Hundreds of thousands of robot ships swept past the ruins of the LOC and streaked toward Earth. The first wave of enemy battleships had already started the devastation there. From their hiding place, Krieger could hear terrified transmissions as the populace begged for help or rescue, calling on the CDF to protect them—although General Keah had already done her best. A handful of warships had survived, but they wouldn’t last long if they continued to attack the immense robot fleet head-on.
“We’re safe here, aren’t we?” asked one of the workers, as if Dr. Krieger could see into the future and make an accurate pronouncement.
Gwendine cut the man off. “As long as we lie low.”
The shadow cloud swelled huge and black, filling an enormous volume of space as it moved, coming closer.
The Shana Rei let the robots be their cannon fodder and take the brunt of the resistance like rabid dogs that would attack any target. The black nebula oozed through from another dimension, surrounding the cluster of hexagonal cylinders like a cocoon. The cloud swelled and roiled, growing blacker and larger, as if it drew strength from the destruction.
Maybe it does, Krieger thought. If the Shana Rei were entropy incarnate, perhaps they did feed on mayhem. That would explain a lot.
The huge cloud began to move toward Earth, drifting close to the sun-bomb factories.
From their hiding place, Krieger and his workers stared as the hex ships cruised past. The facility computer systems began to flicker, and the lights went down as the backwash of Shana Rei chaos began to ruin their power systems. One of the satellite domes frantically tried to send a signal, but it jittered into a hiss of static: “… life support—” Then it fell silent.
Gwendine shook her head. “Comm systems are down too.”
With their lights out and systems down, Krieger could see through the windowports, the black cloud and the creatures of darkness inside it, rolling forward.
“Dr. Krieger,” said a technician in a warbly voice. She swallowed hard. “All our life support is offline.”
It didn’t surprise him. His mind raced as he reached the obvious conclusion. As the Shana Rei shadow cloud cruised past, all the technical systems would be ruined, and Krieger doubted their major systems could be repaired in time. These secondary facilities had small reserve power blocks, but not enough to keep them alive for more than half a day. Without immediate backup, they were doomed.
He gazed across space at the silent glowing wreckage of CDF headquarters and saw the battle beginning at Earth. Thousands of ships tried to evacuate while countless robots closed in, intent on preventing them from getting away.
No one would bother to rescue a handful of workers in these hidden facilities. Krieger knew they were stranded here. They were already dead … a slow, cold, suffocating death.
He let out a long, determined sigh. “Oh hell, I was never good at keeping a low profile anyway.”
He looked at Gwendine, who seemed extremely annoyed, but for once, the annoyance was not directed at him. “I know what you’re saying,” she muttered.
“We have forty-two sun bombs—nuclear-driven, and we know they’re still functional even in the vicinity of the Shana Rei.” He drew a deep breath. “We can either die here quiet and whimpering, with nobody to notice, or we can go out with a bang.” He nodded toward the ominous obsidian cylinders that loomed so close as they moved past on the way to Earth. “Look up there. That is why I designed the sun bombs in the first place.”
The workers turned to him, pale and terrified, some determined, most of them stunned. Gwendine just said, “This isn’t a democracy, Krieger. You’re in charge, so make up your mind.”
He did.
Before the Shana Rei could pass too far away, when the hex cylinders were at the optimal distance for a concentrated surprise barrage, Jocko Krieger launched the sun bombs. All of them.
The glowing pinwheel spheres spun out of their storage depot. The mechanical launchers were sufficient to activate the cores and hurl them within range. Even if the entropy scrambled their guidance, Krieger knew he didn’t have to be precise. It was close enough for a small exploding star.
Crackling, sparking, and expanding with activated plasma, forty-two of the devices sprayed out in a deadly hailstorm toward the Shana Rei. “I just want to see that we were effective, at least for a second. Full filters on the windowports!”
The view darkened, momentarily blinding them, but then the sun bombs detonated like firecrackers in blindingly fast succession. The shadow cloud filled with newborn suns. Some explosions directly impacted the black cylinders, while others simply burst into a searing flare nearby, and the furious shock wave ripped into the hexagonal sides.
The Shana Rei ships shrank, clearly damaged, some broken apart, but the sun bombs faded all too quickly.
The still-powerful shadow cloud lurched toward them, but Krieger was grinning.
“You always were a showoff,” said Gwendine.
Waves of entropy hammered the station as well as the satellite facilities. All technical systems had already failed, but now even the physical integrity began to fall apart. Chaos increased. Seals crumbled. Joints collapsed. Structural members dropped away, and within moments all systems failed catastrophically.
The shadows engulfed the facility as it fell apart, hull plates spinning off into space, atmosphere venting explosively, fuel reservoirs exploding, until even the components disintegrated into their individual atoms.
Then the wounded cloud moved on toward Earth.
CHAPTER
52
JESS TAMBLYN
Inside Academ, the wentals were awakening with an energetic glow. The elemental force had been mostly dormant for nearly two decades, but their defensive response against Elisa Enturi had shown that they were indeed aware, even agitated.
After he and Cesca finished classes and sent the students to conduct engineering experiments with the Teacher compies, they paused at an open ice patch on the sealed corridor wall. Working with his fingers, Jess peeled up the edge of the flexible polymer film to expose the naked ice, and the pale glow brightened. He and Cesca touched the frozen surface.
“It feels so weak,” Cesca said.
Jess sensed a definite tingle there, a fizzing undertone of energy boiling up. “But stronger than it has felt in a long time. I wish we knew what they’re thinking.”
Years ago, their bodies had been infused with the elemental water, but the uncontrolled force had made their very touch deadly. He and Cesca had expended all that energy when they fought and defeated the faeros. Now, as Jess touched the pure ice, it seemed yielding. He pushed harder, and the ice gave way, parting for him. Cesca’s hand sank in next to his. Together, with their hands surrounded, they could feel throbbing, like the heartbeat of the comet.
“Are they awakening because of the Shana Rei?” Cesca asked. “The shadows already fought the hydrogues inside Golgen, and they’ve attacked the verdani and the faeros. Could the wentals be at risk, too?”
“Maybe they’re waking up to join the fight.” Jess felt a grim chill. “That means Academ might be in danger. And our students.”
The Teacher compy KA met them in the corridor, fully repaired from Elisa’s stunner blast. “You have a visitor, Jess Tamblyn and Cesca Peroni. Someone wishes to withdraw a student. Seymour Dominic requests his daughter Kellidee to work in their bloater-extraction operations.”
Hurrying back to their office, Jess and Cesca found a lanky, dark-haired Roamer waiting for them. Seymour Dominic wore a comfortable jumpsuit embroidered proudly with clan markings. Though he was withdrawing a student, Seymour did not look angry; in fact, he was beaming. “I need Kellidee, maybe for just a year, maybe permanently. I couldn’t say. This is an opportunity we can’t pass up.”
Jess remembered Kellidee, a beautiful thirteen-year-old girl with a sharp mind and a grasp of mathematics. “She was just about to start advanced mechanics and intermediate electric circuits. It’s not a good time to pull her out.�
�
“But we don’t know how much time we’ll have,” said Seymour. “It’s an ekti rush out there. Have you seen the reports of all the stardrive fuel? Clan Dominic got a sweet deal on pumping and transportation equipment, and we’ve staked our claim on a large bloater cluster. Nowadays you can barely find a bucket and a straw available, because every scrap is sold out, but our operations are already going full-scale. We could really use Kellidee’s help.”
“Every clan has the right to withdraw their children,” Cesca pointed out. “But I hope you’ll bring her back. We’ll miss her around here.”
“Or I could just hire a set of tutors. We’ve delivered four loads of ekti-X to Newstation already, and our scouts have found two more bloater clusters. The faster we get stardrive fuel to market, the more money we’ll make.” He was practically dancing with excitement. “With one delivery, my clan made as much as we earned in the entire past year. This is unbelievable.” He looked from side to side. “Do you know how many other clans have set up ekti operations?”
“A lot of them rushed off to get started even before they knew what they were doing,” Jess said.
Dominick groaned. “That means there’ll be many more shipments coming in this week.” He glanced at the chronometer on the office wall. “Can we hurry up and get Kellidee, please? I need to get back out to the operations.”
“KA is bringing her right now,” Cesca said. “She’ll need a few minutes to gather her things.”
Seymour fidgeted. “Leave it all behind. We can buy her a new set of everything ten times over.”
Jess softened his voice. “Give her a little time to say goodbye to her friends, Seymour. Think about your daughter. She’s very popular.”
The man’s shoulders slumped. “I’m just so excited … so anxious. At peak operation, we could drain the entire cluster in another two weeks. I’m already setting up our next extraction field.”
Cesca looked troubled. “Like loggers clear-cutting a forest. Do you even know what bloaters are?”
“Of course,” Seymour said. “They’re an easy source of ekti-X.”
Kellidee Dominic arrived, flushed and confused, but she brightened when she saw her father. He swept her up in a hug. “We’re going out into space, little girl.”
“But I’m in the middle of a class project.”
“You have more than a class project to worry about—we have our most important clan operations ever, and you’re going to be part of them.” He pulled out a display pad and showed her images of the gray-green nodules drifting in space, hundreds of clan Dominic ships, arrays of ekti tanks.
Her interest was piqued, and in the end, Kellidee needed little convincing.
Jess compiled the young woman’s class records, while Cesca gathered a year’s worth of lesson plans, which Kellidee promised to follow in her spare time. Seymour was jabbering with infectious enthusiasm as he led his daughter back to the Academ docking bay.
After they were gone, Jess was both amazed and uneasy. “I didn’t realize the operations were so significant. If there are fifteen or twenty extraction fields like that, how many more bloater clusters can there be?”
Jess touched the wall of their office complex, where he could sense the wental ice even through the insulating film. The water elementals were brooding and uncommunicative, but restless. Through the faint contact, he could feel something larger, something mysterious out there.
CHAPTER
53
ZHETT KELLUM
While at Newstation with nothing to do, Zhett had found a ship’s log from Orli Covitz and Garrison Reeves, which had been automatically loaded without comment into the station database. Some months earlier, the Prodigal Son had encountered a large distribution of bloaters on the outskirts of the Ikbir system, long chains of nodules that extended into interstellar space. No one remembered that reference because, at the time, bloaters had been mere curiosities. Zhett hoped she was the only one who had spotted that notation.…
Now, she, Patrick, and an eager Toff flew to the Ikbir system to lay claim to all those bloaters before any other Roamer clan could. She’d had enough drama in her life, and she just wanted a nice quiet cluster of innocuous gas bags to harvest.
Patrick shut down their stardrive far outside the Ikbir system to begin their search. The ship had decent sensors, and they knew what they were looking for, but it was tedious work—something both Zhett and Patrick agreed was a perfect assignment for Kristof. At first the teenager considered it a reward, but after four hours of staring at nothing he started to complain. Zhett would hear none of it, though. He had volunteered for this mission, and he would have to accept his assignment as any adult Roamer would.
At last, Toff spotted a string of bloaters which led like breadcrumbs toward the star. “Look, if we connect the dots and follow them into the system, there’s bound to be a cluster closer in.”
Patrick tousled his son’s hair, then activated the engines to follow the line of bloaters down toward the bright white sun. Closer to the heart of the Ikbir system, they found exactly what they were looking for: thousands of bloaters drifting together like a globular cluster of fish eggs. Flares of light flashed from one nucleus to another in a seemingly random pattern.
Drenched in nourishing radiation near Ikbir’s sun, the bloaters looked different, however. Rather than seeming inert like the other silent and drifting bloaters, these moved, rotated, pulsed, squirmed. Their nuclei became visible in the afterglow of the spontaneous flashes. And the crowded grouping began to fission.
“What’s happening?” Toff asked. “Those are our bloaters!”
Zhett guided the ship closer, but stopped at a safe distance as the nodules squeezed, swelled, and pulled apart into dumbbell shapes, which then split apart into two bloaters. The nodules doubled, and then each of the new ones swelled in the Ikbir sunlight, quickly growing to normal size. Before long, even the new bloaters began the same process of fissioning, quadrupling their original numbers.
“Look how fast they’re reproducing,” Patrick said. “We’ll have a larger cluster to harvest than we imagined. That’s all stardrive fuel for the taking.”
Zhett began to map out how they would bring the refurbished Osquivel equipment here to begin extraction activities. She imagined how fast the fortunes of clan Kellum could recover from their current financial disaster.
After the nodules had multiplied and the cluster became a full swarm, the bloaters changed again. Their nuclei continued to flash with more frequent bursts of lightning, as if they were sending Morse-code signals. Then the newborn bloater nodules flattened, stretching out from roughly spherical sacks to spread their membranes into broad wings, like stellar manta rays.
Zhett’s voice was tinged with awe. “By the Guiding Star, what the hell are those things?”
“It’s a metamorphosis. Are they … alive?” Patrick asked.
Toff frowned. “How are we supposed to harvest them if they do that?”
The newly transformed bloaters became more active. They extended their enormous lobes and began to move in slow graceful arcs. The bloaters turned themselves, extending sail-like membranes to catch the solar energy. Then, like a flock of magnificent cosmic avians, they spread apart and soared away.
The entire cluster, and all of that potential ekti-X, simply flew off while Zhett watched.
* * *
Toff surprised them with an idea. Instead of following the line of bloaters toward Ikbir’s star, he suggested flying in the opposite direction, tracking the breadcrumbs farther out into space. “If the sunlight triggered the fissioning, then we should just go into deeper space, catch them before that happens.”
“Worth checking out,” Zhett said. Actually, she loved the idea.
Patrick piloted them along the outbound line of straggler bloaters, and Kristof’s face could barely contain his satisfied grin when they did indeed discover a new island in a sea of stars—several hundred bloaters bobbing along, and swollen with ekti-X … ripe f
or the harvest.
“Back to Osquivel, then?” Patrick asked.
“You read my mind,” Zhett said. “We haul our equipment here and start extracting as fast as we can.”
CHAPTER
54
LEE ISWANDER
Lee Iswander was neither meek nor humble, but when he traveled to Newstation with a full load of ekti-X, he had to swallow his pride and straighten his backbone. The Roamer clans would try to shame him because he had stepped outside the bounds of what they considered acceptable or wise.
He would endure their scorn. He would face them, show them how strong and determined an Iswander was. Again.
He didn’t care what they thought. They had insulted him repeatedly, brushed him aside. Even though he came from a once-respected Roamer clan, they didn’t like his tactics, his attitude, or his ambition. He was not one of them. Roamers had always struggled against adversity, crowing about their successes and sharing their tragedies, but none of that seemed to count when Lee Iswander was involved.
They had celebrated his cheap and plentiful stardrive fuel, and now he would go to Newstation and see if they would do business with him, or if their grudge would make them even more stupid than usual. Oh they hate me … until they need me.
Instead of taking his private yacht, he drove an unwieldy tug that carried a large array of fuel cylinders, a load that was more significant than any fuel shipments the upstart operations were bringing in. Even though he was no longer the exclusive provider, it would be enough ekti-X to draw attention.
And Iswander wanted to draw attention.
On approach, he transmitted to Newstation traffic operations, “Requesting a commercial dock for a load of ekti-X as well as a VIP landing berth for my personal ship.”
Eternity's Mind Page 24