In the year since he had left the Orbiter, he had suffered attacks in which his head seemed to splinter and his body shook with uncontrolled tremors. Only the medicine helped. At a dosage equal to 10 percent of what Alaj Rajindia had given Dehya, it alleviated Eldrin’s symptoms without incapacitating him. He wanted to stop using it. The medicine had taken over his life. Just this morning he had vowed, yet again, that he would take no more. Only now he was desperate. He tried to get up from the floor, but he was barely off his knees when his body went rigid.
Eldrin’s father had told him once that he was never aware of his seizures, but for Eldrin it was excruciatingly different. He fell to his side, convulsing, and he felt every terrifying moment. The attack seemed to go on forever, a waking nightmare.
Mercifully, it finally stopped. Eldrin went limp on the floor, gasping. For a moment he just lay there. Then, clutching the armchair, he dragged himself to his feet. He stumbled into the bedroom where he had stored his travel bag, which he had never unpacked even though he used its contents, because he kept hoping he could go home.
His medicine was inside the bag.
With shaking fingers, he pulled out the syringe he had taken from Dehya’s suite and programmed in the relaxant. He had just managed to inject himself when he collapsed on the bed and began to convulse again. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t make a sound. His throat closed up while his body arched and seized.
When his muscles finally released, Eldrin groaned with relief. The drug was taking effect. His body slowly relaxed, muscle by muscle, and his nausea receded. The pain in his head eased. For a long time he lay on his back. He didn’t understand what was wrong with him. Only Dehya’s syringe could be programmed to dispense this medicine he so needed with such urgency; others he had tried didn’t even recognize the drug Alaj had prescribed her.
Eldrin would never forget its name.
Phorine.
4
The Claret Suite
Soz was almost ready to go to the starport. A shuttle there would take her to a transport ship in orbit, and the transport would carry her to her new assignment, a tour onboard the Imperial Fleet battle cruiser, Roca’s Pride. Good name, that. She approved.
But first she had two stops to make.
After seeing her parents a few days ago, her mood had lifted. Her father hadn’t been able to walk much, so she had kept the tour of the academy brief and spent most of the time talking to them. Even after they had left, her spirits had remained high. But now they dimmed.
She rode a mag-lev train into HQ City. It didn’t take long to reach the hospital. Today she went inside Althor’s room instead of staying in the viewing chamber. She walked quietly to the bed, though only she could hear her footsteps. He lay on his back, his face gaunt, his body kept alive by lines and machines.
Soz sat in a chair by the bed and spoke softly. “I came to say goodbye, but just for now.” Her voice caught. “Althor, you must get better. You have to carry your half of this Imperial Heir business.”
Only machines whispered in the room. Soz couldn’t believe he had been dead for over two months. Althor, come back, she thought.
His eyes opened. She almost jumped out of her chair and shouted for the doctors. Then she saw his blank gaze. The monitors around his bed confirmed the truth: his condition hadn’t changed. His brainstem had partially survived, and it continued to control his heart rate, breathing, reflexes, the contraction of his pupils, his swallowing reflexes. It even regulated his sleep cycles. Yesterday he had moved his fingers. If a sharp edge touched his skin, he jerked. But he was conscious of nothing. His cerebral cortex had died. He had lost the functions that gave him personality, intelligence, memory. Modem medicine could do a great deal, but it couldn’t repair his mind. The essence of Althor, her brother, was gone.
“I don’t want to say goodbye.” A tear ran down her face. “I’ll see you again. I promise.”
Soz walked out onto the training fields. She had one hour left, just enough time to complete one last task.
In a distant quadrangle, Lt. Colonel Dayamar Stone was working with a group of novices. Sunrays slanted across the fields, gilding athletes with antiqued light as if they were figures out of a legend rather than real people. They were doing calisthenics, led by a cadet in their class. Soz jogged over and walked around their formation, hanging back. Stone stood several meters to one side, peering at a holoboard. As she approached him, he glanced at her.
Soz stopped a few paces away and snapped a salute. “Sir!”
He returned her salute. “At ease, Valdoria.”
Soz relaxed an infinitesimal amount.
“What brings you out here?” Stone asked.
“I leave tonight for Roca’s Pride, sir.”
“Yes. I heard.”
“I was wondering—”
He waited. “Yes?”
“Sir, I’d like to run the Echo.”
Stone visibly tensed. He was the one who had suspected her of cracking the meshes so she could cheat on the obstacle course. He hadn’t had any evidence; Soz knew how to cover her tracks. If she hadn’t confessed, they probably couldn’t have proved anything. But she would have known. Her grief was no excuse. Confessing had been one of her hardest moments, and she regretted losing her honors status, but she couldn’t have lived with herself otherwise. The cadets thought her clever for cracking the system, but to Soz, an accomplishment gained by unfair advantage meant nothing.
“You know the course has been reprogrammed.” Stone made it a statement rather than a question.
“Yes, sir. That’s why I want to run it.”
He considered her. “Very well”
Stone gave his holoboard to the cadet leading the exercises. Then he and Soz walked across the fields. She halted at the Echo and narrowed her eyes. This course had been her bane. Her half-brother Kurj, the Imperator, had ordered her to run it on one of her first days at the academy. But to do well on the Echo, a cadet needed the physical augmentation they received their third year. Although she had never run the course, she hadn’t wanted to lose face in front of Kurj or her classmates. Then he had added one last command: beat the record of nine minutes, forty-three seconds. Soz had gritted her teeth, tried the impossible, and failed. Her time had been appalling. Only later did she learn that she had been the first novice in ten years to finish the course on her first try. Kurj had neglected to mention that fact. He was too busy giving her hell because she was his heir and his cocky sister and who the blazes knew why else.
Since then, she had tried the Echo numerous times but never beat the record. Often she limped off the course covered in mud and bruises, humiliated by her time.
Then the Traders had killed her brother.
Soz had gone a little crazy then, obsessed with revenge. She had sworn to rip through her training and graduate so she could go out and destroy the Traders who had ended her brother’s life. She cracked the field webs, memorized the Echo files, and pulverized the previous record. But it hadn’t been real, and it hadn’t helped her grief.
Today she again faced her nemesis, this time the honest way.
Stone held his timer and said, simply, “Go.”
Soz took off.
The entrance to the Echo looked like a dirt path, but it was actually perplex, a material saturated with sensors. It evaluated her stride, weight, brain waves, and any other data it could use to analyze and predict her actions. So she didn’t go down the path. Instead she ran along a narrow bar at its border. Although the bar could also gather data about her, the information wouldn’t be as accurate. Any advantage she gained, no matter how small, could help. She sped along the bar, her speed and reflexes enhanced. It shuddered, trying to knock her back onto the perplex, but she outwitted its attempts.
A vaulting horse blocked the end of the path. Soz jumped in front of it, never breaking stride, and hurtled over the horse in a flip. She nailed her landing and sprinted forward, carried by her momentum. The scaffolding loomed ahead, a s
tructure of metal struts that vibrated, bent, and snapped with rudimentary intelligence. When she jumped up and grabbed a bar, it almost succeeded in throwing her off. The techs had added odd nuances to its vibrations. She grabbed new bars as the ones she held sagged and jerked. She swung through the crazily shaking struts, letting go of each just before she grabbed the next, so that for an instant she was airborne with no handhold. She had discovered it confused the program that controlled the structure. The bars responded to her touch, and if she broke contact, they couldn’t react as well.
She made it through the framework, but her unfamiliarity with the changes in its behavior slowed her down. At the other side, she let go from high up and dropped. The impact of her landing could have broken her knees before ISC had enhanced her body. Now they bent at exactly the amount necessary to cushion her landing, and her augmented legs absorbed the force. She took off and ran hard, her feet drumming the ground. The perplex surface bucked, trying to throw her off balance, but she had evaded enough of the Echo sensors that it had trouble judging her stride. It failed to toss her to the ground.
The pool lay before her, serene, reflecting the pale sky like a visual echo. Its mirror quality came from oil that coated its surface. The first times she had done the course, she had tried running around the stone rim, but keeping her balance had proved impossible. She always slipped into the oil and ended up covered with crud. Today she jumped. The pool was too large to clear even with her enhanced muscles, so she leapt to the rim, touched down, and leapt again. A third jump and she cleared the pool.
Next she faced the aural labyrinth, an enclosed maze of tunnels that echoed, making it hard to judge direction. The walls rose higher than her head. Inside, she lost her way twice and had to backtrack. She kept running, pushing to the limit, and exited the maze on the far side.
Rebounders crashed and bounced ahead of her, a series of gates that operated in complex rhythms, snapping open and slamming closed. She dodged through the clanging portals, but they managed to crash into her body anyway. She didn’t fall because they struck from both sides and held her up, but it felt like hell. Gritting her teeth, she kept going. By the time she lurched through the last gate, she was gasping. She stumbled into a white sand trap and leaned over, her hands braced on her knees while she heaved in air.
As her pulse calmed, she straightened up and looked around. Stone was a few paces away, studying his timer. As Soz walked over to him, he glanced up.
“Nine minutes, fifty-two seconds,” he said. “Almost the record.”
Oh, well. “Almost isn’t good enough.”
“It is when it’s honest.” He spoke quietly. “It’s a good time, Soz. Be proud of it.”
She had to admit, this result felt far better than when she had shattered the record last time. “Thank you, sir.”
For the first time in ages he smiled at her. “Good luck on Roca’s Pride.”
Soz grinned. “Good name for a ship, eh, sir?”
He chuckled. “That it is.”
They headed back then, he to the first-year cadets and she to the dorms. She was almost there when someone fell into step beside her. She glanced up to see a tall fellow with dark hair and eyes, broad shoulders, and devilish good looks, one of the cadets who had been doing calisthenics with Stone’s class. He saluted her with a powerful slap of his crossed wrists.
Soz returned the salute. “At ease.”
“Thanks.” He looked her over.
“Who are you?” Soz asked.
“Rex. Rex Blackstone.”
“Well, Rex Blackstone, what do you want?”
He wasn’t the least intimidated by her bluntness. “I saw you run the Echo.”
Soz shrugged. “It wasn’t much.”
“Looked like much to me.”
Soz was tired, not to mention jittery about leaving Diesha. “You want something, Blackstone?”
“Maybe.” He considered her with that appraising gaze of his. “I want to get a look at the wildcat they call the toughest, smartest, worst-behaved cadet at DMA.”
Soz gave a startled laugh. “Well, you got your look.”
His eyes flashed with a wicked glint. “Remember me, Valdoria. When you’re in command of the toughest, smartest, most notorious squadron of the J-Force, I’ll be flying with you.”
“Is that a challenge?”
“Hell, yes.”
“All right, you got it,” Soz said. “You graduate top of your class and when I’m in command of that squad, I’ll tell HQ you’re one of mine.”
“Deal.” He held out his arm, his fist clenched. Soz laid her wrist on top of his, her fist also clenched, sealing the pact as Jagernauts had done since the first pilots took to space.
Rex jogged off then, headed to the first-year dorms. Watching him, Soz felt a chill run up her back. She suddenly had a vision of him jogging with her out to a tarmac where four Jag fighters waited. Gray streaked his hair and he wore the gauntlets of a Secondary, the second-highest rank in the J-Force.
She wore those of a Primary.
Soz shook her head. Her imagination was getting ahead of her. She had yet even to graduate.
Eldrin was reading a novel when he heard the noise. He had been struggling with the words, looking them up in the dictionary that came with the holobook. Although he was no longer illiterate, he read slowly. Glyphs for the same words never looked the same to him, though he had come to understand that certain arrangements referred to the same word even when they showed up in different places, in different fonts, even different colors. It had taken him a long time to learn to process those differences. Reading was no longer an exercise in teeth-gritting frustration for him. It was even fun.
He gradually became aware of the rattling. Nothing in the sitting room looked out of place, though. Just empty. The Ruby Palace always seemed that way to him even when he wasn’t the only one here. He wished someone would visit. Not that anyone could come without his invitation; so many installations protected the palace, he could live here in peace and quiet even if a horde of maniacs was storming the mountains.
Eldrin glanced at his holobook. He was reading about ISC. The Assembly wanted him to learn about the military in case he ever became a Key, a member of the Dyad. As pharaoh, Dehya was the Assembly Key: as Imperator, Kurj was the Military Key. Eldrin wasn’t first in line for either title; Soz was Kurj’s heir, and Taquinil was Dehya’s. The Assembly wanted to name Eldrin as the second heir to the Assembly Key, though, after Taquinil. The title went according to ability as well as heredity. Although he didn’t understand the technology of Kyle meshes, he apparently had the mental sensitivity required to create and manipulate them. He was much farther down the line of succession for Imperator, but he was in there somewhere, probably eighth or ninth.
The Assembly Key didn’t have to be the Ruby Pharaoh, but Dehya held both titles. The pharaoh’s consort didn’t assume her royal title on her death; traditionally it went to her oldest daughter. Dehya had defied tradition and made her son her heir, so Taquinil was also first in line for the Ruby Throne. Dehya’s second heir was her sister Roca. That did put Eldrin in the line of succession, through his mother rather than his wife, making him third in line for the throne after Taquinil and Roca.
Eldrin felt painfully unqualified for all three tides. He had been a good warrior on Lyshriol, with a sword and bow, but he didn’t have the mind for modern warfare. He wasn’t a politician, either, though he did attend Assembly sessions. It intrigued him to watch Dehya in that theater of power. The title of Pharaoh was supposedly titular, but she had forged it into an immense, shadowy power he could barely fathom.
He could work the web, though. For him, more even than for Dehya and Kurj, it came as naturally.
A rattle disturbed the silence.
“What is that?” Eldrin muttered. He put down his book and went to the console across the room. When he touched a fingertip panel, his personal EI spoke in a mellow voice.
“Good evening, Your Majesty.”
“My greetings, Etude,” Eldrin said. “Did you hear a noise?”
“I detect many noises.”
“This one was out of place, like a rattle in the walls.”
“Ah. Yes, I heard it.” Etude paused. “It came from the system that heats these rooms. A conduit is loose. I have sent a mechbot to fix it.”
“Good.” The problem surprised Eldrin; the bots were obsessive about maintenance, if one could ascribe human attributes to machines. He supposed it was more accurate to say that whoever had designed them was dedicated to ensuring the palace stayed clean and well-organized.
He went to the liquor cabinet and took out the dragon carafe. “Will it take long to fix?”
“About ten minutes.” Then Etude said, “Your Majesty, in the past few days you have consumed an amount of alcohol large enough to register as a concern on my medical scanners.”
Eldrin picked up a crystal tumbler. “Don’t start again.”
“Again?”
“Bothering me about a drink.” He wondered if the same person who programmed the cleaning bots had coded Etude. “Don’t you have anything else to do?”
“One of my functions is to protect your health. You consume too much alcohol and take too much medication.”
Eldrin tensed. How could it know about the phorine? He used only the syringe he had brought, which had no connection to any mesh in the palace. The syringe belonged to Dehya, which meant if she needed more of the medicine, she wouldn’t have it. Alaj could issue her another one, though. She apparently hadn’t used the phorine since then, anyway. He doubted she had even noticed the syringe was missing. Sometimes he wondered if she knew he was missing from her life.