A Prison Unsought (19 page)

He gestured at the holograph behind him. “Although
communications between Dol’jhar and the Rifter ships equipped with a hyperwave
are encoded, and have so far resisted cryptographic efforts, there is an
ever-increasing volume of transmissions—both en clair and in Sodality codes
that we can read—between Rifter ships.”

The admiral smiled sardonically. “The undisciplined
proclivities of Eusabian’s Rifter allies are a major weakness in his strategy,
which the hyperwave will permit us to exploit. The content of these messages
enables us to position their ships with some accuracy. In addition, correlation
of ship-movements data obtained from these messages with the encrypted
communications will eventually enable us to decode the Dol’jharian message
headers, revealing what ship each message is addressed to for an increasingly
clearer apprehension of the enemy’s strategy. All this information is fully
worth what Captain Ng and her detachment paid for it.”

His tone sharpened. “Needless to say,
these messages will continue only so long as our possession of the hyperwave is
unknown to Dol’jhar. So far, there is every indication that they do not know we
are listening.”

Nyberg paused and surveyed the still room. “Thus, I
reiterate. There will be no mercy for anyone discussing these matters with
anyone not authorized. It is unlikely that any communication can pass from this
station to the enemy, but we are determined to take no chances.”

The admiral paused, letting the threat settle in. Then his
tone shifted to mildness. “Now, before we move on to the
Battle of Arthelion, I would like to introduce a man who deserves your utmost
attention and respect. He maintained his Oath of Fealty in the face of the worst
torture that Eusabian could inflict on him, to conceal information that, in our
hands, may yet doom the usurper to failure and death. Gnostor Sebastian Omilov,
Chival of the Phoenix Gate.”

Startled by the sound of his name, and the unexpected
formality of his title, Sebastian Omilov stood, feeling the psychic weight of
all that attention. He was trying to convince himself it was no different than
facing a gathering of students when Admiral Nyberg placed his left hand over
his heart and began striking it rhythmically with his right, in the measured
cadence of the salute normally rendered only to fellow officers wounded in the
Panarch’s service. The shock of emotion was almost physical; Omilov struggled
to control himself, knowing that he was failing in the face of this stunning,
almost unprecedented encomium.

Captain Ng and her officers at the presentation consoles
rose to their feet and joined in, followed by the space officers present, then,
hesitantly, by the station officers.

Taking refuge in analysis, Omilov noted that the civilians
around him stood respectfully, as did the Aerenarch, but quite properly did not
join the salute—that was the prerogative of the Navy.

Omilov bowed in gratitude, breathed deeply, and began
speaking. He could not hide the hoarseness of emotion in his voice, so he
closed his eyes, reaching mentally for the comfortable surroundings of a
lecture hall.

“Thank you, Admiral
Nyberg, all of you. I only wish I had more to tell you—Eusabian probably would
have learned nothing from me he did not already know. But I have hopes, thanks
to Captain Ng and the many men and women of the Navy who fought at Arthelion,
that we may solve the riddle of Eusabian’s power and win through at last.”

We. He was distracted
by the familiar longing to be part of the team Nyberg would appoint to pursue
what little was known of the Urian artifact and its center of power. He forced
himself to go on.

“The little I know is this. Ten
million years ago the race we call the Ur vanished from the galaxy after a war
that lasted for millennia. They left behind those astronomical works of art
known as the Doomed Worlds, various artifacts resembling each other only in
their degree of incomprehensibility, and the selfsame legend among the few
races not exterminated by the energies unleashed in the death throes of the Ur.
Humankind calls it the Suneater—and its reputed powers are described fully by
its name.”

Omilov gazed at the hologram above. Perhaps it was the
impact of Nyberg’s salute, shaking him loose from the comfortable groove of
Douloi formality, but he perceived in that flattened ovoid of stars, distorted
by the chaotic emptiness of the Rift, an implication—no, an utter
certainty—with tectonic implications: a glimpse of a power beyond anything that
humankind was ready for. A force now in the hands of the Avatar of Dol, a man
unconstrained by any moral imperative save that of force.

Omilov swallowed, aware of small stirrings of puzzlement at
his unexpected pause. “In fact, it’s my belief that this device created the
Rift, that anomalous frontier of the Thousand Suns that has conditioned so much
of our history in Exile.”

No one spoke, or keyed, or even seemed to breathe. One of
the nearby space officers glanced down at her console and touched its tabs
lightly, as if wondering what human technology could do in the face of such
power.

“I will not go into details now,
except to say that I believe Eusabian has discovered the Suneater and,
moreover, now possesses the key to its full potential. Our hope is that the
full use of this key will evade him until we, too, can find the Suneater and
destroy it. If it can be destroyed.”

He paused again,
feeling an odd, complex dissonance of emotions as he studied the hologram of
the Thousand Suns. It was as though he were seeing it for the first time, and
yet with a sense of familiarity. And, overlaying it a poignant sense of
impending loss. And past loss: llara. He’d watched her leave the Mandala twenty
years ago on her doomed mission to Dol’jhar. That wound had never healed.

No. This time Dol’jhar will not win.

He cleared his throat. “I am a
xenoarchaeologist, accustomed to casting my vision into the distant past to
decipher the nature of races long vanished and little known. You are warriors,
accustomed to gazing into the furnace of the present moment in battle, and into
the fog of the future created by your actions and the response of the foe. I
know little of the art of war, or of those functions you professionals call
SigInt and Moral Sabotage. So I cannot guess how much you will learn from the
hyperwave that Captain Ng has brought us. But I am sure that by synthesizing
these branches of knowledge that perhaps have never before been combined, the
heart of our enemy’s power can be located and wrested from his grasp.”

As the gnostor opened the proceeding to questions, Margot
Ng’s mind raced ahead. No satisfactory hypothesis explaining the creation of
that chaotic abyss of sundered stars and fivespace anomalies had ever been
advanced by the gnostors of the College of Ontological Physics.

She shrugged. It didn’t really matter. The important thing
was that the Suneater gave the usurper’s forces an offensive weapon an order of
magnitude beyond anything the Navy could field, and vastly superior
communications.

Therefore the Suneater’s power was both a strength and a
weakness for the enemy. Eusabian would have to sacrifice anything, any plan, to
protect it. The Fleet would have to be redeployed in any case—most of it
mustered here at Ares for the attack on the Suneater when it was finally found.
That movement would inevitably be detected by Dol’jhar, and in combination with
carefully crafted intelligence leaks implying that the Navy had already located
the Suneater. . . .

Margot Ng smiled. If they timed it right, after they had
broken the message header codes so they could track ship deployments, the
motions of the enemy’s ships as he shifted them to counter the coming attack on
the Suneater would inevitably point right at its hiding place.

If specialized knowledge from those like Omilov didn’t lead
them to it even sooner.

She cast a thoughtful glance at the portly gnostor as he
reseated himself. Sebastian Omilov had retired from government circles quite
suddenly ten years ago; her patrons had implied that he’d been a peripheral
victim of the L’Ranja affair. She didn’t know enough about him otherwise to
assess the reliability of his professional judgment, but there was no doubt he
had Nyberg’s respect. Did he have his backing? Who would Nyberg put in charge
of the research project? If one were to consider the scene that had taken place
from a purely political point of view, Omilov would be in a perfect position to
head that project.

She sighed.
Politics.
One’s oath could lead one down some strange paths, but if the Navy did end up
dependent on Sebastian Omilov’s expertise, then she had to know if he could be
trusted. She would use any source of knowledge to that end.

She caught her name: Nyberg had begun to speak again.

“. . . Margot
O’Reilly Ng, who will guide our exploration of the battles of Treymontaigne and
Arthelion, with the goal of understanding the new tactical reality imposed upon
us by the enemy’s weapons and communications. Captain Ng?”

She got to her feet, and was astonished to see the admiral
step down from the rostrum and take his place in the audience. The significance
of this act was not lost on the officers and analysts present. She would have
their full attention.

“Thank you, sir. What you will see
here is a compilation of the actions at Treymontaigne and Arthelion, assembled
from multiple ships’ records. We’ll run through a unified view of each, then
each of you may access the segments of interest to you via your consoles. Each
of us here on the control rostrum is available to you for questioning and
interpretation via the adapted tabs at the top of your consoles.”

She paused to give them a chance to take in the tabs, then
went on.

“Here’s what we need to keep
uppermost in mind. First, and most obvious, what you are seeing here is not the
raw data, but a selection of it by those of us who experienced it. We may be
too close to it; I encourage you to investigate the full records on the secure
consoles that will be made available to you later. You may well detect
subtleties that evaded us, during the battles and later.”

Another flash of Metellus Hayashi’s face. She paused to
breathe against the spasm of grief, the agony of not knowing what had happened
to him. Hope hurt nearly as much as grief.

She cleared her throat and resumed. “I’d also like to
remind you that while there have been many secret weapons in the history of
human warfare, and many have been decisive in one or more battles, none has
ever decided a war. Sometimes the impact of the weapon has been overestimated;
other times—and I believe these battles are an example—the side possessing the
weapon has not trained enough with it to integrate it sufficiently into
tactical doctrine. Dol’jhar’s need to keep the powers of the Suneater secret
during his preparation for war crippled the tactical knowledge of his Rifter
allies by preventing them from exercising sufficiently with the new weapons and
communications.”

A quick, appreciative buzz quickly stilled.

“I also believe that what you are
about to see reveals that Dol’jhar’s tactician, Kyvernat Juvaszt, whose style
is known to many of you, has made a fundamental mistake. His tactics appear to
be patterned after what the Urian technology can do. Rather should he have
discovered what it cannot do and found a way to accomplish his mission anyway.
We can exploit this.”

Subtle reaction rippled through the space officers.

“Third. A philosophical
consideration. It was pointed out long before the Exile that the unity of
control exercised by totalitarian regimes such as Dol’jhar is a recipe for
overwhelming technological mistakes. Only the freedom of discussion—and the
confusion that sometimes results—found in an open society can prevent that. I
don’t know if this will be the case with what faces us now. It is a
possibility. The specialists in Moral Sabotage among you will need to consider
this.”

She tabbed her console. The dyplast window behind her
clouded, then shimmered into a view of space, and the wreckage of the
Prabhu Shiva
swam into view, echoed on
her console. Within minutes, compressed by careful selection and editing, the
Battle of Treymontaigne fought again in savage displays of fire and light,
kindling a reawakening of her own emotions, from shock to fury.

The replay of Arthelion was even worse. She struggled with
the anguish triggered by the raking attack of the
Falcomare
on the
Fist of Dol’jhar
,
attempting to distract herself by sequencing through the audience consoles to
get a sense of what the officers and analysts were focusing on. A rapid-fire
flicker of Tenno caught her eye, in an unusual configuration, and she paused,
astonished. It was coming from the Aerenarch’s console.

She looked up. The young man’s fingers tapped unerringly
across his console, his gaze intent, almost severe. She looked back at the echo
of his actions on her console and watched in fascination, her unconscious
judgments of him dissolving in the face of his obvious competence. His
configurations in the new Tenno were inevitably naive, yes, but no more than
those of anyone else who had yet to be exposed to them. Better, she had to
admit, than many. He demonstrated an edge that held great promise, needing only
the honing of the simulator and finally the stress of battle to bring him to
tactical maturity.

And more. Brandon vlith-Arkad was applying the data
strategically as well. He’d moved many of his more complex Tenno configurations
to a holding matrix where they were evolving through a series of
differentiations apparently patterned on the classic
tsushima
strategic semiotics. The ten years since his dismissal had
obviously not been spent in mere carousing and drunkenness, as rumor had it.

He glanced up, and their gazes met; the blue intensity of
his regard transfixed her until she noticed that unwinking stare really didn’t
see her. His gaze fell away, but her mind remained in turmoil, all her
political calculations upset. She now had even more to probe the younger Omilov
for. What had he seen in those weeks in the company of the heir?