The Timeweb Chronicles: Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus Read online

  It might still work, if the old man died of his head injury.

  On the bier beside her, Prince Saito groaned again. Francella felt like stuffing something in his mouth to shut him up, but resisted the temptation. She would take the rational course, not letting her emotions get the better of her.

  Chapter Nine

  We Parviis are the most powerful of all galactic races.

  And, with good reason, the most secretive.

  —Woldn, Eye of the Swarm

  A towering black cloud hung over Canopa’s central plain like an anvil, threatening to strike the land with a hammer-blow of rain. Summer was late getting underway this year, as the weather had been unseasonably stormy and cold, almost a month into the season. There had been some warm days, but not many.

  As Tesh Kori stood on cobblestones near the center of a large courtyard, she wished her boyfriend did not have such a quick temper. Dr. Hurk Bichette stood with his hands on his hips, shouting at the maintenance man for his country estate. The prominent physician had a strong jaw and closely-set green eyes. A vein bulged and throbbed at his temple, a sign that he was losing control.

  “You’re not paying enough attention to your duties,” Bichette thundered in his basso voice. “It seems that other things interest you more.” He shot a glance in Tesh’s direction and glared at her for an instant before looking away. This courtyard was between the doctor’s palatial home and the stables for his expensive tigerhorses. The buildings were constructed in the classical Canopan style, of smoky-white marble with inlaid ruby and emerald gemstones. A colorful kaleidoscope of imported tulips bloomed in flower beds around the perimeter of the courtyard, and in planter boxes on the balconies of the three-story main house.

  The target of Dr. Bichette’s rage, Anton Glavine, wore a short blue-and-white tunic buttoned down the front, with high, tight leggings, and black boots. Remaining calm all through the verbal onslaught, the blond, mustachioed maintenance man stood taller than the doctor, and stared down at him dispassionately, saying nothing in response.

  Tesh tried to be understanding, but in recent weeks she had been growing increasingly irritated with her boyfriend’s possessive, even paranoid, attitude. Bichette seemed to fear that he might be losing her affections to this rough-and-tumble young upstart, who enjoyed tramping around in the woods and living off the land. Glavine—only twenty years old—had been working on the opulent estate, performing handyman tasks and yard work.

  Concerned that the situation would escalate, Tesh stepped forward and said, “Hurk, he’s hardly spoken to me at all. I assure you, there’s nothing for you to worry … “

  “You stay out of this,” he snapped. With one arm, he shoved her away, and she stumbled backward before regaining her footing.

  The muscles in Glavine’s face tightened. He studied Tesh, as if to make certain she was all right.

  Standing off to one side with her arms folded across her chest, Tesh had to admit to herself that she was physically attracted to Glavine. With a tan, ruddy complexion and hazel eyes, he carried himself with an air of maturity. Despite his youth, he was well-spoken and knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects. He had a tendency to exude an air of arrogance, though, and this seemed to grate on Dr. Bichette at times.

  Human males have interesting means of combat, Tesh thought.

  She hoped this pair didn’t come to blows, but she had seen other Human men fight for her attentions, and even an unfortunate instance where one man had killed another. Among her own Parvii race this sort of verbal … and potentially physical … battling never occurred. But her true identity remained a complete secret here on the merchant prince planet of Canopa. With long black hair, emerald green eyes, and a full figure, Tesh looked like an attractive Human woman of around twenty-seven years.

  But all of her people looked Human, with one significant exception. Parviis were exceedingly tiny, no taller than the little finger of a typical humanus ordinaire. In order to conceal their true identities when traveling to foreign planets such as this one, the diminutive humanoids used a personal magnification system that made each one of them look as large as the Humans of the merchant prince worlds. The ingenious apparatus, undetectable to scanners or the most sophisticated scientific instruments, even caused anyone touching Tesh’s “skin” to think it was real, and permitted her to experience sensory feelings. Her projected skin and hair, and the atomic structure of the clothing she wore, were in reality crackling molecular energy fields, technologically-created illusions that involved no magic whatsoever.

  Emerging from her thoughts, she noticed she that the doctor was taking a deep breath and gazing off into the distance. After several moments he resumed talking, in a lower, more controlled tone. He seemed to be holding back a little, perhaps because he knew that he could not easily find another person who would maintain the structures on the large estate as well as Glavine. In the few months that the young man had worked on the property, he had already completed important repairs to the larger of two stable buildings.

  Among other operations here, Dr. Bichette provided a tigerhorse stud service for nobles on the merchant prince planets. This had been his family business for centuries, begun by a great-great grandfather and continued to the present day as a highly successful enterprise. Bichette himself had extensive veterinary knowledge, in addition to the medical services he offered to important noblemen and their ladies. A renowned medical expert with a handful of powerful clients, he was Saito Watanabe’s personal physician. He also directed CorpOne’s Medical Research Division.

  Presuming that the dispute between the men would dissipate, Tesh went inward again. She did this sometimes in order to revisit the fondest places of her memory and heart, and for deeper ruminations, to better understand her position in a cosmos of staggering dimensions. The voices of the men droned on, a fuzzy background noise in her mind.

  Linked inextricably to the fate of her own people, Tesh could extricate herself somewhat from them during occasional inward journeys in search of her own personal identity, but these were no more than ephemeral trips of the mind, vagrant sparks of thought that were soon washed away in the streams of time. She was linked to every other Parvii, part of a collective organism that stretched into the most distant sectors of the galaxy, into light and into darkness.

  The personal magnification system of each Parvii provided only superficial benefits, a defense mechanism for each segment of the much larger organism that allowed it to avoid detection in certain situations … and thus to survive.

  The Parviis were a powerful race. Secretly, they held dominion over another galactic race, the Aopoddae, that fleet of podship spacecraft that carried travelers and goods across the entire galaxy. One tiny Parvii could, in fact, pilot a much larger sentient pod through deep space. It had been this way for countless millennia, since the early moments following the Moment of Creation. And Tesh was herself a pilot. She had learned her skill from an early age, in the time-honored method by which all children of her race were trained.

  However, since there were many more Parviis than podships, she had a great deal of time off-duty … as much as a decade without interruption. During the current interlude she had been getting to know Human men better, while on previous breaks she had dated the men of other star systems. By galactic standards she was quite old, much more than she appeared to be. It was like this with all of her kinsmen, but each Parvii was not eternal. On average they lived for twenty or twenty-five standard centuries, and sometimes for as long as thirty.

  Parviis were a traveling breed, galactic gypsies without a homeworld. They lived all over the cosmos, and communicated with one another across vast distances through a mysterious, arcane medium that was known by many appellations, the most common of which was Timeweb.

  Timeweb.

  Even after the seven-plus centuries of her life, the thought of the gossamer connective tissue between star systems never failed to amaze and confound her. The web meant so many things beyond its phys
ical reality.

  A shout startled Tesh to awareness. It was the deep voice of Dr. Bichette, and she saw him shove Glavine in the chest. The younger man, much stronger than his feisty, smaller aggressor, hardly moved backward at all. Enraged, Bichette took a wild punch, which Glavine eluded with athletic ease, and then grabbed both arms of his boss to restrain him.

  “Let go of me!” Bichette demanded, as he struggled unsuccessfully against the stronger man. “If you value your job, take your filthy hands off me!”

  Instead, Glavine spun him around and forced him toward a wrought-alloy bench on one side of the patio. “Our relationship is no longer employer and employee,” Glavine said in a flat tone. He glanced at Tesh, and then looked away as he shoved the doctor onto the bench. “Sit there until you’re ready to talk reasonably.”

  “Nothing happened between you two?” Bichette looked first at her, then back at him.

  In response, both of them shook their heads. But Tesh knew it was a lie; there had been sparks between her and the young maintenance man, a mutual attraction that they had not acted upon. Not yet. Parvii women, like their Human counterparts, knew such things intuitively.

  With a sudden, startling clang, a heavy metal door slammed open on the perimeter of the courtyard, and a heavyset man in a purple uniform burst through. Wearing a frilly white shirt with lace at the collar and sleeves, he was a messagèro, one of the bonded couriers who worked for the Merchant Prince Alliance. Breathing heavily and perspiring, although his run had not been far from the circular parking area outside, he bowed as he reached Bichette.

  “Doctor Sir,” he gasped, “Most urgent news. A car awaits you.”

  Narrowing his eyes, Bichette accepted a pyruz from him, a rolled sheet of white ishay bark on which matters of life and death were written. The doctor touched an identity plate on the seal, causing the pyruz to unfurl and become rigid. He read it, then rose to his feet.

  “We must continue this later,” Bichette said to Glavine. “I am certain we can resolve it.” Without another word, he handed the pyruz to Tesh and strode out of the courtyard, behind the sweating messagèro.

  Tesh read the communication.

  “Prince Saito has been gravely injured,” she said to Anton Glavine. But as their gazes met, she knew they were thinking of something else, with each of them wondering where their relationship would go from there.

  They stood near each other, and drew closer, with almost imperceptible movements. Out at the front entrance, the maglev car hummed. Then, with a high-pitched whine, the vehicle left.

  Anton took Tesh in his arms and drew her to him. She had been waiting for this moment, expecting it. However, she had learned that one of the interesting things about physical relationships was that neither the timing nor the exact circumstances were ever known in advance. Of course, Tesh reminded herself, it was that way with the rest of life as well. But she had never anticipated anything quite as much as this particular first kiss, had never wondered about anything so much.

  As Anton held her tightly, the Parvii woman had the pleasurable sensation of floating away, on a journey to a far-off place.

  Chapter Ten

  It is said of merchant prince schooners that they are as numerous as raindrops from a cloudburst. The small red-and-gold vessels, filled with the most wondrous products imaginable, are transported by podship to all sectors of the galaxy.

  —Jannero’s Starships, Tenth edition

  On Timian One, the stocky, gray-haired Doge Lorenzo del Velli sat upon his great throne, perusing a folio that his Cipher Secretary had just delivered to him, the translation of an intercepted Mutati communiqué. The gangly secretary, Triphon Soro, stood at the foot of the dais, awaiting instructions.

  Such messages (which the Mutati Kingdom sent by courier since they did not have nehrcom transceivers) were of interest to Lorenzo, but he always eyed them suspiciously. The shapeshifters were tricky, and had been known to plant false information.

  The missive was brief, and he reread it several times, then spoke it aloud with a query in his voice, “‘Demolio is almost ready.’” Leaning forward a little, he handed it back to Soro. “What in the inferno does this mean?”

  Shrugging, the lanky man responded, “No one knows. It is the first time I have ever heard the word, but it might be a code name for something. Perhaps the letters: d-e-m-o-l-i-o, represent a deeper cipher, or an acronym. We are working on it.”

  “Well get on with it,” the Doge snapped. He waved a hand dismissively, causing the royal functionary to scurry away.

  With a sigh, the aged leader retrieved a rolled parchment from a golden receiving tray at his elbow. He opened the document and let it roll out so that it stretched all the way to the plush crimson carpet at his feet.

  The immense chair on which he sat, the legendary Aquastar Throne, had been cut in the shape of a merchant schooner. Presented to Lorenzo the Magnificent by a wealthy nobleman in exchange for the granting of a lucrative trade route, it was the largest piece of blue aquastar ever found, and one of the Wonders of the Galaxy.

  At the side of the royal dais and only peripherally noticed by the Doge, his Royal Attaché fidgeted, having signaled that he needed to speak with his superior … an entreaty that had been ignored. Dressed in an oversized gold and platinum robe, Pimyt was a Hibbil, a soft-fleshed creature with black-and-white fur that made him look somewhat like an Earthian panda bear. Despite the cuddly appearance of his galactic race, they were vicious fighters, and extremely fast; no one could outrun them. Over the course of centuries, they had formed political and business alliances with Humans, and were most renowned for their innovative machines, which they manufactured on their Cluster Worlds and provided to Human allies at reasonable costs.

  Pimyt was an extraordinary individual. Even though he was not Human, he was so trusted that he had been made the Regent of the Merchant Prince Alliance decades ago, when the princes on the Council of Forty could not agree on the election of a new leader. The aging Hibbil had flecks of gray fur and a thick, salt-and-pepper beard. His red eyes still remained bright and youthful, and at the moment they flashed impatiently as he moved around restlessly. He did not like to be kept waiting, but Doge Lorenzo sometimes made him do so anyway, just to remind him who was in charge.

  “Your Magnificence,” Pimyt said, “if you could just … “ He paused, as Lorenzo raised a hand to quiet him, and read the long parchment.

  The document was a long list of “requests” from the Princess Meghina of Siriki, whom he had married after divorcing three of his previous five wives and executing two others. He had married all of them for political reasons, to cement alliances between the noble houses and to gain assets. Everything was a business proposition for him, and the current spouse was the most expensive of all. Still, Meghina had undeniable physical talents to go with her excellent pedigree, and he intended to keep her around. This did not mean that he was faithful to her, or that he expected her to be, either. She was, after all, a celebrated courtesan … and they had reached an understanding in the beginning of their relationship that neither of them would ever be tethered. For his own part, Lorenzo had always liked to “dabble” with the females of the various galactic races.

  In her mid-thirties, the Royal Consort was much younger than her husband, and he had given her virtually everything. On their wedding day Meghina had asked for her own golden palace, and he had commissioned one for her on the Human-ruled planet of Siriki, complete with two hundred servants and a private zoo of exotic, laboratory-bred animals.

  Now she was pressing him for a larger ballroom and a royal hall to entertain important guests. The new construction would require adding another wing onto her palace. She also wanted a more modern stable for her thoroughbred tigerhorses, and sculpted carriages to be pulled by those powerful animals. This would require new access gates for the coaches to enter and leave the grounds, and a spiral ramp to traverse a steep incline down to the cobblestone streets of the village below.

  L
orenzo fiddled with the gold medallion that hung from his neck. He was not feeling well this morning, from an attack of the gout. Within the hour his physician had administered a kaser injection, which had dulled, but not eliminated, the pain and swelling in his feet. He took a deep, exasperated breath and continued reading.

  Meghina’s document included a construction cost estimate, which he presumed she had inflated grossly—one of her many tricks to extract extra money from him. Adding to the expense, she wanted a fast-paced construction schedule, requiring some of the highest paid artisans in the galaxy. Fortunately, Doge Lorenzo had no shortage of funds. In his position at the top of the merchant prince food chain, he had an efficient tax collection network that brought in a massive flow of money. All of it was managed by his Finance Minister, but the Doge—ever cautious and suspicious—had an elaborate system of checks and balances to prevent embezzlement.

  In her transmittal, the Princess explained why it all had to be done quickly. She had given birth to the first of seven daughters for the Doge when she was only fifteen, and now Annyette—the eldest—was making her society debut. The party for her would be a grand affair, with guests invited from most of the galactic races … with the exception of the Mutatis and their allies, of course.

  With a sigh of acceptance, Lorenzo signed the parchment and instructed Pimyt to attend to the necessary details. As the Doge gave his orders, it amused him slightly to see the Hibbil twitching and clearing his throat, wishing to say whatever was on his mind but having to wait.

  “Yes, yes,” Pimyt said when he had heard the commands. “I will attend to all of them.”

  “Immediately.”

  Confusion reigned in his expression. “Yes, of course, but don’t you wish to hear … “

  “One matter at a time. I don’t want anything to be forgotten. You would not wish to displease me or the Princess Meghina, would you?”