The Rifter's Covenant (11 page)

Naval personnel in
dress whites packed the huge bay, but it was utterly silent except for the
murmur of commands echoed from Ng’s console. Surrounded by his honor guard, Brandon
hai-Arkad, forty-eighth of his line to rule the Thousand Suns, stood below the
main viewscreen, head bent as if reflecting on what he would soon face.

Ng ran her fingers
across the keypads, calling up a sequence of views. A relay from outside showed
the vast egg shape of the battlecruiser settling oh-so-slowly into the huge pit
whose shape matched its after-section, the fierce blaze of the ship’s radiants
reflecting upward in darting fingers of actinic light that swept across the
gases boiling out of the pit. Then a view from the hull, as the rim of the pit
rose past the imager, blocking out the stars as it swallowed the vast ship. She
could feel the vibration of the tractors now, a subliminal hum resonating up
from the deck plates into her chest as billions of tons of warship settled into
its berth.

Finally a faint,
tectonic shudder which lasted nearly a minute as the structure of the station
absorbed the last fraction of the battlecruiser’s momentum. A series of dull
clanking booms resounded, marching around the hull as the interlocks engaged,
mating ship and station.

As the sound died
away, Krajno’s voice came from the console. “Docking completed. You have the
lock, Captain.”

A light on the
console turned green. She exchanged the briefest of glances with the
newly-promoted Dyarch Artorus Vahn, head of the new Panarch’s security detail,
and at this moment leader of the honor guard.

Activating her
boswell in privacy mode, she subvocalized:
(All
yours, Dyarch. Good luck.)
And out loud to the Panarch: “Your Majesty, if
we may take our positions?”

Brandon lifted his
hand, and she tabbed the lock key.

The honor guard
grounded their weapons and shouldered them with a flourish, then marched in
cadence toward the towering lock doors, limned in red lights running
sequentially along the edges as they began to cycle open. Ng drew in a deep,
slow breath and took her place at Brandon hai-Arkad’s side.

(Alpha aft bay reporting—all secure.)

(Beta aft bay reporting—all secure.)

Artorus Vahn, the
only living person to have served directly under all three of Gelasaar
hai-Arkad’s sons, knew at the level of bone and sinew all the ritual moves of a
Marine honor guard.

Which was just as
well, because he could not spare any conscious thought on cadence, weapons
discipline, or any of the rest of it. Though he matched the precise pacing of
the others, his face rigidly forward, his eyes were in constant motion.

So, too, were the
eyes of the complex security team he had spent the last hours putting together.

(Gamma aft bay reporting—personnel adits
secure.)

(Transtube adits secure and locked down.)

(Supply adits secure and locked down.)

Vahn let his breath
out slowly, then subvocalized a command.
(Stand
by for Gamma bay breach.)

Though the lock was
still cycling open, imagers were recording everything; all over Ares, people
watched, and recordings of Brandon’s arrival on Ares would shortly be couriered
out to the rest of the Thousand Suns.

Grim humor flared
through Vahn’s mind as he pictured the battle that would have taken place had
Brandon chosen to enter on the civ side—an entirely civilian battle over who
was invited and who not. Now all the civs were watching from elsewhere, high
and low alike: the only people in that landing bay outside the lock were
military. Clean and simple.

As the Panarch and
his guard reached their position before the vast doors, the thick metal valves
began to yawn open, revealing the equally immense bay just beyond. A beam of
light struck through the opening, highlighting the Panarch’s slim figure; the
flourishing brass of the Phoenix Fanfare pealed out.

(Gamma bay breached. Full alert.)

(Squad 2, scanning.)

(Squad 3, scanning.)

It was deliberate
theater of the grandest sort. Vahn wondered how many unseen people had labored
unceasingly for all the hours since the cruiser’s courier first skipped into
the system, just to bring the focus of this tremendous space onto a single
human being. How Semion would have gloried in this moment. For all the wrong
reasons. It was a chilling thought.

As they waited for
the mighty doors to finish cycling open, Vahn looked back down the years. Under
Semion, all aspects of daily life had been ritualized, from meals to the
frequent floggings. It had taken Vahn’s removal from the self-absorbed
atmosphere of Semion’s fortress on Narbon to grasp how effective Semion had
been at fostering the illusion of power by creating a personal mystique—and it
had taken a deliberate lack of ritual amid the artists and poets on Talgarth,
with Galen, to appreciate a mystique borne of love rather than fear.

Vahn spared a
glance at Semion and Galen’s brother, to find him scrutinizing those perfectly
formed rows; without moving, Brandon sent a privacy.
(The two men at the end of the captains’ row. Who are they?)

Vahn scanned the
motionless gathering inside the bay, his neck prickling at the sheer numbers.
One thing for certain: Brandon was fast at assessment, maybe even faster even
than Vahn.

(Jeph Koestler and Igac Vapet—)

(Two of Semion’s former cadre of cruiser
captains.)

There was no need
to answer this rhetorical statement, and anyway it was time to move.

Vahn called another
cadence and evolution as the new Panarch stepped out of the lock to claim his
birthright; power seemed to condense out of the air around him, layering him in
the armor of a thousand years of dynastic rule.

Vahn’s gaze moved
to the rows of angular machinery all about—on the floor, on bulkheads and
overhead, like the teeth of some vast predator—as he watched for danger.

There was none. The
vast space seemed charged with timelessness, as if all the hearts within it
beat as one, in time with the step of the single figure in white who moved
through their midst.

o0o

Jaim watched the
ceremony on a huge wallscreen in the Arkadic Enclave. With military precision
Admiral Nyberg paced forward to meet Brandon halfway. He dropped to one knee
and offered both hands, palms up. Brandon touched his palms, raised him, then
they turned together.

Nyberg spoke.
Brandon spoke. Jaim had tabbed the audio down; the words were mere ritual, meaningless.
The intent had been clear since the warship landed at the Cap. Brandon had come
in on the military side, as a war-leader.

Which is the only
way he’ll bind them together, Jaim thought as he turned away from the screen to
survey the quiet room, everything in readiness to receive the man who had gone
away a problematical heir and come back an unquestioned ruler. The Enclave was
immaculately clean, the exquisite furnishings a harmonious blend of ancient and
modern. Fresh blossoms floated in shallow bowls of priceless antiquity, adding
their scent to the clean air from the garden; the kitchen sent out aromas of
freshly ground coffee and baked bread, as the new cook, a Golgol chef selected
personally by Nyberg, went about his business.

Jaim caught a
glimpse of his own reflection against one of the windows: a tall, somber figure
dressed in gray, with three Serapisti mourning braids hanging down his back.

His stay alone in
the Enclave during the weeks since Brandon left to try to rescue his father had
not been idle. He’d used the time in study, and in practice, and in watchfulness
against the tireless attempts of various factions to position themselves to
advantage for the expected return of the Panarch. Who is not, for some, the
Panarch they hoped for, he thought.

The console chimed
softly. Brandon was on his way.

Jaim stationed
himself near the door, intercepting a glance from Vahn’s partner Roget, who had
also been left behind—head of the naval team stationed at the Enclave. The
woman was if possible even more reticent than Jaim, which had made it easier
for them to get along during the tense wait for news.

She gave him the
briefest of nods, while not relaxing her posture a whit: she, like her team,
was dressed in the formidably crisp uniform of a Marine honor guard.

He watched through
the leafy branches of sheltering trees as Vahn’s team met with the home team.
There was some saluting, a precise exchange of places, and then came Brandon’s
light voice, although Jaim caught none of the words.

Then he was inside,
and Jaim was alone with the man whom he had once ordered to polish the plasma waveguides
aboard the
Telvarna
, make-work of the
toughest, grimiest sort.

With a sigh of
relief, Brandon untabbed the high collar of his white tunic. “Coffee,” he said.
“And brandy. But not yet. Is Ki about?”

“He’s at the
Cloisters, until you want him,” Jaim said.

“Good. We’ll put
him to work . . . but tomorrow. Did they brief you?”

“Yes,” Jaim said.

Brandon faced the
console, tension evident in the line of his shoulders, the way he flexed his
hands.

Jaim had expected a
spectrum of reactions, from triumph to grief, but not this abstraction as
Brandon walked slowly to the console and seated himself.

Jaim had to test his
own status, now that Brandon’s had changed so drastically: he was sworn to
Brandon as an individual, not as a nick, however high his title. Rifters bowed
to no one, nor did they use honorifics. “Want me to go?”

“You’re welcome to
stay,” Brandon replied, and Jaim was satisfied.

Brandon’s fingers
worked tentatively, with a curious deliberation. He had to be entering the
Panarch’s codes
.
Shock radiated along
Jaim’s nerves.

At first
hesitantly, then with increasing sureness, Brandon tapped at the keypads. Jaim
saw the flicker of a retinal scan—the first he’d seen required at this
console—and reflected in a polished vase a few meters behind Brandon’s head,
Jaim saw the distorted but unmistakable structure of ordered data flashing
swiftly across the viewscreen. The Panarch’s personal databank, hidden from any
other eyes.

For a long minute
Brandon worked the keys, his face unreadable. At last he looked up. “Jaim, did
you know that you had a telltale in you?”

Jaim said, “I
figured that out. The night of the coup.” He didn’t add that Vahn had been
apologetic afterward, and though they both knew that the Marine had only been
following orders, Vahn had exerted himself to include Jaim in the subsequent security
plans; after
Grozniy
’s emergence back
in Ares space, he had seen to it that Roget shared with Jaim the vid of the
battle of the
Grozniy
and the
Samedi
in the Gehenna system,
terminating in the death of Brandon’s father. “So you’ll know, and not have to
ask him,” Roget had said. Jaim suspected that very few people on Ares below the
level of Nyberg had as yet been permitted to see that vid.

“I suspect that the
orders about spying on me have changed,” Brandon said wryly. “In any case, I’ve
disabled it. Shall we see what message awaits me?”

Jaim spread his
hands, and with a curiously gentle gesture, Brandon tabbed a single key.

The holo projector
lit. Gelasaar hai-Arkad wore a plain white suit. A mourning suit. And the hand
with the signet ring rested on the head of a dog.

Brandon froze the
image, and threw back his head, his entire body expressive of grief. Jaim’s
chest ached, and he discovered he was holding his breath; then Brandon looked
around sightlessly, and muttered, “That’s what’s missing.”

“Missing?” Jaim
said.

“The dogs,” Brandon
said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Trev and Gray.”

Jaim was glad to be
able to say, “They’re both fine—here a while ago, in fact. They have a regular
circuit. Even crowded as it’s getting, no one disturbs them.”

Brandon brought his
chin down as he drew a deep breath, and his voice strengthened as he glanced
Jaim’s way. “Galen once told me something my mother said. She’d believed that
the dogs were the single thing that kept us sane. Would that explain Semion?”

He didn’t wait for
an answer, but tabbed the holo again.

The Panarch brought
his hand from the dog’s head, and raised it, in an eerie echo of his last gesture
aboard the escaping shuttle, the ring held toward the imager.

“Brandon,” came the
familiar light, serene voice, “my son. Crisis and destruction have brought you
to my place—”

At first the
proleptic words fell on Jaim’s consciousness like a detonation, then he thought
hazily: Of course it would be violence that would replace Semion with Brandon.
This is old, maybe years old, and Gelasaar probably made one of these for each
of his heirs, extrapolating likely circumstances that might bring each to power
.

“—and I will
address that issue in a moment. For now, I wish to welcome you to the ranks of
your ancestors. In annexed data you will be able to share their joys and
sorrows, as well as assessments of their rules by their progeny and by others.
But first, in the library of the Karelian Wing of the Residence you will find
Jaspar Arkad’s Testamentary. This does not reside in the DataNet as must your
new databank. Each of your forebears has viewed it from that same room, as have
I, and I exhort you to do so without further loss of time.”

A vivid image of
the gardens at the Palace Minor on Arthelion replaced Gelasaar’s image in
Jaim’s mind. The Dol’jharians had probably totally destroyed the place by now.
As far as he knew, there was still no contact with any resistance on the
Mandala.

“. . . I
assume that your brother Galen has refused the accession in your favor. I hope
you will not see this as weakness on his part. Like your mother before him,
Galen maintains that he does not perceive artificial political boundaries,
which some may regard as the naïveté of the artist. I believe he does perceive
them, but refuses to take them seriously. That is a luxury no ruler can afford,
yet I hope by now you will have seen that there are times when the artist’s
perception of the universe affords a kind of clarity of vision that political
realities can cloud . . .”