The Phoenix in Flight by Sherwood Smith, Dave Trowbridge

of its physical properties as
Cheruld himself had been until he picked it up. “ Heavy but light”... He
probably thought of it as a kind of soap bubble. I wonder if he even
knew I once studied briefly under a man who’d actually seen the Heart in
person?
    Likely not. It wasn’t in his CV.
    Cheruld flexed his trembling hands. No, Dol’jhar had seen
only the noderunning talent that had gained him his title, the almost
unconscious, intuitive grasp of structure that enabled him to explore the
deepest reaches of the DataNet—that, and his connection, through Sara, to
Semion and Galen.
    Galen, the Panarch’s second son, the poet, the dreamer with
his quicksilver sensitivity, had a core of very real strength. He had quickly
won both Cheruld and Sara’s hearts, that summer years ago, during their
university days: it seemed only right when Cheruld’s beloved Sara fell in love
with Galen.
    Of course Galen would make a better Panarch, but it had long
seemed that Semion was the Panarch’s chosen heir; his influence over the Navy
more than implied it. So Cheruld had gladly joined the Poets, and not long
after, had been promoted into his sensitive position at Qoholeth, the closest
Anachronics Hub to Dol’jhar.
    The lies and insinuations and manipulations all seemed so
obvious, now.
    He shook his head, then regretted it as pain flared behind
his eyes. He was forsworn, but he would have his revenge on those who’d used
him. It had taken him three shifts to undo the work of years, stretched his
noderunning talents to the utmost in an attempt to negate the web Dol’jhar had
spun around him, and he might still win.
    Maybe. Sara, the one person he was fairly certain he could
still reach—but even if the tortuous method of communication he’d been forced
to use to reach her hadn’t been compromised, given her hatred of Semion, what
could he say to convince her to stop the heir presumptive’s assassination? She
wouldn’t understand the significance of the Heart of Kronos. Who would? Very
few. He needed more time...
    But he was out of time.
    Cheruld’s hands flew over the console again, and a brightly
colored space-time graph windowed up on the screen. Red lines signified
Dol’jhar’s plots, green the progress of the information he would shortly
dispatch to the authorities on Arthelion and Lao Tse, to Galen’s Talgarth, and
to Sara on Narbon. Pale blue spheres, fuzzy with the indeterminacy imposed by
relativistic communications, indicated the various planets. The red lines fell
short of Narbon, and Talgarth; the blue spheres of both Semion’s and Galen’s
worlds were transfixed by green shafts of light and life. Both lines reached
Lao Tse, where the Panarch’s well-publicized schedule would have him, at the
same time. A red line pierced Arthelion ahead of the green. Recalling what he knew
of Brandon nyr-Arkad, Cheruld felt only a trace of regret.
    Sara might feel Brandon’s death more keenly. Cheruld had
been careful to keep from her the knowledge that his death, too, was part of
the conspiracy. His message was phrased to lead her to assume that he’d
discovered the plot against Brandon just as he had that against Galen. She must
not be distracted by grief from doing what she would hate—they both would hate.
Need was greater.
    He closed the window with a stab at the console. As Aegios
Prime of an Anachronics Hub, which rationalized the timing errors that
inevitably built up in a network based on ship-borne data, he knew too well the
fallibility of the graph. At this moment—a concept, he reflected grimly, that
itself had no meaning—someone else halfway across the Thousand Suns could
demand a graph of the same situation, and get a different answer. The DataNet
and all its complex calculations of Standard Time were just a gloss of the
unyielding vastness of space-time. But humanity persisted in imposing order on
disorder, insisted on comprehension of the incomprehensible...and he
could hope.
    It was all he had