“Yes, they did.” Jai’s voice was hard. “They tried to kill us.”
“Jai, don’t,” Lisi said.
“Why? You heard what Vitar said. He was describing ESComm soldiers. They took Father away and tried to get rid of us.”
“Stop it!” Lisi shouted.
“Don’t yell.” Soz gentled her voice, realizing she couldn’t protect them from truths they might need for their survival. “I think Jai is right. They probably believe we’re dead. Only a quasis screen could have protected us and they’re hard to come by.”
“We had one,” Lisi said.
Soz nodded, then realized they couldn’t see it in the dark. “When your father and I were preparing to come here, I used my security clearance to get us a quasis generator.”
“I’m hungry,” Vitar said.
“I know,” Soz murmured. She was starving, having given her food to the children.
“Are we going to another mountain?” Lisi asked.
“Another world,” Soz said.
A long silence greeted her. Then Jai said, “You’re going to use the neutrino transmitter. To call in a ship.”
“Yes.”
“No!” Panic suffused Vitar. “Bad people!”
“It’s all right,” Soz murmured. “They’ll probably think we’re the bad people, when we steal their ship.”
“If the planet is burned, won’t they die?” Jai said.
“We won’t leave them here,” Soz said. “We’ll put them somewhere unaffected by the sterilization, where they can survive. And maybe we can come back.” She doubted it, but she didn’t want to tell the children.
“Can’t they come with us?” Lisi asked.
“No!” Soz took a deep breath. “Listen to me, all of you. We’ve talked about this, what would happen if you ever left here. No one can know who you are. Anyone who sees what you children look like, half Highton and half Skolian, anyone with any clue you are related to me, is dangerous to us. Do you understand?”
Silence greeted her. Then Jai said, “Yes,” followed by less confident murmurs of assent from Lisi and Vitar.
“All right. Let’s get out of here.” Soz tried to exude confidence. “Lisi, do you have the laser carbine?”
“Here it is.” Lisi reached out until her hands bumped Soz and gave her the carbine.
“Vitar, I’m going to stand up now,” Soz said. “Lisi, here’s del-Kelric.”
As her daughter took the toddler, Vitar let go of Soz. She pulled herself to her feet, grimacing from the pain of birthing. She tried not to dwell on the bundle wrapped in a blanket so near them in the dark.
“I can collapse the quasis,” Jai said. “I’m by the comp.”
“When I give the word,” Soz said, “everyone put your arms over your head. Jai, protect the equipment. Roca and Vitar, cover del-Kelric.”
“All set,” Jai said.
“I’m ready,” Lisi said.
“Me too,” Vitar said.
Shielding her head with one arm, Soz stretched the other upward. “All right. Collapse the field.”
Nothing happened.
Soz probed the darkness above her head. Her fingers scraped a smooth surface hollowed out by the quasis bubble.
“When are you going to turn off the quasis?” Lisi asked.
“I already did,” Jai said.
“I think we’re glassed in,” Soz said. “Keep your heads down.” She thrust the carbine up as hard as she could, with enhanced strength and speed. The stock slammed into a barrier, sending vibrations down her arm. She hammered at the barrier again, and again, fast and hard, until bits of fused rock rained around them.
Suddenly the roof caved in, with a blast of air and light.
“Ai!” Vitar shouted. “We’re free!”
Soz exhaled, silent with gratitude. She looked around the cavity, brightened now by sunlight. Four dirty, frightened faces stared back at her. Jai was huddled over the comp, his broken arm held against his chest, Lisi and Vitar had curled around del-Kelric, who was trying to crawl free. Only the toddler seemed unconcerned, too young to understand what had happened.
Most of the ladder was intact, having been protected by the quasis. Soz went up it, pulling herself the last bit over a glassy lip of stone. She climbed out into sunlight and a fierce wind.
And desolation.
As far as she could see, in every direction, their world had become barren. The mountains were slagged, their soil and forest vaporized, the rock melted. No trace of green remained. Ravaged land spread out beneath a harsh blue sky seared of moisture. On a distant mountain a pillar of rock the size of a city tower broke away and crashed down the naked peak. The thunder of its descent echoed through the world, the only sound except for the wind.
“Gods almighty,” Soz whispered.
Lisi climbed up next to her, followed by Vitar. Jai came last, pulling himself with one arm. Vitar put his arms around Soz’s waist, and Lisi stood on her other side, holding del-Kelric. Even the toddler’s gurgles were silenced by the immensity of what they viewed. Jai stood next to them, his broken arm cradled against his chest. In silence, they stared at the remains of their home.
The coals of anger that had seethed within Soz during their long refuge, during the birth of her murdered baby, ignited now. This was no hot flare of energy that vanished as fast as it came, burning itself out.
No, this blaze would endure.
* * *
Viquara, Empress of Eube, stopped before the closed door and rested her hand against it. A new era of Highton triumphs waited for her on the other side.
No one knew. Doctor Tecozil was dead. Ur Qox was dead. Jaibriol I was dead. Only she and the man beyond this door knew the truth. Monstrous yet inspired, unthinkable yet brilliant, that truth would finally let Eube sweep the stars in triumph.
The emperor was Rhon.
“Open,” Viquara said. Set to obey only her voice, the door slid aside.
He was staring out a window at the grounds of the palace. He turned as she entered, and she knew him in a glance, knew his face, his eyes, his features, his grace. He was older now, a man in his late thirties rather than the youth she remembered. He still had on the rough trousers and shirt he had been wearing when they found him. His hair fell over his shoulders and down his back, barbaric in its length.
He stared at her as if she were a ghost. The irony wasn’t lost on Viquara, who had so long thought him dead. Yet here he stood. None could deny this man—Jaibriol the Second—the title of emperor. The proof lived in his genes. But faced with the threat of that other heinous truth revealed, his Rhon heritage, and the horror it would make of his life, he would keep his silence.
And through him she would rule Eube.
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 ship, 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 space, another conundrum. Why would Dehya’s ship 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 ship 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 ship, 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 relationships 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 ship. 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 identity 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 analysis, 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 modicum 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 attitudes 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 Assembly Barcala Tikal, and the other councilors of the Inner Assembly. 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, flashing, 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 multitude 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.”
&
nbsp; “Does anyone disagree?” Tikal asked.
Silence answered him.
Tikal started to speak, then stopped, his gaze shifting 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 massive 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 passed. 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 shimmered 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.