Starfall (Stealing the Sun Book 3)
Page 16
Baraq had no reply.
If Louratna was right, the temperature would continue to drop. The clouds would dissipate, and the burning liquid would rain down hard. It may take hundreds of years, or maybe thousands, but eventually Eldoro would be spent. Before that happened, though, the environment of their world would be a far different place and the quadarti would almost certainly be long dead.
If Louratna was right, every scientist on this world should be working to find a way to staunch the flow of Eldoro’s energy through this singularity.
The councilor had been right, too. Or at least right enough.
Another mysterious set of creatures had made the Taranth Stone, but the council would never find them because they were looking in the wrong places. The world was even bigger than even Hateri E’Lar was imagining.
He stepped into his house.
“Baraq?” Crissandr’s voice came from the bedchamber.
“I’m home,” he called.
As he shrugged off his coat, grimacing at what the night’s chill might mean, a sense of total defeat overwhelmed him.
He was getting old. Old and tired.
His world was dying, and he was powerless to change anything.
“Are you hungry?” she said from the dark doorway. She leaned against the wall, disheveled from sleep, her rounded belly bulging. “I put dinner out for you.”
He walked to her and put his arms around her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder. Her smell engulfed him, and the sweet heat of her pregnant body radiated through his chest. For a moment, he saw Hara again and felt the hollow nothingness that she left inside him.
“What’s wrong?” Crissandr asked after several moments.
He hesitated.
“It’s nothing,” he finally said.
“Don’t do that, Baraq. Something’s definitely wrong, and I want to know what it is.”
Baraq looked at Crissandr, then. She was his pair-mate. She deserved to know, and they had already been through so much.
He slowly walked around the room, lifting pictures and examining likely positions for wave talkers. There were none. Not really surprising, he thought. Waganats were not known for bringing their business home with them, and his father wouldn’t conceive of him talking to his wife about such delicate matters. Besides, his office was unoccupied long enough to ensure the wave talkers could be placed and wired, but no one could guarantee an uninterrupted time span that would be enough to wire his home.
He told her everything as he ate.
He told her about Hateri’s request, about the death of two scientists, and about wave talkers and his Family and his father. He was surprised how easily the last came, pouring like falls in underground pools, cascading, growing in power as he went, frothing and foaming with pent-up anger.
He explained what Louratna had suggested this evening.
“Your father will never work on that,” Crissandr said. “There’s no profit in it.”
“Never,” Baraq agreed. “He’ll say that Louratna is a ranting-mad philosopher.” He couldn’t bring himself to voice his concern that his father was just as likely to kill him if he found Baraq was working on such a device.
He sat back heavily in his chair, and braced himself.
“There is something else, though.”
“Yes?”
“The council has had thirty years to work on this, admittedly with poor resources, but thirty years. I’ve had three of the most experienced quadars I know working on it for almost an entire year.”
“You’re worried that even if your father takes it on as a whole, we won’t be able to learn enough from it?”
“That is exactly right,” he said. “At least not fast enough. What have we gotten so far, eh? A few theories and something we know is an electrical system, but wouldn’t know how to build even if one of the priest’s gods were to appear before us. To solve a problem with Eldoro could take generations. I don’t know if we have a chance.”
“That is a problem,” Crissandr said. “Or a series of them. But I think you need to face them one at a time.”
Baraq said nothing for a long time.
He still had no idea of exactly what he should do, but he felt better. That evening, as he slipped into an unsettled sleep, he draped his arm across the swelling form of Crissandr’s belly and held her close.
CHAPTER 27
The idea was his. But Crissandr was the one who finally convinced him he should do it.
It was grasping at straws—a million-to-one against. And if his father found out, Baraq would certainly be killed. But it was all he could think of that made any sense at all. When he posed the effort to Louratna, she had her quadars shake him free of his Family watch as they had done the night of their conversation.
He stole the generator that had been stored in one of his Family’s warehouses since the time of the wave talker’s earliest development. It was, in fact, the very machine Jarka’el Waganat had first used to create waves all those years ago. Baraq selected it specifically because it was so old he figured no one would miss it, and because it had been modified to push waves of great power. Also because it worked in the lowest frequencies, spectrums his Family no longer monitored. The transmitter tower was built from parts he bought by depleting his accounts.
Louratna’s quadars loaded the material onto a cart and drove them into the vastness of the Castanda Desert, where the wind was known to be devastating, but also where no one was around to interfere with their work. Two heats later, the power system hummed and the wave talker burst into life with electric screeches that set his teeth to rattling. He stayed an additional heat, making sure the system was operating, making sure the message was being sent out into the sky, out toward Eterdane, and then toward Katon and Eldoro.
We are here. Help us.
This simple message was sent in ragged bursts across an arching sweep of space.
Louratna ensured at least two quadars would always be staffing the transmitter, and that the message would be continually sent.
Once it was in place, Baraq packed his tal beast up and traveled back to his home, back to Crissandr.
The night was clear and cold when he arrived.
Crissandr smiled from their bed.
One of the nurses handed him a bundle of brown cloth that swaddled a whelpling. He took Brada—his newborn son—into his arms, felt his tiny grip, and listened to his small voice. In a moment’s inspiration, Baraq carried his son out into the night and looked into a sky that was vast and clear and sprinkled with glimmering points of light.
Nothing else was there.
Nothing moving, anyway.
He closed his eyes and imagined the towering wave talker out in the dark desert, throwing its invisible waves skyward.
For maybe the first time in his life, Baraq realized he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. He wasn’t certain what he was doing, didn’t know how to deal with his Family. But mostly, he realized that it didn’t matter.
Small as he was, he had done what he could do.
Maybe no one was out there. Maybe the Taranth Stone had not come from another species. But maybe someone was out there. Maybe the quadarti were not alone.
If so, maybe these other beings could save the quadarti.
Or maybe, instead, they would be monsters and arrive only to devour the quadarti before Eldoro could burn out.
Peering into the night, he thought he saw a movement.
Or maybe it was just a trick of his eyes.
Holding his newborn son in his arms, and imagining waves that raced through the open sky, he prayed, wondering and wishing.
And hoping.
This is the end of
STARFALL
STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 3
If you enjoyed this story, please consider stopping by your favorite online booksellers’ websites and leaving a review. Word of mouth is the most powerful force in the universe when it comes to the livelihood of your favorite authors!
You might be
interested in the rest of the series:
STARFLIGHT
STARBURST
STARFALL
STARCLASH
STARBORN
Yes, I want to buy Starflight now!
Yes, I want to buy Starburst now!
Yes, I want to buy Starclash now!
Ron’s website is: www.typosphere.com
Follow Ron on Twitter: @roncollins13
Sign up for his newsletter to get free stuff!
http://www.typosphere.com/newsletter
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ron Collins is an Amazon best-selling Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction.
His fantasy series Saga of the God-Touched Mage reached #1 on Amazon’s bestselling dark fantasy list in the UK and #2 in the US. His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award, and his short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Derringer Award.
He has contributed a hundred or so short stories to Analog, Asimov’s, Fiction River Anthology Series, and several other professional magazines and anthologies.
He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all to write full-time—which he now does from his home in the shadows of the Santa Catalina Mountains.
Ron’s website is: www.typosphere.com
Follow Ron on Twitter: @roncollins13
Sign up for his newsletter to get free stuff!
http://www.typosphere.com/newsletter
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Let me start by thanking Dr. Stanley Schmidt, whose basic question “what happens next” is the reason this series exists, and who picked up a short story titled “The Taranth Stone,” that is now embedded in somewhat different form in this work.
Thanks to Kevin J. Anderson for all his support, as well as his kind cover blurb about my work. Kevin was one of my earliest mentors, so it’s always a blast to have his help.
Thanks also to my early readers, Chuck Heintzelman, John Bodin, and Sharon Bass.
Then, of course, there’s always Lisa, who, once again, I get to thank both for her outstanding editorial hand, as well as all the other things she brings to my life every day. This book in particular carries a strong flavor of her work, and is immensely better for it.
Any issues that might remain in this work are, of course, totally on my shoulders.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Blurb
Title Page
Copyright Page
STS Includes
Other Work
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
The Expedition
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Honoring the Fallen
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
The Taranth Stone
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
About the Author
Acknowledgements