Carnelians (41 page)

Mac nodded, intent on his controls. “See if you can reach them.”

Del closed his eyes and tried to lower his barriers. He had spent so much of his life making sure his defenses protected him, blocking the onslaught of emotions from other people, that it was difficult to let go. His adrenaline-pushed agitation made it hard to focus.

Calm,
he thought.
Stay calm.
His shields began to fade. He felt vulnerable, exposed to attack, but he kept working. When his shields were all the way down, he “shouted,”
This is Prince Del-Kurj! We’re in ESComm racer QT8. Don’t fire on us! Mac Tyler and I are prisoners in the racer. We have no nav control. Don’t shoot! 
He repeated it message over and over again, imagining his thoughts projected in all directions.

After what felt like an eternity, Mac said, “Are you getting anything?”

Del opened his eyes. The forward screens showed them racing away from the battle. According to a display on his armrest, only one minute had passed since he started.

“I sent a message,” he said. “I’ve no idea if anyone caught it.”

“Try again,” Mac said.

“Okay.” Marshalling his strength, he shouted:
This is Del-Kurj. We’re prisoners in racer QT8. If you’re out there, if you pick this up, you have to stop the racer.

A woman’s voice burst into the cockpit, speaking Skolian Flag. “Racer QT8, this is Secondary Panquai, captain of ISC Blackhawk Squadron. We are receiving you. Good work! We can pick you up more easily out here. I’ll dock with your ship and tow you in.”

The racer spoke. “Onboard communication systems breached.”

Del grinned. “You bet.”

“Do not respond to Blackhawk,” the racer told him.

Mac was touching different panels, trying something, Del didn’t know what, but he would have bet his next royalty payment it was the ship-to-ship comm. Sure enough, the lights on the comm panel suddenly flared green.

“This is Mac Tyler,” he said. “Panquai, can you read me?”

“We’re receiving,” Panquai answered. “Is Prince Del-Kurj with you?”

“I’m right here,” Del said.

“Your racer is preparing to fire on us,” she told him. “It’s also preparing to invert.”

Damn! One racer couldn’t outgun a full Jag squad, but if it inverted out of normal space into superluminal space, the Jags would never catch it. The screens showed them arrowing away from the wheel ship accompanied by four Jag starfighters. Two ESComm ships were in pursuit, drones probably if Mac was right that the wheel ship had almost no crew. They couldn’t keep up with the racer or the Jags.

“Panquai, what do you want us to do?” Mac asked.

“We’re trying to break into the nav-attack system,” she said. “It’s too damn well protected.”

Mac spoke in heavily accented Highton. “Racer, release nav and weapons.”

“Negative,” the racer responded. “If the Jags try to gain control of me, I will fire on them.”

“You not have chance against Jag squad,” Mac said. “You know this.”

“I calculate a two percent probability that I can defeat them,” the racer said. “I calculate a eighty-six percent probability that Prince Del-Kurj and yourself would be killed in such an engagement. I have informed Blackhawk Squadron that I am prepared to fight, and that if they damage my systems, I will detonate myself and kill you both.”

“For flaming sake!” Del said. “Don’t do that.”

A woman’s thought came into Del’s mind.
Prince Del-Kurj, this is Secondary Panquai. Can you receive me?

Del jerked at the unexpectedly clear message. He had never interacted with a telepath while their abilities were being enhanced by the neural technology of a Jag starfighter.

Yes,
he thought.
I’m receiving you.

We’re going to try something,
she thought.
I want you to envision, in your mind, the displays all around you. Let me see them.

Del focused on the panels, creating pictures in his mind.
Is it coming through?

It’s blurred. Can you project more clearly?

Del added more details to his mental picture.
How’s that?

Better,
she said.
My mind is converting the pictures into data my Jag can download. Anything you see, no matter how small, might help. We don’t have much time; your racer will invert within minutes.

Do you want me to look at the pilot’s controls, too?

If you can. But yours should duplicate his.

Del concentrated harder, forming images of the controls in his mind. Mac watched him, staying silent; probably he knew Del was in a link with the Jagernaut.

Good!
Panquai suddenly thought.
We have enough. Now open the nav-attack console and do the same for its interior circuitry. The AI will try to stop you, but it’s easier to confuse than an EI. Distract it.

Del glanced at Mac. “Can you open the weapons and navigation panels?”

“Open it, yes. But I can’t transfer control from the ship to you. We’re locked out.”

“That’s okay,” Del said. “Just bother the AI as much as you can.”

As Mac unfastened a panel from his controls, the racer said, “Stop doing that.”

“We play hopscotch,” Mac answered.

Prince Del-Kurj, get as much as you can as fast as you can,
Panquai thought.

“No you aren’t playing hopscotch,” the racer told Mac. “Replace that panel.”

Del focused on the silvery circuits that Mac had uncovered. He knew nothing about the tech, and he wasn’t sure his image was accurate, but he supplied as many details as he could.

“You see, this is problem,” Mac told the racer in stilted Highton. “This panel, I not wish to replace. Your refusing to give us ship defies the Jabberwocky and Mad Hatter. If you fall down a rabbit hole, you are really in a mole hole, which is maybe a black hole, which means you are trapped forever and elongated infinitely.”

“That makes no sense,” the racer said. “You’re mixing references to children’s stories from the culture of Earth with theoretical astrophysics in a clumsy attempt to confuse me.”

“Am I?” Mac said. “To me, military context is obvious.”

“The Mad Hatter has a military context?”

“Well, obviously,” Mac said. “Why think you he is mad?”

“There is no military context!” the racer said. “Cease your actions or I will flood the cockpit with sleeping gas.”

“You won’t,” Mac said. “You want no harm for either of us, especially not Prince Del-Kurj.”

“Gas released,” the racer said.

“Shit,” Del muttered.
Panquai, the racer is gassing us. I don’t know if I’m allergic.

We’re getting close,
she thought.
Hang in there. Send images for as long as you can.

Del struggled to concentrate. That little white conduit, maybe that was important. The symbols there, he didn’t recognize what they meant, but Panquai might. The gas continued to hiss, until he sagged back in his seat, dizzy and nauseous.
Panquai . . . can’t keep my eyes open . . . 

It’s all right,
Panquai said.
Hang on!

“Preparing to invert,” the racer said.

“
No!
” Mac said. Del managed to open his eyes enough to see Mac struggling to sit forward.

“Mister Tyler, I’m locking your exoskeleton,” the racer said.

“No, don’t—” Mac groaned as the frame around his body tightened, forcing him to sit back.

A pictorial display above the forward controls indicated the ship was jumping in and out of quasis, or quantum stasis, protecting them from the immense accelerations it needed to reach relativistic speeds so fast. Del couldn’t read Highton any better than he could read English, but he recognized the numbers on the display: they were going to invert in only forty-two seconds.

Del just barely remained conscious, though whether it was because of his body’s eccentric reaction to medicine or the racer hadn’t really intended to knock him out, he didn’t know. The AI had achieved what it wanted, incapacitating both him and Mac.

Secondary Panquai,
he thought.
We . . . invert in thirty seconds.

We’ll get you,
she thought.

The seconds flashed by. Twenty-five. Twenty. Fifteen.

We’re almost in!
Panquai thought.

The rumble of the engines surged as the racer activated the inversion engines.

Ten seconds.

Five.

One.

NOW,
Panquai shouted.

A giant fist of pressure slammed Del back. He groaned as his vision blurred. One thought jumped out of his fragmented thoughts; the racer’s quasis generators had stopped working. He prayed the Jags could extend their fields to this racer, because if they couldn’t, these accelerations were going to smear him and Mac all over their seats.

“I can’t survive this,” the racer said. “Self-destruct initialized.”

“No!” Del yelled.
Panquai!
he shouted.
The racer is going to expl—

The universe went black.

XXIV: The Wakeful Night

XXIV
The Wakeful Night

Night on the world Delos stretched out its long arms in an embrace that seemed to Jaibriol as if it lasted forever. He had lived the last eleven years on a world with sixteen-hour days, and here a day lasted sixty-one hours. Now, during the winter, night darkened the city of New Athens for nearly forty hours. The planet’s moon was a large crescent in the sky, which shone with a wealth of stars like multi-colored glitter. It had been night when they landed, fifteen hours ago, and the darkness was only half done, with twenty hours to go.

Jaibriol stood on the balcony of his penthouse in the Ambassador Suites Plaza, the tallest building in New Athens. His suite wasn’t as sumptuous as his palace, but then, neither was most anywhere else in the universe. Although he hadn’t thought he cared, he had become accustomed to the palace. It was home and he missed it.

His balcony looked over a city teeming with lights. The populace tended to stay inside during the day, which burned with heat in the long hours of sunlight. They came out after the sun was long vanished from the sky. The air was cool now, chilly but bracing, and the city hummed, vibrant with energy, awash in color and music in the deepest hours of night.

Jaibriol had come to Delos once before, when he traded himself for his uncle Eldrin, the Ruby Consort, and assumed his throne as emperor of Eube. Before he had taken that final step, he had wandered around New Athens, savoring his last day of freedom. The city bordered an ocean on one side and rose up into the hills on the other. The houses thinned out at the higher slopes and became mansions separated by parks. He remembered the musical fountains and flowerbeds, including flute-blossoms that chimed in the wind. The homes there were shaped like galleons afloat in foliage sculpted to resemble waves, all in hues of green, white, and ocean-blues. The rare boulevard wound through the parks like a ribbon of silver.

The harbor lay southeast of the city. Breakers rolled in over knife-coral reefs, which jutted out of the water in spires. It had fascinated him to watch sparks flash as iridescent fliers darted in and out of the coral. Gates and channels were cut through the reefs, allowing ships into the harbor. Waves glowed purple and gold from phosphorescence and smashed against the coral, jumping high into the air, bursting in sprays of foam.

Tonight Jaibriol saw the city and ocean through a sheen of light that rippled around his balcony like a faint aurora borealis. It was the only outward sign of a cyberlock, an implant in his brain. When activated, the lock produced a field tuned to its owner’s brain waves. If penetrated by anyone whose neural signature wasn’t imprinted in the lock, a low-keyed field sounded an alarm and a mid-keyed field knocked out the intruders. For the entire time he was on Delos, Jaibriol’s cyberlock would be high-keyed: set to kill.

His wrist comm hummed. With regret, he turned from the view and walked past the open glass doors into his living room. White carpet spread around him, glimmering. The furniture resembled wood, but with a glowing quality, swirled with gold and upholstered in rose-patterned cushions. A media center gleamed to one side, glossy with screens and Luminex consoles. Paintings of Greek landscapes hung on the pale gold walls.

Jaibriol touched a panel on his comm and it turned gold. Suddenly he felt better, no longer disoriented. It was how he knew it was safe for someone to approach him; he had just deactivated his cyberlock.

“Jason?” Jaibriol asked.

The EI that ran the suite answered in a pleasant male voice. “Yes, Your Highness. Would you like me to admit the party that has rung your doorbell?”

He hadn’t heard any bell, just the hum on his comm. “Who is it?”

“Your aide, Robert Muzeson.”

“Yes, let him in.”

A door whisked open somewhere beyond the entrance across the room, where two ivory columns rose up from the floor and curved into a pointed arch at the top.

A moment later, Robert walked through the arch, dressed in elegant black trousers and ivory shirt. He bowed deeply. “I’m honored to see you, Your Highness.”

“My greetings.” Jaibriol motioned to two wingchairs. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Not yet.” He waited while Jaibriol sat, then settled into the other chair. A white orb painted with rose and gold vines hovered in the corner, shedding diffuse light over them.

“The preparations are almost complete for the summit,” Robert said. “The Allieds have finished coordinating the construction of the amphitheatre for both us and the Skolians.”

“How did it work out?”

Robert’s wince said as much as his words. “About as well as you might expect. We don’t trust the Skolians and they don’t trust us. But it’s done.”

“Show me.”

Robert pulled a gold tube out of a sheath on his belt and tapped it against his knee. As it unrolled into a screen, holicons appeared above it in neat rows. He flicked one of the Allied insignia, a blue wreath, and a much larger image appeared of a building high in the Delos hills, a structure built to resemble a tall ship. As Robert flicked more holicons, the view zoomed in. Then they were inside the building, in a conference room, at a crystal table. Its seats were a cross between the recliners Hightons preferred and the chairs used by Skolians.