Ruler of Naught (4 page)

Osri straightened as fresh anger pulsed through him. He
would find the truth, and that had to start with Brandon.

The hiss had ceased. The fresher door slid open, and Brandon
walked out, grimacing in pain as he tied a towel around his waist.

“You took a wound?” Osri said, eyeing Brandon for burns or
bleeding.

The Aerenarch... (Osri could not replace the vivid image
of Brandon’s austere, disciplined older brother that that word brought to mind)...
Brandon’s flesh was mottled with purpling bruises, but there were no visible
wounds. “Back.” Brandon’s breath hissed as he fell into bed. “Carrying. One of
the dogs.”

“A dog?” Osri reached for understanding—he knew very well what
dogs Brandon was referring to—but couldn’t find it. “You ran through the palace
Minor, exchanging fire with Dol’jharian soldiers, while carrying a
dog
?”

“Yes. Wounded. By some predatory animal brought by the
Dol’jharians.”

That was exactly the sort of idiocy Osri had hated Brandon
for all their lives. Carrying a 30-to-40-kilo dog through a couple of miles of
corridor under heavy fire when he could have been doing something useful. Like
halting the torture of Osri’s father sooner.

Afraid he would say something he would regret, Osri hit the hatch
control and walked out, though he’d meant to take his own shower first.

The dispensary was not many steps away, but it seemed farther
to Osri, who did not want to encounter any of the wretched outlaws crewing the
Columbiad. Especially its captain, who was a tempath. Supposedly her kind read
emotions, not actual thoughts, but the very idea of some outlaw able to sift
anything from his mental state was unbearably repellent. And the worst thing
was, she would be able to glean that reaction from him. He did not want to be
shot out of hand.

He smacked the dispensary hatch control with his fist.

His mood worsened when he stepped in and found the huge,
grizzled ship’s surgeon waiting, fists the size of the melons Osri had been
compelled to cut up under this same man’s orders, for Montrose was also the
ship’s cook. Osri had been teaching navigation for five years, a fact these
villains knew, which compounded the insult of working as a cook.

“He’s asleep, Schoolboy.” Montrose’s voice rumbled in his
chest like thunder.

The presence of an Arkad dog at the big man’s side, its
masked gaze intent on Osri, did not lessen his menace.
It’s not wounded;
there must two of them on board.
He had little experience of companion
animals, let alone the ancient breed maintained by the royal family and favored
others. Osri’s mother Risiena had forbidden animals in her presence.
“Filthy,
destructive things.”

Past Montrose, at the other end of the dispensary, the doors
to the three recovery berths were closed. Above each of them yellow indicator
lights with a black quarter-section blinking in rotation glowed, indicating
quarter-gee acceleration within.

“I want to see my father.” Osri made an effort to keep his
voice even. Montrose had demonstrated early on, with detached exactitude, his
opinion of Osri’s lawful authority as an officer of the navy. The last of the
bruises had taken weeks to fade.

“You want to worry him to death with interrogation,”
Montrose stated. “I can tell you more than he can. Ask your questions. I will
answer to the best of my knowledge.”

But this Osri was unable to do. Most of the questions
crowding his mind were personal, some were political, and all of them he refused
to discuss with an outlaw. He was forced back to the most fundamental of all,
and he hated himself for how plaintive his voice came out, “At least show me
that he is alive.”

The monstrous tangle of grey-shot black eyebrows lifted over
Montrose’s deepset gaze, then the Rifter surgeon-chef shifted out of the way.
“If you waken him, I will put you in your bunk for a month,” he warned, in the
typical manner of Rifters.

Osri had learned that the old bully meant exactly what he
said. He swallowed his irritation and managed a short nod. Montrose touched the
rightmost of three door controls, revealing a tiny single berth, barely big
enough to hold an infirmary bed, with a med console and a visitor’s stool next
to it.

Under the warm-sheet lay Osri’s father, moored to the med
console by a tangle of tubes and wires. He looked unsettlingly like an
oversized, prematurely aged infant with his head bald as an egg, his complexion
an ugly mix of gray and mottled red under the normal brown.

“Why does he have cuts all over his head? Did you shave
him?”

“No. The Dol’jharians did. They had him wired up to a
torture machine. Mindripper. Brandon slagged it,” Montrose added with morose
satisfaction.

At least Brandon had that much sense
, Osri thought.

Montrose closed the berth door. “From what the gnostor was
muttering before I put him under, the Dol’jharians were trying to find out
where that silver sphere was. It is apparently a key to their military effort.”

“The Heart of Kronos,” Osri corrected automatically. His
father had been so excited over the Urian artifact showing up at his home via
ParcelNet delivery, scarce hours before the planet was attacked.

By
Rifters
.

“The attack on Charvann seems to have had at its goal the
acquisition of the Heart of Kronos,” Montrose said, those massive brows now
lifted interrogatively.

“That’s impossible,” Osri retorted.

But why not? He would have thought it impossible that anyone
would attack Charvann, which had no military importance, and scarcely any
political presence in the Tetrad Centrum—the central Panarchic planets. It was
too far away from the Mandala, and its famous university was hardly a center of
the kind of power Dol’jharians, or Rifters, were concerned with.

Yet the attack had happened. A brutal attack, apparently;
Brandon had mentioned that the Archon Tanri Faseult, a family friend all Osri’s
life, had died in it.

Osri shook his head. “I don’t understand. The Heart of
Kronos is an Urian artifact, but what would Rifters want with it? They couldn’t
sell it anywhere, it’s one of a kind. The planet it was stolen from—and it only
could have been stolen—has been proscribed for a very long time. Merely having
possession of that thing would be a high crime, possibly treason.”

“Under your former government,” Montrose said, looking amused.
“It’s wanted by no less than Jerrode Eusabian, the Dol’jharian war leader who
calls himself Avatar, or Lord of Vengeance. Maybe both.” Montrose lifted a
massive shoulder. “However unlikely this man’s string of titles, he’s managed
to smash the Panarchy pretty thoroughly, and he was having your father
brutalized in some kind of torture machine in order to discover the Heart of
Kronos’s whereabouts. We can assume that the ferocity of this hunt is not going
to abate.”

“Why?” Osri asked. “What’s it for? What does it do? There
were no controls on it, nothing whatsoever, just the unbroken surface. And the
fact that it is inertialess.”

“That information seems to be a mystery to all concerned.”
Montrose tipped his head toward the berth. “Let the gnostor sleep. You will see
him when he wakens, I promise you that. When his heart has stabilized to my
satisfaction, you may bring him his first breakfast.” Montrose frowned. “I
suggest you get some rest yourself. It’s been a very long day for us all.”

Osri was going to protest, but a violent yawn seized his
jaw, nearly unhinging it. He turned away.

Back in the cabin he was required to share with Brandon, he
discovered the Krysarch—no, the
Aerenarch
—asleep. Osri took a fast
shower, and feeling incrementally better, hitched himself into the upper bunk,
where at least he didn’t have to see anyone, and the Rifters had fitted sound
baffles into the bulkhead, so he didn’t have to hear Brandon’s breathing. He
tabbed the air flow to max to simulate a breeze from an open window, a
revealing Downsider habit that his Highdweller bunkmates had teased him for
during his naval academy days, and though his mind was still reeling
frantically from question to question, sleep took him within seconds.

o0o

“They’re all asleep,” Montrose said.

“As I would like to be,” Lokri murmured, his gray eyes
half-closed, his whisper venomous.

Montrose shook his head, hiding his amusement, which (he
admitted to himself) was a shallow cover for an unexpected grief. Who was going
to admire Lokri’s lounging pose, his elegant insouciance? Young Greywing was
dead.
Nobody is ever going to find you as interesting as the admirer you
despised for her ugly looks
, Montrose thought.

Jaim sat a little apart, forearms on his knees, head bent. He
looked up. “How’s the boy?”

Montrose didn’t speak until everyone turned his way. “Ivard
is stable. The burn wouldn’t worry me ordinarily, but the Kelly ribbon... that
is something new.”

“Kelly ribbon?” Jaim asked.

Jaim and Marim had been working in the engine room during the
raid on Arthelion’s Palace Minor. Montrose regarded them as he considered his
words. How characteristic their reactions: tall, somber-faced Jaim concerned.
Small Marim unconcerned, arms crossed, one foot jiggling. Lokri sardonic.

Montrose said, “When we reached the antechamber to the Ivory
Hall, we discovered that the actual hall was closed off. The Dol’jharians
apparently took out the government with a dirty nuke. I don’t know if this is
connected or coincidence, but a ribbon from a Kelly had somehow gotten outside
the doors.”

“A ribbon?” Marim repeated. “Those ribbons are like hair on
the Kelly, aren’t they?”

“No, they’re living tissue. Able to survive on their own for
quite some time. They play a part in memory and sexual reproduction.”

Marim wrinkled her nose. “Sex with a Kelly. Ick.”

Montrose ignored the interjection. “When Ivard bent to get
at some piece of art, it attached itself somehow to his arm. It melded with his
flesh. I will run a test, but I suspect it has integrated down to the cellular
level.”

Vi’ya spoke for the first time. “Was the ribbon
radioactive?” The captain looked tense, her black eyes narrowed as if her head
ached. At least the brain burners were hibernating in their sub-zero degree
cabin. Montrose was grateful for that.

Montrose shook his head. “No reason to expect even Kelly to
be different from other living flesh. If it’s dangerously radioactive, it dies.
The ribbon is still alive.”

Marim sighed dramatically. “What I want to know is, what’s
our share of the take?” Her small stature, the buttercup yellow cloud of hair,
her fluting voice all contributed to make her seem much younger than she was.
At first glance, anyone would take her for Ivard’s age, but she was nearly old
enough to have birthed him.

Vi’ya said, “Some of those artifacts are so rare that it
would have taken finesse to negotiate sales even before Dol’jhar interfered. A
few of them we may as well regard as impossible to sell, like the coin that
Greywing took, and Ivard now has.”

Marim’s eyelids flashed up, then she affected indifference.
“Why should this Eusabian care?” she protested. “That blunge-sucker just
conquered himself more planets than he can ever visit, much less loot.”

“For the same reason he attacked the Panarchy in the first
place,” Vi’ya said. “Part of Dol’jharian revenge custom is possessing his
enemy’s home. He will want everything in the Mandalic palace restored exactly
as it was.” Her accent betrayed itself when she referred to her hated planet of
origin, which gave her words a subtle but sinister twist.

She turned to Jaim. “When we reach Dis, you’ll collect
everyone’s loot. Since Reth Silverknife is our best negotiator, I will send you
and her ahead to Rifthaven. You will take the
Sunflame,
and your first attempt
will be with lesser known artifacts, things that have been copied in like
materials.” She rapped her knuckles gently against a bulkhead. “We will follow
in
Telvarna
.”

Nobody argued. Not even Lokri. They all sensed that the
captain had something on her mind besides their loot.

Sure enough, Vi’ya said, “From now on, I want everyone
wearing their boswells.”

Marim sat upright. “On
Telvarna
?” She tossed her
curls. “Why? All you have to do is stick your head outside any hatch to be
heard from engineering to the bridge.”

“Because I do not want you heard from engineering to the
bridge,” Vi’ya retorted. “I want you in the habit of communicating anything but
the most superficial chatter through your boswells, which the Panarchists will
not be allowed, or you will spend the duration of this war, however long it
lasts, confined to Dis along with the
Telvarna
. In fact, I am not sure
we should land at Dis at all.”

“We don’t have enough fuel to get to our other caches,” Jaim
said, briefly looking up.

“I know,” Vi’ya said his way. “I am considering stopping
only long enough to refuel at the cache off Dis, make contact with Norton, and
then continue on.”

Lokri drawled, “What’s the worry? We escaped the
Dol’jharians. I think they’re too busy to send an armada after a ship crewed by
seven. Now six. With two canine and five sophont passengers. Even if one is a
royal stray.”

Vi’ya’s slanted black eyes narrowed. Lokri’s challenging
grin didn’t abate a whit, but his knuckles betrayed his tension. “You have not sufficiently
considered that fact,” she said softly. “I think you should, before we emerge
from skip. We departed with from Dis with a royal stray, but if what the old
man revealed is true, he is no longer the most useless of the two spare heirs.
He is
the
heir. Maybe the Panarch is dead. Whether he is or not, the
Arkad asleep aft is now the most sought-after person by both sides.”

“So we sell him to whoever offers us the most!” Marim threw
up her hands.