Basil could understand little from the flurry of blips. It looked as if someone had smashed two wasps’ nests together and then stepped back to watch the resulting flurry. He turned to a rabbit-faced comm officer. “Get me General Lanyan on the speaker right now.”
“Sir, he’s blocked all but—”
“I’m the Chairman! Don’t tell me you can’t arrange a priority override.”
“Yes, Mr. Chairman. Of course I can.” Skittering fingers across the control pad, the meek comm officer shouted into the voice pickup, then switched over the screen.
Basil rose to his feet and addressed the EDF commander. “General Lanyan, I need to understand what’s going on up there. Have the Ildirans—”
Gruff and harried-looking, Lanyan flicked his ice-blue eyes at Basil. “I’m busy right now. Can’t you see we’re in the middle of a battle?”
“We can see very little, General. I want a full summary—”
“You’ll get your report when this is over, sir.” Abruptly, he cut the channel.
Basil was left staring at a blank screen. He felt as if someone had punched him. “How dare he terminate the conversation!”
Cain was at his side. “Mr. Chairman, the General needs to concentrate on the battle. In the meantime, I advise that we evacuate to our safe bunkers.”
“No guarantee those are hydrogue-proof either. I need to be in the thick of things, for better or worse.” Basil shook his head as he raised the questions to himself. Even if he could survive the destruction of Earth and the decapitation of the Hansa, why would he want to? Running the government was his entire life. If he’d had anything else to do, he could have retired long ago. And since he no longer seemed to have an acceptable successor, Basil had no choice but to remain in his role. If need be, he would stay here and go down with his ship.
But he wouldn’t be the only one.
An idea spread like sunrise across his features. “Go find King Peter and Queen Estarra . . . in fact, bring Prince Daniel as well. I want them all here.”
Cain readily agreed. “They can record a brave speech. We’ll stand together and show history the defiant end of Earth, if it comes to that.”
Basil squeezed a fist again, then forced his clawlike hands to uncurl. “Regardless, they’re going to be here waiting just like the rest of us.”
But no one could raise Captain McCammon on the local communications net. The guard team stationed outside Prince Daniel’s quarters also failed to respond. Was no one in the universe reliable? Had even the royal guards abandoned their posts?
He threw orders like sharp knives at the guards standing outside the war room. “Go to the Whisper Palace and personally bring me the King, the Queen, and the Prince.” Hearing the rough-edged threat in Basil’s voice, the uniformed men bolted.
The Chairman continued to watch the storm of battle. The blips, images, and projected courses were impossible to decipher. Basil had no way to tell who was winning. While he waited for the runners to return with his sham royal family, he counted down the seconds. Why does everything take so long?
Finally, one of the guards reported back over the intercom. “Inform the Chairman that we’ve arrived at the Royal Wing. The King and Queen are not in their apartments, but we discovered Captain McCammon and another guard unconscious. Apparently stunned. The guards’ twitchers are gone.”
Basil leapt to his feet. “Impossible!”
The second group of men responded. “We just found the same thing at Prince Daniel’s quarters, Mr. Chairman. The guards were knocked out and hidden in a storage room. They’re still pretty groggy. No sign of the Prince, either. Maybe somebody kidnapped them.”
Basil’s legs turned to water, as if someone had hit him with a twitcher. He dropped back into the chair. “Nobody kidnapped them. They escaped.” It was too much! Peter had defied him over and over again. No matter what the Hansa did for him, no matter what Basil threatened or promised, Peter still lashed out at him like an ungrateful dog. Now it was all failing because everyone had betrayed him.
His vision went red and his eyes burned. He heard a loud sound, felt a tearing pain in his throat, and realized that he was making the noises. He howled with rage, screaming inarticulate curses—and then he caught himself. Deputy Cain stared at Basil in astonishment. All the tactical experts and comm officers had turned from the dramatic battle screens to look at the Chairman as if he had gone insane.
Embarrassment came down on him like a freezing rain, and Basil forced his breathing to calm. He remained statue-still, demanding that his face resume its normal calm façade. If they were all going to die, then he would do it in a dignified fashion.
126
CESCA PERONI
Roamer commando groups had spread out to dozens of known hydrogue haunts. For the initial strike with her own team, Cesca had chosen to fly one of the enormous Plumas water tankers alongside others flown by the Tamblyn brothers. They had a long list of infested planets to visit.
Meanwhile, her other teams set off to separate targets, following starcharts that marked the lairs of hydrogues. The deep-core aliens were being hit on hundreds of planets, all at the same time.
Cesca’s small squadron spiraled down to the indistinct edge of atmosphere high above the gas giant Haphine. She had never visited this cool, storm-swept world before, though she knew its historical significance. One of the first two skymines the Roamers ever leased from Ildirans had been deployed here. Haphine was also the site of the fourth hydrogue attack against humans; six thousand Roamers had died here.
Now the tables were turned. Cesca directed her team to disperse their wental cargoes and begin the recapture of another hydrogue stronghold.
Caleb Tamblyn sounded conversational on the comm, but Cesca detected his underlying anxiety, a nervous need to talk and distract himself from the upcoming engagement. “Clan Tamblyn has always been the best at shipping and delivering water where it’s needed.”
“You could consider this all part of a day’s work,” Cesca added.
Then they dumped part of their wental supply. The energized water penetrated the thick, bluish-gray clouds, diffusing deeper into the planet.
The cacophony of wentals in Cesca’s cargo hold filled her senses and talked inside her head. She could feel the clash surging through the winds, and she could feel the imminent victory. “The wentals are already dissolving Haphine’s transgate to bottle up the drogues. The enemy can’t get away.”
As if hearing an invitation, three diamond battleships rose from the contaminated clouds, already crackling with energy bolts. Their crystal surfaces were pitted and stained, scoured by corrosive wental vapors in the atmosphere. Mist smothered the warglobes, clinging with caustic droplets, as if the fog itself were conscious.
Caleb Tamblyn flew his tanker close to hers. “That means we get to deal with those warglobes ourselves?”
“Isn’t that what we came here for?” asked Wynn from his own ship.
From below, at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere, Torin Tamblyn came racing upward. He had already dumped his load of wentals, but even the lightened water tanker was not able to outrun the three warglobes that came howling after him. “They’re on my tail!” he transmitted. “Everybody either help, or get out of my way.”
His two brothers altered course and plunged down toward him with their heavier tankers. Torin tried to escape the blue lightning storm that came lancing out of the diamond spheres.
Cesca’s own tanker was still filled with Charybdis water, and she could feel the contained wentals pulsing through her, through the cargo hold, through the entire ship. She could see immediately that the hydrogues were going to destroy all of the tankers. “You Tamblyns—scatter! You can’t fight this.”
Caleb cried, “But they’re after Torin!”
“Then let them go after me instead.”
As the water elementals vibrated into the hull of the large tanker, Cesca’s ship accelerated, roaring between Torin Tamblyn’s fleeing vessel an
d the oncoming warglobes. The hydrogues had no idea what they were facing.
As the trio of diamond spheres shot toward her, still barreling after the Tamblyn ships, Cesca pulled up to expose the tanker’s lower hull like a submissive animal baring its belly. When she released the cargo bay doors, the wentals lunged out like a hurricane made of living water.
The rolling cloud of vengeful fog expanded into an insubstantial barrier before the warglobes. When the spiked spheres tore through it, they were suddenly swathed in clinging, destructive mist. Cesca had time only to see the water elementals begin to do damage, a caustic film sizzling through the supposedly indestructible diamond shells.
The hydrogues careened left and right. Two of them cracked into each other, then ricocheted like billiard balls. Cesca’s tanker was right in the path of all three blinded warglobes.
When the impact came, the flash of light and fury was all around her. She felt as if her entire body were a gong being pounded by a band of cruel gremlins with hammers. Then she was falling, floating, spinning within a shooting gallery of hull shrapnel, freezing air vapor, and energized water.
The wentals kept her alive. Cesca had not meant to test her indestructibility, had not thought about putting herself or the valuable tanker in harm’s way. She had done what was necessary. She turned to see the three tankers flown by the Tamblyn brothers circling around. She floated alone, without a radio or any means of communicating with them.
To her grim satisfaction, though, the three warglobes were blotchy and leprous, mortally wounded. When the spheres shattered, curved fragments glittered in the distant sunlight, beginning a slow orbital spiral back down toward the clouds of Haphine. The wental mist, moving of its own volition, swooped down past the wreckage like a swarm of angry hornets to the clouds, where the other wentals were already spreading destruction.
Experimenting, Cesca found that she could make herself move, impelling herself through the vacuum simply by willing herself to do so. Caleb, Wynn, and Torin Tamblyn must have thought she had been killed in the explosion, for as she rose in front of one of their cockpit windows, waving her hands, she could see Caleb’s jaw drop. He grabbed the communications transmitter, excitedly spreading the news to his brothers.
She grinned and mimed that she wanted to be picked up through one of the hull hatches. Now they had one less tanker—and one less hydrogue world to recapture. But they had plenty more to do before the day was over.
127
TASIA TAMBLYN
Tasia had never understood most of what she could view through the jeweled membrane of their preservation cell, but now things were crazier than she had ever seen them. “Something’s going on out there again, and it doesn’t look like a party.”
Warglobes cruised over the streets, exiting through the barrier that surrounded the drifting citysphere. Liquid-metal hydrogues flowed like schools of startled fish, and Klikiss robots marched about.
“They’ve always been crazy,” groaned Keffa. “Why don’t they just kill us and be done with it?”
“Maybe they’re trying to see how we hold up under stress,” Robb said.
“Not very damn well,” said Belinda; the haggard-looking female captive had never told Tasia her last name.
After EA’s murder, anger still simmered inside Tasia like molten metal. She longed for a way to smash a Klikiss robot or two. The hydrogues were alien, sure, but the big mechanical cockroaches were actually evil. Klikiss robots enjoyed inflicting pain, dominating, and destroying. It was part of their programming.
She had always relied on her own toughness and brains, using Roamer skills and any scraps of material she could find. Tasia Tamblyn had never expected a white knight on a horse to ride in and save her from her imprisonment. She knew that no heroic cavalry—not even an EDF commando squad—would swoop in to take them away from this nightmare.
However, the sudden sight of her brother Jess on the other side of the translucent membrane was so ridiculous and unexpected that Tasia thought she’d gone completely insane. She had expected to last at least as long as the other prisoners before she cracked. Could the drogues be playing another cruel trick on her?
Jess stood outside in the deadly environment wearing only a thin white garment that clung to his body. His legs and arms were bare. His long brown hair flowed even in the incredible pressure of the hydrogue world.
“Shizz, if I’m going to have delusions, I’d hope they would have at least a glimmer of logic to them.”
Robb yelped. “Who’s that?” When the others crowded closer, all of them gasping and shouting questions, Tasia could not deny that everyone else saw him, too. She rubbed her eyes.
“That’s—that looks like my brother Jess. But it can’t be.”
“I’ll second that,” Robb said. “He’s at the core of a gas giant and he’s . . . barefoot.”
Tasia had seen the drogues create a quicksilver sculpture of her brother Ross, so this must be a new form they had chosen. The aliens’ imitative abilities must have improved, because he certainly looked lifelike. Why did they keep preying on Tasia’s memories? Her joy changed to crushed disappointment. “You’re not real!” she shouted through the membrane.
When Jess came closer to the preservation cell, his face lit up with a real expression of delight and triumph. His rakish grin was unmistakable, dredging up many memories from her childhood. When the drogues had copied Ross, they had never succeeded in showing any emotions or expressions. This was something definitely different.
“Who the hell are you? And what do you want?” she demanded.
His voice came as vibrations transmitted through the dense atmosphere, amplified by some unknown power. It was Jess’s voice, all right. “I’ve come to rescue you, little sister. Don’t you recognize me?”
Her sarcasm was automatic. “Let’s see, your hair’s a little longer than I remember . . . oh, and I don’t recall that you could float about in a high-pressure environment wearing nothing more than a thin shirt and trunks!”
“Let him rescue us!” Belinda cried. “We don’t care who he is!”
“I care,” Tasia growled. “The drogues have screwed around with my family enough already.” She looked again at Jess’s face through the murky membrane and felt her heart flutter. By the Guiding Star, he sure looked like Jess! And she hated hated hated this place. “Okay, I’m willing to be flexible if he can get us out of here.”
“It is really me, Tasia, but I’m not the same as I was—you can guess that much. My body is infused with power from the wentals, a type of being as powerful as the hydrogues and the faeros. I have the power to get you out of here. Right now the wentals are attacking, and vanquishing, hydrogues all across the Spiral Arm.”
“It’s about damn time!” Keffa said.
“Anybody who crushes the drogues is a friend of mine.” Robb grabbed her arm. “Come on, Tasia. We’re light-years beyond having anything to lose at this point.”
The prisoners began to shout, anxious to break out of their hellish cell. Keffa was the lone voice of dissent, warning that it was a trap. Belinda jostled Tasia as if trying to throw herself headfirst through the barrier.
“Can we let him explain everything after he takes us away?”
“All right, we’ve been under a death sentence ever since we got put in this bizarre zoo. POWs are supposed to try and escape.” She looked at her brother, who stood in the hydrogue city without any visible means of carrying them to safety. “How are you going to pull this off?”
In a voice that remained eerie and powerful, Jess said, “Wentals are the mortal enemies of the hydrogues. They changed me, altered my body, so that I can do things you might not think possible.”
Tasia laughed. “Shizz, that’s an understatement!”
“Trust me.” His wental-amplified voice resonated in the cell. “I may not be completely human anymore, but right now that’s an advantage.”
Jess extended his arms and closed his eyes. Misty power crackled around him like g
athering fog as he condensed water droplets out of the air, molecule by molecule. He summoned rain until he had gathered enough elemental-charged water to fashion a protective bubble. The newly created sphere appeared fragile, with a skin as thin and insubstantial as soap film. The wental bubble kissed the protective membrane of the chamber. The films fused, and the cell barrier split open like parting lips.
Jess called from outside, “Pass through, and I’ll hold it together. You have to hurry. The battle is growing worse all around us.”
Tasia had already accepted, and endured, more than her share of impossible situations. What difference did one more crazy thing make? She grabbed Belinda and pushed her through the opening into the wental bubble. “Come on! I thought you all wanted to get out of here.”
A frantic Keffa stumbled through. Tasia and Robb helped the other captives, and then climbed together into the unusual escape vessel. Inside, the air smelled of ozone and fog. Each breath was incredibly delicious after such a long confinement in the hydrogue cell.
When Jess passed through the bubble film, Tasia realized just how much she wanted to run to him, to throw herself into the protective arms of her big brother. The last time she had seen him was when he’d flown past the lunar base, transmitting a coded message to EA that their father had died. But Jess warned her away, explaining about his deadly touch.
“Well, I promise you more than a thank-you note—as soon as we get out of here.”
For the first time since her capture, Tasia saw a glimmer of hope in her fellow prisoners’ faces. Jess’s water bubble detached itself from their hated cell, then rose up and away from the hydrogue citysphere.
128
KING PETER
Peter prayed that Chairman Wenceslas was sufficiently distracted by the hydrogue attack to let them slip cleanly away. “You’re sure you can fly this derelict, OX?”
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