Crown Of Fire (15 page)

Juddis Adiyn strode through Three Zed's central meeting chamber, hardly sparing a glance toward the vaulted ceiling, barely looking into the volcanic depths beneath the chamber's transparent gray floor. Onar Ketaz, commander-in-chief in Modabah Shirak's absence, had called him to the fielding station across the colony from his apartments.

The city ran smoothly in Shirak's absence. Adiyn had seen a marked decline of wisdom and focus in the Shirak family, despite his lab's best efforts. His young tech, Terza Shirak, had seemed stable enough, but Modabah had informed him Terza would not be returning, and the she-biyl confirmed it.

He did not like or trust Micahel. No longer sure the Shiraks could lead an assault on the Federacy, he might have to repair the strain or remove it. He would not order his techs to breed Micahel a son. The next namable Shirak would come from Micahel's grandfather's banked gametes.

As he passed his laboratory, he glanced in. A security lamp gleamed, lighting rows of womb-banks and embrytubes. Behind its locked inner door, in a vast cold room, lay dozens of stasis crypts—Golden City residents awaiting medical treatment, subadults culled for experimentation—and a few gene specimens, including the faithless princess who had briefly graced Three Zed with her presence. Smaller cold cases held specimens taken from Phoena's nieces. Unfortunately, no one had taken samples from the sister Firebird. No one thought she would leave here so suddenly.

So rarely was a new Ehretan family line found that Adiyn's senior staff had focused on decoding the Casvah-Angelo genes. He did have the feeling that something vital could come from the reunion of Caldwell-Carabohd with the Angelo-Casvahs . . . here, in his laboratory. He always attended to those feelings.

At 152 years old, Juddis Adiyn had reached his productive middle age. Three Zed's bioscientists had almost given this people immortality. Unfortunately, epsilon powers still deteriorated, and this laboratory's day-to-day concern was to provide injectable tissue suspension for revitalizing the ayin . . . hence the embrytubes. He'd had a few flickers himself recently. He was due for a fresh treatment.

Beyond and beneath the cold room, a deeper lava chamber housed his ancestors' biological weapons. Though his ancestors destroyed the non-Altered residents of Ehret along with most of their own kindred, his people were now humankind's best hope of survival. The trade worlds had barely survived the first Sabba Six-alpha catastrophe, when that binary star spewed radiation storms out into the Whorl, disrupting travel and trade, destroying technology. Adiyn's people couldn't prevent further storms, but their potentially immortal descendants would be compelled to solve that problem. In time, they would become gods. Their servants-elect on other worlds would be altered over generations. On each world, the first new generation's genes would be manipulated to ensure die-off as soon as the second generation came to maturity. A second generation could carry any gene he chose to introduce. In the truest sense, they would be his own people's descendants.

He did hope he would live to control that phase of the experiment. After death, he expected nothing. Bliss, the Speaker's Country, and all other "spiritual" hopes for eternity were the hopes of a short-lived people, sops to their outraged sense that there ought to be more than a hundred or so years of existence.

He could do nothing for them. For Onar Ketaz, he needed to check what seemed to be a manifestation of the shebiyl.

He backed out of his lab and strode on.

The City was silent tonight, except for low voices here and there. His people wasted little time with sonic entertainments, and infants conceived in his lab lived in distant settlements until subadulthood. The Golden City was no place for youngsters, whose budding epsilon potential made them more nuisance than use.

He found Ketaz in the fielding station, not far from the main north airlock. Inside a ten-sided chamber, teams of three sat in five rounded wells, wearing gray-green shipboards and headsets, watching vast fields of space projected on ten continuous overhead panels.

Ketaz strolled toward him. Square-faced and stocky, the man was about to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. He looked forty by most worlds' standards, another triumph of Golden City genetics.

"Adiyn," he said. "I was simply standing here, watching the screens. I saw two large ships and half a dozen small fighters coming in. When I looked again, they'd vanished. The mass detectors picked up nothing."

Only a few were born with Juddis Adiyn's exceptional ability to foresee the future, along branching paths or streams of alternate reality. He could also tell, with ninety-nine percent accuracy, whether another individual's seeming shebiyl experience was genuine.

He had not bred himself any descendants. He didn't want any potential rivals yet.

He took the seat Ketaz offered.

Ketaz scattered his epsilon-energy static, and Adiyn focused a probe. Ketaz brought up the memory. Adiyn watched, second-hand, as the ships appeared to approach. They had Federate markings . . . Thyrian, in fact.

The vision flickered, looking lifeless and two-dimensional. His own glimpses had the texture of reality. This must be an illusion, created by fear and excitement.

"No," he said. "You were right to call and have it checked, but this is false. You are under stress, and the colony needs you at peak objectivity. I relieve you."

Ketaz narrowed his eyes.

"Report to second-level south," said Adiyn. "I'll call ahead."

Adiyn sensed that Ketaz wanted to object. At Second South, the colony's medics could readjust brain chemicals to ensure peak performance. He'd had it done once. Unsettling, not at all like the multisensory blast of ayin-extract injections.
Tomorrow,
he promised himself.

For Firebird, after the excitement at Nello's, sleep came slowly. Midnight passed, and then one hundred . . . two hundred . . .

She lay awake in the dark, not wanting to nudge Brennen and ask for a calming touch. Behind her eyelids, black-haired Micahel Shirak stalked up their hallway at Trinn Hill. . . and this time, she imagined waiting for him with a dart gun.

This would be her fifth day on Netaia. Not today but tomorrow, the ceremony—then she'd have one day to conclude her charitable obligations. After that, she might fly back to Hesed and her sons, or on to Three Zed.

Actually, she'd half expected to have that fielding information by now.

She reached over the edge of the bed and touched her tri-D, wondering if Carradee thought about her as often as she missed her sons. She hoped she would return to them with the best possible gift, an end to the Shuhr menace.

She slept a little.

Her schedule had been left empty, this last day before confirmation. Tel called early and invited her and Brennen back to his estate, mentioning his newly expanded security force. She leaped at the chance to get off the sterile, unfamiliar new base—but at Tel's, she had trouble settling into any one room, and soon she regretted her choice. At the base, she could have been logging sim time.

Brennen had notified Danton of their whereabouts, and the steady hum of low-flying surveillance craft did nothing to settle her nerves. Guards in Tellai indigo and black stood at every door and sat on Tel's rooftop. She only had to stay calm and let time pass.

Impossible.

Her old palace physician, Dr. Zoagrem, arrived at ten hundred. He diagnosed stress and imminent exhaustion and insisted that this laid her open to several mutant respiratory viruses making the rounds.

If she got sick on the way to Three Zed, she could have trouble using her epsilon carrier. She had to let him give her a series of three lung-strengthening injections, an hour apart. Only Brennen's epsilon touch helped her sit still for a needle. Even Brenn had been unable to help her overcome that old phobia. They'd never dug deep enough to find its cause.

She spent the last morning hour closeted with him, locked away from Tel's hovering servitors, trying to develop a shielding visualization. Again, the quest-pulse was all she could muster. . . and it was weaker than before.

"Distracted," he observed.

"Well, yes." She rubbed her sore arm.

She tried calling Baron Erwin from a CT station surrounded by bubbling fountains.
Still in bed,
she was told, but she no longer believed it. He knew what she wanted. He refused to cooperate. Like it or not, she would have the Powers' blessing.

Brennen sent out another decoy team, and between taking their reports of a disappointingly uneventful day, he heard her recite the first quarter of her second codebook. He corrected her stumbles with uncanny patience. They nibbled exotic sweets that Tel's servitors brought on trays. She even locked herself away with a clairsa lent by Tel's staff clairsinger, but after she loosened her fingers with long-memorized scale and arpeggio exercises, nothing she played expressed anything but discordant tension.

So she ate and paced and explored the grounds with half a dozen of Tel's stiff-backed new guards. Behind her, one of them quizzed Shel about Federate training techniques. Tel walked beside Firebird like a gallant out of some old story, paying court to her ego, trying to revive old dreams of the Netaian throne.

He was almost succeeding. She could accomplish so much if she stayed here. Halting beside an artificial waterfall planted with exotic silverthroats and trailing oncidia, she turned to him. "Tel, remember what I told you. If some combination of circumstances put me on the throne, I would do everything in my grasp to introduce an alternative to Powers worship. Could you support that?"

He glanced back and aside at his guards, then crossed his arms. "I ask my servitors to keep the Charities and Disciplines. I've never punished one for neglecting them, though. Their spiritual status is their business, not mine. I simply want an Angelo in the palace again." He half bowed and then stalked back up the lawn toward the estate house. Two of his guards followed. The rest stayed with her.

She trailed one hand in the chilly cascade. She hated to think of Netaia's future resting on her shoulders. It was a weight she didn't want to carry. Still. . . maybe the Mighty Singer had brought her back to show Netaia the difference between faith and legalism, and to save her people from civil war. Maybe she was meant for the throne.

One of Tel's guards struck a pose at the top of the two-meter falls on a newly landscaped artificial hillside. Two more stood down on the lawn, while one remained close, with Shel.

Suppose she did stay on. She would need a personal security force. The Electors had their redjackets, and every noble House had its House Guards. She should've asked for more Sentinel escorts.

A vague suspicion nettled her. Brenn wouldn't like to catch her entertaining these thoughts. He'd accuse her of the usual offenses.

But she could do so much here. She was capable. She was trained. She had the common people's support.

Hearing a step at the library door, Brennen turned around. He didn't shut the leather-bound volume he'd been scanning. Tel stood framed in the doorway, hands behind his back.

"Thank you again for the invitation," Brennen said. He reached for a velvette page marker, then closed the book, using that time to dissipate his shielding cloud of epsilon static.

Tel raised one eyebrow, curious. Brennen showed him the biography's cover. It was
Iarla of Citangelo.

He'd enjoyed Firebird's singing last night, and he'd felt surprisingly comfortable in that warehouse after cozying up to too many swaggering nobles. Her sweet voice had carried him up and out of the demands of his mission, into a Hesed-like realm of contentment with the eternal.

Still, she must obey the codes. She must not put herself above those laws, or according to all he'd been taught, the One himself would bring her down. He needed to speak with her about pride, too. That subtle glow after the fitting had grown stronger.

"I had that out for research." Tel moved toward a long ebony table. "I've been painting Iarla First. A confirmation gift, though I suppose Firebird might not have room to pack it back to Hesed House." He lifted a cover from a large canvas square.

Brennen eyed the image underneath. The dark-haired, fiftyish woman wore Angelo scarlet, and her eyes glimmered, with amber sparkling through brown. Brennen knew little about painting, but the image impressed him as lifelike and lively. "She'll love it."

"Can anything more be done to ensure her safety tomorrow—and yours?" Tel moved closer and glanced at a long indigo lounger, but he remained standing.

"We'll have guards at every imaginable station, and new equipment, but security is stretched. The best we can do is to ensure tight protection right around us. Like this." Brennen gestured toward two corners of the estate. "Thank you again. We appreciate this deeply. It is much more pleasant than base housing."

Unclenching his hands, Tel leaned forward onto the table where Brennen had laid his book. "I'm beginning to feel responsible, to wonder if you two should have come back to Netaia at all." Tellai's sincere concern gave him a twinge of sympathetic worry. "What about the new technology, the RIA? Can you use that to defend us?"

It still felt strange to discuss RIA publicly. "Yes, but you—and everyone you can convince, on the Electorate and in the Assembly—can do more than we can to bring stability," said Brennen. "Only a unified Netaia can defend itself. Remember Firebird's simulations. Even without Shuhr interference, there's a strong possibility of civil war. Firebird's confirmation came through on the equations as a stabilizing event."

Tel shook his head, frowning. "I hadn't forgotten. I'm glad she came. I'm amazed by how little I care if the Electorate approves of me now."

"You were a follower," Brennen said. "You're emerging as a leader."

Tel chuckled. "I doubt that."

Brennen backed away. Several other portraits lined a shelfless stretch of Tel's wall. Aristocrats all, from their haughty faces and blue sashes. Brennen wondered how many Tel had collected and how many he'd painted.

That couldn't distract him for long, either. They had failed to capture a Shuhr at the palace, and the decoy groups had been ignored. Tomorrow he must be ready to step into Micahel Shirak's targeting scope.
Holy One, protect us. Take us home to our sons.
He'd half expected Firebird's physician to diagnose him, too, as stressed.

"I love her," Tel murmured, his head bowed. When he raised his chin to meet Brennen's sudden glance, he exhaled. "I assume you know that, Caldwell. I have, since—"

"Don't." Brennen tried to say it kindly.

The nobleman snapped his mouth shut.

"I knew. It will go no further."

"Not to her."

"Never to her," Brennen said, knowing Firebird had already guessed. "I've been burdened professionally by many secrets. I have reason to sympathize with yours."

Dinner started as a quiet affair, spent watching news at lap tables in defiance of court etiquette. Rogonin's network, Codex, used the occasion to chronicle the few production quotas that had declined under occupation. There'd also been high-common class protest against Firebird's return, mostly in southern cities and out on Kierelay Island. Codex reporters accused the Federates of complicity in Iarlet and Kes-sie's disappearance. One netter smilingly detailed an accusation that Firebird murdered Phoena herself, that her half-alien husband was using her for mysterious purposes, and the story that she'd birthed sons was fabrication. Where were these mythical princes?

Firebird glanced aside as one of Tel's servitors brought in a carafe of cruinn. "Still no luck, my lady," she murmured as she poured for Firebird. "His Grace must have gone to the country for a day."

Firebird frowned, and then the tri-D caught her eye again. A woman in drab worker's dress was speaking out against the aristocratic tradition that would spend so much money, waste so many worker hours, on one day's pageantry. "I can't believe Codex carried that," Tel said from the depths of a brownbuck chair.

Firebird agreed, but next, the announcer skipped to four men and women who wondered aloud how much of the Angelo fortune would fall Firebird's way, and how much would be hers to take offworld, after her confirmation.

She tossed a lounger pillow idly. They
would
worry about that. Frankly, she wasn't counting on a torn credit-chit after the bills came in—but it would be gratifying to build that Chapter house.

If only she'd demanded that First Lord Erwin change his blessing right then, at the rehearsal when that small Voice prompted. Now she was trapped, with no escape except to try counteracting Erwin's wretched invocation with her short speech afterward.

The other newsnets—Affiliated, a public corporation, and Drong, which had been family owned for centuries—were making a gala out of anticipation, interviewing souvenir hawkers and running old clips from Firebird's adolescence. On screen, she relived her triumph at the Naval Academy's war games, where she'd been nominated for top graduate. She felt Brennen's pleasure as it ran—and his amusement to learn that her all-Academy flight simulator record still hadn't been broken.

Then Marshal Burkenhamn, interviewed live, announced her re-commissioning in the NPN. Newsnet analysts took off from that in all directions. One called it "another step toward the Federatization of Ne-taia."

Tel laughed. "Congratulations, Commander," he exclaimed, attempting a salute.

She grinned.

Another spin-off showed the Hall of Charity's interior, with guards at every entrance. That image metamorphosed unexpectedly into another newsnetter. "There have," he said, "been warnings that Second Commander Angelo's confirmation ceremony might be disrupted by offworld elements, despite all assurances from the Federacy. As a result, the Electorate was polled by CT. Our holy electors will not observe from the sanctum, as scheduled, but from the adjoining North Hall. His Grace the Regent wishes to inform ticket holders that tomorrow's ceremony will be segregated not by class but by preference. To accommodate all comers, the Hall will open at seven hundred tomorrow morn-ing."

"Oof," Tel exclaimed. "No electors in the sanctum? They're scared, Firebird."

"Didn't they call you?" she asked.

"No," he said grimly. "Obviously, they know I'll be there. Did you notice how quickly they picked up on Marshal Burkenhamn's announcement?"

"Yes." Firebird glanced at Brennen. "And if we can pull it off, do you realize what this means? We could have a nave full of people who actually care what I'm doing." A nave full of sympathetic witnesses, if they managed to capture one Shuhr. Those witnesses would tell their children, and grandchildren, about watching Firebird and her security force catch a terrifying enemy.
Second Commander Angelo.
It sang at the back of her mind.
Commander, Commander, Commander. ..

As Brennen discussed the early Hall opening with security people, Firebird called the palace and asked for six-oh-six. Paskel spoke softly. There'd been talk of delaying the ceremony one day, he admitted, but all parties—even Rogonin, consulted via interlink—decided to go ahead as planned. Paskel believed that Rogonin was anxious to see the ceremony concluded and Firebird sent back offworld.

She spent the silent ride back to base rehearsing her lines for tomorrow.
Commander.
Now that it had been announced, it felt real. She hoped Burkenhamn kept his promise about making it temporary.

As she climbed under the bedcovers, she felt a disquieting tension in Brennen. "Mari," he said softly, laying his arm over her. "Don't let all this distract you from the real call on your life, and your responsibilities. Not even catching a Shuhr is as important as one immortal spirit. Our humility is crucial, before the One."

She yawned. "Can we talk about this in the morning?" she mumbled. She rolled aside before he could answer.