The Phoenix in Flight (68 page)

That was a very bad sign. Fear thrilled through Barrodagh,
who sidled a desperate peek at Jesserian, standing at attention with the visor
of his battle armor cocked open. The man’s face was expressionless, giving him
no direction. All up and down the hall Barrodagh could see the smoking,
plasma-seared ruins of little machines of some sort. Everything was liberally
coated with the same corrosive green glop as he himself was.

Had the Rifters been apprehended? There was no sign of
prisoners. Barrodagh had learned never to reveal unproven surmises unless all
evidence was in hand, and understood. Until then? Report the minimum.

“Lord, we had reports of looting in the Ivory antechamber. I
gave orders for interception and execution, explicitly stating that the stolen
art was to be recovered unharmed.”

He swallowed. Eusabian’s face might as well have been carved
from stone. Barrodagh would have welcomed any expression, even that
frightening, inexplicable quirk of cold humor he’d seen too often lately, but
there was nothing. Then the Avatar’s eyes flicked sideways, and his expression
altered subtly as motion reflected in his dark eyes.

Barrodagh shuddered. Somehow his lord’s acknowledgment of
the shadows haunting the Palace made them something truly to be feared.

“Who are these looters?” the Avatar asked.

“They are probably Rifters,” Barrodagh said. “It seemed
unlikely Panarchists would bother to loot. Then they struck at the senx-lo
Evodh and carried off the prisoner. It is possible they attempted to capture
the Panarch, too: they killed the Tarkans there, but they were foiled in this
regard by the prompt appearance of Kyltasz Jesserian’s force.”
There. That
will help keep Jesserian on my side, if only he has the wit to understand that
we’re both in this together.

“The kyltasz also reported that the intruders had used some
sort of terror weapon to kill the Tarkans. Despite this, I directed him to
preserve the prisoner’s life at all costs, as the recording equipment in the
transfiguration room had been destroyed, along with the mindripper.”

At least I don’t have that to worry about
, he thought
as his mind raced ahead of his words. But that was cold comfort. Dol’jharians
had perfected the infliction of pain hundreds of years before the invention of
the mindripper.

“Your pardon, Lord,” interrupted Jesserian. “I did not say
that the Tarkans guarding the Panarch were killed by this weapon. Only senz-lo
Evodh, his assistant, and the Tarkan there. All the others were killed by
jac-fire.”

He paused, and when Barrodagh did not resume, he added,
“They might have been Panarchists. The com system in the kitchen started
playing their battle music when the...” The commander appeared to have
difficulty with the next word. “The counterattack commenced.”

Eusabian was silent for a time. “This counterattack,” he
said, looking around. “It was apparently successful.”

Jesserian replied, “Yes, Lord, they escaped, but according
to my men, the prisoner they had taken was no longer with them. No sign has
been found of him. All the defense positions have been put on alert for
departing craft.”

“There may have been two groups,” said Barrodagh. “Perhaps
the looting was a diversion.” Wild ideas careened through his mind. Could Hreem
have sent Panarchists as a diversion?

“How many casualties did you take here?” asked Eusabian, as
if Barrodagh had not spoken.

“Five conscripts killed, Lord, seventeen wounded. None among
the Tarkans,” replied Jesserian.

“I do not understand,” said Eusabian mildly, “why a squad of
battle-armored Tarkans was unable to overcome a lightly-armed group of either Rifters
or Panarchists.”

Barrodagh could hear death hovering in his words. A glance
at Jesserian revealed that he, too, could sense it.

Then they received a reprieve from an unlikely source. With
a rattle, one of the little machines came to life behind them. Jesserian threw
himself forward with all the speed his servos could lend him just as the device
discharged its last pie straight at the Avatar:
clang-whizz-splat!

Green glop splattered around the commander’s armor as he
intercepted the pie, but he couldn’t stop and ran full tilt into the corridor
wall, punching a huge dent in the concrete wall behind the paneling. Dust and
bits of ceiling rained down on them. Another guard blasted the offending
machine.

Jesserian backed carefully out of the ruins of the wall and
tried to turn around, but slipped in the gray slop underfoot and fell with a
crash that shook the hallway. Broken slabs of paneling clattered down on top of
him.

He finally managed to get to his feet and stood back at
attention in front of the Avatar. His visor had been knocked closed by the
impact. He levered it open, and a flux of green slime oozed out, dripping down
the front of his armor. He didn’t move, blinking painfully.

Eusabian regarded the commander with a meditative gaze, then
said, “I assume this is not the terror weapon you referred to.” Barrodagh noted
with mixed relief and trepidation the quirk narrowing his lord’s eyes.

“No, Lord,” Jesserian replied, relaxing slightly and wiping
green slime off his face.

“Take me to the transfiguration room,” commanded Eusabian.

Barrodagh’s relief vanished, replaced by an echo of gnawing
anxiety. The reprieve might still be only temporary.

o0o

“One hundred kilometers out,” Osri said, and surreptitiously
wiped his sweating palms down his trousers.

“We’re being pulsed,” reported Lokri. “Short-range stuff.”

The ship shuddered as Vi’ya decelerated it to just below
sonic velocity. On the main screen the water swooped closer. They were now only
meters above the waves. Ahead, false dawn stained the sky. Against its faint
glow, the impossibly slender thread of lights that marked the S’lift stood like
a knife blade dividing the horizon.

“Open our eyes, Lokri,” she commanded. “Arkad, you’ll have
to keep them off our back for about five minutes.”

The Krysarch frowned at his console, apparently integrating
the range-pulse information now flowing from Lokri into the Tenno grid. Tenno!
Almost dizzy from the violent swings of emotion, Osri was aware of a sense of
gratitude for whoever had installed the Tenno Major—and for the fact that
Brandon apparently knew their use.

Osri watched him hungrily as Brandon paused, regarding the
pattern critically, then made a slight adjustment.
My father? Tortured?
Eusabian of Dol’jhar?
Osri’s thoughts wheeled uselessly around those three
facts, unable to make sense of them, yet unable to get away. He wiped his hands
again.

Vi’ya tabbed her intercom. “Jaim, I need you to rig the
radiants for thrust. How are we fixed for waste mass?”

“Full up. I ran a hose out to a stream in the forest while
we were working.”

Thrust from the radiants?
thought Osri. That was an
unusual maneuver. The radiants ordinarily used small amounts of waste mass,
usually water, to vent excess heat from the engines to space. In an emergency
requiring more vectors than the geeplane and positional thrusters could
provide, they could be used for thrust. He was beginning to suspect what Vi’ya
intended. The next few minutes would almost match Lao Shang’s Wager for
excitement. If they survived.

“Marim,” Vi’ya continued, tapping at her console, “here’s
what I need from you. Can you do it?”

Marim whistled. “You’re really gonna try it?” She cocked her
head and regarded her console critically, then tapped a few keys. “Yeah. Don’t
have much choice, right?”

Osri looked back and forth between Marim and Vi’ya. He was
intensely curious but unwilling to ask. Brandon raised his brows at Marim, who
grinned back at him. Osri could have been invisible for all the notice anyone
took of him.

He wished he were invisible. No, he wished he were gone.
With
my father.

Tortured?...

“We’re gonna head for orbit right along the S’lift cable so
they can’t zap us without destroying the S’lift.” Marim said. “We call it the
L’Ranja Whoopee—Vi’ya and Markham came up with it in an all-night bilge-banger
after our raid on Hippanus IV. Jakarr said it was impossible. I said we’d never
have a chance to use it.” She shrugged. “Looks like I was wrong, and I sure
hope he was.”

The Krysarch grinned back at Marim, but Osri saw nothing
amusing in the situation. The maneuver sounded insanely dangerous. He
remembered seeing Markham at a cadet gathering, his homely face animated with
excitement, his big hands swooping through the air to describe some impossible
flight trick. And Osri remembered some of the stunts ascribed to Markham in the
gossip inevitable after his cashiering. Those stunts were hallmarked by a
combination of brilliance, insane risk, and tight control... “
Which,”
one of Osri’s fellow instructors had said, her tone skeptical, “
makes you
wonder. If Markham vlith-L’Ranja was that brilliant, why would he
need
to cheat
?”

A wave of changes rippled through the glyphs echoed from the
Krysarch’s console to the main screen. “Incoming,” Brandon said, triggering a
counterstrike. Light flared in the screen; expanding gases buffeted the
Telvarna.

In the main screen land leapt at them, a white beach with
phosphorescent breakers flashing underneath as they raced toward the center of
the island that anchored the S’lift. This was the staging point for most
exo-planetary trade. Only tens of meters below the
Telvarna
a
bewildering jumble of tightly packed warehouses, distribution centers, and
transport lines flicked by with unsettling speed.

Now Osri could see the massive terminal at the base of the orbital
cable. A long sleek shape outlined in colored lights leapt up out of its roof,
clinging to the cable as its magnetic drivers accelerated it toward the Node,
forty thousand kilometers above. A fast glance up the cable, and here was
another carrier descending.

Fingers of light clawed at them from the roof of the
terminal, met with equal speed from the
Telvarna.
The melding of human
and machine lent by the Tenno grid was so perfect that Osri couldn’t tell
whether Brandon or the ship’s defense system had triggered the response.

A pounding roar resonated through the ship as Vi’ya
triggered the radiants into thrust mode. The resulting maneuver was part
aerodynamic, part geeplane. As Vi’ya pulled the ship into a tight vertical
turn, the ground tilted away in the main screen, giving way to a vertiginous
view straight up the thick cable—an endless string of lights outlining the
carrier mag-tracks receding to infinity.

The descending carrier flashed by. Osri had a subliminal
impression of shocked faces in the observation bubble.

There was no more fire from the ground. They were too close
to the S’lift. Vi’ya let the ship drift away somewhat from the cable. “We’ll
hold at this velocity until flame-out, then accelerate to three klicks and hold
there until we’re past the Shield generator.”

“Then we make Whoopee.” Marim clapped her hands together and
flung them apart. “I’m ready.”

o0o

Scurrying along between the whine-thump, whine-thump of
Jesserian in his armor and the brooding silence of Eusabian, Barrodagh felt
like a criminal being led to execution. The eyes of the pictures on the wall
didn’t help any, especially the holographic ones, which seemed to turn and
watch him pitilessly as he passed. The glop on his clothing was drying and
crusting; little pieces kept falling off his collar and down his neck.
I am
going to kill Hreem myself
, he thought, surreptitiously tugging at his
collar.
But first he’s going to bathe in whatever this stuff is, until he
scratches his skin off.

When they entered the room where Evodh and the others had
died, Eusabian’s face registered no emotion. The pesz mas’hadni’s head had
rolled to one side. The Avatar nudged it face-upward with one foot, then
studied its frozen expression of horror and pain. “That is an unusual weapon.
Not what one would expect from Panarchists.”

Barrodagh’s stomach lurched at the thought of it in Hreem’s
hands.

Jesserian’s com beeped. Barrodagh could hear an excited
voice coming from inside the man’s helmet, but could not make out the words.
“Inform Kyvernat Juvaszt on the
Fist,”
Jesserian snapped. More muffled
words. The kyltasz turned.

“Lord,” he said. “The units emplaced around the S’lift
report that a vessel matching the description of the intruder—a ship called the
Maiden’s Dream—
has
penetrated their defenses and is now
accelerating toward the Node parallel to the cable. Juvaszt on the flagship has
already been informed and will attempt to intercept, but he is presently on the
other side of the planet.” More muffled words drifted from the commander’s helmet
comm. The kyltasz’s face became bleak. “The kyvernat reports that because the
resonance field is down, the end of the hohmann launcher—the freight-launching
cable that reaches from the Node into space—is beyond radius. Since he will
have to use long-range weapons, he therefore cannot guarantee capture or
destruction of the intruder without severe damage to both the S’lift and the
Node.”

There was a long pause. Eusabian’s face was thoughtful.

“No,” he said finally. “Post a suitable reward for the capture—alive—of
the Gnostor Omilov.”

When he didn’t continue, Barrodagh realized that Eusabian
preferred losing the looted artworks to broadcasting the news of this
humiliation to the Thousand Suns at large. Barrodagh gritted his teeth. To
protest, to point out the inevitable result of the news of this successful
looting propagating through the Rifter world, would be to put his own life at
risk.

I shall deal with Hreem before I do anything else
, he
promised.
If we live through this day.