“We can’t just run away.” Nikko looked very pale. “We don’t know . . . We don’t know for sure—”
Seeing how the creatures had wiped out the settlement, she decided there was no point in negotiating. She started taking potshots and blasted a pair of individual craft into debris. Another wave of the component craft streaked after them like bees.
The individual Klikiss units returned fire, shooting a high-intensity plasma burst unlike anything Tasia had ever seen. By making an extreme course correction that threw Nikko against the wall, Robb avoided the blast. He accelerated and dodged, scanning the wrinkled landscape, but saw no good place to hide among the arroyos and rock outcroppings.
“You’ve got no reason to complain about not having enough targets, Tamblyn. Stop gawking and keep firing.”
Tasia responded with a vengeance, three shots and three more destroyed Klikiss ships. “Hey, our new weapons work like a charm.” The alien vessels closed in, and four of them opened fire at once. A powerful bolt scored the underside of the Osquivel’s hull; another grazed their engines, making Robb’s cockpit instruments jump wildly.
Pulling himself forward against the heavy acceleration, Nikko slapped the comm system, activating their emergency signal and locator beacon. “Mayday, mayday! We’re under attack by the Klikiss.”
“Who do you expect is going hear us, Nikko?” Tasia asked.
“Anyone who’s still alive down there. There must be somebody.”
“There’s a difference between being optimistic and being clueless. If they had any way of fighting the bugs, wouldn’t they have done it already?”
Robb scolded her. “Don’t yell at the kid. What have you got against positive thinking?”
The Osquivel gained altitude, and Tasia saw two more vessels coming down toward them from orbit. How many more were up there in space? “They’re blocking us in.”
She shot at the two overhead ships, ruining one, and focused on four more that came at them from the sides. The alien craft were like oversized angry gnats in the air. Robb was hell-bent, diving toward the ground, streaking eastward. The sun had already set, and they would be in full night before long. Fortunately, they were far enough from the ruined settlement that no more alien ships joined the pursuers. The insect hive city down there had been chaotic and incomprehensible, and she wondered if the Klikiss had suffered some sort of recent turmoil.
The alien ships still after them were relentless, firing again and again. A solid shot struck the already-damaged engine, and the Osquivel lurched downward. “That isn’t good,” Robb said.
Tasia concentrated her fire on the remaining attackers. “Only five left. I can probably take them out.” As if to belie her assertion, another shot struck the Osquivel and damaged the good engine.
“We’re not going to make it much farther,” Robb said. Around them, the sky had grown dim with twilight. They raced onward.
Tasia saw this as target practice, barely bothering to breathe. She wrecked two more Klikiss ships—three left. But Robb was unable to maneuver. He could barely control their descent. “We’re going down!”
Their albatross flight path lured the Klikiss ships closer, ready for the kill. Tasia could have taken a shot, but first she let them come nearer. The Klikiss, seeing that they had mortally damaged the Osquivel, swept in, driving them downward.
“Come on, you bastards, just a little bit closer.” The component ships obliged. With a yelp of triumph, she hit the weapons controls and fired as many blasts as she could, as fast as the Osquivel could generate the pulses. All three enemy ships exploded in the air. “Gotcha!”
“If you’re going to do a victory dance, do it quick,” Robb said. “Ten seconds until we hit—and don’t expect it to be a soft landing.” The night-shadowed terrain rose up toward them, and Robb tried to head for a wide canyon. “But don’t worry. I practiced this in the simulator.”
“Five years ago.” Tasia braced herself. “Shizz, hang on!”
The Osquivel scoured the bottom of the canyon with its belly, scraping rocks, spewing dirt, slewing right and left. An avalanche of sound reverberated through the hull. Anti-flame foam sprayed around the engines. Crash webbing locked down around Tasia like a hunter’s net.
When the ship came to a grinding rest, Tasia shook her head, trying to focus her eyes and clear the ringing from her ears. As Robb shut down the systems and assessed the major damage (one engine off-line, the other ruined, and most of their fuel spilled all over the landscape), Tasia quickly disembarked and circled the ship to see how bad everything looked.
The Osquivel had come to rest near a lonely distant canyon, far from the obliterated colony settlement. “What a mess.”
Nikko dug out the medkit and came out to stand beside her, looking forlorn. “I’ve crashed too many times for someone my age.”
“Most people don’t get a chance to crash more than once.”
The Osquivel still made groaning and clicking noises as it cooled and settled. The fire-suppressant foam fizzed as it soaked into the dry landscape. Otherwise, the Llaro night was very quiet and ominous.
“Some rescue.” Tasia looked around in the gathering dark.
“We wiped out all the ships chasing us,” Nikko pointed out, “so maybe none of the bugs will know where to find us.”
Robb’s face was drawn. “We need to keep watch around the perimeter.”
“I’ll rig weapons for personal defense. I think I can still fire some of the ship’s guns. Let’s hope we managed to, uh, crash unobtrusively.” Tasia suddenly bolted back into the ship, realizing that the emergency locator beacon was still pinging. She disconnected it swiftly, came out, and stood next to Robb. She put her arms around him and hugged him as they stared off into the night.
102 JESS TAMBLYN
Their wental ship flew away from the scarred ice and tragic memories of Jonah 12, leaving behind a glimmering presence on the empty planetoid. The water beings guided them to a colorful, swirling soup of ionized gases and dissociated molecules, a nebula lit by the fires of nearby newborn stars. Jess now knew it was the site of an ancient battlefield where wentals had been torn apart by hydrogues and faeros, their molecules spattered like blood across the emptiness.
“But what sort of war was it?” Cesca asked the water elementals. “Why were you fighting the faeros as well as the hydrogues?”
“I thought the faeros turned against the drogues,” Jess added.
The faeros are allies of no one. They cooperate when it suits them, but they mean only to destroy. Us. The hydrogues. Everything.
The water-bubble ship flitted into the densest knots of vapor, and molecules coalesced around it. Together, Jess and Cesca used their skills in controlling the wentals to reintegrate the scattered water that had once belonged to the elementals, and the globe began to expand. Individual entities formed a collective strength. How many more of the water beings had been spread across the cold vacuum? The silvery ship drank tiny droplets, pulling out pools that would become more wentals. Healing, strengthening, growing, living. Those were concepts and motivations that neither the hydrogues nor the chaotic faeros embraced.
Jess felt a burgeoning satisfaction fill him. Cesca pressed her fingers to the flexible membrane, watching and touching the wentals as they were resurrected. Visiting Jonah 12 had been a vivid reminder of the robot attack, the deaths of all the Roamers there, and how she herself had nearly died. Now they both felt so alive.
As their ship continued to cruise through the nebula, it grew ever larger, absorbing a multitude of anxious voices. We have been rejoined. Now we must be distributed again, disseminated widely.
Jess wasn’t sure if he could find Nikko Chan Tylar or the water-bearer volunteers who had previously helped him spread the wentals. But he had another idea. “We could go to Plumas. My uncles can use the Tamblyn water tankers to distribute these new nebula wentals.”
“While we gather even more,” Cesca added.
When they returned to the ice
moon, Cesca was surprised and delighted to find her father visiting Plumas. He and Caleb Tamblyn often worked together, planned oddball business schemes together, and got into trouble together. Denn Peroni had come back to see that the water mines were now back in business.
In the completely refashioned underground chambers, a smiling Caleb explained, “With the new availability of ekti and plenty of Confederation planets to serve, trade ships are sure going to need the water, oxygen, and other byproducts we provide.” Chill steam puffed from his mouth as he spoke. “Each day, more and more ships dock at our wellheads to fill their reservoirs.”
After trading with the Ildiran Empire, Denn had returned successful—and somehow changed. Even Jess picked up on the difference, sensing an unexpected resonance with the wentals in his own bloodstream.
When Cesca asked her father about it, Denn brushed most questions aside, but he could not stop his eyes from sparkling. “Everything’s different now! That green priest on Ildira, the Hansa engineers, they all changed, like an evolution. They found a new way of thinking and showed it to me.” Though he wore only a light vest and shirt in the frigid underground grotto, he did not appear cold. Though not infused with wental energy, Denn seemed able to sense the elemental beings, hear their thoughts in a way that surprised Jess.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into him.” Caleb shook his head. “But then, he never made much sense to me anyway. Should I worry about it?”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Cesca said. “It’s not . . . threatening or dangerous.”
Denn smiled at his daughter. “Before long, I might even figure out how I can touch you again. Everything used to be a mystery, but now it makes so much more sense.” He clapped a hand on Caleb’s bony shoulder. “We will be happy to distribute the new wentals while you continue your search. We’ll take a Tamblyn tanker and do it ourselves.”
Caleb scowled. “Who are you to offer—”
“I’m the one who lent you the workers and equipment from Osquivel to fix your water mines.”
“Well, that may be so, but we didn’t end up needing them as much as we thought we would. Jess and Cesca did most of it.”
“Good. In that case, why not do them a small favor?” Denn’s grin did not diminish; he seemed entirely at peace. “Paying back a debt is never a waste of time.”
“Well, of course not.“
Later, out on the surface of the frozen moon, Jess directed the segregated nebula wentals to stream away from his bubble and pour into the landed tanker. The revitalized water flowed like a glistening caterpillar, alive as it moved into the hold and spread out to fill every empty space without losing a drop. When the tanker was filled with the energized fluid, Jess and Cesca said their farewells and thanks.
Cesca looked deeply into her father’s eyes, trying to understand what had changed about him. The wentals picked up on a closeness similar to the mental bond she and Jess shared, but this ability was broader, more all-consuming, than the wental connection. Denn seemed happier, stronger, as if he could be closer to her than ever before. “It’s wonderful, Cesca. Don’t ever worry about me.”
“Are you going to explain what happened to you?”
He gave her a strange smile. “Someday. I’m sure the wentals will comprehend it. The worldtrees are starting to. Right now, I need to understand it better myself. When I’m ready, I’ll share this with my daughter, or the Speaker—former Speaker—of the Roamers.”
“In the last year, I haven’t been much of a Speaker or a daughter.”
“You have been everything to me, dear Cesca. By the Guiding Star, don’t ever forget that.”
103 SIRIX
Defeated but not destroyed, broken but still surviving, Sirix struggled to keep his dwindling forces going. The battle group was battered from the clash at Llaro. He had lost many of his ships, Soldier compies, and black robots. The heavy EDF vessels had very little fuel remaining and almost no weaponry.
For the first time, he considered the real possibility of simply hiding, hibernating, burying all of the black robots on some isolated asteroid or moon, and just waiting for a few thousand years. But by that time, Sirix was certain the Klikiss would have swarmed unchecked across the Spiral Arm. He could not abide that, and dogged determination kept him going. There had to be some way.
He stumbled upon an unexpected advantage.
In the vastness of empty space, the prowling robot battleships encountered a lone Roamer cargo escort heavily loaded with ekti tanks. Sirix focused his attention and locked on his enhanced sensors. All of his surviving ships came to full alert.
“We should attack,” Ilkot announced. “Our battle group is desperately in need of stardrive fuel.”
“Our battle group is desperately in need of everything.” Sirix studied the results of their cursory scans, forcing himself to be logical and consider the broader implications. Their very survival was at stake. “By itself, that cargo load is insufficient to fuel our battle group for long. Allow the ship to increase its distance, while we remain just within sensor range. Perhaps if we follow this Roamer craft, it will lead us to an even larger prize.”
“We dare not let it escape.”
“It will not escape.”
As soon as the cargo escort detected the battle group, it deviated from its course and accelerated, regarding them warily, like one animal approaching another at a watering hole. The pilot would have concluded that these ships belonged to the Earth Defense Forces, known rivals of the Roamers.
The robot ships moved along their previous course, letting the Roamer think he had slipped past their sensors. Sirix launched a tiny probe to streak off in the wake of the cargo escort and transmit a directional beacon back. The Roamer continued to fly away, clearly believing he had nothing to fear. The cargo escort’s enhanced engines could apply higher-than-expected thrust, so he probably thought he could build extra distance for himself, but the black robots were not fragile humans and could endure even higher acceleration.
After waiting as long as he felt necessary, Sirix began cautiously stalking his quarry. The robot-controlled ships strung out in a long line, careful to maintain enough distance that the Roamer pilot would not detect them. The trailing probe sent a clear signal, and they easily followed.
Sirix summoned PD and QT to the bridge to watch. He predicted this would be interesting.
Eventually, the Roamer cargo escort approached a dim star system lit by a brown dwarf. “Sensors indicate no planets in this system habitable for biological life,” Ilkot said. “The star’s thermal output is insufficient.”
“Scan closer. Look for industrial activity. Artificial bases, satellites, any other ship traffic.” Sirix could calculate few reasons why humans would come to a place so unwelcoming to biological life forms, unless they intended to hide their facility. He felt confident that his earlier conjecture was correct: The cargo escort would lead them to greater stores of fuel. He signaled for his battleships to close up ranks, waiting outside the brown dwarf system as the Roamer slowed, drifted in, and pinpointed its safe haven.
Ilkot reported, “We have found a small facility, mostly artificial, made of processed metal. It carries a high thermal signature. The parent asteroid is less than half a kilometer wide.”
“It is a fuel-transfer depot of some sort,” Sirix concluded. “Roamers would not want others to know the location of this facility. Approach with caution, maintain communications silence, and minimize engine output.”
The cargo escort docked at the small asteroid depot and shut down its hot in-system thrusters, but Sirix ordered his robots to wait a full hour to allow the people at the depot enough time to grow complacent. The gathered robot ships cruised silently closer, poised to strike.
Sirix announced, “Roamers generally have few defensive weapons. Their mode of protection is to hide rather than fight. We must encircle and trap them, complete containment, not only to maintain our secrecy, but to avoid the loss of valuable spacecraft or materials. Fire your weapo
ns with precision. We do not wish to destroy, and therefore waste, the stardrive fuel.”
“Or waste our weapons,” PD said.
Engines fired again, pushing the stolen EDF ships like projectiles in a last high-speed race toward their target. Before the startled Roamers could do any more than transmit an indignant inquiry, the black robots had overwhelmed them. The humans didn’t even try to run.
Sirix studied the outpost, which was not much more than a tumbling rock with domes and subsidiary tanks welded on. He saw docking cradles for six cargo escorts. The depot’s large ekti reservoirs were nearly full, ready for widespread distribution among Roamer facilities and human colonies, perhaps even to the Ildiran Empire. Four small ships were also parked there.
“Eleven life forms aboard,” Ilkot said. “No significant defenses.”
PD and QT diligently offered to help, but Sirix took control of the Juggernaut’s weapons systems himself. Without making any unnecessary announcement or threat, he destroyed the depot’s life-support generators. It took him only one medium-power jazer shot.
The explosion made a beautiful pattern of fire and light; hot debris sprayed upward and kept drifting out into space, slipping away from the asteroid’s low gravity. Sirix considered blowing up the four small parked ships as well, just to cripple the humans, but he could not afford to waste any viable equipment.
The Roamers howled in an annoying cacophony across the communication bands. “All right, you Eddy bastards, we surrender! Damned pirates! Barrymore’s Rock may be a small facility, but we are a member of the Confederation. By the Guiding Star, we demand that you take us to King Peter. The Earth Defense Forces has no right—”
Three other Roamers crowded closer to the screen. “You destroyed our life support. We won’t survive long—”
Sirix opened the channel, allowing them to see his black geometrical head and his squat beetlelike body. “No, you will not survive long. And we are not interested in your surrender.”
He closed the channel and dispatched crews of robots to the depot. They needed no atmosphere or docking bays. They simply dropped out of the open bays of the EDF ships and streamed over to the small rotating facility, maneuvering under their own power. This was the way battle was supposed to be.
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