Softly Viquara said, "Welcome home, my beloved son."
20.
William Seth Rockworth III was the oldest man alive. Good health, good genes, and a careful lifestyle had extended his life span enough to reach the fledgling era of nanotech and life prolongation. At 173, hale and fit, with a few extra pounds on his frame and gray streaks in his black hair, the retired admiral had outlived all his peers.
One other person came near his age: the Ruby Pharaoh, 155 years old, a woman Seth had once called wife. Time softened the edges of his memories. He recalled Dehya as a lithe young woman with a gentle smile. He had never regretted leaving behind the Imperial court, but even so, he valued the Rhon bonds he had formed during that time of his life. Before then he hadn"t known he had a Kyle rating of ten, a psionic strength claimed by no more than one in every ten billion humans. Although he left Dehya, he had sworn her an oath on that day he departed the Orbiter to return to Earth. A Rhon oath. If ever she needed help, she could ask it of him. In the seven decades since, she had never invoked it.
Until now.
Her message was simple. Meet my s.h.i.+p, Tailors Needle, at Logan Starport. Rhon Oath. He stood in his study reading the words on his console, wondering what had spurred her to contact him after so long.
It was three in the morning when Seth drove his hovercar into the parking lot at Logan. Tailors Needle was arriving at a domestic terminal, which meant it came from Allied s.p.a.ce, another conundrum. Why would Dehya"s s.h.i.+p have an Allied ID?
He found the gate in an out-of-the-way concourse emptied by the late hour. Only vessels that couldn"t afford better berths used these areas. He had to walk out onto the tarmac to meet the pitted two-person scout s.h.i.+p that sat in an old docking bay.
The hatch opened and Dehya jumped down to the tarmac. Seth couldn"t see her well in the shadows by the s.h.i.+p, but he recognized the heart shape of her face, the length of her hair, and her innate grace. Except she was too tall.
In the instant before she left the shadows, he realized it wasn"t Dehya. Like a ghost come to haunt, the woman stalked into the light.
"Soz?" Seth asked. This couldn"t be Dehya"s niece. Soz had died fifteen years ago.
"You gave Dyhianna Selei an oath when you were her husband," she said. "Rhon Oath. Do you still honor it?"
That sounded like Soz: to the point, wasting no words. "Yes," he said, wondering what he had gotten himself into. Soz? he asked. Is it you?
She kept her mind closed. She was holding a laser carbine she must have smuggled past the port"s at-a-distance sensors, not a difficult task for someone who knew how. "Do you honor the oath?" she repeated.
"Yes." He paused. "I made it to Dehya, though."
"Rhon Oath."
He understood her meaning. Given the Rhon"s interwoven relations.h.i.+ps and merged minds, it was impossible to give an oath to one without impacting the others. "I will honor it also to you."
Her hands relaxed their white-knuckled grip on the carbine. In an unexpectedly gentle voice she said, "Then I have four miracles for your keeping. Protect them for me."
"Miracles?"
She motioned-and four children climbed down from the s.h.i.+p. At first he saw only their general forms: a boy about six-foot-one, gangly with youth, probably still growing, his left arm in a sling and a toddler cradled in his right; and an adolescent girl with long hair, her arm around a boy hanging onto her waist.
Then they came into the light and he saw them better, the tall youth"s red eyes, the glitter in the younger boy"s hair, the trace of red in the baby"s eyes. The older boy"s features were unmistakable. Highton. But Seth also saw the multicolor streaks, wine-red and gold, in the children"s hair, and the green eyes on the girl and the middle boy.
"My children," Soz said.
"How?" he asked. Had she been a prisoner all these years, the provider of a Highton?
She didn"t answer. Instead she said, "You can never reveal their ident.i.ty or let anyone know they"re psions. Say they"re refugees from Eube, that you became their sponsor, anything. Can you promise this? I can"t leave them with you unless you do."
Psions? Their father couldn"t be Highton then. Seth decided to trust her, not based on any profound a.n.a.lysis, but because it was Soz, whom he had always liked, though he hardly knew her. It was also the middle of the night, she was a ghost, and nothing this interesting had happened to him in decades.
"I will promise." He hesitated. "Were you caught by the Traders? Your children look like they have Highton blood."
"My husband is one-quarter Highton."
"Your husband?" He would have thought it inconceivable that a member of the Ruby Dynasty would marry anyone with even a modic.u.m of Highton blood. "Why?"
"He"s Rhon."
Seth wasn"t sure what response he had expected, but that wasn"t it. Rhon? Rhon? Just like that, simple as you please, my husband is one-quarter Highton and he"s Rhon. The implications staggered. During the time Seth had lived on the Orbiter, he saw enough of Highton att.i.tudes toward the Ruby Dynasty, and Skolians in general, to know how grievously Allied authorities erred when they discounted ISC claims of Trader atrocities. He had no wish to live in an age when ESComm had access to a psiberweb, which they soon would if they were making Rhon psions.
"Who is your husband?" Seth asked.
"Jaibriol Qox."
He waited for her to laugh. When she didn"t, all he could think to say was, "The First or the Second?" It was an absurd question, given that both were dead, but it was far less absurd than what she had just said. Then again, she was dead too.
"Second," she said, with her usual verbosity.
When it became clear no explanation was coming, he tried to put it all together. "You say Jaibriol II is alive, that he"s Rhon, that you two have these children-come to think of it, they must all be Rhon if both you and Qox are. And you"re married to him?" When she nodded, he said, "Then these children are your legitimate heirs. That would mean they are heirs to both the Ruby and Carnelian Thrones."
"That about sums it up," she said.
"Good Lord, Soz." What hit him most wasn"t the interstellar implications, the prospect of empires in upheaval. It was that she chose to entrust her miracles to him. He looked at them and they looked back, their faith in their mother suffusing his mind. If she said he would do right by them, they believed her.
"Earth is the best place for them," Soz said. "You"re the only person I can trust on Earth."
"But why? You hardly know me. Dehya and I split up before you were born."
"She trusted you," Soz said. "I trust her. We"re Rhon. You can"t hide in a family of telepaths as close-knit as ours. She knew your mind; I knew her mind."
Dehya trusted him? Had anyone asked, Seth would have said he had neither right nor reason to believe such. Oddly enough, though, had he ever needed to hide his children, he would have thought first of Dehya. Of course his children were all grown, and his grandchildren, and on down the generations. They had less time now for the old man in the Appalachians. It would be nice to have young people filling his empty mansion again.
He felt the minds of the children. They weren"t trying to reach him; it just hadn"t occurred to them that he was someone they should protect against. Their emotions surrounded him in a sea of warmth.
"I"ll do my best," he told them. The six-year-old smiled and the baby gurgled.
Soz"s voice gentled. "I know."
He turned to her. "What will you do now?"
Her eyes glinted in the dark. "Get my husband."
The War Room on the Orbiter slumbered. In the stardome, the command chair was empty. Although telops worked in the amphitheater, many consoles were dark, unable to sustain peak efficiency without the power provided by the Triad. Stillness lay over the area like a blanket.
On a dais at one edge of the amphitheater, a group of civilians sat at a table: Roca, her husband Eldrinson, their son Eldrin, Kurj"s widow Ami, First Councilor of the a.s.sembly Barcala Tikal, and the other councilors of the Inner a.s.sembly. An archway opened in the wall there, on the dais, and a corridor stretched from it into the guts of the Orbiter. Translucent columns bordered the corridor, made from an ancient composite that modern science had yet to reproduce. Lights spiraled around the machinery within the columns, scintillating, flas.h.i.+ng, sparkling. The corridor extended back so far that its perspective converged to a point, drawing the eye to infinity.
The First Lock waited at the end of the corridor.
Roca looked around at the others. "If I do this, it can"t be undone." Once she used the Lock to join the Triad, her mind would become too interwoven with the web ever to extract it. If she tried, it would disrupt the mult.i.tude of Lock-formed changes in her brain and leave her brain dead.
Fatigue showed on Eldrinson"s face, the exhaustion of trying to operate a Triad with only two people. "We need you, Roca."
Barcala Tikal looked around the table. "Any of you has a right to object."
"Kurj would want it," Ami said.
Eldrin nodded. "I agree."
"Does anyone disagree?" Tikal asked.
Silence answered him.
Tikal started to speak, then stopped, his gaze s.h.i.+fting to a point behind Roca in the amphitheater. Then he closed his mouth and rose to his feet. Eldrin looked and started, then stood with a sudden, powerful motion. Eldrinson turned his gaze that way, and he also stood, followed by everyone else at the table.
Puzzled, Roca got up and turned around.
The woman stood in the cup at the end of a ma.s.sive crane suspended a few meters above the amphitheater. Everyone in the War Room had stopped working and was watching her. Among the colossal machinery, she looked as fragile as a soap bubble, her delicate face gaunt with exhaustion, her skin pale almost to translucence, the circles under her eyes as dark as bruises. Gray streaked the braid of black hair that hung over her shoulder to her hips. She had lost weight, become so thin she seemed ready to drift away. Fragile and vulnerable, she stood before them, this woman Kurj had called the most powerful human being alive.
"I agree that Roca should join the Triad," Dehya Selei said.
Eldrin"s relief bathed Roca. Until that moment, she hadn"t realized that not even her son had seen Dehya, his wife, since the death of Kurj.
The robot arm lowered Dehya to the ground, and she stepped out into the amphitheater. A telop jumped to clear a carton from her path. Pages stepped back and bowed as she pa.s.sed. They were all bowing, throughout the War Room, telops, ISC officers, soldiers, pilots, citizens from every stripe and seed of the Imperialate, bowing to their Pharaoh.
Dehya came up onto the dais. "The Traders are about to make an announcement."
It was Tikal who found his voice first. "How do you know?"
"I know." Her voice was shadows. She looked around at them, her gaze coming again and again to Eldrinson, as if he were a puzzle she had to solve. She indicated a great screen above the archway of the Lock corridor. "Listen."
Tikal spoke into the control band on his wrist. "Activate the dais holoscreen in the War Room."
The screen s.h.i.+mmered and the image of a black puma formed, more than life-size. The Trader anthem drifted into the air, a haunting work of art that Roca had never reconciled with its Aristo composers. So much Eubian music had an incomparable yet grief-stricken beauty, as if its creators lamented their own existence. The puma reached out an arm with its claws extended. Then it faded, replaced by the Hall of Circles in the Qox palace on Glory, filled with tier after tier of glittering Aristos.
Five Hightons walked down an aisle of the Hall, accompanied by the palace secret police, the brutal Razers feared throughout Eube. Roca recognized four of the Hightons: Empress Viquara, the Qox heirs Corbal Xir and Calope Muze, and the Eubian Trade Minister Kryx Quaelen.
Then she saw who walked with them and her heart froze.
Tall and unsmiling, his hair s.h.i.+mmering, his ruby eyes cold, his stride like the beat of a drum no one could hear, he walked through the Circles. Jaibriol Qox.
They reached the dais in the center of the Hall, where a chair waited. Made from solid carnelian, the throne stood as an inanimate reflection of its creators. Jaibriol II mounted the dais and looked out at the a.s.sembled Aristos. Gone was the vibrant youth Roca remembered from fifteen years ago, the young hero adored by Aristos and hated by everyone else alive. This man stood gaunt and silent, in unrelieved black.
Then he sat on the Carnelian Throne.
As one, the Aristos of Glory lifted their arms. As one they snapped their fingers. It was the only sound they made. In the Hall of Circles, it was an unsurpa.s.sed accolade.
Here, in the Orbiter War Room, the Councilor for Life said, "G.o.ds almighty. This we didn"t need."
"He must be an imposter," Judiciary said.
Barcala Tikal looked tired. "It has to be him. They would never tolerate an imposter on the Carnelian Throne."
"It can"t be," Eldrinson whispered.
Roca glanced at her husband. Eldrinson was staring at the screen as if he had seen a nightmare. She didn"t blame him. With the son of Ur Qox returned from the dead to rally his empire, the Traders would surge in morale while Skolia stumbled.
A voice spoke behind Roca. "Ma"am? Do we report to you?"
Roca turned to see a telop, a woman in an ISC uniform. Whom did they report to? The lines of command had grown tangled since Kurj"s death. She had to find the resources to take charge, with an a.s.surance she didn"t feel, lest her lack of experience damage her people"s already subdued morale. Solid leaders.h.i.+p was even more important now, with a strong young emperor suddenly on the Carnelian Throne.
"Yes," she said. "Go ahead."
"We had a power surge in a conduit feeding a generator in the Strategy Room," the telop said.
That puzzled Roca. Why would they seek her attention over so trivial a matter? "Can"t you fix it?"
"It"s the conduit to the Command Chair, ma"am."
Then Roca understood. She looked up at the chair in the dome high over their heads. The Imperator would have to go up there to activate the controls.
"That"s odd," Tikal said. He was peering at a screen in the table that showed a display of schematics. He pointed out several lines, threads of green on a diagram. "These just activated."
Roca scanned the display. "They should be active. That system controls the backup for node seven of the War Room web."
"That entire node has been down for days," Tikal said.
"Councilor Roca," the telop said, her hand to her ear as she listened on her comm. "We"re getting a report from the SCAD air defense nodes. They"re activating."
"What?" Roca frowned at Tikal. "When did you order that?"
He straightened up. "I didn"t."
Behind them, Roca heard the bell of a telop summoning a page. The rumble of a crane growled through the growing hum of sound in the amphitheater. Voices came from consoles relaying reports and from the councilors here on the dais, talking into their wrist comms or gauntlets.
Dehya walked away from them all, to the entrance of Lock corridor on the other side of the table. Roca watched her sister. Had Dehya provoked this web activity? If anyone had the resources for it, she did. Or was the Pharaoh simply lost in thought, pacing the intricate labyrinth of her mind?
A clang sounded, followed by a surge in the hum of power. Roca turned to see a crane swing to the floor. She knew telops often sat in the cranes that moved through the War Room, using all levels of the amphitheater. But they did it only when the room was fully energized; otherwise it took needed resources from other systems. And the War Room had been at low power for days.