The Final Key: Part Two of Triad by Catherine Asaro Read Free Book Online Page B

hell. He needed them.
    Taquinil reached across the pad's boundary, and his hand passed through Eldrin's arm. "Look!" He laughed, a full, contagious sound Eldrin had always loved. "You're a ghost."
    "I hope not," Eldrin said. He wanted to hug his son.
    "Will you go into Kyle space with Mother?"
    "I'm already there."
    The boy paused. "I'll go watch closer. Is that all right?"
    "Yes, go ahead." Although Eldrin knew it unsettled Taquinil to see his mother caged by machinery, he had long ago realized his son loved technology. So Eldrin tried to adapt, learning to accept the dreams of the boy's universe.
    Taquinil ran across the chamber, the only child allowed to visit this strategic command center of an empire. It grated on Eldrin to see his son left with a soldier while his mother was bound to a soulless mesh and his father exiled on another world. Dehya's upward-tilted eyes were closing, the long lashes covering her exotic sunrise gaze, a film of rose and
    gold pastels overlaid on her pupils. The techs were running tests on her much as a ship's crew ran preflight checks on a spacecraft. They calibrated the feeds that provided nutrients and kept her hydrated, and checked the med lines that monitored her health, making it possible for her to stay in the Chair for days, if necessary.
    Finally they stepped back, and one of them spoke into his wrist comm. With a deep hum, the robot arm rose from the floor and carried the Chair up into the holodome. Eldrin felt Dehya submerge into the Kyle web. Her mind spread out in ripples, and she became the mesh that held a universe created by human thought. She almost seemed translucent, as if part of her had transferred into the ghostly web that spanned Kyle space.
    Come , she thought.
    The Chair answered without words, only an implicit sense that it understood her request. Dehya went to work then, creating and re-creating the web. She built new nodes, made repairs, and established real-space gates into Kyle space. She tended the fluxes and flows of data and thought, tracing patterns, spanning a star-flung empire. She was always watching, always moving, the Shadow Pharaoh who went everywhere, including places no one else could access, probably some that no one else even knew existed.
    Always, as she worked, she also searched for clues about how Vitarex Raziquon had infiltrated Lyshriol and captured Eldrin's father. They could never ask Vitarex. One of Eldrin's younger brothers, gentle Shannon, had rescued their father. Only fourteen at the time, Shannon was the dreamer of the family, smallest and least warlike of the Valdoria sons—and yet he was the one who had murdered Vitarex to avenge their father.
    The Aristo had taken his secrets to his grave. Now Dehya's mind flowed around the edges of secured Trader meshes, looking for anything that might unravel the knot of how Vitarex had trespassed on Lyshriol. The same thought drove her that hung like a specter over all of them; if the Traders could violate the Imperialate stronghold of Lyshriol, no place was safe.
    Eldrin felt her fatigue. She was responsible for a system
    that served trillions of people. Any telop could monitor the web, but her job went much deeper. She created it—and ensured it survived.
    Kurj also worked the web as a Dyad member. With it, he built the Imperialate military into a sleek, deadly machine that even the Traders, with their greater military resources, couldn't defeat. Dehya was the Assembly Key, linking the web to the government: Kurj was the Military Key, linking it to ISC. Dehya had nuance: Kurj had blunt power. Dehya was the Mind of the Web: Kurj was its Fist. Together, they held together the meshes that made Skolia an interstellar power.
    It wasn't enough.
    They were exhausted. Two people, no matter how driven, couldn't keep up with the ever-changing demands of that voracious mesh, which added billions of networks per hour. Eldrin knew the truth no one admitted, that the Assembly kept quiet, that ISC buried. No one