Kingdom of Stars (The Young Ancients: Timon Book Three) (15 page)

It wasn't clear why she'd suddenly gone off on a lecture,
but Timon tried to pay attention. It was rare enough that any of the old ones
managed to speak about anything not directly at hand that it was probably a
good idea to listen to her. She was, by definition, wise, after all. If she
said that it was important to try and avoid those things, then she was right.

Not that he'd be able to. She was probably correct there
too.

"I'll keep that in mind, when I can. For now, if you'd
collect your people and move them back to 'Julie safe distance'? I don't
suppose it would be fair to lock her in a little room again, would it? She
seems to have had some issues when the... Enemy did that to her."

Lyn glared at the woman in white, who stood finally, and was
staring with hard eyes right back at her.

"Probably not. Don't let her fool you though, she can
control herself if she tries. I've seen her do it. Hundreds of times in fact.
She just doesn't care to be bothered most of the time."

Which wouldn't work on a small and confined ship. Or even a
large one. Not for long.

Timon waited while Lyn called her people away, and walked
off with them, including Dorgal who she didn't leave near the leader of Soam at
all. Kolb took Tiera away, along with Orange. They were busily looking at Julie
as if she were the enemy now too. Well, Tiera wasn't, she just seemed peaceful.
The other two didn't however.

When they were all gone, and it was just him, Deshi and
Julie left, Timon spoke to her, trying to make himself seem relaxed and not
like he was scared of the woman. In a very real way, he was. Sex and terror
were together in his mind now. He'd worked on that a bit, with Trice, trying to
make it not as intense, but it was still there and being hit like that left him
feeling shaken and like he wanted to be sick himself, if only a little.

That wasn't going to work though, so he forced a smile and
let his eyes not show it at all.

"We need to get you someplace safe. I don't know if you
can protect yourself if we take you to Soam. Do you think you can? They grabbed
you from there once, after all, and replaced you with a Cordes infused clone of
you." He watched her, her chest rising and falling rhythmically, and her
pearl colored skin almost glowing in the orange and green of the nearby ship.

"I do not know, little brother. Perhaps I could stay
with you, on your mission?"

He shook his head.

"No. I can't take much more of this. I can't take you
to Noram and no place else is any better."

It was a rare thing for him to actually be at a loss for
words, even for a few moments, at least if it wasn't about some kind of deep
emotional issue. The only saving grace was that Julie herself nodded.

"I can probably go back home then. I'll need to go into
hiding, but it won't be the first time that I withdrew from public life, over
the millennia. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cause problems for you. It wouldn't
be so bad you know, us being together. I'm not truly your sister, or aunt."

Timon knew that, but shook his head. The name was really
enough to make it hard for him to see past it, but not so much that a normal
and healthy version of him wouldn't have taken her up on the offer. He wasn't
stupid
after all, and she was really that wonderful, in certain ways.

"I was recently tortured by a woman. Using Austran pain
medicine. I don't know what it's called, but it was bad. A larval Assassin was
part of it. There was enough that it's linked to sex now and I haven't really
recovered." He tried to sound matter of fact about it all and thought he
actually managed pretty well, but Julie teared up and almost as if she hadn't
heard what he'd just said, tried to touch him.

Because that's what would have made her feel better. His
shield stopped her at least.

"So... If you could keep yourself calm and not
influencing people? We can have you home inside an hour, I'm sure."

Not that it was up to him, but Captain Bering didn't seem to
be holding a grudge against the other woman and actually had them in Soam, over
their main city, about fifteen minutes later. It was fast and efficient, as if
she'd already known exactly where to head. Then Julie was given a guard while
she set things up, which took longer, but two hours later they were rid of her.

Timon was shown to a room, which had a nice bed in it and
was decently large. About twenty by forty. It had its own shower and restroom
too. The floor was made to look like black tile, and the fixtures like copper
and wood, which gave a very strange sailing ship feel to it all. The bed was
soft though, and formed to him perfectly, and he was able to get some sleep for
about six hours, which was nearly enough.

He woke when the lights turned on, Monroe standing by the
door, touching the glowing orange sigil there. A lot of things were needlessly
orange in space, it seemed.

"Rise and shine! We need to go and collect that gear
from Austra and the Captain is actually feeding us. It will, as long as I get
everything I need, take about a week to make a sample of micro-plasma. If I go
over the specifications of it, can you start to work out ways of stopping it?
Then we can test them and see which is the best, as soon as the sample is
ready?"

It wasn't a bad plan, though it would have been a lot better
if Tor was around to do the work. It might take him a lot longer than that to
get the right answer around. Not saying that, he rubbed at his eyes.

"Yes. I'll try to make that work. I should be able to
remember what the field of the stuff was like, if I go into a deep enough
trance, which might help. I'm going to need a work space. Food first, and then
I'll see to those supplies, if it's needed."

That it seemed wasn't really the case. Brown was going
against Austran tradition and making certain they had the supplies
without
paying for them. It was for a good end after all. That meant that Tim just had
to get some food into him, which turned out to be very Noram like fare, being
bread and cheese with sliced fruit. The women that made it were all young girls
really. The short ones that he'd seen who were just now legal adults.

All ones that had been trained to cook for the military at
Wildlands Station. It was a program that Tor had paid for, but his wife Ali had
put together along with Sam Builder.

It was good enough and as soon as he was full, Timon just
sat on his bed in his room with the lights off, and tried to do something
useful. The first part was just driving himself into the deepest trance he
could. That was the start and prime tool of all building or field sensing after
all. Everyone knew that much.

Then he went back in his mind to the rescue of Julie White.
Focusing everything he had on that pink glow. What it did to Kolb and then,
with a lot more focus, he narrowed the sense of it down in his mind. What it
felt like in his head. It was strange and unlike anything he'd ever noticed
before. It was like fire in the air, but each part of it was tiny and held bits
of information in a simple form.

At first he wanted to work against the plasma fire itself,
trying to take the energy away or maybe smother it. As if dumping water on it
would work. It turned the water in the air into fire after all. That was what
it used as fuel. It took a long time, but he realized that the actual trick to
the stuff was the way it held those bits of information, and what it could do
with it.

It was that part of it that was vulnerable. If he changed
the information, the plasma would stop moving, which would mean that it would
exhaust it's fuel in the local area in minutes and go out, like a camp fire
buried under the earth.

Not that he had a clue how to do that exactly. He could, he
thought, work out how the information was held, basically, but what the
different orders meant... He just didn't know.

That meant fighting his way back to the surface of his own
being, or close enough so that he could move around and climbing stiffly off of
the comfortable bed, to go and find their expert on the stuff. Monroe was, he
found, working in a small laboratory space, humming to himself as he did it,
when Timon walked in.

"Ah! There you are Tim. I should have the sample ready
in a day. Do you have an idea or two already?" He looked hopeful, but
there was also doubt in his body language, as if he didn't really think it
could be done.

"Yes. I need to know the programing codes though, and
how they're passed. Then I can build some devices that will simply keep the micro-plasma
from getting new information, and order it to stay in place, making it pretty
much useless." Timon waited for the man to claim that wouldn't work, or
come up with some other arguments against it, but he just explained how it all
worked, going over it several times.

"That's not a bad solution. The hard part is having one
of your devices close enough to the release point then. Or can you put this
signal out all the time, all over the world? That would work. Can you do
that?"

He sighed.

It would take doing something that no one had really managed
yet, and having fields that covered the entire planet. Or, well, one person had
sort of done that, but he didn't know
how
really. Tor. Naturally. It
wasn't like he could just go and visit and get all his secrets either. If he
got too close, his brother would read him, and know that he knew about the
Cordes inside of him being far more in control than not. His brother didn't
know about that part of things, he didn't think.

If he did, Tor would be fighting. If that happened, Tor
either won, or would figure out how to kill himself, to protect everyone else.
Cordes was an Ancient intelligence, with hundreds of more years of life than
Tor had. His brother however was The Builder. It wasn't a fair fight, but only
because Cordes wasn't up to the task, Timon didn't think. The trick there was
that he'd infiltrated so deeply that it might be too late.

When the Larval assassins were hunting him, Torrance had
used nano-sized dust particles that were programmed to find the Larval and
basically drug them into a stupor, and then force them to all go home. They
were tiny physical structures, unlike the micro-plasma, which was all energy.
If he could do something like that however, and dump the fields all over the
world, billions of them or more...

It might work. Each field would have to be long lasting, and
powerful, even if anchored to a tiny piece, and he had no clue how to make that
part happen at all. Tor the Great and Mighty could make a million field devices
in a week, perhaps, or even more than that. Timon's best efforts so far had
made a batch of a hundred. No one did more than that.

No one
else
.

That was going to be a problem, he realized. There had to be
a trick to it, but what it was he couldn't see, probably just lacking the
information to ask the right question in the first place.

But Tor knew.

His brother was separate from Cordes, and was still his
brother, even if they had been fighting for a while, since Tor had warped his
mind and made him feel things like other people did. That might have been
Cordes though, trying to remove the competition? Or it might have really been
his egotistical and bossy brother attempting to make him into a miniature version
of himself. Someday, Timon decided, he really needed to figure out which it
was. The idea of not knowing would drive him crazy, otherwise.

"I might be able to. I need to work on something for
that, I guess. This isn't going to be easy." It might even be impossible,
he knew.

For one thing it would mean having to swallow his pride and
go to Tor. Over a communications device, and not in person. That would allow
him to have enough distance from him, and not really have to deal with him in
person. It wasn't like they hadn't been in the same place since it happened. The
change. Tor hadn't mentioned it, but if he really thought it was all over, he
was a fool. No matter what, Timon was going to make whoever had done this to
him pay. If it was both Cordes and Tor, which was the most likely case, then
they'd both have to be punished for it.

How that was going to happen he didn't know.

Tiera had mentioned something, likely as a joke, but that
held a bit of promise really. She'd told him to seduce Alyssa and have sex with
her. He wasn't ready for that kind of thing yet, but taking his wife would hurt
Tor a lot more than a beating would. He could forgive that kind of thing, but
sex with Ali? No that would warp his mind almost as badly as what he'd done to
Tim.

The rest of it was out of what he knew what to do with so
far. Cordes could be killed, but not without taking Tor's life too. He might be
able to be suppressed, somehow. It was important, but also beyond him so far.

"I'll see to it, if I can. Once you get this done, you
should start working on the lunar base idea. It's something to do after
all." He was half kidding, since there was no real value to it, he didn't
think, other than having some backup people away from the planet while a
massive war raged, but it got a big and happy grin from the all black man. He
was dressed in a strange white coat at the moment, which made him hard to look
at, due to the contrast. It didn't suit him really, having a slightly worn look
to it, even if it was magical in nature. Monroe wasn't having a lot of trouble
adapting to the new way of doing things at all, it seemed to Tim.

The other man looked at him for a bit, smiling and then
shook his head a little. He didn't disagree though. Not in any direct fashion.

"That's not a horrible idea, but this might take some
time. I should help you with your side of this, if I can. Then we need to go
over what I know about Cordes and Gray's plans for us. It isn't a lot, but I
should write it out, before doing something fun like that. They really didn't
tell me anything, but I still learned a lot more than they expected. People
forget that I'm not stupid. It's the traits they built into me. Constantly
seeming happy and energetic. It's a lie of course. I
have
to smile, but
my feelings don't match that all the time. I have to obey too, if given a
direct order, but I can still know what I should be doing, if it's something
different." There was a friendly air to the way he said it, but Timon
wondered what that might really mean. It could be anything, from the man being
forced to, to thinking this was a great and happy situation all together.