Today, an inexplicable brooding filled his home. Jarac paced from room to room trying to fathom it. Finally he left. He walked across Valley, past the house Dehya shared with her husband, Seth Rockworth, then past the home where Roca lived with her new son. It wasn’t until he had traversed the length of Valley that he reached Kurj’s house. In some ways, it resembled his own, large in dimension and simple in style. But it had accents: arched eaves, beveled glass, a slanted roof. Its windows were designed so someone inside could see out, but no one could see in. It reminded Jarac of the inner eyelids Kurj often kept lowered.
When Jarac touched the pager at the entrance, the door shimmered and vanished, offering admittance. This surprised him; given his current strained relationship with Kurj, he hadn’t expected his grandson to put him on the list of visitors with automatic permission to enter.
He found Kurj in his office, sprawled behind his desk, studying a document on a screen in front of him, his inner lids lowered. He was clenching a light-stylus in his hand so tightly, his knuckles had turned white.
“Bad news?” Jarac asked.
Kurj jerked up his head. Then he threw the stylus on his desk. “Did you send Banner Highchief to try talking me into negotiating with the Traders?”
“No.”
Kurj stood up, rising to his full height, one hand on his back as he stretched. “She wants me to reconsider my vote on the invasion.”
Jarac felt tempted to say, So do I, but that was the wrong approach with Kurj, reminding him of his subordinate position. He had grown more and more restless these past years, impatient for more authority.
Jarac waited.
“I told her I would think about it,” Kurj finally said.
“And have you?”
He crossed his muscled arms. “No.”
They faced each other across the desk. Jarac knew his grandson had more to say. He wished he could find a way past Kurj’s emotional armor, but it had no chinks. The days when Kurj was a laughing child running to him with arms outstretched were long and forever gone.
After a while Kurj spoke in a quieter voice. “When I was a pilot, I participated in an engagement against a Trader frigate. Its Aristo commander had a psion, a youth he had captured by raiding a Skolian commercial liner.” His fingers were pressing his desk so hard, tendons stood out on the back of his hands. “The Traders were using the psion to detect our forces. They had already killed his parents, using them for the same purpose. I picked up the youth’s mind at the same time he detected me.”
“What happened?” Jarac asked, dreading the answer.
A muscle twitched in Kurj’s cheek. “He wasn’t revealing enough about our forces. So they ‘encouraged’ him.” He made a visible effort to speak evenly. “While they were torturing him, I couldn’t break my connection with his mind.”
Jarac felt the horror in Kurj’s mind. “What did you do?”
His jaw tightened. “I blew up the frigate. I couldn’t free that boy, but I could end his agony.” His hand curled into a fist. “And I rid the universe of the monster who had destroyed his life.”
Jarac spoke quietly. “If I could free you from those memories by taking them into myself, I would do it in an instant.”
“You’ve never fought.” Kurj’s voice grated. “You weren’t a military officer when you became Imperator. How can you lead ISC when you don’t burn inside?”
“And what would you have me do? Destroy us in the blaze of my hatred?”
“You have no right to be a man of peace.”
Jarac’s voice took on an edge. “It makes no difference, does it? No matter how hard I work toward peace, we will have a war.”
Kurj fell silent then. Jarac didn’t push. His grandson had said his piece and would add no more. In that rationing of words, he and Jarac were alike.
Then Kurj said, “I received the report on Eldrinson from the medical team that went to Skyfall.”
That caught Jarac off guard. “What does it say?”
Kurj jabbed a panel on his desk and it ejected a copy of the report on Eldrinson. He gave it to Jarac. As Jarac scanned the report, his relief grew. Both psychologists rated Eldrinson Valdoria as above average in intelligence. Tyra Meson called his spatial perception “spectacular.” Both she and Undell considered him competent to sign a marriage contract with Roca. The doctor’s opinion was less definitive, but even he acknowledged that the initial reports on Eldrinson were wrong.
Jarac raised his eyebrow at Kurj. “Even your handpicked doctor won’t judge him incompetent.”
Kurj crossed his arms.
Jarac sighed. “Why don’t you go talk to this man your mother married?” He set down the holosheet. “Perhaps you will find him less objectionable than you expect.”
“How can you accept him? That marriage is a travesty.”
“Roca loves him. He makes her happy. That makes me happy.”
Kurj gave a dismissive jerk with his hand. “All sorts of things make us ‘happy’ that are wrong.”
“You must make peace with this.”
“Why? So you don’t feel threatened by my anger?”
“No.” In truth, it unsettled Jarac to hear Kurj acknowledge what usually went unspoken between them, the tension born of Kurj’s conviction he was better fit to rule as Imperator. They both knew it could be decades before Kurj assumed the title, possibly even centuries, given that Roca was next in line.
Kurj pushed his hand across the short cut of his metallic hair, so unlike Jarac’s shaggy mane. “I would wish that life could have given us kinder roles to play.”
“Yes.” Jarac spoke quietly. “I, too.”
DNA molecules rotated, helices in neon colors wrapped around his neck, choking, choking, choking…
Kurj sat bolt upright, staring into the darkness, his heart pounding. As it slowed, he took a deep breath. His biomech web registered that he had held his breath for more than two minutes.
Callie lay on the other side of his bed, asleep. He leaned over her, brushing back her hair, but he didn’t wake her. Instead he slid out of bed and pulled on the black robe he had thrown over a chair. Then he left the bedroom and walked through his house. It remained silent but aware of him, always aware, never sleeping.
In his office, he brought up the DNA records for his father, Tokaba Ryestar, and compared them to Eldrinson’s genetic map. He had to find defects in Eldrinson’s DNA, proof it would contaminate the Ruby Dynasty. A way had to exist to negate this last, damning report. But he had to show that whatever flaw existed in Eldrinson didn’t apply to Tokaba, who had also brought new blood into the Ruby Dynasty and sired a Ruby son. Surely a dramatic and usable difference existed between Tokaba’s DNA and that of a barbarian on a backward planet. He had to prove Eldrinson’s flaws.
Kurj had more trouble than he expected in his investigation. Several systems he needed to access were unusually well secured, challenging his most sophisticated EIs. But gradually he uncovered the story. His conception had involved years of work by a team of scientists. The Assembly had set up an entire program dedicated to that one purpose. Desperate to ensure the Ruby Dynasty would provide heirs for the Kyle web, they had insisted the doctors do whatever possible to make it happen, regardless of what that meant to Roca and Tokaba, even if the failures of Roca’s pregnancies brought them immeasurable grief.
Kurj clenched his teeth, his resentment hot within him. Yet he understood their desperation. He felt it every time he let himself acknowledge how little stood between his people and enslavement by the Trader Aristos. Only a gossamer, indefinable web protected them, one that didn’t even exist in the spacetime universe. But no matter how much he understood their motivation, nothing would ease his anger at the pain his family had suffered as the Assembly sought to control and manipulate their lives.
The more he investigated his birth, the more he understood why his mother called him a miracle child. The odds against his conception had been so high, it made him feel strange, unreal. He followed the tr
ail through ever more abstruse networks, searching out his heredity. Finally he left spacetime and plunged into the Kyle web, becoming a cowled figure striding across a stark grid.
The more he searched, the more puzzled he became. On the surface, Tokaba’s DNA map seemed reasonable, but the deeper Kurj delved, the more anomalies he found. The shade of blue it predicted for Tokaba’s eyes wasn’t quite the same as the true color. His hair should have been a slightly darker brown. He had always joked about how it curled in the fog, but according to his DNA, it should have stayed straight.
Kurj continued to search, probing forgotten nooks in the web, following the oddly confused trail left by the geneticists and Assembly. His cowled avatar climbed down the grid, deeper and deeper, until no light filtered down from above and fluorescent data-fish swam by his body.
Someone had hidden the trail.
At first he thought the files he was searching out had degraded over the years, but gradually he realized someone had deliberately erased them. He sank into areas that even the most adept telops didn’t know existed. In a data-grotto encrusted with corrupted files, he found traces of an encryption scheme used by the Assembly long ago. They had retired it just before his birth. He cast about, searching for whatever it had hidden.
Searching.
Searching.
And finally he found what he sought, the barest trace of a file, one that had languished for thirty-five years. The actual data had been erased, but its ghost persisted like a translucent copy. Laboriously, using all the mental tools at his disposal, he reconstructed the file.
It was a DNA map.
Tokaba’s DNA map.
Tokaba’s true DNA map.
In many ways, this vague file matched the robust records Kurj had found at the top levels of the webs. However, it gave the right shade of blue for Tokaba’s eyes and the proper traits for his hair. It matched his physical records in every detail. It lacked only one thing.
The genes of a psion.
Tokaba had none of the complex genetic mutations that created a psion. He manifested no empathic traits because he lacked the genes, either paired or unpaired. He just plain didn’t have them. Tokaba couldn’t be his father. It was impossible.
Impossible.
Nausea rose within Kurj. He refused to believe Tokaba hadn’t sired him. It would kill him.
Inexorable now, Kurj slipped through convoluted mazes in the depths of the web, following tenuous leads that thinned and vanished. He continued to probe, search, and dig. What had the Assembly done? What godsforsaken crime had they committed, to make a Ruby psion out of the impossible?
Finally Kurj found the truth they had kept from him, from his parents, from his entire family. They had sabotaged Roca’s and Tokaba’s fertility treatments. They replaced Tokaba’s sperm with that of another man.
And then Kurj found what the Assembly had hidden.
It was the name of his father.
His true father.
Jarac.
25
Sacrifice
Kurj lost control.
He ripped his mind out of the web so fast, his disrupted neural pathways registered the process as a firestorm of white light. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He had stumbled upon the ultimate treachery. The one moderating force in his life, the memory of his father, was a lie, one on such a monstrous scale he couldn’t comprehend its enormity.
The Assembly had destroyed him. And now, in his rage, he would make them pay. The Skolian Imperialate survived because a Dyad powered the web. Kurj knew exactly how he would achieve his vengeance—he would take into his own hands the power of the web that the Assembly so prized, the web for which they had committed this atrocity. He would become that web. He would control it. He would hold the Assembly hostage to his power.
He would destroy them.
A thought far back in Kurj’s mind warned of danger to his grandparents, but his fury swamped it out. His grandfather was his father. The betrayal went so deep, he thought he would scream with the knowledge.
By the time he became aware of his surroundings again, he was striding through the War Room. The amphitheater was strangely empty, without a single telop on duty. Kurj stopped at a console and accessed its records. An hour ago an immense spike of power had surged through the systems here. Following it, Kurj had sent an order to every telop, officer, aide, page, and tech in the War Room: Evacuate.
He didn’t remember giving the order. In his mental explosion, he had operated without conscious thought, ridden the magrail across the Orbiter’s interior and come here to the War Room without seeing where or how he went, his mind careening from the shock of his violent withdrawal from the web.
He strode to the Lock corridor.
It began at the perimeter of the amphitheater and stretched back into the wall itself, dwindling to a point as if it reached to infinity. A great arch framed its entrance and its floor flashed, a steel and diamond composite. Set off by pillars rather than walls, the corridor glowed in the otherwise dark War Room. The columns were akin to the Strategy Table, transparent and indestructible. Clockwork mechanisms gleamed within them, active as never before, glittering with light and alive with moving gears, all eerily silent.
He stepped up onto the raised corridor. His boots rang on the floor as he strode toward the infinite point of perspective. The end of the corridor never seemed to come closer, though he passed pillar after pillar.
Suddenly the point expanded into an octagonal doorway. He slowed as he reached the sparkling arch. When he stepped through it, time dwindled. Space became thick. He felt as if he were moving through invisible molasses. A great hum of power filled the octagonal chamber, and a glare of light hid the high ceiling.
The Lock pierced the chamber.
A pillar of light rose out of an octagonal well in the center of the floor, a great column of radiance so bright it made the air shimmer. The Lock was a singularity in Kyle space. It pierced spacetime like a needle, rising from the floor and vanishing overhead in a hazed glitter, back into its own universe. Humanity had lost the technology that created it, but the Lock remained, forever enduring.
Kurj crossed the chamber in slow motion, his steps long and heavy. He stopped at the rim of the octagonal depression.
Then he stepped into the pillar of light.
Kurj, of the endless Fire;
My one son, forever bright.
Escape the blazing pyre;
Mute your rage, decry the night.
Tokaba’s voice flowed through his mind. He knew the cadence of that rhyme; his father had often sung it to him. But the poem had been about a child’s playful life, not fire and rage. Kurj had never heard these words—and yet, he knew Tokaba’s voice. It came from his memory, and he wanted to weep for the loss of what it meant to him. Caught in grief and fury, his mind twisted the rhyme into a chant of his anguish.
In this nether land between space and time, braced between two universes, he relived his life in a million instants, so many moments he had thought lost and forgotten.
Then other memories began coming to him, recollections not his own: Lahaylia, Ruby Pharaoh, born into slavery and ascended to rule one of the largest empires in human history; Lahaylia, who built the Skolian Imperialate from nothing and would protect it with the same ferocity she protected her family; Jarac, the only survivor of a dying race from an ancient Ruby colony that had failed over the millennia of its isolation; Jarac, whose Ruby genes had revitalized an ancient family and whose love gave Lahaylia an unexpected gift in the twilight of her life. Together, they had founded a dynasty that commanded, enthralled, incensed, aroused, and mystified the peoples of a thousand and more worlds.
The waves of thought that created Kurj’s mind overlapped with those of Jarac and Lahaylia, blending, interfering, canceling and adding, creating wave patterns for three instead of two. Power flowed through Kurj, filling him with white noise. He stood within the pillar of light, his face turned upward, his body bathed in the radiance
of another universe.
The Triad was born.
The mental explosion yanked Roca awake. As she scrambled out of bed, Eldrin cried out, his wail rising in terror. She stumbled to the crib and lifted him into her arms, murmuring as she struggled to focus. Her mind was reverberating from an incredible surge of energy.
Roca strode into the living room, holding Eldrin. He was sobbing now, his simple anguish filling her heart as she tried to soothe him. Starlight slanted through the windows, silvering the room. The console by the doorway had lit up like a festival tree, including the page light and its alarm, alerting her to an urgent message. Shifting Eldrin to one arm, she thumped her hand on the pager.
“Roca!” Her mother’s voice crackled. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Roca’s heart was pounding as if she had just run a kilometer. “What happened?”
“Gods only know. Have you seen Jarac?”
“No. He isn’t with you?”
Eldrin went still and silent, his small hands hinged in half as he clutched Roca’s nightdress.
“He went to see you hours ago,” Lahaylia said.
Roca felt the blood drain from her face. She sensed her mother’s dread all the way across Valley—her mother, who never showed fear. “He never arrived. Can’t your EI locate him?” It could monitor every centimeter of the Orbiter.
“No.” Lahaylia took an audible breath. “Something is blocking its signals.”
“That’s impossible,” Roca said.
“I can’t find Kurj either,” her mother said.
Eldrin began to cry again, taking gulps between his sobs. Cradling him, Roca leaned over the console to hear her mother better. She thought of Kurj—
And her mind burned.
He burned.
Blazed like a flame.
A pillar of flame.
“Gods, no,” Roca said. “It can’t be.”
Eldri sat up in bed, the images of his nightmare flaming in his mind. If it hadn’t been for his medicines, he had no doubt he would have convulsed. His mind was on fire. Fire.