Cesca could see it, feel it in her mind. “They were dragged into a sun.” A cluster of the fiery beings had struck a Plumas tanker in the Jonah system—with her father and Caleb Tamblyn aboard!
More ripples, more elemental tremors. Worse, a much larger group of faeros was attacking elsewhere, a breathtaking force of thousands upon thousands of fireballs.
“Charybdis!” Jess shouted, his voice torn. Inside their shimmering ship, the newly retrieved nebula wentals swirled around them. Cesca tried to bite back a moan, but the furious pain seemed to be everywhere. Her father, Charybdis, so many wentals—
As if her eyes had opened onto a distant, foreign place, she saw more than the energized water in which they drifted: a churning alien oceanscape studded with a few lifeless black rocks that poked above the water. She recognized the primary world where Jess had reestablished the wentals, where she herself had been healed and changed. Where she and Jess had gotten married.
All the seas on Charybdis were alive, impregnated with wental power. Now, as cluster after cluster of faeros swooped above the vast ocean, the sentient waves rose up in defensive formations. The very clouds themselves pulled together for battle.
Angry faeros appeared—first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands—all of them miniature suns, blazing bright. Like stars going nova, they scorched away the churning clouds, sent steam gushing in all directions.
As the fireballs descended into the seas, the wental oceans backed away, then surged forward to block them. The incandescent creatures fought. Energized water quenched innumerable fiery entities, but still more came. The faeros began their bombardment, flame upon flame, like lava scorching the black rocks, the deep seas. The wentals on Charybdis could not stand against such an overwhelming force. It seemed as if all the faeros in the universe had converged here in an impossible, sterilizing attack.
Agony ripped Cesca’s heart. This couldn’t be happening! The faeros scorched the wental reservoir, incinerated the oceans. Although the watery elementals lashed out with extensions of themselves and extinguished numerous faeros ships, the rain of fire continued. No matter how many fireballs fell smoking into the dwindling bodies of water, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of faeros kept coming.
Inside their distant, protected bubble she blindly reached out to clutch Jess’s hand. She welcomed his tight grip on hers, welcomed that small physical pain that was nothing compared to the horror and loss she was seeing on Charybdis. She screamed.
Their ship raced toward Charybdis, but they were much too far away to help. It would take them days to get there. They could bring no other wentals to add their strength. As the blazing destruction continued, Cesca and Jess struggled to understand why the fireballs had turned their vengeance against the wentals. Even the wentals did not comprehend the sheer fury.
Cesca’s tears flowed, dissipating into the living liquid. As they continued to observe the last moments of the attack, the nebula water inside their own vessel grew hot—and began to boil.
123 ADAR ZAN’NH
On their return from dropping the human colonists at Dobro, the Adar’s septa encountered five burned warliners drifting in space. The crew was gone, thousands of Ildiran soldiers incinerated where they stood, now nothing but dark stains on the decks, at their damaged stations, sealed in their quarters. Each deck resounded with aloneness.
Aboard the processional flagship, Zan’nh found only Hyrillka Designate Ridek’h alive along with old Tal O’nh, blind and driven nearly mad by the darkness and sheer isolation.
Terrified to be on a ghost ship that reeked of cremated flesh, the boy had withdrawn into himself. Ridek’h lay curled on the deck, trembling with horror, when an anxious boarding party made its way into the warliner’s command nucleus. “Faeros! The faeros came. Rusa’h . . .” His words rasped out like ashes.
Zan’nh had found no further sign of the fiery creatures on Dobro, and knew of no reported incidents at other splinter colonies. The Mage-Imperator, however, had sensed something more and more wrong in the thism and sent scouts out to investigate. Apparently none of them had returned.
And now this! Such an inferno taking the lives of thousands of Ildiran soldiers should have resonated like an agonizing scream through the thism—yet he himself had felt nothing. Was it possible that even the Mage-Imperator did not know?
Tal O’nh, his face burned, stared forward with two blackened and scabbed eye sockets. “They cut us off. Burned the soul-threads and consumed our crew. All those people . . . Rusa’h said they would replenish the faeros.”
“How long ago?” Only by coincidence had Zan’nh detected the darkened ships on his trip back to the Prism Palace.
“Two days . . . maybe more,” Ridek’h said. “Forever. Alone. Hard to tell.”
If they had been stranded any longer, Zan’nh realized, these two would have gone completely insane.
In a ragged voice, O’nh added, “The faeros were heading to Ildira.”
124 KOLKER
Now that Kolker saw and knew far more than ever before, it did not matter to him where his body was. Standing placidly in a park not far from the Prism Palace, he felt he could be everywhere. He no longer even needed the treeling.
With his eyes half closed, Kolker sensed several of his converts nearby, humans who had stayed in Mijistra to work: skymine workers, two Hansa engineers, one new Roamer trader. He knew they would all spread the word. By now, even some Ildirans were listening; he had finally gotten the attention of the lens kithmen. Kolker began to feel very confident and satisfied.
Though this square had been rebuilt by unlimited Ildiran laborers, the place held sad memories for him. Here, hydrogue warglobes had crashed down into the city, maiming and killing thousands, including old Tery’l. Gazing into the light that flashed from his prismatic medallion, Kolker sensed that his philosopher friend was still there somewhere, linked by soul-threads, existing on the plane of the Lightsource. Tery’l would be proud of him now.
The green priest shifted his thoughts in another direction until he seemed to be standing beside Tabitha Huck aboard one of the new warliners. She and her mentally linked engineers and work crews had by now assembled twenty-one of the giant vessels, an unparalleled accomplishment in so short a time.
In the park, Kolker closed his eyes completely, feeling the warmth of the suns on his skin. He concentrated on watching Tabitha, vicariously joining her skeleton crew of human engineers and Solar Navy soldiers as they took the vessel on its first shakedown cruise.
Tabitha tested the in-system engines and the Solar Navy weapons. She primed their ekti tank and engaged the stardrive, and took the new warliner out on a circuit of the nearby solar systems. She strutted about on the bridge, issuing orders. The Ildiran crewmen followed her every suggestion as if she were the Adar himself.
“Approaching Durris-B, Captain Huck,” said one of the Ildiran station managers. She had assigned the title to herself and was quite pleased by it.
“Plot a tight orbit and swing close.” She wanted to see the dead sun for herself, a dark scar in the Ildiran psyche. Astronomer kithmen had continued to monitor the stellar cinder, hoping for signs of rekindled nuclear fires. Tabitha thought it a perfect war memorial.
“Let’s check out our systems. Run full tests with our analytical panels and calibrate them according to previous baselines.” Even though Durris-B was a cooling ember that no longer shone of its own accord, the star retained all of its mass and gravity. Tabitha had the warliner approach with caution, constantly monitoring their engines to be sure they could pull away if necessary.
“Calibrations are off, Captain Huck. Durris-B exhibits far more thermal output than anticipated.”
“Remove some of the filters. Let me see for myself.” As she watched, the burned-out lump began sparking. Light glimmered through from deep layers as if something had reignited within its core, like an ember fanned into flame. Durris-B began to brighten.
“We’re seeing an energy spike.”
&n
bsp; She did not want to take any chances with her new warliner. “Increase our distance.” She turned to her Hansa engineers, not trusting the Ildirans to have sufficient imagination to figure out what was going on. “How do you reignite a star—start its nuclear reactions again?”
“Not by any natural means.” One of her engineers frowned down at the bridge console. He shrugged. “But remember, I used to design skymine pumps. What the heck do I know about stellar mechanics?”
Standing out in the open square of Mijistra, Kolker lifted his head to gaze with closed eyes into the cloudless sky. Around him, his other converts paused in their activities, also sensing something unusual taking place. The rest of the Ildirans in the city had not yet noticed any change.
“I don’t like this,” Tabitha said in the warliner’s command nucleus. “Not one bit.”
Through her new connection with the thism, she could sense the Ildirans aboard growing uneasy. Finally picking up on that distant connection, the people in Mijistra became unsettled. Now everyone could feel the stirring sun. But the Mage-Imperator could not offer his strength or guidance; from far-off Theroc, he did not have the mental power to soothe them all, and the Prime Designate was not capable of doing it from the Prism Palace.
In the warliner’s command nucleus, Tabitha shielded her eyes and cried out. Faster than automatic filters could cover the viewing screen, Durris-B brightened with a blinding flare as lightning bolts of power crisscrossed its uncertain surface. Tiny specks appeared—huge balls of fire, great ellipsoids that streamed from the lower layers of the sun, like spores puffing out of an overripe mushroom.
“Faeros ships! The faeros have returned,” shouted one of the Ildirans.
“Turn about and get us back to Ildira,” Tabitha said.
Her crew challenged the new warliner’s engines, accelerating as much as the untested systems could bear. One of the control boards burned out and another reacted sluggishly, but the huge ship began to pick up speed and pull away from the suddenly flaring star. Faeros boiled out of the cooling stellar depths by the thousands, flew into space like sparks from a cosmic grinding wheel, and disappeared from the Ildiran system.
Ten of the ellipsoids closed around Tabitha’s warliner, like a flock of birds going after the same slow-moving insect.
Down in Mijistra’s sunlit square, Kolker bit back a cry. He could feel Tabitha’s fear reverberate inside him, inside all of them. Ten huge comets of flame loomed up, their surfaces a tapestry of ghostly, screaming faces.
A booming voice echoed in Tabitha’s mind and across the warliner’s comm systems. “What is this thism? I have found your soul-threads—but who are you?”
“Kiss off!”
The faeros voice sounded intrigued. “You are human, yet you have a conduit into the thism, like that human we consumed with the wentals. . . . You also have a conduit that extends to . . . ah, the worldforest! The verdani mind.”
As more and more faeros streamed out of the reawakened sun, the ten fireballs tightened their circle around the warliner until the hull began to melt. Alarms shrieked from every main system. In the command nucleus, the consoles slumped into molten metal. The front section of the bridge exploded, but even the vacuum of space could not extinguish this kind of fire.
Kolker lost contact with Tabitha aboard the ship, feeling the pain like a sword thrust into his chest.
But it wasn’t over. The dominating presence of the former Hyrillka Designate roared along the new soul-threads that Kolker himself had so carefully laid down. The voice hammered into his mind. “I demand your soulfires to strengthen the faeros. You have given me the way.”
While thousands of fireballs raced out into space, ten of them led by Rusa’h moved implacably toward Ildira. Kolker could not block the faeros incarnate from his mind, from his thism or telink. Without opening his eyes he could see his other converts staggering. Two of them fell to their knees as they spontaneously caught fire.
Kolker struggled to block the searing lines and cut his converts off from the revelations—the vulnerability—that he had shared with them. But he could not save them, could not save himself. The faeros fire streamed like acid through his mind and through his body. Then, with a last flash and a spark, he became one of many dissipating curls of smoke in the air.
125 ORLI COVITZ
The Klikiss held Orli and her companions inside the old city. Though she had struggled against the hardening goo, the insect warriors had torn her backpack away from her. The breedex seemed to recognize what the synthesizer strips were and intentionally deprived the girl of them.
In addition, Orli was kept separate from Tasia, Robb, Davlin, and Nikko—because of her music, like Margaret Colicos?—and she felt very alone. DD had also been led away, and she had no idea what had become of the little compy. After removing her resin restraints and throwing her into a dusty, hard-walled cell, the Klikiss had stretched resinous excretions like prison bars across the chamber opening. The others were kept in a larger chamber down the tunnel, all of them without food or water.
At least Orli was close enough to shout to her companions and hear what they were doing; she could even see them if she pushed her head partway through the gummy barricade. The resin had an oily feel and smelled like burned plastic.
“We could work together, rip loose some of these web bars,” Nikko said. He threw his shoulder against the rubbery barricade, to little effect. Nikko tried to tug and pull at the strands. Even if they broke away the web barricade, however, Orli didn’t know what they would do afterward. They were in the middle of a huge nest, with no way out.
Tasia yelled into the echoing corridor, as if the Klikiss could understand her. “Hey! Would it help if I told you we hate the black robots, too? I could tell you stories that would make your exoskeletons crawl. We should be allies in a common cause!” The bugs patrolling the passageways did not pause, apparently ignoring Tasia’s statement.
Robb said, “You know, I’ve actually been in worse situations. And gotten out of them.”
“Me too. But getting into deep shizz isn’t a habit I’d like to continue.”
Orli peered out into the interconnecting hallway. By now only a few traces of the old EDF base remained on the curved stone walls: pipes, electrical conduits, intercoms, and lighting systems that had been rigged up by the original colonists.
Two strange newbreeds walked into view with a stuttering gait. Briefly, before the pale creatures were gone, Orli glimpsed fleshy faces and shifting features that had a bizarre, indefinably human quality. None of the other Klikiss even had a hint of a face. The newbreeds seemed curious about the prisoners, and also somehow sad. A Klikiss warrior marched along behind them and, with a staccato hissing and clicking, chased the newbreeds away.
As if visiting a relative in a hospital wing, Margaret Colicos arrived with her compy beside her. “DD! Margaret!” Orli reached her hand through a gap in the web-barrier.
The Friendly compy stopped at her small cell, his optical sensors gleaming. “I am pleased to see you alive and well, Orli Covitz.”
“Alive and well? The Klikiss are going to kill us all.” Orli doggedly clung to a spark of hope. “Do you know where my synthesizer strips are?”
“I do,” DD volunteered brightly.
Margaret stopped in the corridor. “Since the recent fissioning, there’s a new breedex. It still knows who you are, Orli, but it also understands more about humans, now that it has incorporated so many attributes of the colonists.”
Tasia was listening from the second cell down the tunnel. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? If the Klikiss understand us—”
“Not good enough.” Margaret kept her attention on Orli. “That means the breedex is less susceptible to previous distractions. I am afraid the music you play on your synthesizer strips won’t be enough to eliminate you from . . . consideration, after all. It still has great power, but the breedex has heard it before, and humans are no longer as special to it as I once was. We are all in danger
.”
Farther down the tunnel, Davlin pressed up against the sticky bars. “Margaret, you can help us get out of here. Bring us tools, Klikiss weapons—something to give us a fighting chance, at least.”
“What do the bugs want from us, anyway?” Nikko said. “They already killed my mother, killed all the colonists! Isn’t that enough?”
“How long are they going to hold us?”
“Can you find some food? Water?”
As everyone began to shout at once, Davlin raised his voice, cutting through the noise. “If the hive has already fissioned, aren’t we safe for now?”
Margaret said, “The expansion phase has accelerated, and the new-generation breedex will fission yet again, as soon as possible. The subhive must continue to grow. These Klikiss intend to destroy all rival breedexes in the coming hive wars. Therefore, it must reproduce again, and it wants to incorporate you, your human memories and knowledge, to give it an unexpected advantage over the other subhives—a weapon they won’t suspect. The domates will come to gather us for the next round. Soon.”
Orli reached through the rubbery barricade toward the compy. “DD, help me—convince her to help all of us.”
“You don’t need to convince me,” Margaret said. “Even if I could get you out of those cells, we wouldn’t get far with so many Klikiss around. We’d certainly never get out of the hive city.”
“Listen to me,” Davlin said. “If we escape, we can take you and DD away from here. We can take you home. Our escape ship is prepared and fully fueled. We’re ready to fly away—if we can just get out of here.”
DD seemed excited, turning to his master. “Yes, the ship is ready, and I would very much like to leave here, Margaret.” Obviously, the older woman hadn’t considered a real possibility for escape in a long, long time.
Orli stretched her other hand through the gap. “Please, Margaret?”
Before she could answer, groups of Klikiss raced up and down the tunnels in a fury, apparently summoned by an urgent call. The older woman cocked her ear as if hearing something that no one else understood.
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