Sophie shouted to the surviving guards, “Get her to sick bay! Call the doctors to prep.”
“It won’t be enough, Mother.” Devon’s hands were covered with blood as he pressed against the bullet wounds. “I’m using telemancy to help her cling for a few moments longer. I’ve slowed her metabolism, but she can’t survive this. If only we had the slickwater.”
Adolphus was there. “Go—now! Take her on a shuttle direct to Slickwater Springs, if that’s what you need to heal her.”
“It’s too far away.” A vast gulf of despair seemed to be inside Devon. “We’re in orbit.”
Sophie touched his shoulder. “You know not to give up hope, Devon. When have we ever given up?”
The dismay inside him seemed to be coming from the Birzh personality, because Devon struggled to the fore. “You’re right, Mother. Her heart is still beating—we have to try. If Xayan telemancy can help her hold on for just a few minutes longer, we’ve got to take that chance!”
Adolphus spoke over the intercom. “This is a top-priority message. Prep a shuttle for immediate departure with the pilot who can make the swiftest flight possible to Slickwater Springs. Go, go, go! I want that shuttle ready now!”
Rather than letting anyone else carry Antonia’s body, Devon used telemancy to lift her from the deck. He began to run with her body drifting in front of him, still dripping a bright intermittent trail of blood onto the deck, like scarlet breadcrumbs. Sophie ran behind them, breathing hard.
A lift tube took them directly down to the Jacob’s hangar bay. An alert young female pilot was waiting for them, and she rushed Devon and Sophie to a shuttle whose hatch was open. The pilot didn’t give a second glance at the bleeding young woman who floated into the craft’s passenger compartment.
The pilot was already warming up the shuttle’s engines, and as soon as the passengers were inside, she activated the thrusters and lifted the craft off the deck even as the hatch sealed.
The gravely injured Antonia sprawled on the seat, her eyelids flickering. Devon propped her head on his lap, holding on to her. “I’ve slowed her heartbeat as much as possible. She’s still with us, but only by the thinnest of threads.” His face was drawn, the eyes wide and wild. He looked like a child again, and Sophie wanted to comfort him, but she didn’t dare disrupt his concentration.
Antonia tried to whisper something, but Devon placed fingers on her lips. “Save your energy.” He closed his eyes, touching her face with his fingertips and communicating silently with Jhera. He did not even react when the shuttle accelerated out of the open launch-bay doors and arrowed down toward the cracked surface of Hellhole.
Knowing the urgency, the pilot dispensed with the customary safety checks, and did not give them a gentle flight. She took the swiftest possible descent, burning through the atmosphere at such a steep angle that the hull heated to the limits of its tolerances. In the back compartment, Sophie was jostled from side to side, thrown off balance in the buffeting winds as the shuttle peeled through the cloud layers.
Somehow, Devon kept his balance, bracing himself and Antonia in a bubble of telemancy. He leaned close and whispered, “Just hold on.…”
“There’s a growler storm between here and Slickwater Springs,” the pilot said over the intercom. “I have to skirt it.”
Sophie shouted back. “We need to land as soon as possible—every second counts!”
“Hang on. I’ll try to find the best way through, but this is going to get rough.”
The craft’s reinforced framework groaned with the strain as the shuttle entered the immense static storm. Sophie heard the pelting dust and pebbles that slashed against the side of the vessel.
With his arms wrapped around Antonia, Devon closed his eyes and concentrated with such intensity that Sophie couldn’t see him breathe. His eyelids did not flutter, nor did Antonia’s. Their faces looked as if they had been carved out of marble.
When the shuttle passed through the growler and got beneath it, the sudden calm was shocking. “Smooth as glass. We’ll be down in five minutes!” As the pilot accelerated into the clear air, Sophie was shoved back against the seat.
The pilot circled the basin and the mirrorlike alien pools that gleamed in the midday sunlight, surrounded by prefab tents, outbuildings, a lodge house, and the shelters Sophie had built for those who came to immerse themselves in slickwater. Nearby, a large encampment was being fenced in and workers hurried to set up the prisoner holding area.
The pilot set down hard, scattering spectators on the edge of the landing field. Sophie bounded to her feet and opened the hatch as dust swirled around them from the landed shuttle. “Come on, Devon! I’ll help you—hurry!”
But Devon sat motionless in the seat, still holding Antonia. Her clothes were soaked with blood, as were his arms all the way up to the elbows. He hung his head and looked up at his mother. She saw no distant alien presence there now, just a terrible emptiness. “She died before we passed through the storm.”
“Oh, Devon … oh, Devon, I’m so sorry!” Sophie reeled, clutching the side of the hatch.
Though he seemed to be drowning in grief, Devon gathered Antonia’s body, held her in his arms, and buoyed her up with telemancy. He plodded forward on leaden feet.
Around the landing zone, other shadow-Xayans had gathered to watch them. Devon stepped into the dusty haze and walked forward carrying Antonia; he looked like a man approaching his execution.
Tears streamed down Sophie’s face. “With the slickwater and all your telemancy—isn’t there something you can do?”
“I’ll take her to the pools,” he said.
Nearly fifty shadow-Xayans were already there, recently converted volunteers. They formed a silent column, watching as Devon walked toward the nearest pool. Sophie remained close, matching her son step for step. The thick tears that rolled down Devon’s cheeks were his own, not an alien’s.
They reached the pool, and he stood on the boardwalk, looking at the placid but mercurial waters that held the preserved memories of a great ancient race. He glanced over his shoulder toward Sophie. “Thank you, Mother. I love you.”
Then he stepped into the water, carrying Antonia’s limp form in his arms. Sophie’s breath hitched. Her son and the young woman he loved had merged with another romantic couple from a different time and a different civilization. Sophie would never be able to understand the depth of the loss that Devon felt now.
He waded forward until the sparkling alien water came up to his waist, then his chest, and Antonia was floating. He held her up and kept walking ahead until they reached the center of the strange pool.
The other shadow-Xayans gathered on the boardwalk, their gazes focused on him and his grief. No one uttered a word.
Devon submerged himself, pulling Antonia under the mirrored surface.
Sophie swallowed hard, sobbing, not knowing what he was doing. A moment later Antonia’s body floated to the surface, drifting free … and beside her Devon rose up as well, facedown in the slickwater. Neither of them moved.
“Devon!” Sophie screamed, ready to jump forward, but she stopped herself. If she entered the slickwater, one of the shadow-Xayan lives would join her body. She didn’t dare touch the alien liquid. Frantic, she looked from side to side, begging the shadow-Xayans. “One of you, please! Go retrieve my son! Bring him out! And the girl!”
Ten shadow-Xayans dropped into the pool and swam out to where Devon and Antonia drifted, side by side. Working together, they retrieved both forms and pulled them back to the shore. As the shadow-Xayans lifted the two out onto the boardwalk, the slickwater slid off them, curled away in living droplets and dripped back into the main pool, leaving the walkway dry.
But Devon and Antonia were lifeless and empty, their faces smooth and at peace. Sophie moaned. She turned to the slickwater pool and the distant reflections on its surface, and cursed it.
84
As the asteroids hurtled closer, Tanja didn’t sleep for three days straight, but exhaust
ion finally made it impossible for her to function. She budgeted a few hours for a nap, although she was too heartsick about Candela to sleep.
Several generations ago, her family members had given up everything to journey here from the Crown Jewels and make a fresh start. They lived on this frontier planet, accepted the beautiful views and verdant landscape, even when it was offset by torrential rains and terrible mudslides.
Then the greedy Diadem had surprised them all with the arrival of an unexpected trailblazer and the establishment of an unwanted stringline connection back to the old core worlds—so much for their solitude and independence. As a flood of new and uninvited colonists poured in, all of them loyal to the Constellation, Michella Duchenet had “welcomed” the independent Candela colonists back into her taxable fold like prodigal children, and forced them to pay exorbitant tributes for the privilege.
General Adolphus’s new Deep Zone network granted them independence again, with new dreams, a bright future. Tanja had expected a struggle against the Crown Jewels, yes … some pain and anxiety, probably bloodshed. She had fought back against the Diadem’s depredations in every way possible—too harshly, she realized now—but she’d done it to give her people and her planet a real chance.
And now all of that was being stolen from them by a pair of capricious asteroids—a disaster that Tanja couldn’t even blame on the Diadem or her corrupt government. But how could two asteroids target her planet simultaneously? Impossible! Survey ships and observation telescopes kept track of the incoming space rocks, each one nearly a hundred kilometers across. They hurtled forward on schedule, only three days from impact.
No one on Candela could stop them, and no one could survive on the surface in the aftermath of the impact. It was twice the disaster that had occurred on Hellhole five centuries before.
Her shadow-Xayan colonists had telemancy, but they were almost entirely wiped out from the backlash of their previous mental blast through the stringline. Only Tel Clovis and the Original alien Tryn survived, despite serious injuries, and they did not have enough power to nudge the asteroids onto a safer course. Even if the hundred shadow-Xayans remained alive, though, she suspected their telemancy would not be strong enough. Centuries earlier, the entire population of Xayans had not been able to push away one giant asteroid.
Tanja would have to save her population by other means.
* * *
The two stringline haulers arrived from Hellhole loaded with thirty-three rescue ships, which General Adolphus had dispatched from his military fleet. The first hauler pilot delivered his report in a breathless voice: “We were just attacked by the Army of the Constellation!” He showed Tanja Hu and Ian Walfor the images of Redcom Hallholme’s ragtag fleet. “But the General defeated them! They surrendered—they were starving!”
“Are you sure it’s not a trick?” Walfor asked. “Those ships disappeared months ago.”
“I saw the look in their eyes, sir,” the hauler pilot said. “They couldn’t surrender fast enough after hearing the promise of a hot meal. The General is now configuring the captured ships for his own defenses, but he sent these available vessels to help you evacuate. I hope these thirty-three ships are enough.”
“We’re going to need every one,” Tanja said.
The constant evacuation had continued for the past four days. Of the twenty-one main ships she had over Candela, eleven were completely loaded, their corridors packed with refugees, their life-support systems already beyond the nominal capacity. She needed to dispatch them to the Hellhole hub right away. The ships had never been designed to hold that many people, and certainly not for long.
Now that Adolphus had provided more ships, Tanja wasted no further time. She dispatched a codecall message: “All loaded refugee vessels—depart for Hellhole immediately. All passengers will disembark there, where they will be safe. Meanwhile, we will keep loading here until the last possible second.”
Time was now the issue. They wouldn’t have enough hours to make the shuttle flights needed to get everyone aboard the orbiting ships.
The pilot quickly returned to his hauler, ready to take the crowded refugee vessels into the docking clamps made vacant when the newly arrived vessels disengaged. Shuttles at the stringline hub kept dispatching evacuees onto the waiting ships.
Walfor had already done the calculations. Shuttles ran constantly, and now the main problem was arranging enough fuel for the upboxes and passenger pods. They had dispatched more flights in the past few days than Candela would normally have launched in a year.
“At least now we don’t need to pack people aboard iperion cargo ships,” he said, then narrowed his eyes. “And I’m sorry to be so blunt and pragmatic, my dear, but we’ve also got to keep extracting and shipping iperion ore until the last possible second. Candela is our only known source in the Deep Zone, and our network will unravel without it.”
“Ian, I’ve got to get the people off this world before the asteroids hit! I can’t ask miners to stay at work.”
“It’s not an either-or prospect,” he said. “We must do both.”
She drew a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “All right, we’ll do both. We’ll do everything we can.”
85
To Diadem Michella, a large part of ruling the Constellation involved putting out fires, crushing flare-ups before they could cause damage. Thanks to Ishop Heer, she was able to take care of many small blazes before they became conflagrations—such as Selik Riomini’s appalling scheme to break into the quarantined hangar and extract the alien specimens inside. He might have unleashed contamination across Sonjeera. Worse, he had openly defied her explicit command! She was so thankful for Ishop’s diligence.
She could assemble charges and destroy the Black Lord. Added to that was his failure to understand the military implications when he first learned that the stringline to planet Hallholme had been severed and that their large fleet had been lost. In his initial analysis, he had failed to realize that General Adolphus had set a trap, had assumed only that the ships would not be able to return home by their traditional route. He had been so wrong, and if Governor Goler’s report was to be believed, all those ships had been captured by their greatest enemy.
Despite her fury at what the Black Lord had done, however, Michella understood that she couldn’t execute him, or even strip him of everything, as she had done with Lady Enva Tazaar. Michella’s detractors would turn the accusations on her, and make her look incompetent for choosing Riomini in the first place, for relying on him so heavily. The uproar among the nobles would tear the Crown Jewels apart.
Or Riomini’s supporters might fight back and start an uprising of their own to depose her. He controlled the Army of the Constellation (what was left of it). Michella had to tread carefully, or she might find herself facing a coup, and the Black Lord would probably find irony in sending her severed head in a message pod as some sort of peace offering to General Adolphus.
Most importantly, despite his transgressions, Selik Riomini was her only viable option as a successor. Michella was realistic, and knew that she could not rule forever.
But she was not ready to step down yet, and in order to maintain her authority she needed to punish the Black Lord for what he had done. Once again, Ishop Heer had come up with the perfect solution.
Responding to her crisp and annoyed summons, Lord Riomini stood stiffly before the Diadem’s desk in the windowless war room of her palace. He wore his characteristic black clothing, but this time he chose not to adorn it with medals and braids. He obviously knew he was in trouble.
As usual, she had arranged for Ishop to observe from concealment, where special monitoring screens would display Riomini’s body temperature, pulse rate, and perspiration. As she looked at the Black Lord, though, Michella didn’t need any specialized images to see that he was sweating. She’d never seen him this way.
“Eminence, allow me to apologize, and explain—”
“I don’t think I need any explanations.”
Her voice was cold and angry. “I want this lesson to hurt, Selik, so that you will remember it the next time you are tempted to get out of line.”
“I acted only for the good of the Constellation.” Now he didn’t even look shamed! “We must defend the Crown Jewels against further alien attacks, and the only way to do so is to understand what those creatures can do. My scientific experts were quite clear in their assessment.”
“And I was quite clear in my refusal! You defied me. Don’t you see? General Adolphus wants us to dabble with the specimens and become contaminated by them. This could be part of his overall plan, an insidious way to spread the alien infection. Breaking open the hangar would have been like triggering a biological land mine, and once the alien influence spreads across the Crown Jewels, the rebels wouldn’t even need to fight. They would defeat us from the first moment of contamination.”
“I … did not consider that possibility, Eminence.” He lowered his gaze, and at least had the good sense now to look cowed. “In warfare, it is always necessary to take chances. We cannot win if we do not accept some risk, even considerable risk.”
“You don’t understand the power those aliens wield. You weren’t there in the hangar when Ishop and I saw that creature exert a mental hold upon the human passengers. No doubt the creatures have already done the same to the entire population of planet Hallholme, including my own daughter!”
“But didn’t your man Ishop Heer journey there and interact with the inhabitants? Didn’t he himself go to the strange pools that supposedly contain alien sentience? Is he contaminated, Eminence?”
Michella considered this for a moment, then said, “Don’t try to turn this on me, Selik! Ishop is not infected, and we are here to discuss your actions, not his.”
As her voice became more shrill, Michella realized she might be overreacting, even irrational on the subject, but once she had established her opinion she would never back down.
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