Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (50 page)

"Anthem?" he hissed. "But if Maeve is not with you, then who…?"

"I told her before," Anthem told him. "I know she loves Logan Coldhand. I thought that perhaps we could love one another, but we cannot give hearts that are no longer our own. Maeve should have gone to him months ago. She needs her hunter. No one survives on honor alone."

Syle fell into a low crouch, his spear held close and his wings curled. He whirled and sprinted for the hold, for Maeve. He would kill the queen and her monstrous human lover… Anthem was on him in a second, as silent as falling snow. Syle cried out once as Anthem's spear slid between his ribs. The knight clapped his hand over the dying man's mouth even as blood poured between his fingers.

"Go softly now, Syle," Anthem said sadly. "You will not be alone in the dark for long."

"Life is only as precious as what we will die for."

– Nnyth agreement (2,401 MA)

It had been three hours since Duaal's surprisingly smooth drop from superluminal flight. Logan stood beside Maeve at one of the small porthole windows of the mess. She stared out the thick, scarred glassteel with an intent look on her beautiful face that made him want to sweep her up into his arms. Logan settled for a small kiss against the soft skin of her neck. It was like silk against his lips.

"Logan," came Duaal's voice over the Blue Phoenix com. "Get up here. This place is even worse than I remember."

Logan kissed Maeve again and made his way toward the cockpit. Anthem sat at the table, reading. He glanced up at Logan as the Prian passed, but said nothing. In fact, everyone else on the Blue Phoenix had left both Maeve and Logan largely alone. Anthem had been very quiet and even stopped his incessant hovering. Logan wondered if the knight was avoiding him and decided that he didn't really care. He had Maeve. Nothing else mattered.

Up in the cockpit, Duaal gripped the Blue Phoenix's control yoke with white, sweaty knuckles. Logan looked outside. It was easy to see why Duaal wanted a hand, even a glass one. The Rynn system was like nothing Logan had ever seen before. It was small by Alliance standards and ancient, located far away from the hot, dense pack of younger stars in the galactic heart. Logan squinted. Though they were not far away from it, he could barely make out the star at the system's center. It was a dim, blue-gray spot only barely visible against the deeper darkness of space: a neutron star, the core of a large dying star that had collapsed violently under its own weight to the size of a single city.

There were two other stars in the Rynn system; tiny, dim little brown dwarves too distant in their slow and ancient orbit to make out with the naked eye. But no planets. At least, not anymore. They would have been destroyed when the system primary blew off its outer layers of volatile gas and then the massive gamma ray burst that would have resulted from the star's implosion. All that remained were billions of tons of rock and ice, millions of asteroids twisted by the neutron star's intense and unpredictable gravity to form several convoluted belts.

Logan slid into the copilot's seat. Duaal did not dare look up. "Can you fly through this?" the young captain asked.

"Yes."

Duaal gratefully turned over thruster control to the copilot's station with the flip of a switch. "Great. I need to find the Tower. It's been a while since we were last here and it isn't exactly stationary. It doesn't even follow a real orbit."

Logan tipped the Blue Phoenix up onto another axis to glide alongside a roiling cluster of small, rough black stones torn free by the collision of two larger asteroids. The debris glinted in the Blue Phoenix's running lights as though faceted. "That's going to make a stealthy approach difficult. Are the sensors working in this?"

"They're working fine," said Duaal. "But the Tower is stone, just like the rest of the asteroids. The Nnyth chew up rock and then secrete it to build the hive. The Tower is made of the same shit as the rest of this mess. The sensors don't know how to differentiate."

"What about size?"

"I'm showing several large bodies in the system. It could be any one of them. We're going to have to get close enough to use our eyes." Duaal shook his head and scanned the sensor readout again. "You know, I seem to recall the Tower being a lot bigger than any of the asteroids; this giant sort of ring-shaped thing. But I was just a kid the last time. Everything probably looked bigger. Maybe the Nnyth are smaller than I remember."

"I've seen Tiberius' original data. Not likely."

"Great," Duaal answer sourly. "You're a real beacon of light in dark times, Logan."

Logan didn't answer. A pair of huge, pyramidal chunks of stone tumbled slowly ahead. He pushed down on the controls and slid the Blue Phoenix beneath the obstacles while Duaal consulted his readouts and adjusted their course.

"We'll try this one," he said, pointing to a large blotch on one screen.

Logan glanced at it. "The one in grid seven is closer," he pointed out.

"Yeah," Duaal agreed. "But look at how much other stuff is in that grid, Logan. That's going to be some tough flying."

"And better odds that one of those mass signatures is the Tower. There will be good cover, too. We
are
trying for that quiet approach."

"Shouldn't we rule out the easy ones first?"

Logan gave Duaal a pointed look and the young mage grinned. "You're absolutely right," he said. "Why stick to the easy stuff? We're trying to save the whole damned galaxy!"

That wasn't exactly Logan's thought, but close enough. Duaal punched in their new course. Without slowing, the Blue Phoenix pivoted and changed direction. They looped up over the pair of pyramid-shaped stones and into a glittering patch of darkness that reminded Logan disconcertingly of the Devourers' nanite swarms. The asteroids were too many and too close for the pale radiance of the neutron star to penetrate. The only light was that of other, brighter but far more distant stars flashing off tumbling and turning faces of the celestial stone.

The Blue Phoenix slid into the asteroid field. Even with both Duaal watching the monitors closely and Logan making myriad minute corrections, a dozen or more skull-sized black asteroids smashed into the Blue Phoenix's hull. Duaal winced visibly.

"You know, I've been working really hard on my flying," he said. "A little more of this and no one is going to believe it."

"I'm flying," Logan pointed out.

"You're Prian. I've seen your ships, remember? They're not exactly delicate machines."

"And the Blue Phoenix…?"

Duaal laughed shortly. "Nope. But her captain surely is."

They arced the Blue Phoenix up over a broad, flat chunk of stone almost twice the old freighter's size. Logan peered down at the asteroid. "What's the chemical composition of this system?" he asked.

"Not sure," said Duaal. "Nitrogen, carbon and nickel, I guess. All the usual stuff. Probably some iron and heavier elements from when that star blew."

Logan pointed to a long, thin spar of dark stone. "These don't look like any asteroids in the Prian system," he said. "These seem almost crystalline. They're structured."

"Shit. You're right." Duaal glanced up from the computers to Logan. "I don't remember any asteroids like this last time."

Stone soared and tumbled all around the Blue Phoenix, impacting the fibersteel hull with loud, ringing thuds. Tumbling and colliding stones surrounded the ship. What the hells was going on? Asteroid fields – even those surrounding such unstable stars as Rynn – were usually thinly populated and rather staid areas, full of silently and smoothly gliding stone and metal that contently circled its parent star. This was too crowded, too chaotic to be normal.

"What is going on?" Maeve asked, suddenly standing in the cockpit's door.

Duaal jumped. "God, Maeve," he gasped, but didn't look up at the fairy. "Don't do that!"

"Why are we hitting so many asteroids?" she asked.

Logan grimaced. "I don't think they're asteroids, dove," he told her.

"Then what–?"

Maeve fell silent. They had reached the center, the large body that the Blue Phoenix sensors had registered. Maeve's gray eyes went wide and one hand flew to her mouth.

The Tower. A hundred or more of the great star-hives' shattered pieces floated crooked orbits around a single crescent of dark, faceted-looking stone. The ruins of the Nnyth hive tumbled slowly through space.

"What… what in the three hundred hells?" Duaal gasped. "What happened here?"

"The Tower's gravity has pulled all the small debris back in," Logan said sharply. "We're exposed out here. We need to move back."

"Whatever did this could still be out there," Duaal agreed.

"Wait!" Maeve interrupted. "Take us into what remains of the Tower. There are openings large enough to fly the Blue Phoenix inside."

"What?" Duaal asked. "Why?"

"We need to find out what happened here. Perhaps some of the Nnyth yet live."

"Dove, you
know
who did this," Logan said. "It was Xartasia. Who else could it have been?"

Maeve stared at the Tower, dark and broken. "But we need to know
why
, enarri. Why was Xartasia here? And why did she attack the Tower?"

"I'm more worried about
how
she did it," Duaal pointed out. "Maeve, she could still be here!"

"Is that not what we had hoped? To finally catch Xartasia? We have followed my cousin since this began! Now we have some slim chance to find out what she wanted here. Take us to the Tower, Duaal."

The Hyzaari captain looked at Logan, waiting for him to argue with Maeve. But Logan said nothing. Maeve was right. Duaal drew a deep, hissing breath.

"As you command, my queen," he said.

Duaal toggled control of the Blue Phoenix back to his own station and flew toward the ruins of the Tower.

As the huge crescent eclipsed their vision, Maeve wormed her hand into Logan's. He squeezed her fingers gently. He wanted to reassure her, but had no idea what to say. What did she hope? That the Nnyth lived? Dead star wasps posed no danger to the Blue Phoenix or anyone else, but they couldn't answer questions, either. And whatever Logan thought of the Nnyth and their secretive, defensive isolation, he did not particularly want the species wiped out. Did Maeve hope to find Xartasia still haunting the ruins of the shattered Tower? Or that the White Queen was already gone, her terrible work here done? Logan did not hope either way. He simply sat, waiting.

Duaal circled the shattered Tower carefully. The Blue Phoenix glided soundlessly along the outer edge of the crescent. Duaal swore once as a huge segment of gray and black stone suddenly shuddered and tore free from the ruined hive. Logan watched the massive thing spin slowly through the cold void. Smaller pieces –smaller, though each was still larger than his Raptor had been –fractured and then broke away. The loss of mass slightly changed the giant stone's spin, twisting toward the Blue Phoenix. Logan sat forward. There was something inside the rock…

"Do you see that?" he asked Maeve.

Logan pointed. The interior of the broken stone – easily larger and longer than a CWAAF cruiser – was not black or gray, but a pale pink like the inside of a seashell. As he and Maeve stared, a subtle blue shimmer rippled over the rose-colored surface. Logan knew that light. He had seen it on his own homeworld, in the mountains above Pylos.

"A… Waygate?" Maeve gasped.

"A piece of one," said Logan.

The Phoenix flew around the huge floating stone. The blue-lit pink inner surface vanished from view. Duaal wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. "You and Anthem keep saying what Waygate experts the Nnyth are. Makes sense that they would have one of their own."

"But…" Maeve traced a circle in the air over Logan's shoulder. "A ring. A great ring in the stars. The Tower is a Waygate!"

Logan looked up at her. "At least, it used to be."

They were flying close along the flat, faceted surface of the Tower. The ring's broken edge loomed up ahead, sharp and dark as obsidian. Maeve and Duaal were silent. Logan felt the Arcadian queen's breath against the back of his neck as she leaned close, staring through the viewport. Logan switched on the sensor panel to his right, but there was no sign of any other ships. Not that he could find, at any rate… But even snapped in half, the Tower was huge. Logan could see vast pentagonal openings into the ring's surface, wide tunnels into darkness more than large enough for a ship to land inside. Surrounded by the stone and metal of the Nnyth hive, what chance did the Blue Phoenix's outdated sensor system have of picking them out…? Xartasia and her whole army could be anywhere out there, hiding among the destruction.

A huge, dark shape streaked through the flickering, inconstant starlight at the Blue Phoenix. Duaal shouted and jerked the controls, but not fast enough. The thing landed on the old freighter's conical nose. A large, sleek silhouette crawled up the front of the Blue Phoenix until it was looking into the cockpit.

A Nnyth. The star wasp had to be nearly thirty feet long. The weight of its own black and red-striped exoskeleton would have killed it on the surface of any planet, collapsing under the surface's gravity. But out here in the void, it moved with a fluid, alien grace. Almost… One of the shiny black legs – longer than Logan was tall – ended abruptly at the first joint. Dark ichor leaked slowly from the wound and beaded into glistening spheres that froze and floated away into the darkness of space.