The breedex regarded him as if it knew exactly who Davlin Lotze was, knew everything about his past and his secrets. Could it have residual memory echoes from the Llaro colonists? Even if it did, he expected no mercy. He tried to push himself up, but could not balance on his broken leg. “What do you want with me—with any of us?”
The chamber filled with a buzzing, chittering din, as if he were in the middle of a cloud of locusts. He received no answer—at least nothing he could understand. The background buzz grew louder. His blood continued running onto the stone floor, and he nearly passed out as black curtains of weakness fluttered around him. Davlin remained conscious only by sheer force of will. “What do you want?” he shouted again.
The thoughts of the breedex mind pounded against him like a physical wind. His skull ached. Behind him, workers scritched and scrabbled, slathering resinous concrete material across the doorway, walling him into the breedex’s chamber with the domates. The domates stood at attention, waiting, willing.
Davlin tried to crawl away, but he had nowhere to go. He refused to accept that it was futile. “Humans don’t deserve this. We were never your enemies. Understand us before you try to destroy us, because we will fight back.”
The plural mass that formed the bulky hive mind began to dissociate. Hundreds of thousands of the grubs—larvae of various sub-breeds—sloughed down. The breedex lost its shape, becoming a ravenous myriad. The hungry pieces squirmed and writhed toward Davlin.
But first they encountered the passively accepting domates. By consuming the striped domates, the grubs would mature into large monsters, subtly different from the previous generation, stronger and more aggressive. At the moment they were small and individually weak.
Davlin used his balled fists to smash the grubs as they came at him, crushing one after another into the floor. But it was like trying to stop a downpour by catching individual raindrops.
In the middle of what had been the shifting body of the breedex, he saw a larva that was shaped differently. It rose like a miniature king cobra, and Davlin understood intrinsically that this was the seed of the next generation’s breedex. It turned its glinting eyes toward him, fixing on his face. The breedex wanted to acquire him personally.
More grubs crawled forward. The domates waited, their segmented limbs spread wide, their hard shell casings cracked open to provide access to the tender flesh inside.
Unexpectedly, Davlin spotted a glint of metal, a square box no larger than the palm of his hand. Margaret’s wind-up music box. Knowing the music’s strange power over the Klikiss, he rolled away from the grubs, ignoring the pain in his back, ribs, and leg. He tried to grab the device, but one of the domates snatched Margaret’s keepsake—and smashed it into little metal pieces. The last tinkle of sound was not at all musical.
Now Davlin did feel despair. He collapsed backward, looking up just in time to see waves of hungry larvae sweeping across the striped bodies of the domates. They began to tunnel in, burrowing, chewing, digesting. The myriad little creatures made swift work of all eight domates, and the large carcasses toppled into sticky, dripping debris like driftwood floating on the tide.
When the breedex larva approached him, Davlin did not recoil. Instead, he threw himself forward, blocking the pain. He had been trained to fight, to kill, not to surrender. His hands wrapped around the writhing creature, but it was slick and tingly, as if covered with liquid electricity and tangible thoughts. Davlin grasped it, and instead of struggling away, the breedex larva wrapped around him in a contest of wills, as much as a battle of physical strength.
Davlin did not let go, and the immature breedex began to falter. Never in its experience had it encountered such mental intensity and determination instead of fear. The malleable hive mind was forced to change. Davlin knew he could not survive, but that didn’t mean he would accept defeat.
The grubs swarmed over him.
144 JESS TAMBLYN
When they finally reached isolated Charybdis, he and Cesca found only a smoking ruin. The primordial atmosphere was thick and poisoned with sour, sulfurous clouds. The rocks, once submerged, were now baked and blackened. Whole oceans had been boiled away. These wentals had been eradicated.
“It looks like hell came here.” Jess’s words were little more than a haunted whisper. He didn’t need to speak. Cesca was as horrified as he was.
“We can’t leave them like this. We have to do something.”
“We will, Cesca. Oh, we will.”
Yes, we must set things right, the wentals said in their minds. Through you, we will become strong. Perhaps we will be strong enough.
They already knew what had happened here from receiving the thoughts of the distant, devastated beings. Jess had needed all of the elemental strength in his body to drive back the fury and stop the boiling backlash in their bubble ship. They were alive, but he didn’t think they would ever be safe again.
Before, he and Cesca had felt the wondrous strength of the water entities swirling through them; now they experienced ripple after ripple of pain and loss just by standing in the ruins of Charybdis. This must be how the wentals felt when they were torn apart in space, their molecules strewn across a cosmic expanse. And this must be how the water elementals felt when they were dragged silently screaming into the hot atmosphere of a sun.
Jess and Cesca emerged trembling from their bubble ship, the only living things on the scalded planet. The water they had retrieved from the nebula clouds remained protected within the energy membrane. Some craters held sterile, bubbling pools, but the water here was dead. The life force of the wentals had been purged from the water on Charybdis. The clouds were heavy and suffocating, the corpses of wentals thrown into a sky battlefield.
The energy that the faeros had unleashed was unimaginable. Jess could not comprehend the anger of the fiery beings.
“Why would the faeros do this?” Cesca was weeping, and Jess held her. Even the energized water seeping from her tear ducts would not be potent enough to reawaken the water here. Would Charybdis be forever tainted? “Why do they want to destroy the wentals?”
Because they are chaos. They are fire.
Fury began to build in his very core. “That’s not a good enough explanation. Not for me.” Jess remembered the esoteric balance between order and chaos, entropy and construction, life and un-life. But it wasn’t a reason.
He walked barefoot on the smoking black stones. “There is no reason for it, but it is. We must stand against it. We will!” He inhaled, purposely filling his chest with the weak steam, the last gasps of a few now-dead wentals. Somehow, he felt the strength increase within him. “I don’t care how devastated this planet is, we will bring wentals back to Charybdis. We’ll gather more and more of them out in the Spiral Arm. And I swear that never again will the faeros take us by surprise.”
A swell of hope and determination filled them, husband and wife. Even the wentals inside Jess and Cesca and in the bubble ship took heart and rallied their energies. Jess understood that they were not facing the end. Not at all.
“This is war,” he said.
145 FAEROS INCARNATE RUSA’H
Ensconced in the Prism Palace where he belonged, Rusa’h glowed and shimmered, shedding animated fire and light at the heart of an immense magnifying prism. The bright reflections passed through the crystal walls and blazed outward in a beacon. The light on Ildira was bright, very bright indeed.
Now that the fiery elementals had reignited the darkened sun of Durris-B, the glory of the Empire would be greater than before. The faeros over Mijistra were gorged with more than ten thousand soulfires they had consumed from helpless, short-sighted Ildirans. His people. Now each one of them understood the truth of the Lightsource, the purifying flame. If only they had listened before. Finally he had the strength to compel them to listen.
He did not mean to destroy this great city, but to save it. Cleanse it.
Sadly, the chrysalis chair, his rightful throne, had been unable to endure the magn
ificence of his presence. It lay scattered about him in remnants of ash and pooled precious metals that flowed across the floor. Everything inside the Palace was dead and burned.
He felt sated—temporarily. He had lost two of the great fireballs because of Adar Zan’nh’s attack, but high above the Prism Palace, the pulsing fireballs expanded, throbbing. Reproducing at last. They began to split apart—doubling, then tripling their numbers as they spread across the Ildiran sky.
Meanwhile, the rest of the faeros had embarked on great battles against the wentals. The final conflict was just beginning.
Thanks to the green priest he had found here, the one who began his own thism-telink network, Rusa’h had access to a new conduit directly into the vulnerable worldforest. The faeros incarnate sent out his thoughts like a flaming javelin. Sparking and rushing, the fiery elementals followed him along the soul-threads until he encountered the exotic, oddly familiar network of green priests and their telink.
In the past, humans had been disconnected from Ildiran thism, but now Rusa’h plunged irresistibly toward the waiting green priest minds, through open connections that Kolker and his followers had unwittingly created. He found one, then another, and another. The fire raced invisibly toward the heart of the worldforest.
146 CELLI
When the worldtrees enfolded her in a verdant embrace, Celli felt as if she were being surrounded by leaves and fronds, vines and roots. A brief sensation of fear, of smothering—and then the whole forest, the whole world, the whole universe opened up for her.
During the metamorphosis, she drifted far from her body, her mind racing through the infinite pathways of interconnected trees and green priests around the Spiral Arm. During that brief time within the verdani mind, she saw and experienced more than she had absorbed in the nineteen previous years of her life. Celli plunged into millennia of history, of towering battles, destruction and defeat, the wars with the hydrogues and the faeros. She also saw hundreds of worlds through the eyes of the green priests who lived there.
The Spiral Arm was more wonderful than anything she had imagined. Finally, after years of missing Beneto, her mind rushed outward, and she was able to directly contact her brother in his immense verdani battleship guarding Theroc from space. She could feel herself as part of him, sense his enormous thorned branches as extensions of her arms and legs. It was wonderful! In her own mind Celli could feel Beneto laughing with her.
After an unknown time that might have been days or mere minutes, she emerged from the thicket. Celli felt the feathery strands of her hair falling out. Her skin had shifted from a coppery tan to a smooth emerald green, and now it tingled at the touch of sunlight. She flexed her fingers, looked at her forearms, touched her face. She had never thought the color green could be so beautiful. Celli was the same as always, but better, enhanced, and filled with greater understanding.
Exhilarated, she sprinted back to the fungus-reef city. Kilometers passed in a breeze, and she barely felt her feet touching the forest floor. Then with a new energy, she sprang to one of the lower fronds, pulled herself up. Like an arboreal creature, she bounded from one branch to another, spinning, flying, leaping, landing. Treedancing had never been like this before! She seemed to be in the embrace of the whole forest, and she could never fall. Was this what Solimar felt all the time? Now Celli could enjoy—and share—her gymnastic moves in a way she had never imagined.
And she could never get lost. Every piece of the worldforest was a piece of her. Through telink, she learned many other things, news from around the Spiral Arm and close to home. Ah, Estarra had given birth to her baby! Celli felt a stab of disappointment because she hadn’t been there, but she would spend much of her time with the little boy, helping where she could. She knew that King Peter and her sister were going to name the child Reynald. Celli felt a lump in her throat. Of course they would name him Reynald!
When she reached the clearing beneath the fungus reef, several green priests were gathered, including Yarrod and his followers. The King and Queen were high above, gazing down from a balcony; Estarra held her baby in her arms, and, oh, the way she smiled!
Solimar came toward her, and they embraced, connecting in a way that they had never done before. While she was still cocooned within the worldforest thicket, she had contacted him through telink, and they had excitedly spoken with each other. But now that she saw him in the flesh, the connection seemed even stronger.
Now that she was familiar with telink, she sensed that Yarrod and his followers were distant, separated from the rest of the network. As the wonder began to fade away, she realized what had been a thrumming undertone in the back of her mind. The verdani were indeed restless, disturbed . . . angry—or was that fear? Something dark and dangerous was abroad in the Spiral Arm. Yarrod and his converted green priests seemed the most susceptible.
“What is it, Solimar? Do you understand it?”
He shook his head. “No more than anyone does. Yarrod won’t tell us. It’s something his converts know—”
Then Yarrod’s body went rigid, his arms thrust straight out at his sides, his fingers splayed. His green skin shimmered with an inner energy. With a rush of combusted air, he became a pillar of fire. His fellow converts likewise ignited, standing together like human torches in the meadow. Something was rushing along their mental strands—something against which they could not defend. Yarrod and his companions fell to the ground as silhouettes painted in ash.
High up in orbit, the looming verdani battleships began to spin about. She could feel Beneto there, feel him fighting, cutting himself and his gigantic thorny form off from the rest of the worldforest. Then she felt one of the treeships catch fire, even in the vacuum of space, like a fever in the blood.
The trembling pain built and intensified. Celli staggered backward, and Solimar was with her. Both of them touched the overlapping gold-scale bark of the immense trees, desperately seeking an anchor. Trying to help the trees fight.
The worldtrees could not escape the horrific fire coursing invisibly toward them through their own network. All around the clearing, six of the largest trees physically trembled, then began to steam and smoke. The faeros had found their way inside the verdani network, like a spark to tinder. From its core outward, the largest tree exploded into a column of fire. The other giant trees began to blaze from the roots upward, but they were not consumed. Instead, the incandescent worldtrees shone with waves of heat, fire coursing through the heartwood, heating but not destroying. Flametrees.
The faeros had seized them, possessed them, and would not let the worldforest mind be burned. Like frozen torches towering over the canopy, the six trees blazed hotter and hotter, and the rest of the forest seemed to shrink away.
As Celli and Solimar ran away from the flames, the unquenchable fire spread.
GLOSSARY OF CHARACTERS AND TERMINOLOGY
Adam, Prince—predecessor to Peter, considered an unacceptable candidate.
Adar—highest military rank in the Ildiran Solar Navy.
Aguerra, Carlos—Raymond’s younger brother.
Aguerra, Michael—Raymond’s youngest brother.
Aguerra, Raymond—streetwise young man from Earth, former identity of King Peter.
Aguerra, Rita—Raymond’s mother.
Aguerra, Rory—Raymond’s younger brother.
Alexa, Mother—former ruler of Theroc, wife of Father Idriss and mother of Reynald, Beneto, Sarein, Estarra, and Celli.
Alintan—former Klikiss world.
Allahu, Hakim—main representative of Rhejak.
Alturas—Ildiran world in the Horizon Cluster, formerly conquered in Imperator Rusa’h’s rebellion.
Andez, Shelia—EDF soldier, former captive of Roamers at Osquivel shipyards, now serves with General Lanyan.
Aquarius—wental-distribution ship flown by Nikko Chan Tylar.
Archfather—symbolic head of the Unison religion on Earth.
Barrymore’s Rock—isolated Roamer fuel depot.
Bartholomew—Great King of Earth, predecessor to Frederick.
Battleaxe—nickname for former Hansa Chairman Maureen Fitzpatrick.
BeBob—Rlinda Kett’s pet name for Branson Roberts.
Beneto—green priest, second son of Father Idriss and Mother Alexa, killed by hydrogues on Corvus Landing, returned in a wooden body as an avatar of the worldforest, then later joined with verdani battleship.
Big Goose—Roamer derogative term for the Terran Hanseatic League.
Blind Faith—Branson Roberts’s ship, destroyed during an escape from Earth.
breedex—the hive mind of the Klikiss, which controls and creates all the breeds in a subhive.
Brindle, Conrad—Robb Brindle’s father, former military officer, returned to active duty; assisted Jess Tamblyn in rescuing prisoners held by hydrogues deep within a gas giant.
Brindle, Natalie—Robb Brindle’s mother, former military officer returned to active duty.
Brindle, Robb—young EDF recruit, comrade of Tasia Tamblyn, captured and held prisoner by hydrogues after trying to contact them at Osquivel, rescued by Jess Tamblyn.
Burton—one of the eleven generation ships from Earth, seized by Ildirans at Dobro and its passengers used for breeding experiments.
Cain, Eldred—deputy Chairman and heir apparent of Basil Wenceslas, pale-skinned and hairless, an art collector.
cargo escort—Roamer vessel used to deliver ekti shipments from skymines.
Celli—youngest daughter of Father Idriss and Mother Alexa.
Chan—Roamer clan.
Chan, Marla—Roamer greenhouse expert, captured by the EDF and held on Llaro; mother of Nikko Chan Tylar, wife of Crim Tylar.
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