In the past few days Kelric had heard a great deal about Onyx. Two billion ISC personnel and over three hundred thousand ships had served the twenty-three space habitats that formed the Onyx ISC complex. But even that had been nowhere near enough to defend against the two million ships in the invasion fleet ESComm sent against them. Faced with those odds, ISC Admiral Starjack Tahota had ordered a daring evacuation. Rather than surrender the Onyx stations, however, she and a group of volunteers stayed behind—and blew up the entire city of space habitats in a maelstrom of energy. It had destroyed the ESComm fleet as well. Starjack and her people gave their lives to break the Trader military and end the war.
The Traders had captured only one Onyx station. The Third Lock. That knowledge chilled Kelric. The Locks were remnants of forgotten Kyle sciences developed during the Ruby Empire. Modern sciences had yet to unravel their technology, so no one could build more of them. But the Triad used the ancient Locks to make the psiberweb. It had given Skolia its one advantage over Eube: ESComm had strength, but ISC had speed. Now ESComm had lost its strength and ISC had lost its speed. So a balance remained. But if ESComm created a psiberweb, they could rise above the chaos and conquer war-ravished Skolia. All they needed was a Key. A psion powerful enough to use the Lock.
A Rhon psion.
A member of the Ruby Dynasty.
Kelric considered Maccar. Hiring on with the captain could bring him enough funds to achieve his goals. He could buy a new identity, get offworld, begin setting up a power base, reach one of the Locks, install himself as Imperator, and find medical treatment. Most of all, he would have hope of seeing his family again. The knowledge that his parents and many of his siblings still lived, albeit in captivity, kept him going. Time was his enemy; the longer he took to reach his goals, the more his health deteriorated.
But should he risk going into Trader space? Borders could close without notice. The Aristos could clamp down on their slave populations any time. Maccar’s run might be safe today and a disaster tomorrow.
As Kelric debated, Maccar watched him. Despite the captain’s mental barriers, Kelric felt his frustration. Maccar had invested a great deal in this run and now found it beyond his reach for mere lack of crew. Although an honest man, he had reached the point where he was willing to sidestep the law.
“Where in Trader territory would we be going?” Kelric asked.
“Sphinx Sector.”
“That’s well into Eube.”
“We won’t be there long.”
“How long?”
Maccar grimaced. “As fast as I can get in and out.”
“Fifty thousand isn’t enough.”
“How much is?”
“Two hundred thousand.”
Incredulity surged in Maccar. Outwardly he just snorted. “The top spacer at the PA isn’t worth that much.”
“Maybe not. I am.”
Maccar raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
Kelric turned his arm over so his palm faced the sky. He pulled up his wrist guard, uncovering a socket in his wrist. Although Maccar kept his face impassive, surprise leaked out from his mind.
“That’s a psiphon socket,” Maccar said.
“That’s right.”
“You a telop?”
“No. A Jagernaut.”
This time Maccar whistled. “Can you prove that?”
“Yes.” Kelric lowered his arm. “Link me into your ship’s EI and I can defend your entire flotilla.”
Maccar studied him, his face edged in harsh light from the lamps. “If you’re an ISC officer, why don’t you have ID? Zeld tells me you’ve no proof you’re even a Skolian citizen. She ran a check on your DNA, and it says no record of you exists.”
Damn. Zeld must have taken a lock of his hair or a scrape of skin. Legally, only ISC or the police could do a DNA scan without the citizen’s permission, and even that law often came under criticism. But he had no doubt that buying a black-market scan right now was easy. He even understood Zeld’s reasons; for all she knew, he was a mass murderer. However, if his gene map was in the Edgewhirl webs, it gave him even more cause to get offworld.
All he said was, “I’ve no reason to have ID here.”
“No?” Maccar raised his eyebrows. “Edgewhirl has two ISC bases. Zeld checked both the ASC complex up north in Bartanna Shore and the Whitecap naval base on the South Jadar continent.”
“I’m J-Force. Not ASC or navy.” He doubted a spacer with Maccar’s savvy would confuse the Advance Services Corps or the naval fleet with the Jagernaut Force. The captain was probing.
“You AWOL?” Maccar asked.
“MIA.”
“You don’t look ‘missing’ to me.”
“People don’t like Jagernauts,” Kelric said. Jag pilots were both revered and reviled, as avenging angels and human weapons. In normal times the monolithic presence of ISC protected them. But now? Who knew?
“You think you’ll have trouble?” Maccar asked.
“It’s possible.”
“Why? You Jagernauts are heroes.”
“Sometimes.”
Maccar scrutinized him. “If you really are a Jagernaut, doesn’t that make you a telepath?”
“I was.”
“Was? Past tense?”
“Yes.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Neural damage.”
Maccar quirked an eyebrow. “Can you hear my thoughts?”
“No.” Even with his mind whole, Kelric could only read simple thoughts, and then only if they came from nearby. They also had to be sent with enough strength for him to detect, which usually meant they had to come from another psion. He still picked up less specific impressions, such as emotions, but Maccar hadn’t asked about empathy.
“If you’re telling the truth about your mind,” Maccar said, “doesn’t that make you less able to function as a Jagernaut?”
Kelric shrugged. “I might have trouble in the psiberweb. But what does that matter? It no longer exists.” He regarded Maccar with a steady gaze. “I can link to any real-space net and make full use of it as a Jagemaut.”
Maccar considered him for a long time. Finally he said, “You have any other names besides Kelric?”
“Garlin.” He had no intention of revealing his full name, Kelricson Garlin Valdoria Skolia. Although Valdoria wasn’t unique to the Ruby Dynasty, it was still rare, and known as the last name for a branch of his family. Skolia was the dynastic title used by all Rhon members of the Ruby Dynasty.
“All right, Kelric Garlin,” Maccar said. “Prove you’re a Jagernaut and you’ve got your two hundred thousand.” He inclined his head in the time-honored gesture of sealing a bargain. “Meet me at my ship tomorrow, twelve hundred hours.”
Anticipation washed over Kelric. He returned the nod. “I’ll be there.”
4
The Corona’s Circle
The merchant ship grew on the shuttle’s view screen like a glittering pipe, a promise to Kelric of the future, yet also a promise of peril, as it prepared for the plunge into Trader territory.
Maccar called his vessel the Corona. The glistening cylinder had one end open to space. A large half sphere capped the other end. It was a good-sized ship, though not huge by interstellar standards, about 1.5 kilometers long and .25 kilometer in diameter. The sight made Kelric’s breath catch; it had been far too long since he had boarded anything other than the crotchety schooner. He savored the sense of homecoming this gave him.
A docking tube extended down the center of the cylinder, its diameter wide enough to swallow a shuttle. Magnificent spokes radiated out from the tube to the cylinder in a design chosen to maximize stability. The spokes didn’t actually touch the docking tube; instead, they connected to-huge rings that circled it. It allowed the cylinder to rotate grandly in space, while the tube where shuttles docked remained stationary.
Kelric found the Corona beautiful in all its pitted, rugged glory. The familiar design welcomed him, as if to say, You weren’t gone
so long after all. Lights glittered along its hull, strobing from antennae, cranes, flanges, pods, observation bays, and the robot crawlers that monitored its myriad surfaces. Huge thrusters circled the open end of the cylinder. His excitement surged as if he were a sailor too long separated from the sea and sailing ships he loved.
They approached the cylinder’s open maw. It grew on their holoscreens until the ship dwarfed them, looming around the shuttle. The hub at the end of the docking tube opened like a giant flower pod. Even knowing space had no atmosphere to transmit vibrations, Kelric imagined he felt the power thrumming in the merchant vessel. Their shuttle sailed into the pod, and the great petals closed around them.
In the pilot’s seat, Maccar glanced at him. “Ready to board?”
Kelric grinned. “Aye, sir.”
The captain’s mouth quirked in a smile. “Then let’s go.”
They exited the shuttle into a round decontamination chamber. Electromagnetic radiation bathed them while monitors and airborne nanomeds examined their bodies for contaminants. If these meds resembled the ones Kelric remembered, they were cousins of the species he already carried in his body.
Nanomeds were designer molecules. Each type had its own task, such as catalyzing a reaction, repairing broken bonds, or ferrying other molecules. Each med carried a pic-ochip, a tiny computer that worked on quantum transitions. The chip directed the industrious med and helped it replicate. Nanomed sex was rather prosaic; they just built more of themselves from excess molecules hanging around the neighborhood. It took energy, but not prohibitive amounts. Picochips in a particular series could chat among themselves using chemical messages. That let them form a crude picoweb which could interact with the picowebs of other series.
Decon meds had one goal: search and destroy. Like nano-thugs cruising the cellular neighborhood, they relentlessly analyzed anyone who entered their decon chamber, seeking contaminants that might endanger the ship. They compared what they found to their databases of allowed and forbidden species, and ran tests on unknowns. Then they tackled unwanted invaders and rumbled with them until they disposed of the intruder or fell apart trying. If any decon meds remained intact after they finished their work, they disintegrated into pieces the body could use or flush out of itself.
The health meds in Kelric’s body helped keep him well, repaired his cells to delay his aging, and attacked unwanted chemicals. Both decon and health meds had to meet certain standards and should recognize one another as acceptable species. But what if standards had changed? For all Kelric knew, the decon meds might attack his mutated meds or the medicine Doctor Tarjan had given him to slow the mutation rate. His meds might retaliate with their own thuggery. The last thing he needed was nano-gang warfare in his body.
He floated with Maccar in the chamber, trying to relax. The captain monitored the decon process on a palmtop computer he unhooked from his belt.
Fortunately, the nano-thugs approved of Kelric. They only cleaned out a few species of bacteria. He and Maccar left the chamber, drifting weightless in the docking tube. They boarded a magcar, and it raced off into a smooth-sided tunnel like a glittering bullet hurtling down a shiny bore.
The car took them to the far end of the ship, where the hemispherical section capped the cylinder. They disembarked into an air lock. After they cycled through the lock, they floated into the hemisphere, an area about one quarter kilometer in diameter. The ship’s bridge.
Maccar’s command chair hung “above” them, though up and down had no real meaning here, without gravity. The chair faced the forward curve of the hemisphere and had its back to the cylinder, giving a sense that the captain looked forward into space and the unknown. Of course, without the holoscreens on, they saw only the interior of the bridge. It glinted silver and black, studded with equipment. Consoles ridged its curve, their controls and screens glittering in a rainbow of lights.
Most captains spun the bridge for at least a portion of each shift, to provide a break from the weightless environment and to help stabilize the counter-rotating cylinder. Although the result bewildered some spacers, Kelric enjoyed the strange effects. If you imagined the cylinder’s rotation axis extending into the bridge, it passed through the center of the hemisphere and pierced the hull forward of Maccar’s chair. The pull of gravity increased with distance from the rotation axis. So right on top of the axis, you had no weight at all no matter how fast the ship rotated.
“Down” always pointed radially out from the axis, so the inner surface of the hemisphere turned into a steep slope. Consoles jutted out like terraces. As you walked away from the rotation axis along the hull, gravity increased. The slope gentled as you moved farther away from the point where the axis intersected the hemisphere, toward the back of the bridge, until at the “equator” where the bridge met the cylinder, the ground became level and gravity was full strength. If you looked “up,” across the quarter-kilometer diameter of the bridge, you could see other crew members blithely walking around upside down on the “sky.”
Right now Maccar’s chair was suspended in the middle of the hemisphere, near the rotation axis, so even during rotation it would have almost no weight. However, the massive chair served as the terminus of a similarly massive robot arm that could easily move within the bridge.
Kelric and Maccar propelled off a bulkhead and flew through the bridge. They controlled their progress using cables that stretched across the hemisphere. Kelric exhilarated in the freedom of escaping gravity’s tethers.
Members of the bridge crew were at their stations running preflight checks, each person secure within the exoskeleton of a console chair. Maccar introduced Kelric to them all: Nadick Steil, the executive officer, second in command, a stocky woman with brown hair cut short around her head; Larra Anatakala, the navigation and tracking officer, a gaunt woman with long legs and arms; and Ty Rillwater, the communications officer, whose small size and soft yellow hair made her look like a child compared to the others.
The weapons station was located between Communications and Navigation. However, Maccar took Kelric to a different console. Unique on the bridge, this one had psiphon capability. If the psiberweb had still existed, it could have boosted Kelric’s mind into psiberspace. Even without the web, he could still use it to jack his brain into the Corona’s EI brain.
The station curved around its command chair, bringing its mobile control panels within easy reach of whoever sat there. Maccar took an auxiliary seat across the console while Kelric slid into the control chair. The exoskeleton folded around Kelric and its sensors studied him as if he were a new processing unit. It shifted position at his neck, back, wrists, and ankles. Then psiphon prongs clicked into the sockets in his neck and lower spine, the strong, silvery pins inserting through holes in his spacer’s jumpsuit designed for that purpose. But when the prongs tried to insert into his wrists and ankles, they hit his guards.
Kelric pushed the exoskeleton up his arm, uncovering his wrist guard. He worked the psiphon prong under his guard and tried bending it into the socket. Apparently it wasn’t flexible enough. Or maybe the meds that tended the socket no longer worked, leaving it non-functional. In any case, the prong wouldn’t click into place.
Maccar reached over to a comm panel on the console. “I’ll have a bosun remove the guards.”
Startled, Kelric glanced at him. “No.”
The captain raised his eyebrows. “No?”
“I can’t remove the guards.”
Maccar considered him. “What was your Jagernaut rank?”
The non sequitur puzzled Kelric. “Tertiary.”
“That’s about equal to a Fleet rank of commander, isn’t it?”
“About.” He wondered what the captain was getting at.
Maccar leaned forward. “Understand me, mister. I don’t give a kiss in hell how much of a loner you were as a Jag pilot. If I hire you, I expect the same adherence to the chain of command from you as from my other officers. If you have a problem with that, I don’t want you on
this ship.”
Kelric stiffened. Of course he knew his position in a chain of command. Still, he wondered at his response. Had he become so used to his aristocratic civilian life on Coba that he had forgotten military discipline? He wouldn’t have thought so, yet his automatic response to Maccar’s implicit order had been a refusal.
He felt Maccar’s mental debate. The captain was weighing his doubts about his prospective weapons officer against his need for Kelric’s expertise. Before Kelric had a chance to respond, Maccar said, “I can’t gamble, Commander Garlin. Where we’re going, I can’t take any risks.”
“You won’t be taking a risk,” Kelric said. Maccar’s use of the title Commander disoriented him. But it made sense; even if he had wanted his military rank known, which he didn’t, using Tertiary on a civilian ship was inappropriate.
“And if you decide you can’t follow another command?” Maccar started to unfasten the clasps that held his safety web in place. “The shuttle can take you back to Porthaven.”
“Wait.” Kelric didn’t want his job interview to end before it even began. “You won’t have any problem with my following orders, Captain. Call the bosun.” Then he thought, Ixpar, I’m sorry.
Maccar glanced at the wrist guards. “Why don’t you want to take them off?”
“They’re from my wife.”
The captain stiffened. “Hell’s road, man, I thought they looked like marriage guards. They’re old enough. How many thousands of years did it take us to get rid of the laws that let women make us property? Don’t you know the origin of Trader slave restraints? They’re a variation of the Ruby Empire marriage guards. Except Traders put them on both men and women. Why? Because they show ownership. How can you wear that kind of symbol?”
Of all the comments Kelric had expected, that wasn’t one of them. How to answer? Even on Coba, only Akasi princes wore the marriage guards. As the husband of a Manager, he had been such an Akasi. In the star-spanning culture of Imperial Skolia, the custom had mostly vanished. Even the Imperial noble houses dispensed with it more often now than not.