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  THE RIFTER’S COVENANT

  Exordium: Book Four

  Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  July 24, 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-529-8

  Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge

  PROLOGUE

  Smoothness and order, the manifest attributes of the teeth, have entered into the very nature of power. They are inseparable from it . . .

  The teeth are the armed guardians of the mouth and the mouth is indeed a strait place, the prototype of all prisons. Whatever goes in there is lost, and much goes in whilst still alive. . . . The readiness with which the mouth opens in anticipation of prey, the ease with which, once shut, it remains shut, recall the most feared attributes of a prison. . . . In this terrible place nothing could thrive, even if there were time to settle there. It is barren and nothing can take root in it. . . .

  [This] narrow gorge through which everything has to pass is, for the few who live so long, the ultimate terror. . . .

  The road that the prey travels through the body is a long one and on the way all its substance is sucked out of it; everything useful is abstracted from it till all that remains is refuse and stench.

  This process, which stands at the end of every act of seizing, gives us a clue to the nature of power in general.

  —Elias Canetti

  Crowds and Power

  ca. 300 B.E.

  A faith unfulfilled is loyalty’s pyre

  For power can only compel, not inspire.

  —The Third Polarity of Jasper Arkad

  The atmosphere on the bridge of the Dol’jharian corvette Acheridol hummed with tension.

  Morrighon swallowed painfully, wondering how his throat could be so dry while his skin was sticky with sweat. If we fail the next stage of this struggle, no doubt I’ll have time to ask Eusabian’s pesz mas’hadni before the tortures begin, he thought with bleak humor.

  The more than forty-eight hours in real time it had taken the Acheridol to approach the Suneater had visibly worn on everyone, from the three Bori Rifters Morrighon had taken from the Samedi before it was destroyed, to the usually impassive Tarkans.

  Everyone except Anaris, in spite of the fact that the duel for the succession was surely now to begin. And every Dol’jharian, from the lowest gray-clad menial to Jerrode Eusabian—conqueror of the Thousand Suns—knew it. Any wrong move, wrong word even, would result in an excruciating and protracted death. Yet Anaris seemed, if not well-rested or tension-free, at least coolly composed.

  Morrighon swallowed again, forcing himself to look at the tall, broad-shouldered silhouette seated directly before the viewscreen. The skipradius of the black hole, wherein fiveskip flight was impossible, was more than two light-hours. It was bad enough to have to come anywhere near a singularity, but to have to endure the deadly glare of its accretion disc for fifty hours was almost unbearable. Still, no one had dared suggest the viewscreens be blanked, for Anaris had spent most of his waking time contemplating the spectacle: a slash of blue-white fury shining through clouds of dust, the edge-on view of a whirlpool of plasma spiraling into annihilation as it passed out of the universe. One end of the needle of light transfixed a giant sun, the stellar mate whose substance fed the invisible, insatiable singularity at the center.

  And now, looming large against that glaring needle: the Suneater, their destination.

  The only sign of tension that Anaris betrayed was the more than usually intricate writhing of the silken dirazh’u in his powerful hands. The strange, complex knots he wove reflected the strangeness they were approaching.

  “Five minutes, lord,” said Tatriman Ombric, the little Bori noderunner seated at the nav console.

  Anaris did not reply. He continued to gaze at the Suneater that was now the heart of his father’s kingdom.

  The snarl of curves and tubes and flaring cones did not resemble any work of humankind. Molded in some material that looked like inflamed flesh, its curves drew the eyes in directions they could not follow.

  It hung alone in space, no ships in sight. From the briefing squirted to them upon emergence, Morrighon knew that the energy sink that powered the station forbade the approach of ships greater than one hundred meters in any dimension. But why were no others visible, of any size?

  A corvette, twin to their own, erupted from the open end of one of the cones, its radiants flaring as it came about and took up position less than a kilometer from the Suneater, its hull glistening in the light from the flaring gases spiraling to destruction. The martial angularity of the vessel contrasted with the unsettling, almost melted appearance of the Urian station.

  Then Morrighon stifled a yelp as the true strangeness of the Suneater manifested itself with no warning: a pseudopod erupted in slow motion from a section of the station. It writhed sinuously toward the cone from which the other corvette had emerged, which bent to receive the pod with a narrowing of the opening in its apex that suggested a grotesque variety of autosexual behavior.

  “Stand by,” came a voice over the com.

  The second cone had to be the landing bay for which they were heading.

  A beam of plasma lanced from the corvette hovering nearby and struck the pseudopod. A puff of gas erupted from its surface as the tubular extension recoiled, plunging its end into a different cone which then closed a sphincter around it and began throbbing peristaltically. Morrighon desperately suppressed a near-hysterical snicker; it looked like a decapuss sucking its tentacle after an encounter with a snapclam. Was the accursed thing alive?

  The landing-bay cone now bent toward the Acheridol and elongated, the opening in it gaping wider, as if it had decided that the corvette would do as a substitute for the wounded pseudopod. Writhing palps lined the oval hole, reminding Morrighon of the sessile flower-shaped animals whose analogues were found in the oceans of almost every planet in the Thousand Suns. Between the palps hazed a lock field, and behind it, ranks of heavily armed, black-clad Tarkans had drawn up in the brightly lit interior of the station’s mouth.

  Bay! Morrighon corrected himself uneasily. Landing bay.

  The hum of a docking tractor seized the ship and drew it in, rings of light fleeing outward as the ship nosed through the lock field. It came to rest with a faint bump. The engines whined down into silence.

  Anaris stood up and left the bridge. Morrighon scurried after.

  The interior of the Suneater was even more unsettling. Its walls, floors, and ceilings flowed into each other in organic confusion, with no straight lines anywhere. Worse, the substance of the station glowed with a reddish internal light that seemed to emanate from below the surface, as though it were not an effect but an aspect of the material. Despite the apparent brightness of the light, it cast no shadows.

  It’s like being in something’s intestines. The human machinery at the periphery looked fragile and out of place, and around the points where cables penetrated the walls, the light faded, leaving a small portion of wall a sickly porous gray.

  At the back of the bay, behind the ranks of Tarkans, an opening dilated with a disgusting sucking noise. Eusabian stepped through and approached, followed by Barrodagh. Morrighon was shocked by the change in Eusabian’s lieutenant: Barrodagh was thin and haggard, the pinpoints of reddish light reflected in his eyes giving them a feverishly feral cast as they ferreted continuously from side to side. Already short and slight, as were all Bori, he seemed to have shrunk.

  Eusabian appeared unchanged. He stopped in front of the first rank of Tarkans, and Anaris stepped forward. He drew his peshakh out of his sleeve; Eusabian’s eyes narrowed slightly at the sight of it. Anaris slashe
d the base of his right thumb with the little sleeve knife. “Even as I shed the blood of our lineage here and now, have I shed the blood of your enemy. As you commanded, so it is done: that part of your paliach is complete.”

  Morrighon noted with fascination that the blood did not pool on the deck. Instead, it vanished without a trace. He thought, too, from the angle of Anaris’s head, that this had not escaped his notice, either.

  Nor Barrodagh’s. He was staring at the point on which the blood dripped, a look of horrified anticipation on his face.

  The rolling gutturals of the Dol’jharian ritual continued, and Morrighon remembered the ceremony in the bay of the Fist of Dol’jhar, when Eusabian had dispatched his son to see to the exile of the Panarch.

  Then, the severity of the battlecruiser’s metal bulkheads and equipment had underscored the Dol’jharian ritual of revenge, the paliach. Now, in the alien surroundings of the Suneater, abandoned ten million years before by an alien race of awesome powers about which almost nothing was known, the ritual lost much of its meaning.

  He wondered if Eusabian sensed this. He was certain that Anaris did.

  Barrodagh glanced fearfully up at the ceiling, where a sort of gland or blister had begun to swell, its tear-shaped surface rippling with internal tension. Morrighon could tell that the Tarkans had seen it, too.

  Morrighon thought of the imagers recording this for hyperwave transmission. Cleverly placed scrims had been set to block any real view of the bay’s interior, and whatever happened next, Barrodagh would make certain that only an uninterrupted ritual would be seen by anyone outside this bay.

  Eusabian and Anaris continued the ritual, oblivious to whatever the protrusion portended. They interwove their dirazh’u, the curse-weaving cords, in a complex knot that stretched between them as they stepped apart.

  “Your vengeance was my vengeance,” Anaris said, his low voice carrying in the weird room, “as your vengeance will be my vengeance.”

  The cord stretched quivering between them, humming with tension.

  Then, with a ripe, fruity noise, the gland in the ceiling ruptured, and what appeared to be at least five liters of blood spewed down, drenching the intertwined dirazh’u, dashing them from the two Dol’jharians’ hands. Blood, or whatever it was, splattered the clothing of both Anaris and Eusabian; the red-soaked silken cords lying the deck between them looked like the entrails of some messily-deceased animal.

  During the ringing silence, Barrodagh looked like he was going to faint. Morrighon clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering as fear of the Dol’jharian reaction made him weak.

  Then Anaris spoke.

  “It appears that even the Ur would share our vengeance on the Panarchy.” He bent over and picked up the dirazh’u. “A fine omen for the final completion of your paliach,” he continued, bowing to his father.

  Eusabian showed his teeth briefly in what might have been a smile. “Well spoken,” he said.

  Morrighon sensed a slight easing of tension in the ranks of Tarkans, though no one moved as much as a millimeter. Anaris’s improvisation had turned a disaster into, if not a triumph, at least not an omen of failure.

  But as father and son left the landing bay, heralded by the awful sucking noise of the Urian equivalent of a door, Morrighon wondered what kind of omen it really was.

  And of whose blood.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  SHIAVONA: MALACHRONTE SYSTEM

  A message from Hreem the Faithless was always a harbinger of death and destruction. Captain Lochiel’s despair intensified as she watched the unfolding tragedy on the viewscreen; her two lifemates watched with equal intensity, Messina in growing fury, and Bayrut with a wary eye not on the screen, but on the shipmoot comprised of the Rifter destroyer Shiavona’s officers and shareholders.

  The imager relaying the horror was located about a kilometer up one of the end-caps of the doomed sync. Below it the lush verdure of a forest stretched into hazy distance below hook-shaped clouds, curving up on either side to become a verdigris sky until it was lost from sight behind the sun-bright diffusers. In the foreground a flock of red and black birds sketched a frantic, screeching tracery of protest against the distant landscape where, sixty degrees antispinwise, a deadly haze hid the fatal wound inflicted by the missile from the Hreem’s Flower of Lith.

  Silence gripped the shipmoot. Some of the faces mirrored shock, but not enough of them, Lochiel and Bayrut saw. The Kelly trinity, with three votes, was unreadable.

  The novosti was still speaking. Lochiel forced herself to listen.

  “. . . and these Rifters, under the command of the infamous jacker known as Hreem the Faithless, had aimed their missile precisely. It opened a 150-meter rupture in the sync, which ordinarily could have been repaired before the partial pressure of oxygen fell to lethal levels. But the missile also destroyed a crucial valve cluster in the hydrostabilizers and opened a major conduit from a lake, rendering it impossible for the engineers to reestablish dynamic stability.”

  The image switched to the novosti, his face rigid with horror—and imperfectly suppressed excitement.

  He went on in a forced-sounding measured cadence, “Even though, in accordance with the Family Ozman’s Orthodox Teilhardian beliefs, the sync was only sparsely populated, it was not possible to evacuate all the inhabitants before the habitat’s rotation entered a chaotic domain as the spin axis precessed toward the more stable short-axis orientation.”

  The image switched again, and someone sucked in a harsh breath when the screen revealed a chaos almost unrecognizable as the interior of a habitat. Clots of water, earth, and organic material churned, lit by the dim glow of the diffusers as the sync oscillated out of control.

  “Temenarch Vitessa Ozman refused evacuation, giving her place on the Family yacht to one of the children of the village below the Residence. Fewer than four thousand of the oneill’s inhabitants survived.”

  A bright haze filled the screen as the habitat, stressed beyond its design parameters, finally ruptured and its atmosphere fled into space. The image flickered, pulled back: against the bright ring of the remaining habitats around Malachronte, the debris of what had been Sync Ozman spread slowly into a trash reef that did not hide the dragonfly shape of Hreem’s destroyer, the Flower of Lith.

  The image switched to a group of commentators. As they began describing what they’d just seen, Lochiel cut the sound and turned to face her officers and shareholders.

  No one moved.

  Bayrut, Shiavona’s first officer, broke the silence; anger flattened his customarily precise tenor: “And now we’re taking orders from him.” It wasn’t quite a question.

  “Charterly was a greedy chatzer.” Luz-Cremont, the weapons specialist, leaned forward, his eyes blinking rapidly. “But he had style, and he knew there were some limits you don’t cross. Not like this Hreem.”

  Hope penetrated Lochiel’s sick grief. Luz-Cremont was usually a troublemaker; now it sounded like he might support her lifemates and her in their plan to break away.

  Things had been so much simpler under Charterly, until he had bought it two weeks earlier in a savage action in the Dolorosa system, where the Panarchist Navy administered a brutal mauling to his fleet, despite the loss of a battlecruiser. The remnants—including the Shiavona—had been posted by Barrodagh to Hreem’s fleet for refitting here in the Malachronte system.

  The Dol’jharian influence had caused enough strife in the fleet. But now, with Charterly’s death and the dispersal of his fleet, shipboard alliances and allegiances cracked even further.

  “Even the Shiidra never fired on a Highdwelling,” Messina spoke up, her olive complexion yellowish with nausea. No surprise. She grew up a Highdweller. As did Luz-Cremont.

  “At least Hreem doesn’t have to worry about LJO,” said Vidocq. She shrugged and stretched back in her pod with a semblance of ease, but her watchful gaze and tight shoulders betrayed her.

  Lochiel could not look at her, lest her hat
red reveal itself. She seemed like a good choice at the time. Bayrut’s unwavering gaze watched for the subtlest clue of betrayal.

  The shareholders around them shuffled and muttered; at either side of Vidocq, Dai Gan and Y’Lassian exchanged glances and subtle signals of agreement.

  Messina flicked a questioning glance Lochiel’s way. When Lochiel responded with her own questioning brow-lift, Messina said to Vidocq. “Nullwit. If there was even one Malachronte Downsider on the sync when it blew, Local Justice applies—if there’s such a thing as justice left, now that Dol’jhar’s in charge.”

  “You call that being in charge?” Ambrose’s quiet baritone cut through the background chatter. The taciturn damage-control officer tilted his chin at the screen, still silently relaying further coverage of the Ozman atrocity. “You’ve seen the relays from the hyperwave. And no one knows what the ships without a hyperwave are up to, until long after the event.”

  “We don’t have a hyperwave.” Lochiel stated the obvious so she could study the reactions in the faces around her. She stood up and indicated the image-feed. “So Barrodagh gets data on us third hand, and Hreem only a bit faster.”

  Feeling Bayrut’s and Messina’s tension—they were waiting for her to broach the plan the three of them had conceived—she nevertheless permitted a silence to build. Something was wrong. She sensed it, but couldn’t pinpoint the cause.

  “You maybe suggesting we duck out, Captain?” Vidocq’s tone was even, her head cocked so that her flame-colored hair-spikes tilted.

  Several of the minor shareholders standing against the bulkhead exchanged glances, and one or two betrayed the signs of privacies, though that was forbidden during shipmoots. But all that was as expected: Vidocq had been building her own clique among them by dividing their interests from the major owners.

  “Hell of a time to decide that.” Y’Lassian’s voice was outraged. “So far we’ve had the snot beat out of us, and hardly a sniff of loot. Seems to me that Hreem’s fleet’s done a lot better.”