Of Fire and Night

by Kevin J. Anderson

  All but defenseless, they watched the battle rage. Several shots slammed into the side of the warliner, causing the systems in the command nucleus to spark and overload.

  “Emergency stabilization!” Zan’nh shouted. “Our task here may be done, but the war is not over.”

  “We have no effective weapons, Adar.”

  Zan’nh stood alone, staring. Even if he could have moved, it would have accomplished nothing. The feeling of helplessness left him very angry.

  He did not make excuses, did not apologize to his crew. The Adar had done what he had sworn to do, but now he and his brave group of soldiers were no longer relevant to the continuing battle. They could only sit like fallen leaves while the furious storm of conflict roiled around them.

  120

  ANTON COLICOS

  When the work was done and the planet evacuated, Tal O’nh’s flagship and seven warliners remained to watch the final death throes of Hyrillka’s primary sun. Anton and Vao’sh kept careful notes.

  Though the one-eyed commander had insisted that his priority was to get the young Designate safely back to Ildira, Ridek’h stood firm. “Hyrillka is my world, my responsibility. I will stay to the end. I want to go down there one last time.”

  Yazra’h turned her head away from the boy to hide a proud smile.

  O’nh fixed him with an intense stare from his single eye. “To what purpose, Designate? Everyone is gone. You have done your duty.”

  “I wish to say farewell. I should be the last one there—along with my rememberer.” He looked at Vao’sh.

  Yazra’h stepped forward. “I can guarantee the Designate’s safety, as well as that of Rememberers Anton and Vao’sh.”

  The tal could find no excuse. “Hyrillka will be stable for a short while yet. However, we shouldn’t disrupt our schedule.”

  “My entire planet is disrupted.” Ridek’h sounded alarmingly strong and stern. Anton blinked in surprise.

  And so their small party had gone down. Piloted by Yazra’h, the cutter descended to the ghost town of Hyrillka’s main city. Clouds in the sky were a soup of smoke. Angry weather patterns already seemed to be conspiring to unleash their wrath upon the helpless planet. Anton had a small electronic pad for recording his thoughts, but he had not input a single sentence. “Vao’sh, I think I’m completely out of words for something like this.”

  The cutter landed at the base of the hill by the empty citadel palace. Some of the buildings looked painfully new, with fresh wood and bright stone. A few green shoots poked up from the fertilized plantings in what had been burned nialia fields. Plants rustled in the breezes. The city itself, though empty, seemed aware of its fate.

  To Anton, the spaceport looked like an empty field after a huge carnival had passed through. A few broken-down ships and forgotten belongings cluttered the ground. Discarded supplies and abandoned equipment sat in piles where they had been dumped. Everything would be left behind.

  Anton drank it all in, unable to push from his mind the words of the classic Shelley poem. He recited aloud,

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  The old rememberer frowned. “Is that a tale about the fall of one of your great human empires?”

  “More a reminder of the transience of all things, and how even our most enduring works crumble in the end.”

  “We have similar stanzas in the Saga of Seven Suns. ‘There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.’”

  “Yes, I know that part.”

  Ridek’h stood in front of the cutter, staring as the brisk wind played across his face. The boy’s eyes were full of emotion. His gangly body trembled with impotent anger. “I tried my best, but I failed.”

  “You never really had a chance to start,” Yazra’h said. “Neither your father nor the Mage-Imperator could have done better.”

  “I hate the hydrogues.”

  “As do we all.”

  They remained among the empty buildings in uneasy silence for a long time. Ridek’h walked once more up the citadel palace hill to survey the half-completed structures and the newly repaved streets. With a flash of fire in his eyes, the boy turned. “Take me back to the warliners. It is time for us to leave.”

  When they returned to the battleship, the young Designate gave Tal O’nh the official order to depart.

  The implacable struggles of the faeros and hydrogues continued inside the primary sun. The myriad diamond warglobes swirled around, pouring out icewave blasts as if rallying to deliver a coup de grâce. Solar flares shot out in all directions, giant curls of plasma confined within magnetic loops. Anton wondered what last desperate weapon the faeros might unleash.

  Before Tal O’nh’s warliner could leave Hyrillka, the sensor technician cried out. “The sun has undergone a dramatic shift. It is brightening!”

  Without warning, a surging eruption hurled an uncountable number of incandescent shapes into space. Like sparks from a grinding wheel, hot ellipsoids sprayed from the beleaguered star in an ever-increasing flow.

  The scientist kithmen scrambled to take data and interpret it.

  “The sun is blowing up!” Ridek’h said. The command nucleus crew gasped.

  Yazra’h studied the scene carefully. “No, it is not exploding. It has spawned thousands of faeros ships. Thousands!”

  Anton was amazed. “Maybe it’s . . . all of them.”

  Like spores ejected from an overripe fungus, a new wave of faeros swept outward, and they outnumbered the hydrogues ten to one. The hydrogues swirled to mount their defenses, but the fireballs kept coming . . . and kept coming—a seemingly infinite number.

  Anton supposed the faeros had opened their own transgates deep within Hyrillka’s primary sun. “It almost looks like those fireballs are streaming through from every other inhabited faeros star, all them coming here, all at once. Talk about a showdown!”

  On the screen, the overwhelming number of ellipsoids disintegrated the diamond specks one by one. Faeros continued to surge out of the plasma like lava from an erupting volcano, fireball after fireball, and the blue-white star brightened again, revitalized.

  Within hours, every warglobe had been annihilated. Hundreds of shattered diamond vessels formed a field of rubble and debris close to the primary sun.

  Like a cloud of ignited tinder, the faeros withdrew to the safe layers of the star. They dove into the flaming pool like otters playing in warm water, contributing once again to the stellar fire. Anton wondered if the damaged sun would ever return to normal.

  In the flagship’s command nucleus, few words were spoken. Finally Designate Ridek’h looked hopefully at Yazra’h. “Does this mean . . . is there a chance the sun will keep shining? That we do not need to abandon Hyrillka, after all? If the hydrogues are beaten, then my planet is safe—is it not?”

  Yazra’h remained uneasy. “Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Hyrillka may always be a dangerous place.”

  Anton looked over at her. “Then I will be very glad to be back on Ildira, safe and sound.”

  121

  OSIRA’H

  The hydrogues know what we have done,” Mage-Imperator Jora’h said to Osira’h. “And we did not succeed.” The thism bond between her father and his son Zan’nh had already told him what he needed to know. “The Adar expended all of his automated ships, and I do not think they were enough. The hydrogues launched many more warglobes than the small fleet they specified when they explained their plan.” Jora’h bowed his head, gripped the sides of his chrysalis chair. “Far too many warglobes remain.”

  Osira’h did not share her father’s sense of defeat. Not yet. In the days since coming to live in the Prism Palace, she had come to realize that, although she had fulfilled her ostensible mission
in life by making contact with the hydrogues, she had never fully tested the extent of her powers. She knew there was more inside her than even Udru’h and the lens kithmen on Dobro suspected. She had faith in that untapped power, faith that she could draw strength from the abilities of her mother and her father, faith in the unique synergy between her parents—a loving synergy that had produced Osira’h herself.

  “We are at a cruxpoint, Father. But all is not lost.”

  Jora’h had already sent a signal, placing the warliners in orbit on high alert. Two maniples of warliners were descending at high speed, burning through the upper atmosphere to position themselves in front of the sixty watchdog hydrogue spheres. “I had hoped Tal Lorie’nh would reach Earth in time. Perhaps I should not have sent his warliners away from here.”

  Osira’h looked up at the interlocked panes of the skysphere dome. No one could get there soon enough to intervene. Only she could deal with the hydrogues.

  “The emissary is coming. He is very angry.” Strangely, Osira’h felt more anticipation than fear. She was actually looking forward to this.

  The small containment chamber careened through the Prism Palace corridors like a diamond wrecking ball. The emissary smashed through a gateway, knocked down an arch, and streaked along the stained-glass halls. Ildirans scrambled out of the way.

  Osira’h stood in front of the Mage-Imperator. “Allow me to speak to him, Father. It may be our only chance.”

  “I should never have brought you and your mother into this trap.”

  “Wait. An unwise hunter may be caught in his own trap,” the girl said.

  Overhead, the warglobes were dropping lower, crackling with blue lightning. The Solar Navy defenders would never destroy the diamond spheres in time. Even if they did, the explosions and wreckage would level half the city.

  The girl faced the furious emissary as he entered the chamber and came to a halt. The liquid-metal figure within had already formed into a human shape surrounded by swirling internal gases. An ominous voice thundered out: “You knew the price you would pay if you did not comply with our instructions, and yet you betrayed us at Earth.” Despite his anger, the hydrogue’s simulated expression did not change. “We will now obliterate your city, your world, and your race.”

  With the grace of an Isix cat, Osira’h walked down the steps and stopped innocently before the containment sphere, undefended, nonthreatening. In her mind the bridge between herself and the deep-core aliens had never been completely severed, but she had closed off access in her mind, like slamming a gate shut. “Before you destroy us, we have vital information the hydrogues should consider.”

  “What information?” the doubtful emissary said.

  “A fatal weakness in the verdani, and a flaw you can use to annihilate the returned wentals.” Osira’h’s mother had explained many things she’d learned from her renewed link with the worldforest. “We offer this information to save our lives.”

  “Tell us.”

  “Only if you spare the Ildirans,” she said.

  The emissary seemed taken aback by the girl’s boldness. “We will decide the worth of your information once we know it.”

  Seeming to accede, she said, “I will communicate it through my mental bridge.” Her face went blank and, without waiting for permission, she opened herself in the way she had learned, reestablishing contact. The hydrogue emissary opened access to the bridge from his side. Good. His cooperation made her task easier.

  Always before, her contact with the hydrogues had been accommodating, even subservient. Not this time. Catching them off guard, she smashed the narrow gate open wider with the battering ram of her mind. She felt no hesitation about what she had to do.

  But she needed more. When the emissary recoiled in surprise from the power of her mental touch, Osira’h took a step backward and reached out for her father’s hand as he came down to join her. They touched and bonded. He was the center of all Ildiran thism, the Mage-Imperator, and her father. The bond could not have been stronger. Contact with the thism intensified her own specially bred abilities, and she became unstoppable. Blasting away all barriers, Osira’h forced the telepathic connection like a rape upon the hydrogue mind.

  There was nothing the emissary could do. Osira’h was the bridge. She had to move swiftly, before he understood his true danger. Seizing his mind, the half-breed girl became a conduit through him to all the hydrogues in the sixty warglobes overhead. She crashed through their individual walls, pooled into their common minds. Osira’h instantly sensed their confusion, heard their demands, even detected a glimmer of fear at their inability to understand the unbreakable bond.

  It was exactly what she needed.

  Without releasing his daughter’s grasp, Jora’h drew her closer to him. More important, Osira’h knew that her mother had arrived as well.

  Nira emerged from a hidden side alcove carrying her newly sprouted treeling, its fronds green and golden from the lump of worldtree wood. The moment the female green priest revealed herself, the alien emissary recoiled inside his environment sphere. He struggled desperately to disconnect the mental link, to close the gate that Osira’h had blasted away, but she held his mind fast, refusing to let him go.

  With the treeling in one hand, Nira touched her daughter’s shoulder and connected through telink. As soon as Osira’h and her mother were united, the telink flooded in. Her parents acted as amplifiers, augmenting Osira’h’s power with the thism on one side and telink on the other. Osira’h, the bridge, now became an aqueduct through which the power could stream.

  Nira set loose the worldforest mind.

  The vast and forceful mind of the verdani—every ancient and knowledgeable tree throughout the widespread worldforest—surged like a locomotive through the new and unorthodox conduit. Osira’h let it all flow. The hydrogues could not stop any of it.

  Thousands of years of verdani thoughts, resentment, and horrifying memories spewed into, and overwhelmed, the raw mind of the emissary—and soared through him to the warglobes overhead. It was as if she had planted and then detonated hundreds of explosives within the warglobes.

  Together, Osira’h, Jora’h, and Nira moved closer to the containment sphere. Shrieking, spasming, the hydrogue’s shape dissolved within his chamber. The feedback hammerblow also destroyed many of the quicksilver creatures aboard the looming warglobes. The hydrogues were components of a shared species like the verdani, like the wentals. If the mental shockwave continued long enough, the force would eat away all of the hydrogues, even the far distant ones. The corrosive thoughts of the trees, their enemies, were poison to them.

  The deadly thoughts shot outward, streaming toward the hydrogues overhead. The sixty diamond spheres reeled in the Ildiran sky. Blue lightning weapons discharged erratically, but most of the blasts went wild, firing off into the clouds. With sonic booms from their roaring descent to defend the Prism Palace, Solar Navy warliners plunged toward them—but the warglobes were already dying.

  The deep-core aliens chose to sacrifice themselves and break the link, saving the rest of the hydrogues across the Spiral Arm. They forcibly cut the bond with their race rather than let the poisonous thoughts spread. Reeling out of control, warglobes tumbled out of the sky like crystalline asteroids. They bowled through the streets of Mijistra, crashed into the hills, exploded over dwelling complexes. The dying warglobes shattered ornate towers, leveled tall buildings, and killed thousands. Around them, concussions and flames and collapsing buildings created great havoc.

  Osira’h could sense many of those deaths through her own partial thism, but she felt the end of the hydrogues more keenly. Tears streamed down the face of the Mage-Imperator as he endured so much death and destruction. But her father knew this also meant the liberation of his people. Osira’h could only hope the same thing was happening to all the watchdog enemy ships at other Ildiran worlds.

  122

  JESS TAMBLYN

  Before he could reach his sister inside the alien citysphere,
Jess faced an army of Ross replicas. The hydrogues could not have chosen a more potent image to use against him. He could think of no greater symbol of his failure and his heart’s betrayal than the face of his dead brother.

  How had they guessed? How could the drogues possibly know about Ross?

  Long ago, Jess had taken advantage of his brother’s trust, had fallen in love with the woman who should have married Ross. But now Cesca was wental-infused, like him. And Ross was this.

  His hovering wental vessel had come to an impasse with the crowd of quicksilver copies that blocked his way from all sides. Ross stared at him.

  How could they know?

  From within the encapsulated ship, the wentals spoke to him. It means nothing. They do not know you.

  Ross had been one of the very first victims of the deep-core aliens. The hydrogues must have copied his appearance. That was all. The hydrogues had used that image when their emissary had killed Old King Frederick.

  Despite the doubts in his heart, his mind insisted on the logic. He’d been tricked by his emotions too many times—recently by the tainted wental that had reanimated his mother, and now this. How could the hydrogues possibly understand Ross’s significance to the man now leading a wental invasion into their midst? It couldn’t be so.

  With iron-hard resolve, Jess shouted at Ross’s infinitely repeated face. “You are not my brother, any more than she was really my mother.” He clung to his love for Cesca and his hatred for the hydrogues. Tasia was down here somewhere, and he wouldn’t let this inhuman horde stop him.

  Knowing what he had to do, Jess made his choice. With a single thought, he burst the bubble of his ship. Liberated wental water sprayed out like deadly hail in all directions. Droplets splattered across the quicksilver drogues with the force of burning acid, and the human shapes began to writhe and dissolve. The elemental mist engulfed the standing army and destroyed the hateful charade of Ross look-alikes.