“When the sun bombs ignited, the light burned the Shana Rei like acid. A flash and a rainbow, searing light to bring joy to any Ildiran, and death to a creature of darkness. Although the ebony blanket of the Shana Rei began to dissolve, the hundred sun bombs eventually dwindled. Then the Shana Rei returned for a second onslaught, without tactics or compassion. Faced with the new wall of darkness, Tal Bria’nh knew he could not defeat it. He dispatched streamers with details of the attack back to Ildira, but he stayed with his flagship. Help would never arrive in time.”
Vao’sh caught his breath, inserting a masterful, tense pause. One of the Isix cats shifted against Anton’s foot. “When reinforcements did arrive, Orryx looked as if someone had painted the whole world black. The Shana Rei had succeeded. Every living thing had perished. To this day nothing grows there.”
Vao’sh looked directly at young Designate Ridek’h. “And do you know what happened to brave Tal Bria’nh’s warliners?” The boy shook his head. “They were still in orbit, but each one was wrapped in a cocoon of pure shadow that allowed no light in or out. Nothing. Tal Bria’nh and his brave crew were literally smothered in darkness!” Anton imagined a black body bag being drawn over the warliners.
“The rescuers finally used lasers—concentrated light—to cut through the inky skin. Retrieval parties broke into the warliners, searching for any living Ildiran, but to no avail. No one had survived. How could they have, knowing there would be no more light, no more warmth?” He shuddered, and Anton did not think it was part of his performance. “We can only imagine their nightmarish last moments.”
“So how were these Shana Rei ever defeated at all?” Anton asked. “In the stories, I mean.”
Vao’sh smiled at him. “I know only that the Mage-Imperator created a new alliance and ‘brought forth a Great Light.’ The new records we found tell that the Great Light was fire personified, which drove away the creatures of darkness using fire against the night.”
“It sounds like the faeros,” Yazra’h said.
“Maybe the faeros have helped us before!” Ridek’h said in an excited voice. “Is that what the Mage-Imperator asked you to find?”
Suddenly, the Isix cats bounded to their feet, and Yazra’h’s reaction was only a fraction of a second slower. Anton turned to the door of the Designate’s chamber to see one-eyed Tal O’nh marching in, flushed and breathless.
“Designate, three hydrogue warglobes are en route to Hyrillka.”
“Hydrogues! What do we do?” Ridek’h’s eyes widened, looking from the military commander to Yazra’h. “Do we fight? We have warliners—”
The officer touched the prismatic Lightsource medallion on his chest for strength and delivered his words in a flat, businesslike tone. “My warliners can make suicide plunges against the warglobes. Fortunately, they are mostly empty, with all their crews down here. I hope, however, that will not be necessary. When hundreds of warglobes came to Ildira not long ago, they departed without attacking. Maybe the same thing will happen here.”
“We let them make the first move, Designate,” Yazra’h advised.
They hurried to the open balcony, looking out into Hyrillka’s dull orange evening. From a communication badge on his collar, O’nh received curt updates from his ships in orbit. Anton stared upward. Yazra’h stood close to him, and he realized that he felt oddly safer to have her there.
She spotted it first, extending her arm to point. A trio of diamond spheres cruised down over Hyrillka’s landscape as if observing the ruins. Eventually, they took up position directly above the citadel palace. Though the enemy transmitted no warnings or ultimatums, the threat was clear. They just hung there.
“Should I go to shelter?” Ridek’h looked at the one-eyed officer, then at Yazra’h. “Tal O’nh, would I be safer aboard one of your warliners?”
Yazra’h frowned at her young nephew. “The Designate must stay here. If you are to die, then you will die—but do not die as a coward. Your father did not, when Rusa’h’s followers stabbed him to death. Hyrillka is yours now. Show these people how a Designate behaves. After recent events, maybe they have forgotten.”
Again Ridek’h steeled himself, and did as she told him.
Anton looked up into the sky, hoping he wasn’t about to become another part of the epic story.
82
THOR’H
The darkness was absolute. Black, endless black, seemed to extend from one side of the universe to the other. No torment could be worse.
For an impossible time, Thor’h’s dreams had been empty, then strange. Gradually, as the shiing wore off, the nightmares became more intense, like sharp teeth gnawing at his consciousness.
He slowly began to remember Hyrillka, how he had fought beside Imperator Rusa’h. Together, they had meant to overthrow Jora’h, the false Mage-Imperator, his own father. But they had failed. Thor’h remembered flying his warliners, expecting to die . . . then being captured, bound, humiliated. He remembered Designate Udru’h’s cruel smile, his stony refusal to hear Thor’h’s pleas.
Afterward, there had been shiing . . . too much shiing.
And then bliss.
And then nothing.
And now darkness. Utter darkness.
He did not know where he was. The walls were thick, and he found no way out. Groggily, as if from a great distance, he thought he heard the sound of scuffling feet, furniture being moved, but no one unsealed his chamber.
He could see nothing, could feel no light on his sensitive skin. His hands were unbound, and he touched his face. He reached out and struck a wall. The inky blackness all around him felt like a cold ocean filling his mouth, his nose, his eyes.
He screamed endlessly and flung himself at the walls, pounding until his knuckles felt wet with his blood. He couldn’t find a door. The blackness was a crushing weight, literally killing him.
But first it drove him mad.
Howling, Thor’h battered against the black walls of his prison, shrieking until his vocal cords were torn and bloody. He continued to wail a husky, breathy sound of hopelessness as his mind broke apart.
No one heard him.
No one knew he was there.
And the lights never came back on.
83
JESS TAMBLYN
Eighty of the workers on Plumas had survived the disaster. The water mines, which had been in clan Tamblyn for generations, did not.
Frigid steam gushed from damaged conversion equipment. Life-support generators had failed, and the grotto temperature was already dropping to a deep bone-chilling cold. Only one of the artificial suns remained embedded in the ceiling.
Another thing broken, another thing lost. Jess looked at the crumbling ice ceiling, the shattered ground, the frost-petrified bodies of fallen miners and dead nematodes. This had been his family’s sanctuary, their dream for so many years. He had first left Plumas because of his impossible love for Cesca, and he’d come back as a different person, a different sort of being altogether, with good intentions and dangerous delusions.
The tainted wental inside his mother had wrought all of this damage, but he was to blame as well. Sensing his dismay, Cesca came up to hold him. Her touch—which had been denied him for so long—now gave him strength.
Old Caleb clapped his hands with a gunshot-loud sound and shouted to all the survivors. “Come on, all together. We have work to do.” Water miners scrambled to give first aid to the injured. The exhausted and brokenhearted Tamblyn brothers helped erect temporary shelters by shoring up partially destroyed living huts.
A huge chunk of ice fell from the ceiling and splashed into the metal-gray sea. Jess said sharply, “Cesca, we have to hold this place together until we can get the people away to safety. A lot of them are hurt.” He held her tingly hand. “Let me show you how.”
Focusing on the damage, shunting aside his grief and uncertainty, Jess showed Cesca how to use her newfound powers to seal the worst cracks in the ceiling, welding shut the fissures. With deep conce
ntration and a sweep of his hand, Jess evaporated away mounds of fallen ice.
Since Jess could not touch any living person, he accepted the grim task of hauling the bodies of the dead to the edge of the now-calm sea. Before he touched any of the corpses, he paused. “And what if I infect them with a tainted wental?” After what had occurred with his mother, he was very cautious.
That will not happen here, the wental voices said in his head. It will not happen again.
He looked down at a pale, twisted man who had bled to death from dozens of lacerations; the blood was dark and glassy, already frozen in the ground. Jess vaguely remembered him, a worker in the hydrogen-fuel separation columns; they had nodded hello to each other when Jess lived down here, exchanged a few words. Just acquaintances. Jess didn’t even know his name. Now he was dead.
A crew wearing full environment suits came back down from a surface-access tunnel and delivered their report to Caleb. “Crust shiftings knocked our wellhead shafts out of alignment. The pumping machinery is wrecked, the fuel-conversion tanks broken, the chemical lines completely out of whack.”
Defeat salted the old man’s voice. “We’ve got one lift still functional, but some of the indicator lights are giving funny flickers. Jess, even if you and Cesca patch the ceiling, I just don’t know if this place is salvageable. With Andrew dead . . .” He choked, then drew a long breath. “And without you working with us on a regular basis, we’ll have to reassess how we do business, if we do business at all.”
When Jess spoke the words aloud, they hurt him deeply, but he and his uncles already knew the decision that had to be made. “We’ll have to abandon Plumas, at least for now. Too many systems are damaged to maintain a reliable environment.”
The survivors still hadn’t absorbed what exactly had happened. Wynn and Torin shook their heads, though. “We can’t just leave, Jess. Look at all the work that needs to be done!”
“How is clan Tamblyn ever going to afford all this?” Torin moaned.
“Andrew handled our finances. How can we do it without Andrew?”
“Clan Tamblyn has money in its accounts, don’t you worry about that,” Caleb growled. “But where are we going to get the heavy equipment to redrill the damaged shafts and repair the delivery systems? I’m getting a headache already. By the Guiding Star, it’ll take years!”
Jess felt the wentals singing through his body. Now was the time. He and Cesca could not forget their primary mission. “There’s other work for you all to do—something more urgent. We need your help. All Roamers, all humans.”
Caleb blinked. “Look around you, Jess! We’re not in a position to help with folding napkins.”
“Not true,” Cesca said. “Call the survivors together. They need to hear this.”
Caleb shrugged. “We could use a break—and a little bit of hope.”
Haggard-looking men and women gathered around the ruins of the settlement huts. The Plumas workers stood together, uneasy and uncertain. They had watched Jess and Cesca battle the thing that had been his mother, and these people were afraid of the powerful couple.
The wentals made Jess’s words resonate through the entire grotto. “Speaker Peroni and I came to Plumas for a reason. You have already fought the Eddies and the drogues. You’ve lived on the run, struggling to survive, even as one livelihood after another was taken away. However, the war isn’t finished yet. Not even close. The greatest battle is coming—and the wentals need our assistance.”
Torin grumbled, “Seems to me your wentals caused us a whole lot of grief.”
“One tainted wental,” Jess corrected. “The others saved you. The others can save all the clans, and the rest of the human race. We have to unleash thousands and thousands of wentals against hydrogue planets.”
Cesca said, “It has to be us. The Ildirans and the Eddies don’t have weapons that can crush the drogues.”
“The Eddies were powerful enough to turn Rendezvous into a scrap heap,” Caleb pointed out. “Why should we bother helping them?”
A stormy flicker crossed Cesca’s face, but she narrowed her eyes and spoke calmly. “All humans aren’t like the Eddies. Roamers are better than that.”
Caleb raised his eyebrows. “You expect us to believe that if we defeat the drogues, the Eddies will stop preying on clan facilities? Stop wrecking our fuel depots and greenhouse asteroids? Are they going to release the Roamer prisoners they’ve taken? Shizz, maybe they’ll rebuild Rendezvous while they’re at it! Jess, you and Speaker Peroni know better than that.”
“What we know—and what all of us need to remember—is that the drogues are our real enemy. Among humans, there will always be conflict. Would you just prefer that the hydrogues exterminate us all?”
Caleb did not sound convinced, but he grudgingly agreed. The Tamblyn brothers stood together, took one long look at the ruins and the impossible task of rebuilding it all. Torin said, “All right, we’re at your command. Tell us what you want us to do.”
The surviving workers were glad just to have a sense of direction after the turmoil they’d been through. Jess could see they were ready to cause damage if they were pointed toward the enemy and given an appropriate weapon.
Together, he and Cesca explained how they intended to use water tankers to distribute wentals in a simultaneous attack against drogue gas giants. Jess spoke up: “Everyone here can fit in the remaining fourteen tankers. Divide the duties among yourselves as you wish. We’ll tell you where to go fill your tankers and be ready.”
“Nikko Chan Tylar is already recruiting as many Roamers as he can convince to join the fight. Jess’s other water-bearer volunteers are doing the same thing all around the Spiral Arm, directing them to congregate at other central wental worlds,” Cesca said. “If we’re going to strike all drogue planets at once, we’ll need every clan from Avila to Zoltan.”
“If you want to find a lot of Roamers, go to Yreka,” Caleb said. “That’s our main gathering place these days. Denn and I were the ones who set up the whole thing.” The Tamblyn brothers described the new trading center, where orphaned Hansa colonies were working secretly with Roamer traders. Cesca was pleased to hear that her father might be there.
Later, the survivors made their way up the one functioning lift shaft to the surface, taking ground vehicles to the water tankers waiting at transfer points. They crowded into the passenger compartments.
Jess stood outside on the bleak terrain. His wental vessel shimmered nearby like a veined bubble. He wondered if Plumas would ever be a bustling and thriving outpost again, or if this would be the end of the water mines.
Cesca held him. “A peaceful and prosperous future is not so far off,” she said. “But first we have to win this battle. In order to strike all gas planets efficiently and simultaneously, we’ve got to coordinate this whole wave so the drogues don’t have a chance.”
“A real administrative problem,” Jess said.
“That’s something I’m good at. These people need the Speaker.” She gave him a relieved smile. Out in the open under the starlight and the reflected illumination from the ice moon, he thought she looked very beautiful.
He hesitated, but they both understood the wentals’ plan. “It took us a long time to be reunited, but now you and I need to separate once again. You go to Yreka—and I’ve got to go to Theroc.”
“I know,” she said. “I heard the worldtrees calling the wentals, too.”
The verdani had pledged to fight with them, worldtrees and wentals in an alliance even greater than they had had ten thousand years ago. When Jess kissed her, the sadness of their parting only made her lips taste sweeter. “By the Guiding Star, I swear that when this is all over, you and I will be together.”
84
KOTTO OKIAH
Kotto had almost run out of ideas—an entirely new experience for him. After scanning the ruins of the Jonah 12 base, he detected high radioactivity levels, which implied that the reactor had undergone a catastrophic meltdown. (That was inconceivable
, but how could he argue with the data?) He found no ships in the vicinity, no signs of life, and no answers.
So he went hunting again. After searching three more systems, he found a small Roamer settlement named, of all things, Sunshine. A blistering bath of photons poured over the planetoid’s surface. The Tomara clan holed up underground, excavating tunnels in the crater walls, while solar collectors gorged on extravagant amounts of energy. During the long cold nights on Sunshine, the Roamers scurried out to do their work on the surface.
The place was mostly empty. Kotto asked where everyone had gone. “Why, they’ve all flown to Yreka,” answered an old, one-armed man who worked a tunnel-excavation machine that was five times his size. “Not much work here that my crew can’t handle, so everybody else is off trading.”
“Yreka? What’s on Yreka?” Beside him, KR and GU began to recite the vital statistics of the Hansa colony on the edge of Ildiran space, but Kotto shushed them.
“Biggest swap meet in the Spiral Arm,” said the one-armed man. “Closest thing to free trade since before the drogues showed up.”
“Then that’s where I’ll go.” Maybe he would find his mother, or Speaker Peroni. Kotto thanked the man, took his two compies, and flew away from Sunshine.
He immediately spotted Denn Peroni’s Dogged Persistence on Yreka’s landing field. The locals had made a thriving business of their new marketplace, setting up full-fledged restaurants and food stalls to cater to the influx of visitors. Now that new ekti was flowing in from Golgen, transportation between orphaned colonies had become commonplace again.
When Kotto stepped out into the bustle, Denn was among the crowd waiting to greet him. Speaker Peroni’s father laughed at the bewildered engineer. “I’ve never seen such a grin! You look like you just found buried treasure.”
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