Of Fire and Night (47 page)

119

ADAR ZAN’NH

T
he humans didn’t have a chance. Optimistic and overambitious, as always, they had hung all their hopes on one plan. They had gambled everything on their last stand at Earth, and they had believed Ildiran assurances. Now they were more vulnerable than ever.

The hydrogues were watching.

Though he’d never been overly fond of humans, Adar Zan’nh still felt soiled after the promises he had made, delivering the words exactly as the hydrogues, and his father, had told him to do. It did not seem right. Were the deep-core aliens truly monitoring even ship-to-ship transmissions? It seemed best to err on the side of caution. He particularly didn’t like the thought of hydrogues using
his
Solar Navy to attack the Hansa.

Zan’nh looked stonily at the Ildirans in his command nucleus. They all knew the Mage-Imperator’s orders. He watched intricate tactical projections showing the hopelessly outnumbered EDF ships preparing to meet the oncoming wave of hydrogues. He was sitting on the crux of a moment that would always be remembered in the
Saga of Seven Suns
. Honor or victory . . . humans or Ildirans, survival or annihilation. The hydrogues had pushed them to this.

Through the warliner’s speakers, General Lanyan yelled obscenities. He cursed the Adar by name, howling at the Ildiran commander for his betrayal. With a frown, Zan’nh gestured toward his communications officer. “Switch that off. I have no desire to hear it.” Abrupt silence fell on the warliner’s command nucleus.

The Solar Navy crewmen aboard the flagship were clearly uncertain about what they had come here to do, but they obeyed their Adar’s commands. Zan’nh turned away from the inundated EDF ships, humanity’s last—and insufficient—defense. He wanted no distractions right now.

Before Zan’nh could issue his fateful instructions, before he could trigger the cascade of events that would change—or end—history, his tactical officer yelped. “Adar, more incoming ships! All of them show the configuration of Earth Defense Forces vessels.”

“How many?”

“An overwhelming number! Twice as many as the humans had before.”

“Is it a trick?” Zan’nh rushed to the screen and identified the sensor signatures of Juggernauts, Mantas, Thunderheads, and whatever other gunships the EDF had managed to assemble. “Did the humans deceive us? Are they not so wounded as we were led to believe?”

New armed war vessels cruised in at full speed, directly toward the confrontation. How was this possible? Had the EDF held these war vessels in reserve to lure the hydrogues and the Ildirans? Zan’nh couldn’t believe that. Not even humans were capable of such deviousness.

The Adar looked from side to side, studying the projections. How might this change what he was forced to do? He crossed his arms over his chest and decided that it changed nothing.

Then a transmission shot across the communications band reserved for the Solar Navy. The image showed a black Klikiss robot standing at the helm of the lead Juggernaut. “We have come to assist you in the extermination of humans.”

So, not EDF reinforcements after all
.

Zan’nh assessed his response, then gestured to his communications officer. “No reply. This complicates our job, but it is General Lanyan’s problem. Klikiss robots are not, and never have been, my concern. We will still do what we must.” He drew a deep breath; the air in the command nucleus smelled stale and metallic. “Yes, we will do what we must.”

By now hydrogue warglobes had surrounded the two cohorts of Ildiran battleships, coming in close as they anticipated the Adar’s next move. The trapped and outnumbered EDF ships had no room to maneuver. Zan’nh felt cold inside, knowing there could be no turning back now. The hydrogues had sent far more warglobes than they had told the Mage-Imperator they would. Too many.

He signaled his bridge crew. “Link with all warliners. Inform me when our ships are prepared.” The crewmembers took only moments to inform the Adar that everything was ready. Staring hard at the screen, Zan’nh narrowed his eyes. “Execute your instructions. Now!”

Except for the flagship, the engines burst to life in all of the Ildiran vessels, ramping up in an extreme spike. Massive work crews had disengaged the safety governors before the two cohorts departed from Ildira, adding other modifications. Right now, with no concern for material tolerances, six hundred eighty-five individual warliners turned about in a single perfectly coordinated movement. Their engines built to greater and greater power.

Before the hydrogues could react to the unexpected move, before they could take any sort of evasive action, all of the Ildiran warliners slashed outward. Each heavily armored battleship had a specified target, determined by calculator kithmen in the Adar’s command nucleus.

Accelerating with full stardrive thrust, the warliners slammed directly into the diamond globes. The cascade of impacts happened with astonishing speed, and it was all perfectly choreographed. Shattering flashes erupted as hundreds upon hundreds of suicidal warliners obliterated the hydrogues.

A few enemy warglobes lashed out with blue lightning bolts to defend themselves, but only five of the programmed warliners were destroyed prematurely; all of the others annihilated their targets. A chain of explosions blossomed, as if all the stars in a globular cluster had simultaneously gone supernova.

With a powerful sense of finality and satisfaction, Zan’nh nodded at the forty-nine crewmen in his own command nucleus—the only crewmen aboard all six hundred and eighty-six warliners. The rest of the ships had been completely empty. Remote-controlled.

With the assistance of the human engineers and the inexhaustible manpower of the Ildiran Empire, all those warliners had been reworked to accommodate automated systems. Zan’nh’s single flagship had guided every vessel in the two cohorts. In only a few moments, nearly seven hundred warglobes had been obliterated, and not a single Ildiran had lost his life. Yet.

Zan’nh wondered what General Lanyan thought of him now.

But the Mage-Imperator had never anticipated that Zan’nh would face so many enemy ships. Despite their coercion, the hydrogues had not trusted the Solar Navy to carry out its promised betrayal. Now that the battle was engaged, the hundreds of remaining hydrogues began to open fire on the EDF ships.

Taken by surprise at the turnabout and unexpected firefight, the robot-hijacked EDF ships also launched their weapons indiscriminately. General Lanyan retaliated, blasting away at any attacker without taking time to aim.

Zan’nh’s flagship sat in the eye of a deadly hurricane, the last surviving vessel of the Solar Navy at Earth. In his single overwhelming gambit, he had lost all of his warliners, and now he had nothing other than his ship’s standard defensive systems, which could do little or no damage to the hydrogues. The hellstorm of weapons fire sparkled and exploded all around him.

All but defenseless, they watched the battle rage. Several shots slammed into the side of the warliner, causing the systems in the command nucleus to spark and overload.

“Emergency stabilization!” Zan’nh shouted. “Our task here may be done, but the war is not over.”

“We have no effective weapons, Adar.”

Zan’nh stood alone, staring. Even if he could have moved, it would have accomplished nothing. The feeling of helplessness left him very angry.

He did not make excuses, did not apologize to his crew. The Adar had done what he had sworn to do, but now he and his brave group of soldiers were no longer relevant to the continuing battle. They could only sit like fallen leaves while the furious storm of conflict roiled around them.

120

ANTON COLICOS

W
hen the work was done and the planet evacuated, Tal O’nh’s flagship and seven warliners remained to watch the final death throes of Hyrillka’s primary sun. Anton and Vao’sh kept careful notes.

Though the one-eyed commander had insisted that his priority was to get the young Designate safely back to Ildira, Ridek’h stood firm. “Hyrillka is my world, my responsibility. I will stay to the end. I want to go down there one last time.”

Yazra’h turned her head away from the boy to hide a proud smile.

O’nh fixed him with an intense stare from his single eye. “To what purpose, Designate? Everyone is gone. You have done your duty.”

“I wish to say farewell. I should be the last one there—along with my rememberer.” He looked at Vao’sh.

Yazra’h stepped forward. “I can guarantee the Designate’s safety, as well as that of Rememberers Anton and Vao’sh.”

The tal could find no excuse. “Hyrillka will be stable for a short while yet. However, we shouldn’t disrupt our schedule.”

“My entire
planet
is disrupted.” Ridek’h sounded alarmingly strong and stern. Anton blinked in surprise.

And so their small party had gone down. Piloted by Yazra’h, the cutter descended to the ghost town of Hyrillka’s main city. Clouds in the sky were a soup of smoke. Angry weather patterns already seemed to be conspiring to unleash their wrath upon the helpless planet. Anton had a small electronic pad for recording his thoughts, but he had not input a single sentence. “Vao’sh, I think I’m completely out of words for something like this.”

The cutter landed at the base of the hill by the empty citadel palace. Some of the buildings looked painfully new, with fresh wood and bright stone. A few green shoots poked up from the fertilized plantings in what had been burned nialia fields. Plants rustled in the breezes. The city itself, though empty, seemed aware of its fate.

To Anton, the spaceport looked like an empty field after a huge carnival had passed through. A few broken-down ships and forgotten belongings cluttered the ground. Discarded supplies and abandoned equipment sat in piles where they had been dumped. Everything would be left behind.

Anton drank it all in, unable to push from his mind the words of the classic Shelley poem. He recited aloud,

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The old rememberer frowned. “Is that a tale about the fall of one of your great human empires?”

“More a reminder of the transience of all things, and how even our most enduring works crumble in the end.”

“We have similar stanzas in the
Saga of Seven Suns
. ‘There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.’”

“Yes, I know that part.”

Ridek’h stood in front of the cutter, staring as the brisk wind played across his face. The boy’s eyes were full of emotion. His gangly body trembled with impotent anger. “I tried my best, but I failed.”

“You never really had a chance to start,” Yazra’h said. “Neither your father nor the Mage-Imperator could have done better.”

“I hate the hydrogues.”

“As do we all.”

They remained among the empty buildings in uneasy silence for a long time. Ridek’h walked once more up the citadel palace hill to survey the half-completed structures and the newly repaved streets. With a flash of fire in his eyes, the boy turned. “Take me back to the warliners. It is time for us to leave.”

When they returned to the battleship, the young Designate gave Tal O’nh the official order to depart.

The implacable struggles of the faeros and hydrogues continued inside the primary sun. The myriad diamond warglobes swirled around, pouring out icewave blasts as if rallying to deliver a coup de grâce. Solar flares shot out in all directions, giant curls of plasma confined within magnetic loops. Anton wondered what last desperate weapon the faeros might unleash.

Before Tal O’nh’s warliner could leave Hyrillka, the sensor technician cried out. “The sun has undergone a dramatic shift. It is brightening!”

Without warning, a surging eruption hurled an uncountable number of incandescent shapes into space. Like sparks from a grinding wheel, hot ellipsoids sprayed from the beleaguered star in an ever-increasing flow.

The scientist kithmen scrambled to take data and interpret it.

“The sun is blowing up!” Ridek’h said. The command nucleus crew gasped.

Yazra’h studied the scene carefully. “No, it is not exploding. It has spawned thousands of faeros ships.
Thousands!
”

Anton was amazed. “Maybe it’s . . .
all
of them.”

Like spores ejected from an overripe fungus, a new wave of faeros swept outward, and they outnumbered the hydrogues ten to one. The hydrogues swirled to mount their defenses, but the fireballs kept coming . . . and kept coming—a seemingly infinite number.

Anton supposed the faeros had opened their own transgates deep within Hyrillka’s primary sun. “It almost looks like those fireballs are streaming through from every other inhabited faeros star, all them coming here, all at once. Talk about a showdown!”

On the screen, the overwhelming number of ellipsoids disintegrated the diamond specks one by one. Faeros continued to surge out of the plasma like lava from an erupting volcano, fireball after fireball, and the blue-white star brightened again, revitalized.

Within hours, every warglobe had been annihilated. Hundreds of shattered diamond vessels formed a field of rubble and debris close to the primary sun.

Like a cloud of ignited tinder, the faeros withdrew to the safe layers of the star. They dove into the flaming pool like otters playing in warm water, contributing once again to the stellar fire. Anton wondered if the damaged sun would ever return to normal.

In the flagship’s command nucleus, few words were spoken. Finally Designate Ridek’h looked hopefully at Yazra’h. “Does this mean . . . is there a chance the sun will keep shining? That we do not need to abandon Hyrillka, after all? If the hydrogues are beaten, then my planet is safe—is it not?”

Yazra’h remained uneasy. “Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Hyrillka may always be a dangerous place.”

Anton looked over at her. “Then I will be very glad to be back on Ildira, safe and sound.”