“He knows he should have listened to you about the risks of the Soldier compies. Everyone can see that.”
“Will it make him contrite, or even more stubborn? I fear the latter. We should work together. He doesn’t have to like me, but he does need me.”
“Maybe you should bring the first olive branch—or treeling frond.” Estarra had hugged him, and he could feel the swell of her pregnancy. He had kissed her on the forehead. Please, Basil—see your way clear to saving humanity from this disaster.
Now when the lift door opened to the penthouse offices, Pellidor blocked the way. The guard captain frowned at the Chairman’s personal expediter. “The King is here to see Chairman Wenceslas. Move aside.”
Pellidor ignored the three guards, gave Peter a withering glance. “The Chairman is busy at the moment with his deputy.”
McCammon was unimpressed. “Is he? His King is more important than his deputy. Now stand aside.”
Pellidor was taken aback. Royal guards never behaved this way. Peter took advantage of the hesitation to slip into the room as if he belonged there. He did not want McCammon and Pellidor to waste time in a pissing contest.
Inside his spacious office, Basil was pacing with his back to the door. Peter could see him staring through the expansive windows as if imagining a shattered skyline, a ruined city, a scene of Armageddon. He heard Deputy Cain reading aloud from a report from his focus groups. Peter hesitated, for a moment feeling small and young again, a street scamp rescued from poverty and obscurity and then groomed to be a King, but always under Basil’s thumb. I have grown beyond that. He needs me . . . but does he know it?
Finally Basil pretended to notice the King, though Peter was sure he had been aware of him for some moments. “What is it? We’re very busy here.”
The captain of the guard burst out, “Mr. Chairman, the King wishes to speak with you.” Though Peter was already in the room, McCammon stood at the door chest to chest with Pellidor, as if they were about to come to blows.
“I don’t have time for this right now.”
Peter stepped forward. “Now is exactly the time, Basil. We need to bury the hatchet and work together for the good of the human race.” He avoided the gaze of the deputy, who had secretly aided them by spreading rumors of Estarra’s “blessed pregnancy” before Basil could send in his abortion doctors. Fortunately, the Chairman still hadn’t figured out how that news had leaked.
Basil’s expression hardened. He was clever enough to be careful. “Mr. Pellidor, please escort Captain McCammon outside so the King and I can have a private conversation. A brief one.”
Satisfied that he had done his duty, the guard captain withdrew. Cain sat down, quietly watching.
When they were in private, Basil’s voice slashed Peter like a razor. “Stop playing these games, Peter! Strut around and pretend to be important in your own quarters if it amuses you, but don’t do it here.”
Peter took a deep breath, forcing calm. “I did not come here to argue with you. Look around you, and decide what’s really in the best interests of the Hansa and the human race.” He moved even closer to the dapper Chairman. “Listen to me, Basil. The Hansa needs a Chairman, and it needs me as King.”
Peter’s heart sank as he saw Basil immediately turn stony. “I need a King. Not necessarily you.”
“You took great pains to show me how you keep Prince Daniel locked in a coma where he can cause no trouble. If that’s your only alternative, then, yes, the King does have to be me.”
“I always have other options. Some of them would surprise you, I think.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’d better pray you never find out. Time and again, you have proved you are not fit for your role.” Basil crossed his arms over his chest; it seemed a petulant, rather than a decisive, gesture. “I’ve decided to have you confined to the Royal Wing for the foreseeable future, perhaps permanently. That will keep you from disrupting delicate plans.”
“Basil, even you can’t be that dense.” Even the normally unflappable Cain gasped at the King’s tone, but Peter forged on. This wasn’t a time for niceties. “Now the people need to see us more than ever. You ignored my concerns about the Klikiss programming when I expressed them a year ago, and now everyone remembers that I blew the whistle on the Soldier compies, that I wanted the factory shut down. But you wouldn’t listen.”
Cain quietly interrupted. “That’s true. I’ve heard it mentioned three times in the past hour, Mr. Chairman. The newsloops are hailing the King as a visionary and a hero.”
Basil reddened. “I can control the way the media reports their stories, Peter. I don’t know the identity of their ‘confidential Whisper Palace sources,’ but I will find out who you’ve been talking to, and I’ll put a stop to it.” His quick smile was brittle and unpleasant. “As you know, accepting credit and blame are two of a King’s primary functions in this government. I haven’t made up my mind yet whether you should abdicate your throne because of recent errors in judgment that have cost innumerable lives.”
Peter saw his hopes crumble. So much for making a peace offering or finding a solution to an unnecessary conflict. Cain raised his hands to intercede. “Mr. Chairman, no one in the public will assign blame to King Peter. That is nonsense, considering that he blew the whistle—”
“They will believe what I tell them to believe.” Basil’s tone cut off any rebuttal, and the deputy withdrew, looking both angry and troubled.
The Chairman would lash out at any target he could defeat, since he could do nothing against the real enemy. The Roamers had been painted as enemies, and Basil would do the same to Peter and Estarra. He had fooled himself that there was a chance for a reasonable solution. Maybe there never had been.
“I won’t take the fall for your stubborn inaction, Basil. I reacted swiftly and appropriately to the crisis. My warnings about the compies are a matter of long-standing public record. If there is to be any resignation, it should be yours. Shall I call for it in the next formal session of representatives?”
“Unfortunately for you, I believe you would try something so stupid.” The Chairman looked murderous, losing his temper. Basil never loses control! “I want you out of here. Now.”
Peter backed toward the door, knowing now that Basil would never allow peace between them.
65
CESCA PERONI
Still struggling to understand and use the new powers infusing her healed body, Cesca reeled with the outbursts of elemental power ricocheting around the ice cavern. The entire grotto had become a war zone.
Karla Tamblyn regarded her son with a stony face and blazing eyes. Her reanimated body seethed with destruction, like bottled chaos. Cesca had seen her only once before, long ago, when Karla had come to Rendezvous on clan business. She had been a confident, unshakable woman who balanced the abrasiveness of her husband, Bram. Now she was something else entirely.
“Jess, I can feel the power. She’s not even human.”
“I know what she is,” he said.
When Caleb Tamblyn called out for help, Karla turned toward the older man, extended her arm—and shot knives of ice through the air at him. Jess moved in a flash to intercept the projectiles, using wental power to save his haggard uncle. The deflected projectiles smashed against the frozen walls.
Cesca sought strength and answers from the new energies within her. The strange insistent voices shouted inside their heads. We feared a tainted wental would arise. Some of our energy trickled into her cells, separate from us. The corrupt wental reanimated her body, yet it remains imprisoned within her, unable to propagate. A terrible mutation, surging with power. Now it is trying to break free, destroying her and remaking her at the same time.
Jess staggered closer, holding out his hands, as if he could reason with his mother. His voice croaked as he called out her name. “Karla Tamblyn! Remember who you are.”
Cesca shouted, “Fight the chaos inside yourself—”
Karla’s
expression rippled from distaste to hatred, then fury. “I remember.” She unleashed a second rippling blast that pounded her son with ice and cold. Jess shuddered like an anvil struck with a sledgehammer. “My little boy.” She ignored Cesca completely.
As Jess reeled back, struggling to recover from the blow, Cesca cried to the wentals, shouting into a howling wind. “You couldn’t tell this was happening here? You couldn’t sense it all along?”
The tainted wental is not part of us. Her energies flow in black currents. She wishes only to destroy, to embrace chaos and increase entropy.
“Unless we stop her,” Cesca said.
The woman moved forward, her legs pillars of ice, but each footstep burned a mark into the frozen ground. She raised a fist to deal her son another blow. Jess was already doing his best to prevent further destruction.
Cesca wouldn’t let him fight alone. She summoned the tingling power within her tissues and deflected the blast enough for Jess to recover. He joined his power with hers and turned it against his mother.
While Karla staggered in the backlash of the strike, Cesca turned to see a new threat coming directly at her. More than twenty slithering nematodes flexed scarlet bodies and flashed diamond-chip fangs, rushing to attack her.
When she had seen these creatures long ago at Ross’s funeral, the prehistoric worms had seemed hauntingly beautiful, graceful denizens of Plumas’s primordial sea. Now they were demon soldiers controlled by the Karla-thing, intent on keeping her apart from Jess. In a hypnotic, serpentine movement, the nematodes swarmed to surround Cesca.
She faced the scarlet worms, knowing she had to keep these creatures away from Jess and away from the other victims in the grotto. She already saw far too many bodies sprawled among the wreckage.
Though not yet familiar with her new powers, Cesca fought back in any way she could manage, learning from the wentals as she went. First, she imagined her method of attack, concentrating on the energy of lightning and cold water—and the wentals responded by flowing through her, out of her hands, out of her mind. Cesca blasted two nematodes and froze a third one solid.
As Jess squared off with his mother, the tainted wental seemed to be dredging up words, memories, ransacking frozen cells within Karla Tamblyn’s preserved brain. “You . . . Ross . . . and Tasia—your little sister.” Her voice seemed to come from somewhere else, certainly not from her heart.
As more nematodes swarmed out of the sea and onto the ice pack, old Caleb came forward in a foolish attempt to protect Cesca. “Get away, you slithery things. Go back to the depths!” He stabbed his makeshift spear hard enough to puncture one of the nematodes. Several more raced toward him.
Cesca intercepted them with a blast of power, which distracted her from the dozens more swarming around her. She shouted at Jess’s uncle, “Caleb, go stay safe so I can concentrate!”
When the old man looked at her in surprise, she wanted to shove him away with both hands, but her energized touch would have killed him. That thought led to a new idea—perhaps the discharge would also destroy the worms. She reached out to the nearest nematode and touched its slimy skin membrane, but there was no deadly release of power. The creatures, controlled by a spark of Karla’s wental energy, were immune.
Hundreds of nematodes swarmed closer, hissing and hooting. She tried to fight them but could not focus her mind to summon her blasts quickly enough. The water elementals themselves were preoccupied with the more important conflict against the tainted wental.
Karla let loose an incredible flurry of blasts, and Jess could barely block them all. His mother hurled random bursts at the ice miners, at the few still-intact dwelling structures, at the machinery, then pummeled her son, driving him back with the sheer power. Cesca could see the anguish behind his eyes when he had to fight back, when his mother attacked him.
While Cesca’s attention deflected only for a moment, four worms wrapped around her legs. Others sprang with incredible speed, tangling themselves like heavy ropes around her arms, her waist. Tightening. More swarmed forward faster than she could destroy them. The primeval creatures covered her chest, her shoulders, her neck. Cesca struggled, but the scarlet worms had supernormal strength. Like pythons from the jungles of old Earth, they flexed their skin membranes and pulled themselves tighter, contracting, crushing.
And she couldn’t move, couldn’t fight.
66
JESS TAMBLYN
Jess clenched his fists at his sides as if to contain the elemental creatures within him. They seemed as uncontrollable as the tainted wental inside his mother. He could barely hear anything over the uproar in his head, over the clash and clamor of destruction.
When Karla spoke, the words emerged from the familiar face he had missed so much, but his mother’s voice was a hollow, alien sound. “Jess . . . why are you afraid of me? Don’t you remember?” She walked forward, and steam swirled around her like the smoke from a wildfire. Overhead, the damaged ceiling continued to crack. “My little boy.”
His mother’s reanimated body seemed to be growing more accustomed to speaking, though each word was flat, without any spark of emotion. “I remember the padded sweater I made for you when you were nine.” Her static-charged hair was calmer, her face more peaceful, as if the memories helped his mother wrest brief control over the possessing energy within her. “I remember your compy EA . . . Did you give that to Tasia? Where is Tasia? Where is Ross? My children . . .”
Even surrounded by the horrific turmoil, with slithering nematodes and crackling explosions, Jess recalled the years his parents had spent together, how they’d raised their family beneath the crust of Plumas. Karla had taught Jess how to drive a surface rover when he was only twelve. She had shown him how to operate pumping machinery, how to hook hoses to Roamer ships and fill their tanks with pristine water.
Jess shouted out loud, realizing what had happened. “She was frozen, trapped in the deep ice for all these years. There must have been some small spark of life still within her. Suspended animation. When I touched her, started to thaw her, I must have released power into her somehow. And now a tainted wental has control of her.”
No life remained. She was dead. She remains dead.
“I don’t believe it. There’s something still inside of her!” Jess faced Karla, willingly taking the brunt of her attack. “Mother, listen to me. Please!”
As Karla took another step closer, the wental voices thrummed insistently. She is not truly your mother. She is not alive.
“But she remembers me.”
The tainted wental is accessing chemical signatures frozen in the tissue of her brain. Your mother is no longer there.
He could not escape the thought of those previous tainted wentals—the Ildiran septar who wanted the power to fight for his Mage-Imperator, and the Klikiss breedex who wanted to conquer encroaching hives. He had simply wanted to bring his mother back out of her icy tomb, not to bring Karla Tamblyn alive again. Some strange spark from him had caused this corruption.
We must remove all of the tainted water from her.
The wentals surged out of him, becoming a mist of droplets in the air. The energized moisture began to swirl around Karla like a scouring blast of abrasive hail. Jess’s body shuddered. His teeth chattered.
“Bring her back! Save her. My mother’s still in there, somewhere.”
She no longer exists. Do not be fooled. We must withdraw every droplet, every molecule.
Jess could not fight what they were doing. The wentals simply used him as a conduit, channeling themselves through his body. He silently called out for his mother to hear him, to exert control over the tainted energies.
Feeling a strange urgency, sensing that Karla was trying to distract him, Jess forced his body to turn. To his shock, he saw dozens of the attacking nematodes wrapped around Cesca. She moved, struggled . . . still alive!
But when he tried, he couldn’t move to help her. The wentals inside his body guided his every action. Though desperate alarm erupte
d within him, the wentals were using his body as a weapon. Their weapon.
“Save Cesca! Help her fight!” Jess said through clenched teeth.
The tainted wental has not propagated inside the worms. As Karla Tamblyn resists us, her control over them weakens.
Jess managed to stretch out a hand, but Karla fought harder, demanding his attention. “Cesca! Keep fighting!” He couldn’t break his concentration away.
From somewhere within, Cesca found a focal point, drew upon her own wental energy. She released the power in a dazzling explosion, frying, freezing, and detonating the nematodes swarming around her.
Then she stood free, her dark hair snapping about, her eyes crackling with power not unlike Karla’s. Sparkling, she stepped forward, ignoring the torn scraps of dead worms strewn across the ice.
When she grabbed Jess’s hand, an increase of power rushed through his head like a torrent of water over a cascade. An incomprehensible sound came from the combined wentals, and something expanded. He and Cesca moved in unison, guided by the forces inside them. Jess felt as if something essential were pouring out of him, something he hadn’t even known was there. The wentals drew upon that.
The desiccating cyclone increased around Karla Tamblyn’s trapped body. She held up both pale hands, defending herself with bursts of lightning, waves of cold, and geysers of water that spun in a howling storm. She let loose wild destruction in all directions, bursting against anything that could be shattered.
But in a rush the combined wentals began withdrawing the contaminated moisture from Karla. Her waxen skin glistened with droplets that wept from her pores only to be whipped away by wind.
Seeing what was happening, frantic to find another way, Jess tried to hold the wentals back. He wanted to persuade them to save his mother, rather than annihilate her. Previous battles with a tainted wental inside the Klikiss breedex had broken an entire planet, and the possessed Ildiran septar had wrought as much destruction as a full-fledged battlefleet.
The wentals had to contain Karla here, even if it meant the obliteration of Plumas itself.
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