The Phoenix in Flight (24 page)

The Archon’s voice deepened slightly to an almost theatrical
pitch and timbre. “So, Sebastian, do you know this man?”

Now Deralze understood the loud voice, the dress whites:
there had probably been no formal dinner. The Archon was using his Douloi
arsenal to project competence, and power. Not to the Rifters, who would despise
everything the Archon stood for, but for his own people.

A glance at Omilov revealed that he seemed caught off
balance by the question. “No,” he replied, his bushy brows puckered in
question. “And I would remember had I ever met him. Should I?”

The Archon gestured. “Enough, Bikara.” The man’s image dwindled
back to one among the previous array of windows. “You must forgive my weakness
for theatrics, my friend. When I was a child I loved courtroom dramas: the
sudden, stabbing questions, the exposure of deep secrets.” He put a hand to his
chest, pointed dramatically at Omilov with a mock-severe expression. “And where
were
you
on the night of Jaspar sixteenth?”
He smiled broadly.

Bikara said, in the manner of someone carrying out an order,
“Five minutes, Your Grace.”

“No, my friend, you would not be acquainted with Hreem the
Faithless, as that one is called,” the Archon said, serious now. “Though he is
well known to any naval captain who ever dreamed of raking in a jackpot bonus.
Hreem is a Rifter—one of the worst—specializing in slave-trading, jacking, and anything
else that will make him rich with a minimum of risk.” He glanced at the screen.

Rifters? Attacking an Archonate?
Again, as he had at
the Mandala, Deralze had that sickening sense he’d been outmaneuvered. Not
sense. Conviction.

Brandon looked back at him bleakly, the mask of detachment
gone. Deralze could see his own question mirrored there:
What is Markham’s
role in this?

“But what can they hope to gain?” asked Omilov.

“You, Sebastian,” said the Archon quietly.

Omilov stared, his eyes wide with incomprehension. “Me?”

“About two hours ago, a single ship skipped in just outside
the resonance field and destroyed one of the resonators. Minutes later, a
number of other ships followed.” The Archon spoke low and fast now, not for the
staff below, but for Omilov—and, a quick glance revealed, Brandon. “Charvann is
not heavily armed. It has not been necessary for centuries. Moments before you
arrived the last of our ships was destroyed.” The Archon darted a glance up at
the screen. “Bikara?”

“The wavefront is still fifteen minutes from complete
coincidence with
Korion
’s usual patrol area, but probability is
ninety-six percent that the signals from the attack have already reached it
.”

The Archon turned back to Omilov, his voice rising again,
smooth and reassuring. “The battlecruiser
Korion
is on maneuvers
in-system—just the usual reminder to our local Rifters to maintain their good
behavior—” He paused at Osri’s slight breath of disbelief.

The Archon glanced his way. “The Rifter situation is not as
neat as the serial chips would have it.” He chuckled. “Only a small percentage
of Rifters are given to raiding and jacking, and most of those, like our local
ones, tend to prey on other Rifters. As long as they behave themselves
in-system, we leave them be.”

“You mentioned that there are Rifters in the system once
before, I believe,” Omilov said. “But now they are attacking, and they want
me
?”

“These are not the local set.” The Archon indicated the
screen. “And we have no idea why your name was mentioned when they demanded our
surrender. No matter. The
Korion
was scheduled to be in the middle
system, no more than two light-hours out. By now they’re almost certain to have
detected the gravity pulse accompanying the collapse of the resonance field,
and the ones caused by the Rifter ships skipping in.”

He smiled grimly. “Things will be different when it arrives,
I promise you. ‘Those of my people he murdered shall have vengeance.’”

“‘And a pyre shall I make of my enemy’s works,’” quoted
Brandon in response.

The Archon gave him a considering gaze as Osri’s brows
furrowed.

Brandon made a slight, deferential gesture. Deralze’s
fifteen years around the Douloi still had not furnished complete understanding
of the subtleties of their social interactions. “The Sanctus Gabriel of
Desrien,” Brandon said. “He was High Phanist of the Magisterium in the reign of
the Faceless One, whose memory be abhorred.” The ritualistic tone of the last
words made Deralze’s neck crawl. The horrible deed of that Arkad, dead these
six hundred years and more, of whom no image now existed anywhere in the
Thousand Suns, was not a comfortable thought under the present circumstances.
But
the unfortunate planet Vellicor had dropped its Shield.

The Archon’s eyes narrowed as if he’d taken meaning from
Brandon’s seemingly irrelevant remark. “In any case,” the Archon continued,
“prior to taking down the resonance field, this Hreem person beamed down an
insolent demand for surrender... and for the delivery of one Sebastian Omilov
and all his possessions into his hands.”

“What? What would any Rifters, local or out-octant, want
with me?” Omilov asked.

“You should ask rather,” said the Archon, “what Eusabian of
Dol’jhar wants with you.”

Shock flooded Deralze.
The Lord of Vengeance.
He knew
who that was.

One again he wondered who was really backing the Poets,
whose plot he thought he’d left behind on Arthelion. But here was more evidence
of Dol’jhar’s reach, both in the ships lost above and the damage here below
caused simply by the Shield going up: the ruined S’lift, the planet-wide
electrical storms of the stabilization phase that would already have sparked
massive forest fires.

Deralze threw back his head and stared at the frozen face of
the Rifter named Hreem.
What did Byron promise you?
And who is Byron?

Deralze looked away, at Brandon nyr-Arkad, who stood
isolated, tense and still as he watched the images on the screen. “Eusabian of
Dol’jhar—” Omilov’s voice choked off. He raised the small box, which had hung
unregarded in his left hand since his arrival, and clutched it in both hands.
“How did he know?” he whispered.

“Excuse me?” Archon frowned at Omilov’s hands. “What do you
mean?”

“I’m sorry, Your Grace,” said Omilov. “A... guess of mine
has played out truly, much to my astonishment.” He opened the box. The sphere
threw back in brilliant, multicolored distortion the blinking lights and
shifting images of the defense room. “I received this only hours ago—an
artifact of the Ur, stolen from the Shrine Planet.”

“Quarantine One,” said the Archon.

“Yes—”

“Emergence pulse, Your Grace,” interrupted Bikara.
“Signature—it’s the
Korion
!
”

o0o

“You got that Archon yet, Dyasil?” Hreem stood up, the
excess energy created by the battle finding no outlet in sitting still. He
paced around the bridge of the
Lith,
staying close to the command pod so
he could be seated in a position of command when he spoke again to the Archon.

“Not yet. The Shield’s raising hell with the beam.”

On the viewscreen the
Novograth
hung against the
planet and its auroral crown, angular silver against the warm brown and blue
curve of Charvann’s horizon.

“Erbee!” snapped Hreem. “What’ve you got?”

“Nothin’, Cap’n. Bunch of hash from the Shield, crazy-scared
chatter from the Syncs. Riolo can’t get through to the Datanet. No ship signs at
all.”

Hreem drummed his fingers on the back of the pod. He hated
waiting like this, especially in inner space where a ship couldn’t use the
fiveskip to drunkwalk, making its position less random.

He glanced impatiently at the image of the
Novograth
again. It hadn’t changed for a while. The
Lith
had been on the same
heading for some time. Bargun was hunched strangely over his console, and the
light from its screen on his face was flickering in a way quite unlike the
usual pattern.

Hreem smiled grimly.
He’s watching that damned chip of
Dyasil’s again. After this is over I think Bargun’s gonna put on a little show
for the crew.

He cat-footed across the deck and then lunged, dealing a
savage blow with his fist to the back of the unsuspecting Rifter’s head. Bargun
shrieked as his face slammed down onto his console screen. He tried to push
himself back up as Hreem raised one foot and flexed out his heel claw.

From Erbee’s console came a quiet bleep, and the Rifter tech
yelled, “Emergence! Eight light seconds! A big one!” His voice cracked with
terror.

Hreem slammed his foot back to the deck and gasped a breath
to yell a command, gaze snapping to the screen, but his voice stuck as, in
total silence, the
Novograth
shuddered violently, bits of hull plating
flying off. The ship’s form blurred, and a terrible coronal discharge wreathed
it briefly before it fell apart and then exploded in a glaring blast of light
that momentarily overloaded the viewscreen.

Almost simultaneously a deafening supersonic screech blasted
through the bridge of the
Lith,
falling quickly to a subsonic rumble
that shook the entire ship and knocked his feet out from under him. Pain
stabbed his ears, and blood trickled from them down his neck. His limbs
twitched in a violent spasm as the edge of a ruptor pulse brushed the ship.

Others were not so fortunate. Alluwan’s console exploded
violently and he was momentarily outlined in a red fog as the intense gravity
pulse tore through him. Then his chair ripped out of the deck and spun into a
bulkhead, denting it with the violence of its impact. There was nothing but a
swirling bloody cloud where he had sat, mixed with black smoke from his
destroyed console.

Hreem scrambled off the deck and vaulted into the pod,
slamming his fist down on the jump pad, but as he had feared, nothing
happened—the delicate resonance of the fiveskip was almost always the first
thing to go when a ruptor grabbed a ship.

“Erbee!” he shouted. “Find that chatzer! Hurry!”

But Erbee was already screaming out another contact. “Emergence
pulse, 1.2 light seconds.” He slapped frantically at his console.
“Coordinates
to Fire Control!” The main screen windowed up a vision out of Hreem’s worst
nightmares: the vast bulk of a cruiser closing in.

“Pili! Target!” The stars swung across the viewscreen
rapidly as the ship slewed around. “Ready a skipmissile!”

“Skipmissile charging!”

Hreem clutched at the arms of his pod—at least they still
had missile power. Give them only a few more seconds.

Damn you, Bargun...
when I...
He
noticed then that Bargun was beyond reach. A macabre eddy in the ruptor pulse
had torn his head off and deposited it neatly on his console, staring
sightlessly at his body slumped on the deck nearby, the flickering action from
the record chip on the screen under the head imbuing his features with ghastly
animation.

On the screen an inward-blinking ring of arrows pointed at a
fat blur of light. “Targeting locked on. Skipmissile. Six seconds to
discharge.”

“Fire on zero!”

It was rare that one got a second chance against a cruiser,
the only ship large enough to mount ruptors. The
Lith
had never
encountered one up close before—the one or two encounters they’d had, their
monstrous pursuer had been no more than a distant blip on the rear screens as
they escaped into fivespace. Even with the vast power of the Urian relay, Hreem
never wanted to see one again—unless it was his own...

Hreem stared at the targeted blur, willing it into inaction
for the few seconds more he needed, hardly hearing the screams of pain from the
wounded, some of whom had lost limbs to the alternating gee fields of the
near-miss ruptor pulse. This was not the sure thing Eusabian had promised, not
what he’d imagined in so many pleasant daydreams of power and revenge. He’d
never sustained this kind of damage before. Fear blurred his thoughts until he
washed it out with rage, as he always did: rage against Eusabian, against the
Panarchist Navy, and against his own terror. His heart hammered painfully in
his throat as he waited for death or victory.

o0o

Sebastian Omilov barely had time to raise his eyes to the
main viewscreen when one of the Rifter ships windowed there shuddered
violently, bits of hull plating flying off. The ship’s form blurred, and a
terrible coronal discharge wreathed it briefly before it fell apart and then
exploded in a glaring blast of light. Other windows revealed similar carnage

As the defense room rang with cheers, Bikara tapped at her
console. One window expanded, showing another Rifter ship, elongated and
wasp-like, with a jet of gas venting from a rip its hull, wheeling about.
Another window bloomed, revealing a fat, egg-shaped ship bristling with
antennae, with three large turrets spaced equally around both ends.
That
must be the Korion,
thought Omilov, pleased that he could at least pick
that out from the welter of images and arcane glyphs flickering on the screen.

At one end the cruiser’s radiants formed an angular break in
its otherwise smooth lines. There was no hint of the
Korion’s
true size
from the picture on the screen, but Omilov knew that it was over seven
kilometers long—a battlecruiser was the most powerful weapon of war ever built.
Even a shielded planet could not hold out for more than a few weeks against one
of these ships, which were the backbone of the Thousand-Year Peace.

For a second or two, nothing seemed to happen. A murmur
arose from the assembled monitors.

“What is he waiting for?” demanded Osri, puzzled anger in
his voice.

“The dimensions of this mercy are above my thoughts...” said
Brandon, as if quoting someone, and Osri glared at him, obviously nettled by
the implied rebuke.