The Dark Between the Stars

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “I’ll be sure to inform our creditors that we will be paying all future invoices with ‘gratitude,’ ma’am.”

  Osira’h didn’t entirely understand their teasing banter, but she sensed that they were hiding their worry by keeping busy and contributing their support in the best way they knew how. Reyn still kept his arm around Osira’h, who leaned closer against him; they seemed to generate strength for each other just by being in close proximity.

  Inside the meeting chamber, several green priests looked frail as they huddled over their treelings, touched the verdani mind, and tried to prepare for the worst. The whole worldforest was weakening—and no effort on a human scale could save them.

  “It happened before, and we survived,” said one of the priests in the throne room. “All but the smallest portion of the worldforest was wiped out, and yet the trees survived to thrive again.”

  Queen Estarra wore her traditional garments, like the ones her mother Alexa had worn. “Much of Theroc was devastated, but the trees came back.”

  The green priest shook his head. “That was the recent war. I was referring to something much worse—a battle far, far in the past.” He touched the treeling again, and his brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Theroc is not the original home of the worldforest. That was destroyed, and the . . . Gardeners were made extinct.” He looked up, surprised by what he had just discovered. A stir rippled through his fellow green priests as they realized the new hint of information that had just been revealed to them.

  “Who were the Gardeners?” Peter asked. “Can you tell us more about that battle?”

  “Long before humans became green priests, there were . . . others. Gone now. Smothered by the Shana Rei.”

  Listening, Osira’h looked at Prince Reyn. “The Shana Rei nearly destroyed the Ildiran Empire as well. Fear of them is etched deep within us, a permanent scar on our psyches.” Her eyes flashed as she drew herself up, and she felt her feathery strands of hair twitch with energy as her determination grew. “But we are in a different situation now. We have new skills. We have me.” She gasped Reyn’s hand. “Take me to the treetops. I need to see the sky, look out at the stars, and focus my thoughts.” She flexed her hand, felt the still-tender burns on her fingers, focused on the pain. “Maybe I can summon the help we need to solve this problem.”

  Curious, Reyn took her above the fungus-reef city, and they emerged onto the dense polymerized canopy. A few evacuating ships still glinted in the sky, hot exhaust trails rising to orbit. Osira’h sat with him in the soft, spongy embrace of interlocked worldtree fronds. Deprived of nourishing sunlight for days, the leaflets drooped, the color washed out of them.

  Reyn looked worried, with a faint sheen of sweat on his face. “All the Shana Rei have to do is wait. This darkness will be the death of the worldtrees.”

  “Not necessarily.” Osira’h had never been able to feel the trees the way her green priest mother did, but she was aware of the verdani presence. Now, as she looked up at the mocking stars, she used her telepathic powers and her understanding of the great forces of the universe to call upon other entities.

  Osira’h summoned the faeros, begged them. With her open mind, she showed them the threat, called upon her past connection with them. Though she couldn’t see into the thoughts of the fiery elementals, she felt the awakening, the awareness, the response. The sparks grew brighter in her mind.

  She turned to Reyn. “They are coming.”

  Osira’h asked him to stay with her, and they sat together for hours in the deepening cold of the continuous night. They watched the dark sky until she saw bright lights like distant fireflies drawing closer. She rose to her feet, and Reyn stood with her, his face filled with questions.

  Before long, dozens of the fireballs appeared, blazing ellipsoids that rolled along spouting a corona of flames. They roared across the Theron sky, crackling and sending out waves of palpable heat. Like miniature suns, they shone their light over the darkened forest.

  Green priests ran to the canopy, shouting in fear and confusion. Osira’h, though, was not afraid. “The faeros aren’t here to attack,” she assured Reyn. “I asked them to help us.”

  The fireballs drifted over the canopy as if to acknowledge Osira’h’s presence, then together they swooped upward and hurtled out into space.

  ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY

  ZOE ALAKIS

  Zoe waited inside her sterile dome on Pergamus—and waited, and waited—hoping for word from Tom Rom. She checked with her system perimeter sentries, the picket-line ships. Nothing. She began to grow very concerned.

  She had good reason to worry about him, especially after his recent encounter with the Roamer pirates on Vaconda. Though he was more competent than any other person she knew, Tom Rom put himself in dangerous situations—to do as Zoe asked—and she dreaded the day when he would not come back.

  Finally, though, a small, unrecognized courier ship arrived at Pergamus, burning the last of its fuel in a red-line deceleration. Her picket security ships went on alert, racing out to defend the medical research station, but she could see that this tiny courier vessel posed no conceivable threat. One or two blasts could vaporize the ship before it even entered orbit.

  Then Tom Rom transmitted a security code, and his voice came through, rich and familiar. “Zoe, prepare an available ORS, full lockdown and quarantine setup. I’ve . . . brought you the alien plague for your library.”

  She found herself grinning like a teenage girl. Just hearing his voice made everything all right, but she found it odd that he hadn’t transmitted his image. She wanted to see him. Zoe responded quickly, using a priority override to break through the usual signals of the security ships and the receiving crews. She had a wealth of questions.

  “I don’t recognize that vessel—what happened to your own ship? Why didn’t you send a message? You’re five days late, and I was worried. . . .” She let out a nervous laugh. “Go through the full decon routines and meet me here in the main dome. We’ll have time for the whole story. It must have been quite an adventure.”

  Tom Rom maintained an audio-only transmission. “Zoe, use secure channel five.” Then he switched off.

  She frowned. That meant he had a private message for her that he didn’t want even her most dedicated personnel to overhear. Something that could not wait. She tapped the controls on her desktop and opened a new window, piped in through several layers of security access.

  When Tom Rom’s face appeared on the screen, she gasped in dismay. His face looked ravaged and discolored, as if thugs had held him down and beaten him . . . but Zoe could see the blotches were not mere bruises.

  “I brought you the alien microorganism, Zoe, as promised. It’s inside me. I’ll take samples of my own blood, seal them in sterile packages, and arrange to transfer them to a designated Orbital Research Sphere. I don’t want this to go into any surface dome, no matter how many precautions you take. This may be the deadliest disease we have ever studied. I have only a few days left.”

  Zoe shook her head, trying to deny what she saw. “I’ll put you in one of the ORS labs. I’ll use all of our facilities and researchers—everything Pergamus has. We’ll find a way to treat you.”

  Tom Rom had never denied her before, but now he shook his head. “This is incurable, Zoe: one hundred percent mortality. You can’t risk it. Every person aboard the alien space city died.”

  Zoe refused to listen. “Those other victims didn’t have my resources, my experts, my database. I’ll take care of you—I promise.”

  “You will get the disease sample for your library, but anything else is too dangerous. I can’t let this disease get near you, Zoe. Once the specimens have been placed in a safe orbital station, I will need to be neutralized.”

  Growing angry, she leaned closer to the screen. “That’s not going to happen, and you know it.”

  “I insist,” he said.

  “Insist all you like. I’m going to ignore it. You’ve always listened to me, done as I as
ked. You swore—and now I’m going to hold you to your word.”

  “Then I’ll destroy this ship myself, just to be sure.”

  Zoe snorted. “No, you won’t, because you haven’t given me the sample yet.”

  She called up records on screens across her table surface. “Take your ship directly to ORS Twelve. It’s empty—recently sterilized and decontaminated. Our best team just finished refitting it for research.”

  “Dr. Hannig’s lab?”

  “Yes. Hannig made a mistake, and I cleaned it up. We can take care of you there.”

  Tom Rom looked deeply disturbed, but she had found a loophole and she knew it. “You have to do this for me,” she said. “Let us put the Pergamus facilities to good use. You know I’ll take the proper precautions. I will assign a team of doctors, every one of them in a sterilization suit. The ORS is completely isolated.”

  “Too risky.”

  Now she hardened her expression because Tom Rom needed to see her resolve. “You know me. If anything goes wrong, if there’s even the slightest chance of a release, I’ll vaporize it all rather than risk contamination.”

  He seemed amused by that. “Even with me aboard?”

  “Yes, dammit! Even with you aboard. You know I will.”

  He let out a rattling sigh. “Yes. I know you will.” She could see Tom Rom was too weak and too ill to argue, and he accepted defeat with as much grace as he could manage. “If nothing else, you’ll learn quite a bit by monitoring and testing me as the disease progresses. I’ll allow myself to become your specimen.”

  He guided his stolen courier vessel toward the necklace of research spheres that orbited above the planet. Security escort ships followed him in, unaware of what was happening. They simply believed Tom Rom carried an extremely valuable and dangerous specimen—which he did, but they didn’t need any more information.

  Her pulse racing, Zoe called up the records of her research teams, scanned their areas of expertise. She knew little about the alien disease, so she would put her best scientists on it. All of them. Other work on Pergamus would grind to a halt, and she didn’t care.

  Tom Rom continued to talk to her in his ragged voice. He transmitted a summary that he had compiled on his journey, but many of the sentences were aimless or incomplete. He had trouble focusing his thoughts, which chilled Zoe to her core. She had never known Tom Rom’s mind to be anything but sharp and organized.

  She couldn’t lose him!

  This exotic and deadly plague was a Klikiss-borne disease that had infected another, previously unknown alien race, then also spread to humans as well. It might have opportunistically shifted its genetic structure to adapt. A disease that could cross species lines was amazing and terrifying—Zoe needed to study it. In her war against the unseen world of germs and diseases, this was like a super weapon.

  She understood Tom Rom’s determination to get the specimen here, but she couldn’t imagine how he had been so careless as to become infected. He simply did not make mistakes.

  Though she struggled to remain calm, panic rose within her. Seeing him, knowing he was dying, made her feel helpless again—just as when her father was in the last stages of Heidegger’s Syndrome. Adam Alakis had died because no medical research teams had bothered to devote resources to curing an obscure disease, and Zoe refused to let that happen to Tom Rom. To save him, she would devote the full resources of Pergamus: people, equipment, finances, and knowledge.

  She handpicked her top doctors for the ORS 12 research team and powered up the sphere’s life-support systems.

  She wanted to keep talking to Tom Rom, because she didn’t dare lose a second of what remained of his life. He looked as if he’d grown sicker in just the few minutes while she’d been busy making arrangements.

  She said, “Do not underestimate me.”

  His smile was weak but genuine. “Zoe, I never underestimate you.”

  ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-ONE

  ORLI COVITZ

  Orli didn’t want to get her hopes up. Depending too much on unrealistic hope was what had made her hesitate while Tom Rom was pursuing her.

  But the green priest said he had a way to cure her. On screen, Aelin wore an expression not of arrogance, but of unwavering confidence that he knew everything, even though he could only share the tiniest fraction of it.

  “What have you got to lose?” asked Garrison Reeves, who looked earnest on the screen as he talked with her from the admin module.

  And Orli realized that she did not in fact have anything to lose.

  Though they had never spoken before, she felt a connection with Garrison. He and his son were both familiar with her compy work. And she knew something about Garrison too, having watched the sad last messages of clan Reeves, including the farewells spoken by Olaf, Dale, Sendra.

  He seemed different from the Retroamers, though, an independent man who had not wanted to isolate himself from the rest of the Confederation. From his obvious compassion, she could tell he was not at all like Matthew. Orli wished she could have had a chance to know him better. It was a cruel irony to meet someone like that when she was in the last stages of a terminal disease. . . .

  DD contributed his opinion about the green priest’s offer. “I encourage you to pursue any option of a cure, Orli. I would find it difficult to force you if you decided to resist—but I would still make the attempt.”

  Orli looked at the Friendly compy, struggled to focus her eyes. Her head pounded, every part of her felt indescribably awful. She doubted she had the energy to fight off even little DD. “Why would you force me?”

  “My programming requires me to save you. I cannot allow you to come to harm through inaction—mine or yours. If you refuse to try the only possible cure, then I would not allow your inaction.”

  She responded with a weak, rattling laugh. “That’s an interesting contortion of logic. I’d like to stay alive, even if just to study that further.” She turned back to the concerned audience that watched her from Iswander’s admin module. “All right, so what exactly am I supposed to do?”

  The green priest said in a calm voice, “Do what I did. Go to one of the bloater nodules and pass through the membrane. Inside is the universe’s primordial sea—life itself, and everything. Immerse yourself.”

  “I thought the bloaters were filled with ekti. Won’t I just drown in stardrive fuel?”

  “You will bathe in the blood of the cosmos,” said the green priest. “You are not like me. You don’t have telink, so the effect will not be as pronounced, but I am confident you will find the cleansing you need.”

  “I’m glad somebody’s confident,” Orli muttered.

  Without being told, DD operated the piloting controls and eased the Proud Mary toward the bloater cluster. Far below, the system’s bright white sun looked intense and alone. Nodules drifted toward the star, followed by the extraction ships and equipment.

  Iswander Security flanked her, as if to make sure Orli didn’t try to escape, but that was the farthest thing from her mind. With blurred vision, she looked at the industrial operations, the cargo ships flying about, the dark and deflated husks that drifted loose in space—and the remaining bloaters, spherical, silent, except for an occasional flash that sparkled from a nucleus.

  Orli indicated a bloater that drifted outside the main mass of nodules. “Fly me to that one, DD. Get as close as you can.” She still didn’t really believe the green priest had a solution, but—as Garrison said—what did she have to lose?

  It took her three tries to push herself out of the pilot chair. DD decreased the artificial gravity aboard so she had an easier time moving. She would need an environment suit, at least until she was submerged inside the bloater. She dreaded the effort that donning the suit would require, but she knew she had to do it.

  Orli tugged on the slick fabric. She hadn’t had many occasions to use a spacesuit in recent years, but the safety systems were helpful. The fastenings sealed themselves. Her left foot was maddeningly uncooperative, an
d she couldn’t seem to get it seated properly in the integrated boot.

  When DD came to offer his assistance, Orli almost wept with gratitude. Like a prim butler, he adjusted her fingers in the gloves, sealed the remaining components, repositioned her foot in the boot, then activated the suit’s life-support systems.

  “I have piloted the Proud Mary up against the bloater membrane,” he said.

  She sank down onto a bench so she was low enough for the compy to fasten her helmet. “Thank you, DD.” Then it was time to go.

  With weaving steps, she moved to the airlock. Through the windowports, she could see the bloater’s mottled membrane so close. The thing was both intimidating and majestic. Standing at the airlock hatch, she turned back to the little compy. “Even if this works, I can’t come back aboard the ship. The Proud Mary is contaminated. Nobody else can come aboard. Ever.”

  “I already have my instructions, Orli. I have prepared the ship’s self-destruct systems.” He paused and added, “BO and the other clan Reeves compies provided an example that I intend to emulate.”

  Orli stepped into the airlock, then turned back. “I’m modifying your instructions, DD. Once I’m inside the bloater, take the Proud Mary a safe distance from the Iswander operations and set the destruct timer. Transmit your coordinates, and then exit through the airlock into open space. You’ll be adrift in hard vacuum, but someone will retrieve you soon enough.”

  “So, to clarify—you do not wish for me to be aboard during the self-destruct sequence?”

  “No, DD, I don’t wish that at all. The plague organism won’t survive exposure to open space. It can’t.”

  DD hesitated. “Are you certain?”

  “Dead certain. Once they retrieve you, the industrial crew will keep you isolated and put you through every possible decontamination routine they can think of just to be sure.”

  “Just to be sure,” DD echoed.

  If nothing else, she imagined that DD could become the companion of young Seth Reeves. She was sure the boy and the Friendly compy would get along well together.