Of Fire and Night (50 page)

127

TASIA TAMBLYN

T
asia had never understood most of what she could view through the jeweled membrane of their preservation cell, but now things were crazier than she had ever seen them. “Something’s going on out there again, and it doesn’t look like a party.”

Warglobes cruised over the streets, exiting through the barrier that surrounded the drifting citysphere. Liquid-metal hydrogues flowed like schools of startled fish, and Klikiss robots marched about.

“They’ve always been crazy,” groaned Keffa. “Why don’t they just kill us and be done with it?”

“Maybe they’re trying to see how we hold up under stress,” Robb said.

“Not very damn well,” said Belinda; the haggard-looking female captive had never told Tasia her last name.

After EA’s murder, anger still simmered inside Tasia like molten metal. She longed for a way to smash a Klikiss robot or two. The hydrogues were alien, sure, but the big mechanical cockroaches were actually
evil
. Klikiss robots enjoyed inflicting pain, dominating, and destroying. It was part of their programming.

She had always relied on her own toughness and brains, using Roamer skills and any scraps of material she could find. Tasia Tamblyn had never expected a white knight on a horse to ride in and save her from her imprisonment. She knew that no heroic cavalry—not even an EDF commando squad—would swoop in to take them away from this nightmare.

However, the sudden sight of her brother Jess on the other side of the translucent membrane was so ridiculous and unexpected that Tasia thought she’d gone completely insane. She had expected to last at least as long as the other prisoners before she cracked. Could the drogues be playing another cruel trick on her?

Jess stood outside in the deadly environment wearing only a thin white garment that clung to his body. His legs and arms were bare. His long brown hair flowed even in the incredible pressure of the hydrogue world.

“Shizz, if I’m going to have delusions, I’d hope they would have at least a glimmer of logic to them.”

Robb yelped. “Who’s that?” When the others crowded closer, all of them gasping and shouting questions, Tasia could not deny that everyone else saw him, too. She rubbed her eyes.

“That’s—that looks like my brother Jess. But it can’t be.”

“I’ll second that,” Robb said. “He’s at the core of a gas giant and he’s . . . barefoot.”

Tasia had seen the drogues create a quicksilver sculpture of her brother Ross, so this must be a new form they had chosen. The aliens’ imitative abilities must have improved, because he certainly looked lifelike. Why did they keep preying on Tasia’s memories? Her joy changed to crushed disappointment. “You’re not real!” she shouted through the membrane.

When Jess came closer to the preservation cell, his face lit up with a real expression of delight and triumph. His rakish grin was unmistakable, dredging up many memories from her childhood. When the drogues had copied Ross, they had never succeeded in showing any emotions or expressions. This was something definitely different.

“Who the hell are you? And what do you want?” she demanded.

His voice came as vibrations transmitted through the dense atmosphere, amplified by some unknown power. It was
Jess’s
voice, all right. “I’ve come to rescue you, little sister. Don’t you recognize me?”

Her sarcasm was automatic. “Let’s see, your hair’s a little longer than I remember . . . oh, and I don’t recall that you could float about in a high-pressure environment wearing nothing more than a thin shirt and trunks!”

“Let him rescue us!” Belinda cried. “We don’t care who he is!”

“I care,” Tasia growled. “The drogues have screwed around with my family enough already.” She looked again at Jess’s face through the murky membrane and felt her heart flutter. By the Guiding Star, he sure looked like Jess! And she hated hated
hated
this place. “Okay, I’m willing to be flexible if he can get us out of here.”

“It is really me, Tasia, but I’m not the same as I was—you can guess that much. My body is infused with power from the wentals, a type of being as powerful as the hydrogues and the faeros. I have the power to get you out of here. Right now the wentals are attacking, and vanquishing, hydrogues all across the Spiral Arm.”

“It’s about damn time!” Keffa said.

“Anybody who crushes the drogues is a friend of mine.” Robb grabbed her arm. “Come on, Tasia. We’re light-years beyond having anything to lose at this point.”

The prisoners began to shout, anxious to break out of their hellish cell. Keffa was the lone voice of dissent, warning that it was a trap. Belinda jostled Tasia as if trying to throw herself headfirst through the barrier.

“Can we let him explain everything
after
he takes us away?”

“All right, we’ve been under a death sentence ever since we got put in this bizarre zoo. POWs are supposed to try and escape.” She looked at her brother, who stood in the hydrogue city without any visible means of carrying them to safety. “How are
you
going to pull this off?”

In a voice that remained eerie and powerful, Jess said, “Wentals are the mortal enemies of the hydrogues. They changed me, altered my body, so that I can do things you might not think possible.”

Tasia laughed. “Shizz, that’s an understatement!”

“Trust me.” His wental-amplified voice resonated in the cell. “I may not be completely human anymore, but right now that’s an advantage.”

Jess extended his arms and closed his eyes. Misty power crackled around him like gathering fog as he condensed water droplets out of the air, molecule by molecule. He summoned rain until he had gathered enough elemental-charged water to fashion a protective bubble. The newly created sphere appeared fragile, with a skin as thin and insubstantial as soap film. The wental bubble kissed the protective membrane of the chamber. The films fused, and the cell barrier split open like parting lips.

Jess called from outside, “Pass through, and I’ll hold it together. You have to hurry. The battle is growing worse all around us.”

Tasia had already accepted, and endured, more than her share of impossible situations. What difference did one more crazy thing make? She grabbed Belinda and pushed her through the opening into the wental bubble. “Come on! I thought you all wanted to get out of here.”

A frantic Keffa stumbled through. Tasia and Robb helped the other captives, and then climbed together into the unusual escape vessel. Inside, the air smelled of ozone and fog. Each breath was incredibly delicious after such a long confinement in the hydrogue cell.

When Jess passed through the bubble film, Tasia realized just how much she wanted to run to him, to throw herself into the protective arms of her big brother. The last time she had seen him was when he’d flown past the lunar base, transmitting a coded message to EA that their father had died. But Jess warned her away, explaining about his deadly touch.

“Well, I promise you more than a thank-you note—as soon as we get out of here.”

For the first time since her capture, Tasia saw a glimmer of hope in her fellow prisoners’ faces. Jess’s water bubble detached itself from their hated cell, then rose up and away from the hydrogue citysphere.

128

KING PETER

P
eter prayed that Chairman Wenceslas was sufficiently distracted by the hydrogue attack to let them slip cleanly away. “You’re sure you can fly this derelict, OX?”

It tore his heart to escape now, when it meant leaving so many people to die if the hydrogues did break through Earth’s line of defenses. But Basil’s decisions had brought them to this impossible situation. If mankind was ever to have a second chance at survival, they could not rely on the Chairman’s irrational leadership. King Peter and Queen Estarra were humanity’s last, best hope.

The Teacher compy stood at the confusing and intricate bank of controls for the derelict’s engines. The colorful panels were inlaid with jewels and crystals that bled downward into the block of translucent polymer, like blood vessels pumping strange chemicals. “The research team compiled an enormous amount of data. I have to assimilate it all.”

Looking exhausted and clutching her swollen belly, Estarra tried to find a place to sit inside the alien ship. She rested against one of the smooth protrusions on the slick alien wall. “Did they learn enough?”

The compy remained intent on the alien control systems, perhaps too intent. For the first time in Peter’s memory, he saw OX hesitate. “Yes, I have sufficient data from which to compile the knowledge I require. These engines are far more complex than the Ildiran stardrive or any propulsion system used by the Earth Defense Forces. However, if I utilize all of my processing power, I can create a paradigm overlay that will enable me to pilot the ship to Theroc.”

“I knew we could count on you, OX,” said Estarra.

With only the slightest pause to gather his resolve, the compy swiveled his synthetic body to face Peter. “Unfortunately, because our plans were made so swiftly, I did not have the opportunity to bring separate downloads. As you know, my memory storage is already filled to capacity with personal history. I have needed upgrading for some time.”

“What does that mean?” Peter said. “You don’t have the processing power to run these engines?”

“I have sufficient processing and storage capacity. However, in order to employ that capacity to comprehend the intricacies and nuances of running this ship, I will need to delete all of my memories.”

“That’s three centuries of experiences!” Peter gasped. “We’ll do something else. We’ll find another way to fly this ship—or we can just hide here on Earth until the emergency blows over.”

“No, King Peter, you cannot. You and the Queen must be kept safe. That is my priority.”

“Then I order you to change your priorities.”

“You cannot, any more than you could order me to kill Chairman Wenceslas.” OX turned his golden eye sensors to the Queen. “Taking you to Theroc is our best opportunity to save you and your child.”

Peter said, “We could go through another Klikiss transportal, like Prince Daniel did.”

Estarra’s eyes pleaded with him. “It’s got to be Theroc, Peter. My people can protect us, and we can use it as our new base of leadership.”

Peter knew she was right. “If we went somewhere else, we wouldn’t be doing anything but hiding. The human race needs more from us than that.” He swallowed the lump that was forming in his throat, knowing exactly what OX would do. He also knew that the tears in his wife’s eyes were for him, for their baby, for Earth . . . and for OX.

“The Chairman will notice we’re gone any moment now. If any of those warglobes break through, they’ll hit the Palace District first. We have to go right away—and hope this derelict is small enough not to get shot down by either side once we reach space.”

In a voice that sounded almost optimistic, OX said, “I will attempt to retain at least a few of my memories of you, if storage space allows.”

Before the King could say anything to stop him, before he could consider another solution to the impossible problem, OX turned to the alien ship’s controls. Hacking into the library of stored information culled from the work teams and stored on all the datapacks Cain had given them, the old Teacher compy stood rigid, only a few systems twitching as centuries of experiences drained away to be rewritten by a deluge of necessary data.

Peter’s heart wrenched and he blinked back tears as he grasped how much the Teacher compy was losing, emptying everything that he held dear just to be filled with the cold equations necessary to understand hydrogue engineering. The Teacher compy was a historical treasure. He wondered if the Hansa had made a backup download at any point, just to preserve OX’s memory files. He doubted that Basil would have gone out of his way for that. He wouldn’t have considered it relevant.

After an interminable moment, OX turned to them with a blank and disengaged demeanor. “King Peter, Queen Estarra.” His synthesized voice was flat. “I am ready. Do you wish to depart now?”

Peter and Estarra both knew they had just lost one of their only friends in the political quagmire of the Hansa. “Yes,” Peter answered, his throat tight with emotion. “Please get us out of here.”

The compy focused on the control panels, flowing crystal grids, and jagged protrusions grown out of the diamond framework. Power systems thrummed through the curved derelict, transferring energy through the structural lattice. The small sphere sealed itself and lifted up into the embattled night.

129

BENETO

T
wenty verdani battleships came out of the cold emptiness of space and swooped down toward Earth. Beneto’s human ancestors had departed from the home planet centuries ago in their generation ship, hoping for a new place to settle. They had never expected it to end like this.

And he did not intend to let it end, even if he was no longer human. His flesh had perished years ago on Corvus Landing, and in dying he had let his soul fall into the verdani mind. Now that he was part of this incredible organic craft, Beneto and his hundreds of fellow treeships were strong enough to conquer the ancient enemy.

“The verdani have awaited this battle for ten thousand years,” he said through telink to all green priests, all pilots. “And these ships are our greatest weapons. Now we must finish our enemies, as we should have done long ago.”

His wooden flesh was fused with the heartwood; his arms were branches kilometers long; his roots trailed out like antenna strands. His rigid verdani body was stronger and more massive than anything his imagination had ever prepared him for. Seeing the mayhem and destruction around Earth, he hoped that the gigantic treeships would turn the tide of the battle. With only a thought, he guided his spiny seedship directly into the fight.

Near Earth, hundreds of warglobes had already been destroyed, but through the myriad forest eyes of his battleship, Beneto saw that many diamond globes still survived—enough to ruin Earth if they broke through the last line of defenses. And the remaining EDF ships seemed to be firing on each other.

The twenty green priest pilots saw their alien targets, instinctively agreed on where each would fly, and careened in amongst the fighting vessels. The huge flying trees dodged blasts from EDF jazers, plowed through clouds of shrapnel and shockwaves from exploded Ildiran warliners, and scraped past the sharp eggshell fragments of broken warglobes. Using the communications systems Solimar had implanted, Beneto transmitted their intentions to General Lanyan, but in the melee he did not think anyone was listening.

Upon seeing the treeships, the hydrogues recognized their mortal enemies. Warglobes abandoned the EDF vessels and spun in space to unleash wild gouts of withering icewaves and deadly blue lightning.

Fused into the treeship, Beneto felt something akin to pain as his outer bark scorched and branches were singed or frozen away. But he came close enough to wrap his thorny branches around the nearest warglobe in a galactic bear hug.

The diamond sphere fought back with the same weapon the deep-core aliens had used to annihilate the worldtree grove on Corvus Landing, where Beneto had died. He remembered the fear, the pain, the death—all those trees, all those colonists! His treeship felt the cold death of icewaves cauterizing several of his huge limbs, but he pulled his spiny branch arms tighter and
tighter,
squeezing until the diamond sphere cracked . . . and finally shattered.

Nineteen other verdani seedships engulfed warglobes as well, crushing them with insurmountable botanical strength.

Around them, the human EDF ships continued to fight each other. All Ildiran warliners but the flagship were already destroyed. And still several hundred hydrogue warglobes pressed toward Earth. Even twenty verdani battleships would not be enough to stop them from breaking through.

But still, they must try. Beneto and the other treeships launched toward the numerous warglobes. He stretched his thorny battleship arms again and embraced another diamond vessel, squeezing until it broke apart.

His determined comrades did the same.