I have been trying to notify them. No palace systems will answer.
Kurj thought of dragging himself farther, but he couldn’t move. He lay among the cushions he had scattered when he toppled onto the bed. The illness had hit with such speed, he hadn’t had time to remove his boots, which had hit a bed post, damaging it …
His boots …
Damage.
Fighting to stay aware, Kurj moved just enough to jam his boots against the footboard of the bed. Extend spikes.
Extending gear designed for climbing in rough terrain will damage the footboard.
Extend … the damn spikes.
Extended.
Kurj’s grip on life dissolved and the night closed in.
8
Pico Assassins
The Dyad Chair enclosed Roca. Panels folded around her, glowing with multicolored displays. The silver exoskeleton fit her body snugly and plugged psiphon prongs into her neck, wrists, back, and ankles. Intravenous lines fed her nutrients and water. The armrests were blocks, half a meter wide and a meter long, packed with webtech. More tech embedded the massive backrest. The chair’s visor reflected the holostars that glowed in the dome above her. Their radiance edged the techs as they fastened Roca into the Chair. The visor lowered over her head, cutting out light that might distract her concentration. Her pulse sped up and she could feel blood pumping through her body. A part of her wanted to tear away the constraints of this alien throne; another part waited with anticipation. She couldn’t see the robot arm as it lifted the Chair into the dome, but the growl of its engines thrummed through her.
A sentience stirred. WHO?
Even having trained for decades to make this contact, Roca was unprepared for the power that coursed through her mind. No simulation could evoke the sheer force of this intelligence. Her trial runs had included a sense of the Chair’s power, but never sentience.
I am Roca Skolia, she thought.
NOT DYAD.
I am a Dyad heir. I come to complete the meshes designed Pharaoh Dyhianna. YOU FASHIONED IMPERATOR.
I am his mother, if that is what you mean.
THE IMPERATOR MUST CONTINUE.
Yes. He must. She paused, uncertain what it wanted. Is he involved with these meshes?
BOOTS.
Boots?
The visor retracted. Roca tensed; nothing in her training had included the Chair disengaging itself during a session. The starlight from the holodome had vanished, leaving her in darkness. As her eyes adjusted, she had another jolt. She no longer sat in the Chair. She was standing in a shadowed bedroom. The scene was hazy and rippled the way simulations became when viewed through the mesh with poor connections.
This looks like the Ruby Palace on Diesha, Roca thought.
YES.
Roca peered into the shadows. The Kyle web had many links to the palace, and she would have expected better resolution in a connection. A man lay sprawled on the bed, his body twisted at an odd angle as if he had dragged himself diagonally across the mattress. One of his legs had caught the footboard.
Kurj.
Roca couldn’t understand why the Chair would show her Kurj sleeping in a strange position. His foot is caught.
IT DAMAGED THE BED. A REPAIR BOT RESPONDED.
Roca could see the bot. It had lodged itself near Kurj’s foot. It isn’t doing anything.
IT CANNOT REMOVE THE SPIKE. NO SYSTEMS HAVE RESPONDED TO ITS SUMMONS FOR HELP.
Roca went cold. Housekeeping, maintenance, and repair bots saturated the Ruby Palace. They were designed to pursue their duties with single-minded diligence. It was impossible that the bot couldn’t find help in fixing the damage.
Bring the Chair down! Roca’s mental shout echoed.
DESCENDING.
A hum intensified. The image faded and she realized the visor had never retracted. Frantic, she pushed it up and found herself in the Chair, lowering to the floor in the Dyad Chamber. She had to make a concentrated effort not to tear away the meshes and lines holding her to the throne. Approval came from the Chair; it had achieved its purpose.
Now she had to achieve hers: help her son.
If it wasn’t too late.
Soz finished her shift on the bridge. Her console was similar to the one used by Weapons and only a few paces away from the Weapons station. Holoscreens on the hull showed space outside the ship, an eerie sensation, as if she and the weapons officer were actually hanging out in the starred cosmos.
Soz extended her arms and saluted Weapons, a stocky woman from the world Sandstorm. Weapons returned her salute, wrists crossed and fists clenched. Then she spoke into the comm on her console. “Weapons One here. I have the console, Cadet Valdoria.” The comm transmitted her voice to the other stations and the distant captain’s chair occupied by Devon Majda.
“Valdoria here,” Soz said. “I stand relieved.” She wasn’t really being relieved; Weapons had been here the entire time, guiding Soz. But they followed the protocol.
Soz headed across the bridge. She still had a good two or three hours of studying before she could sleep. She might have resented the double load, except her course work was easy. Besides, she adored being in space. A few more days working with Weapons and she would move on to Navigation.
The rotation of the bridge created an odd pseudogravity. It bewildered some spacers, but Soz enjoyed it. The point where the rotation axis pierced the forward hull was a pole, just as a planet had north and south poles. Unlike on a planet, the crew here could walk on the inside of the sphere. Gravity pointed at right angles to the axis and depended on the distance from the axis to the hull, which meant the deck under her feet became steeper and gravity weakened as she approached the pole. The Weapons stations sat nearly on top of it, so Soz weighed next to nothing and the hull was almost vertical. Her station jutted out like a terrace.
She walked “downhill,” her steps long, her weight increasing as the incline leveled out. Above her, a cable stretched through the air. Her muscles had developed on Lyshriol, with its heavier gravity, and she easily jumped the several feet to grab the cable. She hauled herself along, hand-over-hand toward the base of the hemisphere, which capped the cylinder. Right now the cylindrical part of the ship was turning with the bridge. Near her goal, she launched off the cable and sailed through the air, weightless. As soon as she grabbed a handhold on the rotating cap, she was dragged toward its outer edge. She hung on, her arms and body stretched out, and grinned for the sheer fun of it.
When she smacked her palm against a panel, a hatch in the cap opened. She climbed up and maneuvered into an airlock tube that connected the bridge to the main ship. At the other end, she came out into a hub where she was weightless again. Tunnels extended outward from the hub in spokes, and ladders went down each spoke. A duty officer was climbing out of one tunnel into the hub. Soz hooked her arm through a grip and saluted. He returned her salute as he floated past and made his way into another spoke.
Soz located the spoke she wanted by lights around its edge; three blue and one violet, for β—β—β—α deck, also called Midshipmen’s Purgatory. As she drifted into the spoke and grasped the ladder, a tug of gravity returned and her perception shifted. Suddenly she was climbing down the ladder. By the time she reached the bottom, she weighed about half what she would on Lyshriol. She came out into a corridor studded with equipment in haphazard patterns, depending on how it had been added. She nodded or saluted other crew members as they squeezed past each other. At the end, she exited—into a city.
Silver and bronze towers gleamed, magrails curved among them, and blue Luminex “sky” glowed overhead. Soz jogged along a white casecrete path that glinted with the flecks of sensors that tracked pedestrians. This place of bright metal was completely unlike the silvery green hills of Dalvador where she had grown up.
She felt at home here.
Lying on her bed, Soz closed her eyes. The walls dimmed, leaving only faint light from a holoscape above her bunk. The holo shifted to a night scene she had
programmed, the Blue and Lavender Moons in Dalvador. It shed just enough light to reveal her console against one bulkhead. Her quarters were barely big enough for the bunk and console, and she shared her cleanser unit with three other midshipmen. She would have preferred to share larger quarters rather than have this coffin-like solo, but they hadn’t had enough of the roomier units.
Soz had only needed two hours to catch up in her courses. She had spent another hour downloading and studying specs on the navigation systems in preparation for her next apprenticeship. With all that done, she could sleep. Except her mind refused to rest. Filled with equations, facts, and worries about her family, her thoughts spun around.
After a while she said, “Sigma Three?”
The ship’s EI answered. “Attending.”
“Any messages from my family?”
“Nothing this evening. You have a letter from DMA, though.”
DMA? Grell must have sent it. She was keeping Soz apprised of Althor’s condition. Every message was the same: no change. As much as Soz knew she had to accept the truth, she didn’t feel as if her brother had died. Surely she would sense a hollow place within herself. She knew only that she was grateful her parents left him on life support.
Grell remained matter-of-fact in her audio-letters, but Soz knew how much she cared for Althor. Nor did Soz miss the stiffness in Grell’s voice when she mentioned Chad. Grell had realized that if Althor married her, it would only be because Soz’s father and the Assembly wanted him to sire heirs. When her father disowned Althor, Soz knew the Bard’s bewildered anger had gone beyond his anguish over losing his children to a war he couldn’t comprehend. They were a family of psions, mentally guarded, yes, but still empaths. Although their father didn’t know about Chad, he had realized he could wait forever for Althor to marry. So he had given his son an ultimatum: don’t come home without a wife. It told Soz just how much that break had devastated Althor, that he had courted Grell even though he would never see her as more than a friend.
Apparently Chad often visited the hospital. Although Soz respected his loyalty to her brother, she also resented it. Chad should have given Althor that fidelity when it could have made a difference.
“Shall I play the message?” Sigma Three asked.
Soz rubbed her eyes. “Yes, please.”
A man’s voice floated up from the console. “Heya, Soz. Whooz me a whoozola. It’s dull without you raising hell.”
“That’s Jaz!” Soz laughed. Whooz him a whoozola? “What time is it at DMA?”
“One-twelve in the morning.”
Jazar might be sleeping. Or maybe not. When they had roomed together, he often stayed up late to study. She missed her verbal parries with him. Sending personal messages from a battle cruiser through Kyle space was hardly routine, but no regulations prohibited it if she wasn’t on duty.
“Sigma,” she asked, “what’s left of my personal comm time?”
“Six minutes and two seconds.”
“Put me through to DMA, then. Personal web, Jazar Orand, second-year dorm, code four-three-alpha-gamma-six.”
“Connecting.”
“Thanks.” Soz closed her eyes. It would take a while for her call to clear security, given her low priority.
She was drowsing when Sigma said, “I have Diesha.”
Soz stirred herself awake. “On audio.” Visual was too costly on her meager account.
A man’s voice floated into the air. “Soz? You there?”
“Heya, Jaz. Did I wake you up?”
“I never sleep. I’m cybernetic, remember?”
“Hah! You aren’t cybernetic. Not until your third year.”
“Well, in spirit,” he amended.
It was good to hear his voice. She grinned. “They must not be working you hard enough, if you have time to take messages.”
“Funny, Soz.” His voice turned smug. “You have to come back. We’re drowning in spamoozala. No one cleans it up anymore.”
“I’m never cleaning that gunk again.”
“A likely claim.”
“What, you think I can’t keep my record clean?”
He was laughing now. “Since you ask, no.”
“You wait until I get back. We’ll see who gets demerits.”
“Ah, Soz, I miss you.”
Soz smiled. “You better.”
“Or else what?” He sounded intrigued.
“I’ll think of something.”
“Sounds like fun.” He stopped as a voice spoke in the background. “That’s odd.”
“What happened?” Soz asked.
“My roommate says there was a spike in our transmission. It registered on his console.”
“What kind of spike?”
“The energy that supplies your console? I don’t know. Anyway, it’s fine now.” He sighed. “I better go. If I don’t sleep tonight, I’ll crash in class tomorrow.”
“All right. Have fun.”
“You, too.” After a pause, he added, “I’m glad you called.”
That made her feel strange inside. Good strange. “Me, too.”
After they signed off, she lay thinking about Jazar. Sexy Jazar. As she drifted to sleep, she wondered what had caused the energy spike.
“We’re in the palace!” The colonel spoke into his wrist comm and he and his medical team ran across the hall of columns. “We’re picking up signs from his suite upstairs.”
The voice on his comm said, “A racer is landing on the roof. The crew will meet you at the Imperator’s suite.”
“Got it.” The medical team sped up the staircase that curved up from the hall. They couldn’t use any lifts; no mechanical, electro-optic, biosynthetic, nanotech, or picotech worked in the entire palace. Only the cleaning bots that acted without the meshes were operational, either too crude or too autonomous to experience whatever killed the other systems.
They found the Imperator sprawled on his bed. The doctors immediately went to work. One fact was blazingly obvious: Kurj Skolia was dying.
“His biomech shut off.” That came from the doctor monitoring him with her hand-held console. Another medic inserted a line into Kurj’s body, flushing him with kamikaze nanomeds that would obliterate invaders even if they had to destroy themselves in the process. A third doctor injected him with meds to keep his heart beating while others set up nutrient lines to replenish his dehydrated body.
“He needs the hospital,” the colonel said.
The doctor with the hand-held suddenly swore. She flicked through holos so fast, they blurred over her console. “If we don’t stabilize him, he won’t make it that far.”
They worked faster, injecting Kurj with med serums. Another team ran into the suite with an air stretcher. It took only moments to carry the Imperator to the racer on the roof, and within seconds they were airborne, streaking through the night.
That was when his heart stopped.
9
Spikes
“You cannot go to Diesha.” Jazida Majda, General of the Pharaoh’s Army, regarded Roca implacably from the holoscreen.
Roca was sitting in the copilot’s seat on a racer, one of the fastest spacecrafts in ISC. She had headed to Diesha the moment she realized Kurj was in trouble, but now Jazida insisted her pilot change his flight plan. Roca was acutely aware of the exoskeleton that sheathed her body, on order of the general. It was monitoring her health to ensure she didn’t succumb to whatever had attacked Kurj.
“He is my son!” Roca clenched the armrests of her chair. “The second one who lies in some gods-forsaken hospital.” It was all she could do to keep from shouting. “Damn it, I will not go into hiding while my children are dying.”
“The answer is no.” Majda’s face was like granite. “We’ve identified the meds that invaded Imperator Skolia’s body. They match the signature of a species designed by ESComm. This was an assassination attempt, Councilor, and it may yet be successful. The doctors barely revived him after his heart stopped. We cannot risk your life. If your son
dies, you will have to join the Dyad. None of your children have anything resembling your preparation. We are sending you to Safelanding.”
“I can’t join the Dyad at Safelanding,” Roca said. “It has no Lock.” A Dyad Chair allowed her to use the Kyle meshes at a high level, but she needed a Lock to become a member of the Dyad.
“None of the three Locks are currently secure,” Jazida said. “I intend to keep you safe.”
“You have no authority over me.”
The general regarded her with the iron gaze she had inherited from the ancient line of Majda warriors who had served the Ruby Dynasty for five thousand years. “With Imperator Skolia incapacitated, I am in command of ISC.”
“I’m a civilian,” Roca said. “Not military. As a member of the royal family, I outrank you. And you answer to First Councilor Meson.” The First Councilor was the head of the government, elected by the Assembly, whose representatives were elected by the citizens of Skolia. Meson had authority over even the Imperator.
“In peacetime, yes.” Majda waited a beat. “That condition may no longer apply.”
“You’ve declared war?” Roca asked, incredulous. Even the Imperator couldn’t do it without the First Councilor’s assent.
“I am in contact with First Councilor Meson,” Majda said. “She concurs with my decision. We are taking you to Safelanding.”
Roca wanted to rage against the decision. Her dying sons were on Diesha and many of her children were alone on Lyshriol, the oldest barely into their twenties, her youngest, Kelric, not even ten yet. She had to go to them.
She also knew, however, that if she was assassinated, it would endanger her family far more than her absence. She could do nothing for Kurj or Althor, nor could she protect her children on Lyshriol better than the military. She would help them best by cooperating with ISC. But her logic and her parental instincts warred, and she barely managed to bite back her protests.
Roca spoke tightly. “Very well.”
“We will take care of them.” Majda’s voice quieted. “Councilor, you visited Imperator Skolia at the palace not long ago. Have you suffered any ill effects?”