Eternity's Mind (34 page)

“You two head out!” she shouted. “I'm taking
Declan
with another batch of people.”

More frantic workers followed her, and she gestured them toward the smaller ship. “Fit as many inside as you can, but I make no guarantees about your safety. It's your choice—decide whether you'd rather be blown up in the air or blown up here on the ground.”

Another Kett ship took off and soared out through the open hangar door high on the headquarters tower. On the far side of the city, one more doomsday bomb detonated, its bubble of destruction vaporizing all buildings within a kilometer radius.

“You're probably toast either way,” Rlinda muttered, but most of the people had no trouble deciding.

“Come on, everybody—time to go!” Tasia yelled.

As workers crowded toward her ship, Rlinda hurried them up the ramp, and then froze. “Wait, I can't leave yet!” She turned and bolted back the way she had come. She hadn't even caught her breath yet.

“Where are you going?” Robb shouted after her. “There's no time!”

“There has to be time. I forgot something.”

“Then leave it behind!” Tasia said. “Everyone needs you.”

“No, only the people on
Declan
need me. I'd rather leave
me
behind.” She reached the door of the bay and yelled back to one man who looked halfway competent to pilot her ship. “Wait as long as you can—take off and fly away if you have to. I might shake my fist, but I'll understand in my heart of hearts.”

Somehow finding a reserve of strength, she bolted down the corridor. Rlinda Kett had never been athletic—in fact, she hadn't run this much in years, and she feared she might burst an aneurysm herself, like BeBob did.

Several of the lifts were malfunctioning, but she found one that worked, although it shuddered alarmingly as it climbed to the level of her penthouse office. Heaving huge breaths, she staggered along the hall. More explosions rang outside. The skies seemed full of the angular ships, and she knew this was just the first wave. Hundreds of thousands of bugbots were coming from the shadow cloud, and with every moment her chances diminished.

But she didn't change her mind. Her heart was thudding hard. She recognized that she would have chastised anyone else for taking such a stupid risk, but she did not intend to leave the precious thing behind.

Inside her office, she paused, perspiring heavily, then lurched toward the desk. She reached out and grabbed the silver capsule from its Plexiglas stand. “I'm not leaving you behind, BeBob. Our ashes are going to stay together in death, but I never meant to die just to retrieve you.”

Before she ran back out, she stopped for just a second at the door of her office, trying to catch her breath, though it did little good. Another nearby explosion got her moving again. “You'd call me a fool for doing this, wouldn't you? Well, guess what—I'm not listening.”

She pocketed the capsule and bolted out into the corridor, hoping the lift still functioned to take her back down to the launching bay—because she sure as hell wasn't going to tackle seven flights of stairs.

As she left the side kitchen where she often amused herself by cooking, she caught a last wafting scent of her delicious new casserole, a recipe she had considered putting on the menu of her restaurants. So much for that idea—the damn black robots had already wiped out her establishment on Relleker, and now they were going to vaporize her Earth restaurant as well. She hated to leave good food behind, and it smelled like it was burning, but she ran, gritting her teeth.

She reached the lift. The doors were askew—not a good sign—but she climbed inside anyway. The car shuddered and dropped two meters before the emergency brakes caught; then the groaning systems engaged, lowering the lift jerkily until it reached the hangar level. The elevator doors started to open—and the power gave out. Rlinda struggled, forcing them apart. The floor was a foot shy of its destination, but she climbed out.

The
Curiosity
was already loaded. The last few panicked people were still running inside the hangar, looking for a way out.
Declan's Glory
was also prepped and running—thank God, in her absence her fill-in pilot had taken the initiative and activated the engines so the ship was ready to take off. Tasia shouted from the
Curiosity,
refusing to let them leave without Rlinda. When the big trader woman showed up, they cheered, then angrily scolded her to hurry.

Rlinda was so exhausted she could barely lift her feet, but she staggered forward, feeling the hard capsule in her pocket. It was too damned romantic to want her own ashes launched together with BeBob's into space, yet she hadn't been able to leave them behind. She didn't expect anyone else to understand.

“Go!” yelled Robb.

“Go, yourself!” Rlinda wheezed, staggering aboard her ship. “Now.”

Robb and Tasia took her at her word. The hatch closed, and the
Curiosity
soared out of the hangar into skies already crowded with smoke and death.

As Rlinda made her way into the cockpit of the
Declan's Glory,
the temporary pilot she had chosen fumbled with the controls, lifting the ship up as the workers crammed themselves together inside, muttering and moaning. She moved the stand-in out of her expanded pilot seat, dropped herself into place, and took the controls. “No one can fly better than me.”

“No argument here, ma'am.” The man looked gray and pale. “Let's just go.”

“Strap in, then.” She boosted the ship forward, and acceleration pushed them back into their seats. “And don't call me ma'am.”

Black robot ships streaked across the sky. Nine converged on the Kett Shipping tower and began blasting with energy weapons, cutting the structural girders, smashing the mirrored glass. Explosions ripped through numerous floors. Rlinda didn't even want to guess how many of her own people had been still inside.

Declan's Glory
soared away just as the headquarters skyscraper began to collapse in groaning rubble and flames. Ahead of them in the city sky, the
Curiosity
was slipping, corkscrewing, diving and dodging like a sun-warmed mosquito. The robot ships fired at it, but none of their blasts hit.

Then the black vessels began shooting at Rlinda, and she flew using all of her tricks. “If you don't get spacesick and bruised from being thrown around, then I'm not doing this properly!” she called back by way of an excuse. After an exhausting minute of dodging, she accelerated, relying on speed rather than finesse, and
Declan's Glory
shot away from the city like a projectile.

Behind her, another doomsday bomb detonated, vaporizing a great swath of the metropolis—including the section where her headquarters had been. In a ridiculously inappropriate thought, she was glad she had retrieved BeBob's ashes in time. “Just stay with me,” she muttered, feeling the small, reassuring lump in her pocket.

Pushing
Declan's Glory
far beyond its specified limits, Rlinda took her handful of passengers—barely able to breathe in the four-G acceleration—and headed into space before the swarming robots could finish destroying the planet.

 

CHAPTER

57

ARITA

During the Elemental War, parts of the worldforest had been charred by the faeros, but those damaged areas still harbored life. Vegetation swiftly grew back.
This,
though, was worse than anything Arita had ever seen in images from the war. The awful blight had turned the worldforest into a dry swath of brown death.

When the Theron expeditionary force arrived in the Wild, the green priests' fear was palpable. “The Gardeners' disease will devour the whole forest,” said Zaquel. She had brought a potted treeling with her for communication, but now she just stood motionless, in fearful awe.

Collin emerged from the landed transport, and he and Arita both looked at the hillsides and valleys once covered with towering worldtrees, now only a scar. His voice was quiet. “The dark rot that extends through the heartwood and into the root network, kills the verdani and wipes out their memories.”

“It is a cruel disease,” King Peter said.

“The Onthos were infected before they arrived,” Arita reminded them all. “They passed it on to the trees, and they're infesting this part of the worldforest so they can reproduce.”

“This is how they repay us for welcoming them to our world—by poisoning the lifeblood of Theroc.” Estarra sounded betrayed. “We have no choice but to excise them from the worldforest. It may be the only way to stop this cancer.”

“You could burn it out,” Osira'h suggested. Her eyes flashed as she studied the devastation. “Use a controlled fire to take out all these dead trees and prevent the blight from spreading.”

“No … not yet,” Reyn said. “We should study it first, find a way to cure the disease.”

Arita recalled the cold blackness in the eyes of the Onthos as they had watched, expecting the voidpriests to murder her and Collin. “Don't shed too many tears for the Gardeners. They deserve their fate.”

But Collin surprised her. “Not all the Gardeners. The worldtrees welcomed them, so there must be something about their race that's worth saving.” He also carried a potted treeling.

“The
worldforest
is worth saving,” Arita argued. “That should be our priority!”

“If we cured the worldtrees, we'd be saving them. Wouldn't that be better?” Reyn asked.

Where the blight had wiped out so many trees, the Onthos had entrenched themselves and built a fortress in the worldforest. Before the expeditionary force landed, survey craft had flown overhead to map the extent of the dead zone, and taken images of the towering embankments and defensive walls erected by the small creatures.

“They knew we were coming,” Arita said. “We don't have time to cure them. They plan to fight us.”

Standing in the open meadow, Reyn swayed as the sight stole his breath.

Ever protective, Osira'h turned to Peter and Estarra. “You are the King and Queen. You command the Confederation Defense Forces. Surely you have enough weaponry to vaporize this
insult
in an instant? The Mage-Imperator would have dealt with this scourge in a single strike from the Solar Navy.” Collin, Zaquel, and the other green priests turned toward her, astonished by the comment.

Peter answered in a firm, calm voice, “Yes, we could do that, but the Onthos seem to be betting that we won't.”

“At least not yet,” Estarra corrected. “But we won't just sit back and watch Theroc die.”

The Gardeners had used their affinity with the trees and their mastery of the verdani to wall themselves off. They had warped and twisted the dead foliage into barriers of thorns, buttresses of dead trunks and limbs. Sharp tree branches thrust outward like dangerous spikes.

The Theron home guard stared at the impenetrable barricade, and the green priests muttered in confusion. Zaquel touched the dead wood of the outer fortress wall. “There's nothing here. No thoughts, no memories. These worldtrees are no longer part of the verdani mind.”

“How much else died with them?” Arita asked. “How much knowledge have we already lost?”

They heard snapping and cracking sounds from inside the dense thicket. Brittle branches broke away under the weight of their own decay. One huge trunk that was not part of the barricade groaned and toppled forward with lumbering grace as the King and Queen and other Therons scattered. The falling hulk smashed one of the expeditionary ships.

“That wasn't a coincidence,” Arita said as they backed away.

“They're attacking,” Collin confirmed.

From inside the tangled forest of broken branches and sharp thorns, Arita saw movement. She braced herself, remembering the cold darkness of Kennebar and his voidpriests. Deep in her thoughts, she searched again to find some touch of that distant mind that had helped her before, but she felt only a stunned silence and white-hot pricks of pain. Even if that other sentience had some inkling of what the shadows were doing here, it would not help. It seemed to be facing an incomprehensible crisis of its own.

Flickers of movement through the dense branches showed pale forms that moved like simian spiders. The green priests stared with uneasy awe, and the soldiers with the King and Queen prepared their weapons.

The Onthos appeared: at first ten of them, then a hundred—which should have been
all
of the refugees from their seedships—and then hundreds more. Collin and Arita had explained to her parents and the green priests that these sexless creatures sprang from spores that infected the worldtrees and drew upon that energy to reproduce. And reproduce. And reproduce.

One Gardener high up in the trees leaned forward as his comrades gathered in the shelter of the pointed boughs and threatening spikes. “We are only here to survive. You cannot stop us. Our race is finally growing strong after being crushed repeatedly to the edge of extinction.” Anger rose in the alien voice. The dead trees rustled and crackled, as if in the death spasms of the verdani. Countless other Onthos skittered forward to face them.

Sarein had died at their hands. In spite of Reyn's plea, Arita did not want to show the creatures any mercy.

Queen Estarra called out, “We defend the trees. We must rid Theroc of you.”

“You will not succeed,” said the alien, as even more of the pale-skinned creatures crowded out from behind their dangerous barricade of trees. “The worldforest is no longer yours.”

 

CHAPTER

58

ANTON COLICOS

Yazra'h showed off her combat prowess, as if she didn't realize that Anton had been impressed with her long ago and that although she was a close friend, she had nothing to gain by impressing him further. She wanted to convince the human historian to become her lover, and he couldn't make her understand that he simply wasn't interested.