Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (2 page)

"Any vessel… need assistance. Help us! Oslain'ii, do you read me? Please dock on level two! We have to evacuate! Get to level two–!"

Xartasia stepped into the cockpit and pressed a switch on a console with one slender white hand. The terrified cries finally went silent.

"Now we feed," said Dhozo.

"And then?" Xartasia asked.

"We will build your ships, little aerad. We have made our deal. The station should have metal and minerals enough to begin."

Dhozo's eyes remained fixed on the twisting, shattering space station. One of the remaining portholes was smeared in red and stared back at the Oslain'ii like a bloodshot eye. The Devourers were monsters. But Xartasia would make her alliance with them worth the blood and horrors to come. For her people, for her fallen kingdom. All would be as it should have been.

"You said that
Devourers
is not your name," she asked at last. "Or not your only name, much as mine has become Xartasia. As you call the Arcadians by their olds names, aerads. What do the Devourers call themselves?"

Dhozo finally turned away from the devastation to look at Xartasia. He towered over the Arcadian and had to bend at the thick waist to avoid hitting his slick, bald black head on the ceiling. Dhozo bared his multitude of long fangs again.

"Us? We are the Glorious."

"Needing advice doesn't make you a fool, but ignoring that advice does."

– Xia (233 PA)

Tiberius Myles hummed the fragment of song to himself. He couldn't remember the whole thing, just that single line. Even that did not sound quite right. Was that really how
Bristler's Call
was supposed to go?

His off-key music bounced and echoed through the Phoenix's cockpit. Orphia lifted her gray-feathered head from under one wing and fixed a cloudy eye on Tiberius. The old hawk squawked once. It was a squeaking, rusty-sounding noise. Tiberius wasn't sure if she was joining in or reproaching her master. Either way, he fell silent.

The last echoes faded and silence descended on the empty Phoenix. Tiberius flew on. Orphia went back to sleep, leaving the old Prian captain very much alone once more.

________

"You can't be serious!" Duaal shouted. "We
saw
them!"

"We have only your word for that," said Ralison.

The submajor sat back and inspected the datadex in his hands. His office was as impeccably clean as his own dark green uniform. The room smelled sharply of soap and harsher disinfectants. Maeve could not look anywhere in the room without facing her own angry reflection.

"No, you don't!" Duaal pounded his fist on the polished black tabletop. "You have reports from the Prian police, too."

"Not many of those." Submajor Ralison wrinkled his nose as though he could smell something unclean in his perfect office. "There are… what? Four reports in total? That's not very much to go on."

"Because everyone else is dead!" Maeve tried to keep her voice quiet and civil, but fury tightened her throat and her words were a strangled cry. "The Devourers tore them apart and left not even remains enough to mourn."

Ralison put down the datadex and avoided Maeve's eyes. He looked instead out one of the office windows. They were on the two hundred eighty-eighth floor, halfway up the starscraper where thousands of offices maintained the Alliance apparatus on Mir.

"That's all quite convenient, isn't it? These Devourers are supposed to have been gone for a hundred years." Ralison risked a brief, disdainful glance at Maeve. "If they ever existed at all. Why would they return?"

"We have already been through this with the authorities on Tynerion!" Maeve said. Her head throbbed and her voice was rising again.

"Where are these Devourers?" Ralison asked in a tone that made it clear that he did not expect an answer. He ran a finger along the gleaming surface of his desk and inspected the results with a thoughtful frown. "CWAAF has no reports of anything like your black smoke monsters anywhere in the galaxy. Surely someone would have noticed something like that."

"I already told you that I don't know where they went!" Duaal said.

"Yes, you
banished
them," Ralison sighed. "Using a Waygate of which there is no record. And using magic that cannot be scientifically verified."

"Kemmer kept his discovery a secret while he studied the Pylos Waygate," Maeve protested. "It–!"

"And the Prian police buried it," the CWAAF officer interrupted with a wave of his well-manicured and brown-striped hand. He looked at Duaal. "And you used this conveniently undocumented device – of which none have ever been seen in the core – to send the Devourers away. By your own report, you don't know where, but you are somehow
certain
that they're still a danger."

"They are!" Duaal insisted. He jumped to his feet beside Maeve, cheeks darkened.

Ralison gazed impassively at Maeve and Duaal. "And they're allied with this–" He checked his datadex. "–Xartasia, an Arcadian princess. Tell me, why exactly would she work with the same creatures that destroyed her own civilization?"

"We do not know yet!" Maeve said. "But my cousin has sacrificed many lives in the pursuit of her unknown goals. Whatever use she has for the Devourers will cost us all in blood. Why will you not listen to us?"

"He is listening." Logan Coldhand leaned against the wall beside the door. He fixed ice-blue eyes on the submajor. "He just doesn't want to believe us."

Ralison's lips pressed together into a thin line, but he did not look at all embarrassed. Outside the perfectly clear window, pale wisps of clouds curled in the wind. Far, far below, the Mirran city gleamed, almost as clean as the submajor's office.

"No, I don't believe any of this." The tall Mirran submajor checked the time on his computer and stood. "I've wasted enough time with this. Look, Miss Cavainna, we have plenty of real problems to deal with. My loyalty is to the citizens of the Alliance, not to some wandering fairy princess making a plea for attention at best, and a grab for power at worst."

"Power?" Maeve shouted. "What power do you think I could seize by this… this madness?"

Logan went to Maeve and put his hands on her shoulders. The cybernetic fingers of his left hand were cold and heavy.

"See? Even
you
call it madness," Ralison said with satisfaction. He looked at Logan with a detached sort of confusion. "But you're the one with credentials on file. You arranged this meeting. You haven't said much, Mister Centra. Surely no one with a background in proper law believes any of these fairy tales."

"I saw the Devourers," Logan answered coldly. "I was there at Pylos. Which you would know if you had actually read the reports. But even if I hadn't encountered them myself and even if I didn't believe Maeve about it, I would listen."

"Wait, what exactly–?"

Logan did not wait. "Maeve is warning you of a threat to the entire Alliance. Even if she were wrong – which she isn't – you should take every threat seriously."

Ralison stood and crossed his long arms over his chest. The mask of stripes around his eyes contorted as he scowled at Logan. "An E3 license grants you many privileges, Mister Centra. Privileges and freedoms that depend upon your good standing with the Central World Alliance Armed Forces. CWAAF trusted that your past experience and training would guide you in execution of Alliance laws."

"Trust
ed
?" Logan repeated, emphasizing the last syllable.

"You've clearly been compromised," Ralison announced. "CWAAF can't have its own employees inciting panic, Mister Centra. I'm revoking your bounty hunter's license."

"I am
not
compromised," Logan said in a voice like cracking ice. "You can't revoke my permits unless I've committed a major crime or failed a psychological evaluation."

The Mirran submajor snatched up his datadex, tapped the screen a couple of times and threw it back on the table. "Which you just did. Now get the hells out of my office."

"What are you–?" Maeve cried, but Duaal grabbed her arm and towed the fairy away.

"Don't make things worse, Maeve," he hissed. "The Alliance doesn't want to listen. We're on our own."

Duaal led Maeve through the silently opening door of Submajor Ralison's office. Logan followed a step behind.

________

Gripper, Panna and Xia waited for them at the Hanjirrah library, just a few blocks away from the CWAAF starscraper. They sat on the steps of the blue and orange dome, in the shade of a colorfully striped awning.

Panna set down the datadex she had been reading and Gripper jumped to his huge feet. "How did it go, Glass?" he asked, calling Maeve by her newest nickname. "What did they say?"

Maeve waited for a middle-aged human in a smooth brown suit to brush past – primly ignoring the Arcadian – and then sank down on the stair beside Xia. "You're back early," the Ixthian said. "But I don't think that bodes well for your success."

Duaal threw his hands into the air. "They wouldn't listen to a word we said! CWAAF thinks that we're crazy, or else that we're lying and trying to start a panic."

"Submajor Ralison suggested that this was all some sort of ploy for attention," Maeve added miserably. "Though even he could not say how."

"And the idiot revoked Logan's license," Duaal finished. "I didn't even know he could do that."

All eyes went to the bounty hunter. The
ex
-bounty hunter. Logan Coldhand stood at the edge of the tiled sidewalk, arms crossed. He met each gaze in turn until the others looked away. Except Maeve. Logan did not look at her.

Panna picked up her datadex and turned it over in her hands without reading the screen. "What now? We came to Mir because it had the largest military presence in the core. Except for Axis, of course."

"We can try again, right?" Gripper said, his plaintive voice ridiculously belying his huge, ogreish appearance. "We can talk to someone else. Someone in another city? Or maybe on Hyzaar?"

"We cannot," Maeve said more sharply than she meant to. She hated to upset the young Arboran, but what else could she tell him? "Without Logan's authority, we cannot make our words heard! Submajor Ralison met with us this morning based only on Logan's rank."

"But… But…"

Gripper had no other ideas, but obviously did not want to give up. Maeve shared his painful frustration. They had been through all the same arguments and fights on Tynerion, first with the local board of Poes Nor University and then with the global regents.

No one believed them. No one
wanted
to believe that the Devourers could ever come to the core. The smoky black monsters were a century-old story from a race of people the coreworlders ignored as a matter of course. A hundred years was a long time to the Alliance, Maeve reminded herself as she stared down into her hands. Generations. There were still some alive who remembered the first appearance of the Arcadians, their flight from the Devourers, but they were few now. And even those had only heard stories of the Devourers. Only the Arcadians had seen them.

Only we remember,
Maeve thought. But what did it matter? It was not her own people that she was trying to convince.

"We should get back to the Blue Phoenix," said Xia. "Staying in Hanjirrah has been expensive and we can't afford to be here longer than it's useful."

"But we don't know where to go next," Panna protested.

"Wherever it is, we can figure it out and get there in the Phoenix," said Duaal. "Let's get the hells off Mir."

No one had any other objections, so Gripper keyed into the mainstream from a dented and claw-scarred computer he carried in one oversized pocket and ordered a large taxivan that took almost an hour to arrive at the domed library. All six squeezed inside. Gripper's weight made the vehicle bob a little on its orange-tinted NI field. The stripe-skinned driver looked over her shoulder at the strange alien, but said nothing.

None of the Mirrans had commented on Gripper, Maeve thought. When she whispered her observation to Panna, the wingless Arcadian girl nodded.

"Mir has a greater number of predator species than any other core world," she answered in the same hushed tone. "The ancient Mirrans survived because of their striped camouflage and that prey's caution colors their psychology still. I doubt any Mirran will go out of their way to attract attention from anyone as big as Gripper."

The driver darted another look over her shoulder at Maeve and Panna. Xia's compound eyes turned an amused blue-green color. She smiled at the Arcadian women with shiny silver lips.

"And they retain their ancestor's sharp ears," Xia said. She did not bother to whisper.

Maeve's face went hot and she quickly turned her attention back to the window. They were driving through an older part of Hanjirrah that looked nothing like the shiny needle rising into the clouds where they had met with Submajor Ralison. Most of Hanjirrah looked like shelves of pottery. The endless flat plains of Mir contained little stone large or strong enough to quarry and even less in the way of useful metals. As a result, other than the Alliance starscrapers, almost everything on Mir was built from bricks, ceramic and tile.