Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (38 page)

"We have it," Dhozo said at last.

Xartasia thought for a moment that she had imagined it, but the Devourer commander was gesturing her over. "Tell me."

"We abandoned the Projectors and all of the technology surrounding them because it had flaws," Dhozo explained. "They don't work on memory, exactly, but observation. Memory is data only for places you've been and can accurately recall. The ancient Glorious Empire used sensors to collect that data from distant locations and used it to activate the Projectors. There was a problem, however. The observational effect caused time lapsing."

"Lapsing?" Xartasia asked.

Dhozo's nanite swarm had closed up over his head again, obscuring his wide alien face, but Xartasia did not need to see it to read the irritation in his posture. The fairy queen could read it but did not care. She had to know.

"Emissions – light, radiation, radio waves – can only travel at the speed of light. The worlds and stars we saw were many light-years away. Our observation of planets in another galaxy was already centuries old or more when it reached our instruments. When we opened a Projector based on that information, it opened a portal to that particular time, hundreds or thousands or more years in the past."

"You stepped through the Waygates not only into the world you saw," Xartasia said, "but the
time
you saw."

"It scattered the fleet through space and time," Dhozo rumbled. "We never did find them all. That's why we stopped using the Projectors. The losses were unacceptable."

"But time…" Xartasia breathed. Her heart sped in her breast. "Our memories of the White Kingdom… We
can
use them to open Waygates to the time we knew. That we loved."

"Yes. But you know that what you want is more complicated than that. Just like I warned you. Since you will be working at such a large scale from memory, not observation, the Projector will need to cross-reference a lot of minds to sift out errors. If there are errors in the destination index, the Projector will just error out and call for technicians again." Here, Dhozo gave the fairies a chilling, sharkish grin. "And I'm not ready to share with another team just yet. Not until you've taught me observational impact."

"What else?"

Dhozo's face vanished behind a veil of swirling black nanites. "We can't do it here. These are just prototype Projectors. They're not what you need."

"This is not the answer I seek," Xartasia hummed in a soft, dangerous voice. "If you cannot deliver what I require, you win nothing."

"Not here, little queen," Dhozo told her in a growling rasp. "Not even in Mysarex, your own star system. But the Glorious fleet didn't step through the Waygates. We flew."

"Waygates large enough for starships to pass through?" Xartasia asked. She narrowed her violet eyes. Done with their work for the moment, the Devourers were slowly gathering around their commander and his queen.

"There were… are two major nodes in the network," said Dhozo. "One on our homeworld in the core, where most of our people lived, and the other on the galaxy's edge, where our fleet and listening posts were stationed. I've collated the data and corrected for galactic drift."

"Show me."

Dhozo waved his arms and a sheet of nanites solidified into a screen. A map of the galaxy lit up across it. A star on the end of one curving arm was circled in red. Xartasia stepped closer and peered at the glowing label.

"Display the names you referenced from the Alliance computer systems," she told Dhozo.

The map flickered, rippling more like a sheet of shining fabric than any monitor Xartasia had ever seen, but the angular Glorious script was replaced by blockier Aver names. Dhozo pointed to the red spot on the galaxy's edge.

"From here, the rim Projector is closer," he said. "You bring enough memories of your beloved White Kingdom, enough to remember your entire home, and you'll have what you want."

"Closer," Xartasia repeated, "but not by much. The journey is still a long one."

"You can always stop," suggested Dhozo.

"Never." She turned to her knights. "Recall our champions and those they have found to fleet. Our recruitment is done."

"Yes, a'shae!" answered Corrus.

"She has what she wanted now," said Orix. The young Devourer was standing very close. Xartasia could feel the heat of his swiftly burning metabolism baking off of him. "We're done. Give us the magic you promised, aerad!"

Xartasia looked up from Corrus and pointed to the map. She did not actually touch the seething nanites. "You are not done yet," she told the Devourers. "Your great old Waygate has not remained empty since you abandoned it. I will require one last thing of you."

"What?" Orix snarled.

"There is a long flight yet ahead of us. Take us there," said Xartasia. "Protect us on this final journey and then I will give you the magic you want, to burn and destroy your enemies and to use the Waygates once again."

"What about Anzhotek?" Dhozo asked, gesturing with a huge black claw to the plaza. "We've collected every morsel of information from the lab systems."

"I have sent Syle to destroy Maeve's kingdom, but we cannot risk that my cousin or anyone else may find what we have."

"Has your man reported in? If he's done, we don't need to worry about Maeve."

"Syle will send us no messages. He is no common soldier or even a knight. Syle works in absolute silence. Any transmissions or messages run the risk of interception. I trust in his work, but I will risk no failure so far into the song. Are the fleet's lasers powerful enough to attack the surface?"

"Of course," Dhozo said.

Xartasia spread her wings to fly back up through the canopy. "Then burn Arborus to ash. Leave nothing to find."

"Wisdom doesn't come from what happens to us, but what we do about it."

– Duaal Sinnay (234 PA)

"Can you believe it?" Jaissa asked.

Gavriel looked over the top of a datadex and hoped that his wife could see the stern frown lines across his forehead. Yellow sunlight streamed in through the open curtains above the sink. Even after thirty years on Tynerion, Gavriel could never get used to the brilliant sun of his new homeworld.

"I believe," he growled, "that this wedding is going to cost us five years of my salary."

Jaissa scoffed. "Of your old Zeon salary, maybe. But Poes Nor University pays you ten times as much. Besides, we're not skimping on our only daughter's wedding."

"She may be our only daughter," Gavriel pointed out, "but this is her second wedding."

"The first one was just practice." Sarru came into the kitchen, high heels clicking on the tiled floor. She bent and kissed her father's thinning hair. "Besides, that one didn't cost you a thing."

"Xiv took everything you had, sweetheart. That's why we're paying for this wedding."

Sarru made a face and turned to her mother. "Daddy sure is getting grumpy in his old age, isn't he?"

"Yes, sweetheart," Jaissa agreed. "But he's allowed to. We're very exasperating women, after all."

Gavriel relented and smiled at his family. "Go shopping before I change my mind and refuse to let either of you out of my sight," he said. "I don't care if you spend every cenmark I make, as long as you're both happy."

"We are, love," Jaissa said.

She kissed Gavriel and grabbed her purse from the counter. Jaissa and Sarru waved and then went out the side door, the one that led to the little cobbled walkway to the road. Jaissa's car was in the garage, but Sarru preferred to drive. Her tiny sports flier was hardly a good family car, Gavriel reflected, and if this marriage worked out, Sarru would need something a little bigger. Maybe as a wedding gift…

Gavriel thumbed his datadex over to mainstream access. Looking at a few options couldn't hurt. He was still pulling up the dealership's node when he heard the deafening squeal of tearing metal, the sharp shattering of glass and then the screams outside. Gavriel jumped to his feet and ran for the door. But by the time he reached the blood-spattered curb and shoved past the shrieking neighbors, it was far too late.

________

Writing speeches and giving them were two entirely different things, Panna learned quickly. Her already towering respect for Maeve went up a few more notches as she washed her sweaty hands for the fifth time. She turned off the faucet and watched the last drops of water fall in a swift, fine spray under the influence of Hadra's high gravity. Panna reached out, but the towel was gone. She had already thrown it down the laundry chute two hand-washings ago. She sighed and wiped her dripping fingers on her shirt.

It was Sir Ballad's job to help her find their fellow Arcadians and bring them together, but it was Panna who had to speak to them. She had tried to persuade Ballad to help out with the speeches. The young knight had been hand picked by Queen Maeve as Sir Anthem's first student, after all. But Panna knew the queen and the new kingdom better, Ballad had argued. She never agreed, but the Prian fairy had been stubborn and refused to give ground.

The bathroom door – which had peeled bare and repainted again so many times that it looked as though it had some sort of disease – swung open and Ballad's face appeared in the mirror. Panna jumped.

"Get out of here!" she shouted.

Ballad didn't move. "You're not doing anything. We need to talk."

"I could have been in the shower!"

"You weren't," Ballad said with his annoying and unarguable Prian pragmatism. "What
were
you doing?"

Panna mumbled a noncommittal answer and followed Ballad back out into the cheap motel room. She sat on the corner of one bed.

"How did it go down in Dark End?" she asked. That wasn't the district's real name, but that was more or less what the Hadrian Arcadians called it.

"Darkened?" Ballad repeated, raising one wheat-colored eyebrow.

"Dark End," Panna repeated, enunciating carefully. "Dark… End."

Ballad snorted. "That's not what it sounded like."

"What?" Panna crossed her arms. "As though you can speak. I can barely understand you through that stupid accent!"

"
My
accent?" Ballad asked, scowling. "You talk like you went to school on Tynerion!"

"I did!"

"That explains why your Arcadian is so bad! It's even worse than your Aver."

"It is not!" Panna cried. She jumped to her feet and felt hot blood in her cheeks. "I speak
perfect
Arcadian! It's not my fault you come from the back end of the galaxy."

"Back end of the galaxy?" Ballad shouted. His face was growing quite red, too. "Prianus is… all right, fine! Maybe it is a bit out of the way, but…"

He trailed off and turned his back on Panna, glaring out the windows. She did not sit down. Ballad might have given up, but Panna was still angry.

"I guess neither of us really sound like the old ones, do we?" he said, not looking at Panna.

"No," she agreed reluctantly. "I guess not."

The anger suddenly collapsed, giving way to a sharp-edged depression. Panna flopped back onto the bed and wrapped her arms around her unsettled stomach. Ballad looked back at the soft thump. He sat on the other bed, angling himself so that his wings remained free. Flaunting them, Panna could not help thinking.

Arcadians –
aerads
, as they had once been called – were children of the air. There had been four races of fairies in the White Kingdom, roughly corresponding to what the old civilizations of both rim and core considered to be the four elements: The fiery but very dead pyrads, the amphibious nyads, the forest-dwelling dryads and the white-winged aerads. Not long into her studies with Professor Xen – the memory of her teacher still made Panna's eyes sting – she was certain that this poetic delineation of the fairy species could not be the work of natural evolution. Someone must have
designed
the Arcadians. Panna considered the gods of her parents and even the coreworlder Union of Light creator, but after many talks with Xen in the Poes Nor University cafeteria, that seemed unlikely.

If a god or gods had created all life in the galaxy, that would certainly explain the similarities that Professor Xen himself studied, like the common genes between the Lyrans and wolves found on many planets, as well as the presence of humans throughout the galaxy. A single creator or committee of them might have such a common and unified vision of life. But what about the imperfections? The Mirran tendency toward high blood pressure and heart failure? The relatively weak Hadrian immune system? These were obvious results of adaptation to their planets, but poor ones that must have evolved side by side with the more positive traits. Mirrans were fast and held most athletic records in the galaxy – with the notable exception of water sports, over which the Hyzaari appropriately claimed mastery – and their stripes had served for generations to conceal them from their homeworld's many predators. But evolving as prey animals on Mir had made them high-strung, nervous and edgy. Over seventy percent of humans with at least one Mirran grandparent suffered some sort of hypertensive condition. If a god had created the Mirrans, surely he would not have included such frailties. No, it was clearly the result of natural pressures. There was some sort of strange mix of intelligent design and natural evolution taking place in the galaxy.