Of Fire and Night

by Kevin J. Anderson

  By the time Tal Ala’nh arrived with hundreds more ships to take evacuees, the one-eyed veteran had already loaded most of his original warliners and dispatched them back to Ildira. With so many hydrogues and faeros in the vicinity, he did not want the crowded warliners to remain in the Hyrillka system. Together, two Solar Navy cohorts would be sufficient to carry all the inhabitants away to safety before the great battles killed the star.

  “One step forward, two steps back,” Anton said. “I think this planet has one whopper of a string of bad luck.”

  Vao’sh gathered armloads of apocryphal documents from the vault. “Peaceful times make for dull stories, Rememberer Anton.”

  The two scrambled to retrieve records from the archives beneath the citadel palace. At first they took great care to keep everything organized, but toward the end they simply threw everything into protective containers. Even Yazra’h helped them, as a special favor to Anton, though she also discharged a hundred other obligations during the frantic exodus.

  The din of the spaceport was deafening. Warliners landed fourteen at a time, far more than the spaceport’s capacity. The big ships dropped down into open fields and empty plazas, anyplace large enough to accommodate them. Personnel shuttles flitted across the landscape, rescuing outlying Ildirans who could not reach the main evacuation depots.

  This struggle made Anton’s chest tighten with dread. He sensed time slipping away from him in an accelerating plunge. The unbelievable operation was being accomplished with unheard-of efficiency, but even with almost seven hundred huge Ildiran battleships, how could they ever get everyone off the planet in time?

  The boy Designate was crushed at the loss of such an old and respected colony, and Anton felt deeply sorry for him. Exactly as Yazra’h had taught him, the boy appropriately showed only resolve when he appeared before his people, but in private he was obviously shattered by the turn of events. “I could have made it work,” Ridek’h said, as he watched a pair of workers carry another crate of diamondfilm sheets aboard a landed shuttle. “We were going to make Hyrillka a good place to live again.”

  “And the people believed in you, Designate.” Yazra’h’s use of the title seemed to build up the young man’s self-confidence. “But now your obligations have changed. Your duty as Hyrillka Designate is to protect your people—and right now that means saving them from the destruction of their world.”

  Rememberer Vao’sh said to the boy in a voice perfectly tuned to play his heartstrings, “I will make sure that the Hall of Rememberers writes your role in these events properly, Designate Ridek’h. Never before has such a young man earned a place in the Saga of Seven Suns.”

  Neither Anton nor Vao’sh spoke as they climbed aboard the shuttle and headed toward the waiting flagship. They sat together, both feeling dismayed.

  Once back in the command nucleus, Anton watched high-resolution images of the churning clash in the sun, and the sight horrified him. Hyrillka’s primary star was dying. Flaming ellipsoids slammed into warglobes by the hundreds. From somewhere within the star itself, the fiery creatures turned solar flares into weapons, blasting out huge arcs of ionized gas in a disintegrating wave that even the warglobes couldn’t withstand. Even so, faced with such overwhelming numbers, the faeros fireballs winked out one by one. The blue-white star now looked like a churning stewpot.

  Scientist kithmen performed calculations to estimate how much longer the primary sun would last. If the main star did burn out, they postulated how swiftly and dramatically the climate would change with only the dull orange secondary. The sudden extreme drop in solar flux would cause unimaginable upheaval. Mega-hurricane storms would literally tear the atmosphere apart. Temperature shifts would rip the landscape, sparking seismic or volcanic activity. No living thing was likely to survive the transition.

  “A real disaster story,” Anton muttered.

  115

  JESS TAMBLYN

  Jess’s wental vessel plunged like a bullet toward the cloudy gas giant. Together with the water elementals, he would fight the drogues, and he would bring Tasia and the other human prisoners out alive. Because of all the wentals had learned from him, they understood his drive, his connection to his family, his love for other individuals.

  Though reinforcements would arrive soon, Jess did not intend to wait—not if Tasia was down there. As he struck Qronha 3’s rarefied atmosphere, plunging headfirst into an impossible struggle, the wentals roiled inside and around him, spoiling for a fight. He wouldn’t be doing this alone.

  Water droplets sprang from the surface of his ship, rushing through the clouds in an explosive release of wental power, dancing from one atmospheric water molecule to another. Wental energy crackled and spread, splashing into the layers of gases like colored dye spreading through a jar of liquid.

  The first strike.

  Descending, Jess peered through the curved walls but could see only storms and mists outside his vessel. Inside his mind, the wentals described their expanding fight, though in terms he could barely comprehend. In the same way they had tamed storm-wracked Golgen, the wentals now exerted a stranglehold on this planet.

  Suddenly hydrogue warglobes boiled up all around him. Blue lightning lanced out to strike the wental-infused cloud decks. Jess careened away from one spinning warglobe, narrowly escaping a crackling bolt of energy. With a sharp maneuver, he dodged again, then plunged deeper.

  He barely avoided ramming a warglobe that emerged from a thundercloud; the hydrogue did not see him, did not open fire, apparently too preoccupied fighting its elusive enemies. As he streaked past, Jess noted that the warglobe’s polished diamond exterior was becoming pitted, eaten away as if by acid. The wental moisture was corrosive to them.

  Guiding the small ship, Jess dodged, sweeping ever downward. Ten more warglobes rocketed up from the depths and into the fray. The deep-core aliens must have a significant base or city somewhere far below. Jess had to find it, had to find his sister.

  The dense atmosphere pressed in around his vessel’s shell like a spherical vise, trying to crush it, but the wentals wouldn’t allow that. Jess wouldn’t allow that. With part of his mind connected to the soul of the ship, he followed the fading wakes of the drogue vessels back to their origin.

  The air thickened to a heavy soup around him. Water drops split from the walls of his spherical vessel like splatters of molten metal from a burning meteor. As each energy-charged raindrop flew into the air, new wentals seeded the clouds and spread like a poison.

  Exhilaration rushed like a white torrent through him. With sheer force of will, Jess maintained the integrity of his vessel even as the wental water sweated away. Parts of the mother-of-pearl framework sloughed off as the support ribs pulled together to hold the ever-diminishing ball of water. Infused with the wentals, he could survive out in the hostile environment, just as he could live in the open vacuum of space. But he had to keep some reserve to protect his sister and the others.

  As organic mists of long-chain aerosols blurred his vision, Jess identified the awesome hydrogue citysphere: a cluster of geometric domes and interlinked enclosures, structures impossible to comprehend. From here, on this very planet, the hydrogues had launched warglobes to attack helpless humans . . . all those ruined Roamer skymines . . . Ross’s Blue Sky Mine.

  Focusing the intensity of his gaze like a laser, Jess made the water-and-pearl vessel hurtle forward. Never decreasing speed, the spinning ship crashed through the protective membranes surrounding the floating citysphere. His vessel careened into the alien metropolis and cruised past the polyhedral building structures. Hydrogue infestations.

  Jess raced down streets and between tall angled complexes of the strange city. His senses were alert for any hint as to where he might find the human prisoners. As he searched, wental senses directed him, helped him track down the protected prison. Seeping through water molecules in the air, the wentals seemed to know he was growing closer every moment. Tasia was somewhere nearby.

  Down in the st
reets among inverted bridges and Möbius-strip arches, liquid-crystal forms gathered like puddles of mercury to stand against him. The hydrogues in this citysphere were aware of his intrusion and pulled together to prevent him from succeeding in what he had come to do.

  The diminished water-and-pearl ship drifted to a halt as the hydrogues blocked its passage. Pooled in front of Jess’s vessel, the hydrogues rose into shapes, coalescing until they all stood in front of him as an army of perfectly identical, exquisitely detailed replicas.

  Jess could not move.

  They were all Ross.

  116

  ZHETT KELLUM

  When all the Roamer ships were full of wentals from the living oceans of Charybdis, Speaker Peroni dispatched her squadrons. The planning and distribution had been complex, with so many target planets and a limited number of ships to do it. Zhett Kellum damn well expected to do her part.

  In groups of twos and threes, the hodgepodge vessels flew to their chosen infested gas giants. The fourteen Plumas tankers, even the small cargo and passenger cruisers, were filled to bursting with wentals, enough to engulf the drogues in a massive, multipronged assault.

  On target and on schedule, Zhett and her father flew their water-laden cargo haulers toward the first planet on their list: Welyr, a burned-out-looking gas giant where the rusty clouds reminded her of old bloodstains. Zhett’s father had requested this world in particular. He had a score to settle here.

  “I took too damn long to ask Shareen to marry me, but we were planning on it—before the drogues, that is,” Kellum mused over the transmission line, sounding regretful. “Those bastards smashed her skymine right down there.”

  “Oh, Dad,” Zhett said from her cargo hauler. She could barely remember her real mother, who had died when Zhett was very young. Her father had always been businesslike and independent, and Shareen Pasternak was also tough and stubborn. The two had made a perfect couple.

  He continued, “Never had a chance to say goodbye. I’m glad to be doing this for all the clans—but by damn, this is personal for me.”

  “Let’s send those warglobes packing and get on with our lives.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to strike the first blow, my sweet?”

  She snorted. “There’ll be enough drogues for all of us, Dad.”

  The two water-bearing ships dove toward the upper layers of the ruddy gas giant. Cargo hatches opened, spilling thousands of liters of energized water, and the freed wentals dispersed into the swirling clouds.

  Cruising along, the ships roared above the misty layers, continuing to drop a rain of water elementals. When they were certain the task was accomplished, they ascended to a safe altitude. Peering through the slanted cockpit panes, Zhett watched rapid storm systems form as the wentals spread out from the seeded clouds like a flame front devouring dry tinder.

  “If warglobes come after us now,” she said, “they’re going to run smack into spreading wentals.”

  The Roamer ships had swung over to the nightside of Welyr. Zhett resisted the urge to spill even more water into the dark clouds. The wentals were already propagating swiftly enough. She could tell her father was anxious to move on.

  “Save some for the next gas giant, my sweet,” he transmitted. “We’ve done what we need to do, and it’s time to head off to our second target.”

  “Then let’s be off. Just when I was starting to have fun. Next stop, Osquivel—six hours away by stardrive.”

  “Ah, Osquivel. Back to our old stomping grounds—to do some genuine stomping, by damn.”

  Behind them, as they departed, the battle raged in the skies of Welyr.

  117

  GENERAL KURT LANYAN

  The EDF ships and two cohorts of Ildiran warliners settled into a well-choreographed defensive pattern around Earth, just waiting for the hydrogues to show themselves. The far-outnumbered human battleships circled with ornate Solar Navy vessels both outside and inside the perimeter. More Ildiran warliners patrolled widely.

  On the bridge of the Goliath, General Lanyan counted down the hours, simultaneously eager and full of dread. He had no way to guess when the damned enemy fleet would show up. Adar Zan’nh hadn’t been specific, nor had he revealed how the Mage-Imperator had gotten his information in the first place. The Ildirans were so enamored with stories, he wondered if they’d ever heard the one about Chicken Little.

  Basil Wenceslas contacted him three times daily for updates. Though Lanyan reassured him, the Chairman still sounded uncomfortable about all the unanswered questions. The General answered reassuringly, “We’re fully staffed and as ready as we can be, sir. We may have diminished crews, but we’re capable of running our ships just fine without Soldier compies.”

  The Chairman did not seem cheered by the information. “No surprise, considering we only have a fraction of the vessels we had a month ago.”

  “I will inform you of any changes.” Lanyan quickly got off the channel. At least here in the home system, he didn’t need a green priest for direct communication. Besides, there weren’t any green priests available other than Nahton at the Whisper Palace. And according to the Chairman, Nahton had recently become intractable.

  EDF Remoras circled alongside the much larger Ildiran warliners. Though the scout flyers transmitted greetings to the giant ships, the alien crews sent no response. Ildirans had always been standoffish; every EDF soldier knew that.

  The fighter pilots extended a network of tripwire sensors farther out to the fringes of the solar system in hopes of spotting the approaching warglobes. Multiply redundant teams kept diligent watch, waiting for the invasion force to sweep in. All eyes were turned outward, looking into the deep interstellar distance for the earliest possible warning.

  No one, however, expected the enemy to suddenly appear from inside the solar system.

  At Jupiter, the gas giant nearest to Earth, the white and ochre cloud bands began to boil. Like a horde of barbarians, hundreds of diamond warglobes emerged from a hidden hydrogue base.

  The first direct clash between the Earth Defense Forces and the enemy had occurred at Jupiter. There, hydrogues had utterly defeated the most powerful EDF battleships. Now the deep-core aliens came back through a transgate inside the giant planet—a back door, an undefended route into the solar system. Hydrogues emerged already inside the outer perimeter, already within humanity’s first line of defenses.

  The asteroid belt shipyards were the first to report the disturbance. High-resolution extreme magnification imagers spotted warglobes streaming like a barrage of cannonballs up from the cloud bands. The initial warning came from a spacedock inspector. “General, the warglobes are coming, and coming! We’ve already dispatched the few fast-response ships we have left.”

  Urgent alarms sounded on the Goliath’s bridge. The crew, already tense and on high alert, scrambled to their battle stations. Lanyan knew the few swift craft from the shipyards didn’t stand a chance. “Withdraw and do not engage!”

  The shipyard pilots were space construction workers, and none of them had ever expected to go into direct combat. Now, facing the armada of warglobes, they performed standard evasive maneuvers. But after two blasts from the front line of oncoming hydrogues, the pilots’ transmissions ended in static.

  The General issued orders. “All ships, withdraw from the outer solar system immediately! Get your asses in close—the drogues are already here!”

  “General, what if this is just a feint?” said his exec. “What if even more warglobes are coming from outside the system?”

  Lanyan looked over at him. “If that’s the case, Mr. Kosevic, then we’re all dead.”

  EDF station ships pushed their in-system engines to their limits, swooping down toward the Sun with all possible speed. But as widely separated as they were, it would take hours for them to arrive.

  Lanyan paced the bridge, knocking his fists together. “Inform Adar Zan’nh—just in case he hasn’t been paying attention. We need every possible defense close to Ea
rth—now.”

  On the tactical screens, the tally of warglobes already exceeded seven hundred, and more continued to stream out of the transgate deep within Jupiter.

  Reinforced EDF hull armor was designed to resist known hydrogue weapons. Each gunship, Manta, and Thunderhead had a full arsenal of shaped charges, fracture-pulse bombs, carbon-carbon slammers, and intensified jazers. Even so, Lanyan doubted they had enough to do more than annoy an enemy fleet of such magnitude.

  He gave orders to his helmsman: “Bring our defensive ring out to stand guard.” Admiral Sheila Willis acknowledged from her rescued Manta and flew to the forefront of the fight.

  Ildiran warliners joined the EDF battleships as the human vessels pulled forward. Behind them came the second cohort of Solar Navy vessels; all told, they presented an extremely intimidating front. But the hydrogues did not slow as they rushed in, aiming at Earth as if it were a bull’s-eye.

  The tension among his crew was palpable. Lanyan used the intership direct line, saying whatever words came out of his mouth, not bothering to think of how he would be quoted in the history books.

  “Buckle in and get ready to meet the drogues head-on. If those ships get past us, they’ll destroy Earth and then go on to exterminate every one of our colonies. You know damn well that I might be asking you to fight to the death today, but we are the last line of defense. If we don’t stop the enemy here, there isn’t going to be a tomorrow.”

  The warglobes tumbled relentlessly closer, looking like the spiked balls on the end of an ogre’s medieval weapon. Lanyan knew that his EDF was as ready as it could be. Every Remora had been launched. Mantas, Thunderheads, and various gunships swirled around like wasps trying to block a herd of stampeding elephants.

  “Prepare to open fire.” Lanyan broadened the transmission. “Adar Zan’nh, are you ready?”

  “I am here to do my duty.”