blocked his perception of real space. It would have been a true exercise in strangeness to experience a VR simulation of reality superimposed on that exact same reality.
"I'm in," he told Maccar.
The captain nodded. "Arm the Impactors on frigate seven."
Normally Kelric would have located the Impactors on frigate seven and sent his commands to the frigate through the
Corona.
At close to light speed, it would take the barest fraction of a second.
But he was curious to see how much the
Corona
's EI could handle. So he tried a less standard approach.
Execute command from Maccar,
he thought, deliberately vague.
Done,
the
Corona
answered. An icon of frigate seven appeared in the lower left corner of his VR sim, hanging in midair. It blinked red to indicate the primed weapons.
Not bad,
Kelric thought. His Jag would have needed more specifics to carry out the command. "Impactors armed, Captain."
"
Corona
, run mod four," Maccar said. "Tricore Defensive code."
Kelric plunged into battle.
Pirate frigates were converging on them like a swarm of hornets. His mindscape snapped into a new simulation, an all-around view of space with its glittering stars and dust. Translucent displays formed, superimposed over space, images that turned data into symbols his mind could process faster.
Neither human reflexes nor thought could keep up with the speed of space warfare. But Kelric knew too little about the strategies in the
Corona
's combat libraries even to name them, let alone choose one. He would have to rely on the ship's EI.
Optimize offense for destruction of pirates,
he thought.
Firing Scythe pattern 8,
the
Corona
answered.
Quasis jump,
it thought.
Impactor hit on—
Quasis jump. Pirates destroyed.
Nausea rolled over Kelric. During quasis, or quantum stasis, their quantum state remained fixed. The ship didn't "freeze": only at absolute zero could matter reach a state where none of its particles had motion. In quasis, the particles that made up the
Corona
continued to rotate, spin, translate, and otherwise behave as they had been when the quasis snapped on. However, they couldn't
change
state, not even by one particle. Molecules kept the same configuration; bonds shook and twisted with the same quanta of vibration and rotation; atoms made no transitions; and quarks kept their charm or lack thereof. Nothing could change.
Thoughts required chemical changes in the brain, so even they stopped, caught in whatever slice of mentation a person was experiencing when the quasis snapped on. The process of thinking resumed when a person came out of quasis, giving the sense of a discontinuous "jump."
In macroscopic terms, the ship and everything in it became rigid, impervious to forces, including the brutal accelerations of split-second combat. Nor could weapons-fire damage the ship, because the process of destruction required particles to change state. After two or three hits the quasis usually collapsed, but while it lasted it provided a good defense.
When a ship came out of quasis, its systems and crew adapted to their new environment. If their physical situation had changed too much, the required adaptations could hurt the ship or crew. The most dramatic case came about when the quasis collapsed under enemy fire— and the crew found themselves in the midst of an exploding ship.
According to Kelric's mindscape, each jump he had just experienced lasted about a second. The "battle" had been simulated. Almost no changes took place while he was in quasis, certainly not enough to make a healthy person sick when his body adjusted to his new environment. His nausea was an unwelcome reminder of his failing health.
The
Corona
had continued to operate smoothly despite the jumps. As soon as the ship dropped out of quasis, the crew resumed their preflight tests, unperturbed by the one-second discontinuities in their lives. It told Kelric a great deal about Maccar's command and his crew. This was a well-run ship.
"TD-four off," Maccar said. The simulation disappeared, replaced by the grid landscape.
Close mindscape,
Kelric thought. Referring to himself, he added,
Release weapons CPU.
Closed,
the
Corona
answered.
You are released.
The mindscape vanished and the visor lifted away from his head. Maccar was still sitting in the auxiliary chair across the console.
The captain frowned. "Why did you attack without hailing the ships? Their intent may not have been hostile."
"Trader pirates don't 'hail,' " Kelric said. "They were also better armed than your escort. In that situation, you don't wait to ask questions."
"So." Although Maccar's neutral expression gave nothing away, his mind projected wary approval. "And if we had faced ESComm ships, instead of pirates?"
Kelric almost snorted. Eubian Space Command had long denied any link to the pirates that raided Skolian and Allied space. But he had seen the intelligence reports that said otherwise. ESComm supplied, advised, protected, and supported the raiders.
"If we encountered ESComm ships in Skolian space," Kelric said, "I would respond in the same way."
Maccar scowled. "Firing without provocation on ESComm is far different from attacking pirates. We might be able to justify the former. Not the latter."
"What do you want?" Kelric asked. "A polite inquiry as to why they came into our territory? While we observe courtesies, they make the capture. You choose, Captain: proper procedure followed by slavery, or a strategy that maintains your freedom."