Ruler of Naught (41 page)

He sat there with his hands dangling between his knees.
Perhaps the dream was not so surprising. Certainly the duty he’d drawn would
make virtually any change a welcome one. The Mbwa Kali was stationed just
outside the resonance field generated by Rifthaven, poised to intercept ships
leaving the Rifter habitat. They dared not attempt interception of incoming
ships, for fear the absence of a scheduled arrival would alert Rifthaven to
their presence.

So far they’d pulled in nothing but riffraff, as ignorant of
Eusabian’s plans as any servant of the Panarch. And none of them had any
inkling of the FTL comm. The only common thread was the gossip they all had
picked up on Rifthaven about the ongoing disintegration of the Panarchy under
the lash of Eusabian’s revenge and the greed of his Rifter allies.

Mandros Nukiel groaned and ran his hands through his hair.
It was agonizing, stuck out here in the middle of the Rift while everything
that made his career meaningful was being destroyed. He’d dispatched a courier
to Ares as soon as they’d taken up station here—assuming the Fleet center
hadn’t already been located and vaporized by Eusabian’s forces. But it would be
weeks before an answer came back—and that answer might well be to continue what
he was already doing. Ng’s orders—phrased with exquisite tact as a request—had
been entirely sensible, but that didn’t make them any easier to follow.

He padded over to the console, bringing up the tianqi settings.
Just as he thought, the Telos-damned thing had slipped into a Downsider mode
again. It was in the spring rain cycle, with increasing ionization, falling
barometric pressure, and variable breezes, but everything was exaggerated
compared to the gentler cycles enforced on a Highdwelling. He slapped at the
keys and reset the tianqi to Highdweller mode.

Then he tapped another few keys, calling up the duty roster
for the Environmental Section.
Chemiltut, eh? Well, we’ll swing him over the
radiants tomorrow; for now, back to the Z-watch.

And no more dream nonsense.

He was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

It was a spring afternoon on Sync Ferenzi. Up near the
spin axis the sun-glow had nearly reached the southern extreme of its track
along the diffuser. From his vantage point in Criana triant, Nukiel could see
the far north of the Laeteria triant, arching into the sky 120 degrees spinwise
from where he stood, dimming into evening. Mellifera triant was masked by
clouds, their tops bent into the familiar hook-shape imposed by the rotation of
the habitat.

With him were some other people. He didn’t recognize
them. One was a slim young man whose back was turned, but whose stance marked
him out as High Douloi; another was an atavism, with pale skin and blazing red
hair. Two were non-humans whose appearance disturbed him deeply, but he didn’t
know why. The others were unremarkable. They stood at the edge of the Commons,
the vast expanse of grass and wildflowers that every three years hosted the
Great Hum. No one said anything: each seemed absorbed in thought.

Nukiel stretched, reveling in the heady scent from the
orange grove at the nearest edge of the grassy sward. It was good to be home.
He looked south, where the mists of the Arctiel rainforest billowed at the base
of the rainbow-feathered waterfall spiraling down the face of the end-cap from
its source near the spin axis. He smiled. Downsiders could never understand why
Highdwellers thought planetary waterfalls so boring, until they saw what the
rotation of a sync did to water.

There was a faint rumble. Nukiel frowned. Then, as he
looked around, an impossibly loud blast of sound, melodious and yet agonizing,
knocked him to his knees. He clamped his hands over his ears, but it didn’t
help. The sound went on and on, battering at him until he thought it would
burst his ribs and strip the flesh from his bones. Then it stopped, without an
echo.

Nausea seized him, disorientation, and then terror as he realized
that he was in free-fall. He clutched at the tough grasses, but his grip failed
and his flailing fear propelled him into the air. His gaze swept across the
southern end-cap. The waterfall was straight. Impossibly, the rotation of
Ferenzi had stopped in an instant, yet the sync was intact.

Then the sun-glow flared and guttered to extinction,
leaving the habitat in gloomy darkness, illuminated only by a sourceless light
too dim for colors. Nukiel stared, his breath catching in his throat, as the fog
along the edge of the Commons mutated into glowing human forms, forms he
recognized: his dead father, his tutor from first-school, crushed in a transit
accident, and others as they drifted up and up, to the spin axis and then
beyond. Many he did not know, but from their expressions, the other, living
people with him seemed to.

The dead paid him and the others no attention, gazing instead
intently into the darkened sky, toward the spin axis invisible four and a half
kilometers overhead.

“... from light to light transformed... ” Where had he
heard that? Light burst in on him, haloing the dead rising through the air, as
the surface of Ferenzi peeled back and unrolled like a scroll in the hands of
an angry god. A violent wind sprang up, hurrying them along like the leaves of
a dying tree toward the bright limb of an immense planet looming too near. It
was not Ferenzi’s primary, Munenzera, but another, and Nukiel thought to
recognize it just as it melted into the face of a woman, her eyes flaring with
internal light, her gray hair standing straight out from her head in a
lightning-laced corona. She held up her hand and a searing red light blazed
from its palm.

Nukiel shrieked. It was the Goddess, come in Her aspect
of the Destroyer!

“This is Desrien, and you are summoned,” she said.

Nukiel fell out of bed and awoke tangled in his bedclothes,
his terrified shout still echoing in his cabin. The lights sprang on, but he
lay still, trying to get his breathing under control. He had the dizzying sense
of having awakened to a world less real than the one he had just experienced, a
feeling that, try as he might, he could not shake.

He pulled himself to his feet and sat down on the edge of
the bed, his head in his hands. Long ago a gnostor at the Academy had lectured on
the spiritual aspects of warfare. What had he said?

“One of the worst mistakes of the ancients was their
belief that the subjective is the unreal, that only the objective has true
existence. Do not make this mistake—it will destroy you as surely as it destroyed
them... ”

Nukiel shook his head. How easy to hear that in the comfort
of a lecture hall, and how hard now. How could he justify making a hejir, in
the midst of war? He shuddered. How could he avoid it? If he refused, what
would the next dream entail? Whatever the answer, he wasn’t sure he could face
it. A court-martial would be a day at the spin axis by comparison.

He had an image of himself suspended in space, caught midway
between the irresistible collision of two planetary masses, Duty and Desrien.
The shape of each was palpable and immediate to his imagination: the shape of
his entire life in the Navy, its traditions and its pride; and the looming
mystery of the Magisterium, which once had even reached out to destroy a
reigning Panarch.

And abruptly the masses balanced and canceled out, leaving
only his will and the knowledge of an oath sworn and a life lived in loyalty.

Mandros Nukiel sighed and lay back on his bed, and the
lights went out. After an unmeasured time his mind quieted, and sleep returned
at last.

o0o

Marim passed the dispensary as Montrose said to Omilov, “I
believe we’re about to dock. Would you like to take a glance at Rifthaven, as
seen from its best vantage?”

Everyone had converged on the bridge—everyone human, anyway.
Marim did not see the Eya’a, the dogs had been sent to their hidey-hole, and
Luce was locked in the dispensary. She laughed at the range of expressions on
the nicks’ faces as they stared through the viewscreen.

“If this is its best vantage, what must it be like inside?”
Omilov murmured.

“More confusing, of course,” Marim said cheerfully, glancing
past him at Osri, who stood close behind his father. His gaze met hers and then
slid away.

Annoyance made it hard to keep smiling, but she managed.
That stupid stiff-ass nick was not going to rizz her out of what was rightfully
hers, but she’d have to be careful.

He’s got it on him,
she thought. She’d searched the
entire ship, compartment by compartment, first anyplace Osri could have been,
and then where he was not supposed to be. Nothing. She’d also watched him, and
noted that he had taken care to be with either Brandon or his father,
especially since the time they’d both been pulled into practice and she’d
searched their cabin. The sneaky blit had probably planted some kind of
telltale that she’d missed.

Well, she wasn’t defeated yet. As the others blabbered about
their first visits to Rifthaven, she faded out of Osri’s periphery and eyed the
close-fitting jumpsuit he wore. No pockets at all on the outside—he’d probably
sewn the stuff against an in-seam.
Maybe his armpit. Couldn’t pickpocket
that even if my fingers were still hot.

She hid a laugh, thinking how bad her skills had gotten
since the old days.
Being around Markham and Vi’ya was a rotten
influence—nothing makes you as slow as honesty.

She turned back to the viewscreen, trying to remember her
first view of Rifthaven. What was it like for the nicks? To her, Rifthaven
looked like nothing so much as the worst multi-ship collision in the history of
the Thousand Suns, a jumble of constructs of even wilder variety than the
spacecraft they served.

She remembered her delight when she had first realized that
some of its component parts were actual ships, haphazardly bolted, welded,
webbed, and otherwise constrained together in a mishmash of metal and dyplast.
Light shone from numerous viewports; radiants venting heat glowed dully here
and there. A forest of antennae and a wild range of weaponry jutted from every
surface.

Beyond the station loomed the red dwarf star—dubbed
Bloodclot—that formed one third of the celestial triad that was Rifthaven. The
other component, Bruise, was not visible. It was a brown dwarf, a gas giant
nearly big enough to be a star, radiating in the low infrared. Rifthaven
orbited in one of the trojan positions of the system, protected from
skipmissile attack by an internal resonance generator that created one of the
largest skip barriers in the Thousand Suns. Almost as safe as their secret base
Ares, so Markham said, if less neat in appearance.

Omilov was frowning at the bewildering swirl of arriving and
departing vessels of every imaginable size, shape, design, and function. Tiny
tech craft drifted in and around the bigger ships, adding to the chaos. “Why
are we approaching so slowly?” he asked.

Montrose spoke up. “Rigid speed limits imposed by the Defense
Caucus. Closer you get, the slower you have to go,” he said. “No warning shots,
either: chase mines on automatic.”

Omilov squinted, as if trying to force some sort of order on
the visual confusion. Marim’s gaze moved to the silent observers beside him.

Brandon scanned passing ships with an attitude of interest.

Osri had forgotten her, and looked fascinated. Interesting.
She had expected his sniff-nose nick face.

“Oooh, look! Zhazrit’s Instantiations is still there. So
they didn’t get flamed, after all, huh?” Ivard spoke up on Marim’s other side.
“Oh! I see a new subdeck, right in there where they used to have the free-fall
kiting... ”

Marim ignored him, knowing he’d never notice. Half the time
now he talked back to weird voices that no one else heard anyway. She
shivered, glad he wasn’t touching her. Just as well he’d lost his desire for
bunny, which saved her from having to bunk him out. He acted too much like he
had a nasty disease.

Jaim stood at the back, his face blank. A trace of incense
clung to his clothing, sending a sense of unease through Marim. Why? It was
just a smell, part of the smells and bells he’d been fooling with ever since
she’d known him.
But I’ve never whiffed that scent
.

Marim stole a look at Vi’ya, who was watching the screen
dispassionately, alternating her attention between the stream of information on
her console and the low-pitched chatter on the approach channel.

Lokri lounged at his console. That was so much as she
expected that she nearly missed the clues. It was his hands. No, they were
loose, cradled around caf. Oh yes, it was his gaze. Not on the viewscreen, in
spite of his occasional comment as Montrose and Ivard blabbed about Rifthaven.
He was watching the Arkad.

Marim nearly jumped. Lokri was still on the hunt. With
Rifthaven in sight?

Marim bit on her lip to control her laughter.
So
much
trouble ahead, if she was right...
I’d better be first off
the
ship.

“What’ll you carry?” Marim ended the silence, looking around
at them all. “I’ll go break out the weapons.”

Jaim twitched his boswelled wrist. “Just this.” His voice
was almost inaudible.

Brandon gave him a quick glance of concern. Marim could have
told him not to worry: Jaim’s mood wasn’t suicidal, it was lethal. She made her
voice and face casual before she dared to a look at Lokri. “You got your
springblade, right? Anything else?”

Lokri shrugged slightly. “Wristknife. Hideout neurojac.”

“Montrose, can I borrow your stenchgun?” Marim asked. “I’ll
bring it back before I bunk my stuff out.”

“Be my guest,” Montrose responded. “I have a number of
things to do here before I seek another post.”