Scattered Suns (6 page)

Chapter 9—JESS TAMBLYN

Encased within his alien water-and-pearl ship and protected by the power of the wentals, Jess descended into the raging depths of the gas giant Golgen. He had asked the water elementals to take him here so that he could see firsthand what he had accomplished in his first strike against the hydrogues.

His strange vessel plunged through wispy clouds and tearing winds; vapors scoured the exterior hull. Apocalyptic storms churned through the high-pressure seas of condensed atmosphere where enemy hydrogues had once lived. Seven years ago, as a brash and vengeful human, Jess had dealt a mortal blow to them.

He and his clan engineers from Plumas had fired short-period comets into this planet as if they were cosmic cannonballs. The impacts, like giant thunderbolts wielded by ancient gods, had been unstoppable, the shockwave concussions more destructive than the strongest thermonuclear bombs.

The huge gas ball was still marked with discolored blemishes like gangrenous wounds from the cometary fusillade. The intervening years had not quelled the atmospheric disruption; repercussions would continue for decades at least. The still-angry human part of Jess Tamblyn took satisfaction in that, a measure of revenge for the death of Ross and his Blue Sky Mine, which the aliens had destroyed...

But while he was focused on his past efforts to defeat the hydrogues, he suddenly received flashes of images, alarms, and thoughts from the wentals themselves—a burst of news sent through the interlinked water beings. The message was not clear, but Jess comprehended what was happening: The EDF had attacked another Roamer outpost, the home of Nikko Chan Tylar, who had barely escaped.

Jess’s fourteen volunteer “water bearers” were quietly distributing wentals to the lakes and oceans of uninhabited worlds where they were free to grow, and the water-based beings were beginning to expand. Though wentals were similar to the verdani, the worldtrees of Theroc, Jess’s volunteers had not been physically transformed to communicate directly with other wentals, as the green priests did with the worldforest.

Nikko was among the most susceptible, and most enthusiastic, of the volunteers. The water entities had allowed him to communicate with them, had even sent a quick alarm about the EDF strike on Hurricane Depot. But Jess doubted his other water bearers could read the details of the call that had just gone out from Nikko through the wentals.

In his own mind, Jess witnessed everything the young man managed to communicate to the wental water aboard his vessel. The Chan greenhouse asteroids had been seized, the Roamers living there captured, while Nikko himself outran the Eddy pursuers.

Now, as his ship descended into Golgen, Jess wrestled with his obligations. He was still a Roamer, and he felt honor-bound to do something to help—if he could. But the raid on the Chan greenhouses was already over, and so was the destruction of Rendezvous and Hurricane Depot. He could never get there in time to accomplish anything.

His water-and-pearl vessel would certainly startle the Eddy battleships, but he couldn’t fight the whole military force, no matter what his powers were. He hoped his sister Tasia was not among the invaders. She had joined the Earth military, but he couldn’t believe she was voluntarily preying upon Roamer outposts. Where was she now?

No, Jess knew he couldn’t allow himself to grow distracted. Better that he continue his quest to resurrect the wentals. If the hydrogues were not defeated, these petty squabbles among humans would eventually become irrelevant...

Around him Golgen’s clouds were impenetrable with stirred ammonia, hydrocarbons, phosphine, hydrogen sulfide. He felt an unexpected fear scrape like sharp fingernails along his bones. The reaction within him came from the wentals’ deep-seated alarm as they remembered the centuries of death and near annihilation the hydrogues had visited upon them.

“Strange, but I think we were destined to be allies,” Jess said. “Before I ever knew of wentals, I dealt the hydrogues a deep wound. I even used comets—frozen water—to do it. I’d like to see what my comets did.”

As the water-and-pearl vessel descended past layer after layer of convulsing clouds, Jess peered through the translucent bubble. Wispy shreds of vapor pulled away at an equilibrium layer, and he saw startling wreckage: enormous fragments of segmented domes, broken curves that had once been the structure of a hydrogue metropolis. The cityspheres had shattered and imploded from the unexpected barrage.

The eerie alien cities must have been magnificent, and Jess wondered how many hydrogues he had killed in the process. He decided the number couldn’t possibly make up for the innocent Roamer victims the hydrogues had slaughtered, or the whole populations of wentals they had eradicated ten thousand years ago.

The wentals said to him,
Now that we are growing stronger, Golgen will be only the first of many vict
ories against the hydrogues.

In all the wrecked components floating in the dense and turbulent atmosphere, Jess saw no sign of the Blue Sky Mine. The hydrogues had smashed his brother’s facility years ago, and he doubted the liquid-crystal creatures had any memory of the innocent people they had slain.

He thought of the last time he had seen Ross proudly riding his own skymine. His brother had been making a surprising success of his commercial venture, proving himself to his lovely young fiancée.
Cesca
. Back then Jess’s deepest worry had been hiding his secret love for her, knowing that she was betrothed to Ross...

In his mind, the wental voices offered a curious reassurance.
We will release part of ourselves from this ship into the clouds of Golgen. The atm
osphere has enough water molecules for us to spread and sustain ourselves. It will be a slow process, but we can gradually draw a diffuse wental mind together to secure and protect this place.

Sweat beads appeared on the outside of the water-and-pearl vessel, transmitted through the armored liquid hull. The droplets grew larger and thicker until they flew off like silver bullets into the restless storm layers.

We can calm the turbulence, dampen the disrupted weather, and tame Golgen again. Our wental essence will survive.

“You mean you’ll occupy an entire hydrogue world?”

Not completely, but we will be here. Already, wental energy seeps through the clouds, questing up and down to fill the ruined heart of this planet. There are no longer any hydrogues here, and we will disrupt their transgates so they can never return.

“Now I know why my Guiding Star brought me here.”

Golgen is safe. You may direct your Roamers to bring their skymines here again and gather all the ekti they desire.

Jess’s heart leaped. A safe planet for skymining! “I am due to meet with my water bearers soon, and together we will spread the word.”

Chapter 10—TASIA TAMBLYN

This wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she signed up for the Earth Defense Forces. Not at all. After her brother Ross was killed, Tasia had sneaked away from her family at the ice mines on Plumas in order to fight the hydrogues. The
hydrogues
. She wanted to be in the thick of things, right in the middle of the war. Isolated on Mars, though, watching over a bunch of bottom-of-the-barrel students, she was as far from the conflict as she could possibly be.

Yanked from her Manta command, Tasia had been sent here to run kleebs through training exercises. What a waste! Admiral Willis insisted it wasn’t a demotion, though the new assignment was obviously intended to keep her out of the way while the Eddies tilted at windmills in an infuriatingly unnecessary crackdown against Roamer clans.

Standing alone on the red rock outcropping, Tasia made a disgusted sound into her suit helmet, after making sure the comm was off. General Lanyan’s Guiding Star must be a black hole...or a whole cluster of black holes, pulling him in a dozen different directions—all of them wrong! Wrong enemy, wrong priority, wrong war.

It hadn’t been easy for her to leave her clan in the first place, to leave all the Roamers and her way of life, but she’d done it to fight against the monstrous aliens that preyed upon Roamer skymines—including Ross’s. She wasn’t like one of the shiny-eyed new cadets from Earth who joined the Eddies because they thought it was glamorous, or because the uniform would help them get laid. Tasia had thrown her not-insubstantial skills in with the EDF because she wanted to hurt the drogues.

The Roamer clans were not timid—hell, they lived in places that would have made most Hansa members wet their environment suits!—but the loose confederation of families kept no organized military force. If Tasia wanted to fight the drogues, then she had to do it with the EDF. Their goals coincided with her own. Supposedly.

Though she had served faithfully, no one had forgotten her roots. Since Roamers were considered hostiles, Tasia had been pulled to the sidelines, where she set up mock surface battles, guided raw recruits on high-atmospheric drops, and drilled them on tactical exercises in the classroom. Waiting in her bulky and uncomfortable EDF-issue environment suit, she stood facing the mock combat area on the rusty surface of Mars. She had chosen a high vantage from which she could watch the teams. She had deposited them out in the tangled canyons of Labyrinthus Noctis, the “Labyrinth of Night.” The troops marched according to coordinated plans, like two sports teams vying for a championship.

At her side, her compy EA stared in the same direction she did; Tasia couldn’t tell if the Listener model was actually seeing and absorbing details, or just imitating her owner.

Buzzing ramjet flyers soared through the thin Martian atmosphere, deploying a squadron of parachute troops that leaped out of cargo bays in the low Martian gravity. As they dropped, the troops unfurled gigantic batwings, tough films with sufficient surface area to provide resistance in the thin air. The unexpected parachute assault troopers were landing close to the objective.

“That’s an unorthodox trick from Team Jade,” she said to EA.

“It is a twist that will probably allow them to win the day’s challenge,” the compy said. The fact that EA would make such an observation made Tasia hope the Listener compy was at last thinking for herself.

Tasia smiled through her helmet faceplate. “I’ll have to commend those soldiers for ingenuity. Doing impossible and unexpected things is the only way the EDF’ll make headway against the drogues.”

She knew that the large rammer fleet would soon be completed: extraordinarily armored kamikaze battleships to be crewed by Soldier compies. The rammers would tackle the drogue warglobes head-on, one for one. An exceedingly expensive defense, but one that would hurt the hydrogues without a cost in human lives. So far, nothing else had worked. As soon as the big rammers were ready, they would look for the right opportunity. As long as the new vessels performed up to expectations, the Eddies would have a proven new weapon against the drogues. Maybe, if they began to win against the hydrogues, they would finally stop picking on the Roamer clans as a surrogate enemy...

The EDF was having a difficult time convincing people to enlist, and each batch of kleebs seemed worse than the last. That was why the battle groups depended more and more on Soldier compies to fill out their crews.

And Tasia had to groom the rest. What a waste of time! Why should she be forced to train more soldiers who might one day turn against the clans and cause more destruction?

The glider troops landed, stripped off their giant flexible wings, and took up their positions to meet the oncoming second team. Tasia watched them, paying attention only because she would have to submit her own report and analysis of the day’s results.

From her observation site, she scanned the teams of trainees running through drills. Most of them were impossibly slow, reacting with clumsy book-learned responses that were a long way from becoming swift instinct. Their lives had been too easy, too comfortable, and their mistakes had rarely had serious consequences. They were not accustomed to a daily awareness that any botched move might bring catastrophe.

Because she hadn’t joined the military to fool around, Tasia had risen swiftly in rank. She hadn’t coveted medals or promotions, and she didn’t play political games, but she worked damned hard and excelled at each tested skill. Though she claimed no political or career ambitions, the advantage to having a higher rank, as she saw it, was that she could do more important things. That was the idea, at least.

But now, thanks to their Roamer boondoggle, they’d pulled her from her Manta command and placed her in cold storage on Mars while the EDF picked on the clans. Couldn’t they at least have given her something
useful
to do?

She clicked her helmet transmitter. “Team Sapphire, what are you doing down there? Looks like you’re trying to light a campfire!” Despite the lack of oxygen in the air or any form of burnable material, she wouldn’t actually put it past them.

“Hadden has a leak in his air tank, Commander. He fell on his back during the last cliff descent, and now we’re trying to swap out with a spare tank,” said one of the kleebs.

“Pressure’s dropping fast!” Another voice, with an edge of panic.

“The speed you’re going, you may as well start planning Hadden’s memorial service. I could fill out the forms and requisition an EDF coffin while I’m waiting for you to finish goofing around.”

“We’re bringing in a spare tank, Commander, but I don’t know if we can get it up the canyon fast enough. We locked it in a cache when we secured this quadrant from Team Jade.”

“Commander, I need to abort the exercise! Call in an emergency rescue lift!”

She scowled. “Instead of hitting the panic button—which will never work in a
real
emergency, dammit!—try some creativity. Find a different way. If his tank is leaking, then seal it!”

“How? We’ve got nothing but wound sealant in the medpack, and that’s not for use in this cold.”

“Slather it on anyway! It’s designed to hold up against spurting arterial blood; you can bet it’ll clog a pinprick in an air tank. And the cold will keep it harder than a metal weld. Should hold at least until you can get that spare tank humped up to you. If that doesn’t work, try something else. Solve the problem.” She shook her head, grinding her teeth together to calm herself. “Once you stop the leak, he’s got enough air inside his suit’s reserve bladder to keep him alive for fifteen minutes even if his tank is empty.”

“We’ll try, Commander!”

As they jabbered to each other, scrambling to fix the leak, Tasia continued, “In the field, you’ll have limited resources. You have to know your supplies and equipment and what exactly they do. Just because a purpose isn’t listed on the instruction label doesn’t mean you can’t improvise.”

Not surprisingly, by working together they easily saved the kleeb with at least ten minutes to spare. She refused to let them bow out of the exercise, though they wanted to run back to base and lick their wounds after the close call. Team Sapphire lost a lot of ground, and would probably come in dead last in the scoring, but they had learned something...for a change.

Out of the loop on Mars, Tasia gleaned whatever information she could about the continuing stupid strikes on clan outposts. Rendezvous gone, even Hurricane Depot...

Tasia had been to Hurricane Depot only once, on a flight with Ross when she was twelve. Ross had been assigned to guide a water tanker from Plumas, and took Tasia along to show her the Galaxy. He had even let her do some of the piloting—at twelve she was already rated for most of the ships used around the water mines—but he himself had flown the vessel through the gravitational obstacle course to the stable island between two orbiting rocks.

The Depot had been a marvelous example of Roamer engineering, a bustling trading bazaar and meeting point for all the clans. Tasia had eaten exotic foods there, listened to tall tales from clan traders, seen so many people and strange clothes and traditions that she felt her head would explode. She’d always wanted to go back.

And now, after seizing everything they wanted, the Eddies had simply swatted Hurricane Depot out of its stable point and smashed it like a bug. A show of force. A demonstration of General Lanyan’s cold stupidity...

After that provocation and show of force, the Hansa seemed frustrated that Speaker Peroni had not simply capitulated. Tasia couldn’t believe the bull-in-a-china-shop way the Chairman was handling the entire situation. When she was a young girl, she had heard that the Earth military was a bunch of bullies and thugs. Apparently those stories were accurate.

While on board her Manta, and during R&R stops at EDF bases, she had listened to the Hansa’s smear campaign against the “treacherous space gypsies.” Many stories implied that the clans were in league with the hydrogues because they had cut off shipments of stardrive fuel “solely to weaken the effectiveness of the Earth Defense Forces”—which was ridiculous in so many different ways she couldn’t even count them.

There was no official announcement of the newly declared “war” against the clans, but most of the EDF soldiers knew (and celebrated) the recent provocative actions. Still, much as she hated their screwed-up priorities, the bureaucracy and prejudices, and all the ill-advised things they insisted on doing, the Hansa’s powerful military was the only force humanity had that might stand up against the hydrogues.

And she hated the drogues more than anything the EDF had done...so far.

Unexpectedly, while she watched the teams wrap up their scheduled exercises, a transmitted request and event summary appeared on the small screen of her suit’s text unit. “Roamer outpost captured at Hhrenni, numerous prisoners taken at greenhouse domes. Request assistance/reassignment of Commander Tamblyn to liaise with new Roamer detainees and escort them to Llaro. Her background may be useful.”

Appended to the formal request, she saw a single line from Admiral Willis, her Grid 7 commanding officer. “Request approved. But only if Tamblyn wants to do it.”

Tasia caught her breath. Another Roamer facility trashed? She tried to remember what sort of settlement had been located at Hhrenni and which clan had run it, but she’d been away from that way of life for so long. Even though her last battle had been a debacle—at Osquivel, where she had lost her lover and friend Robb Brindle—Tasia wished she could be out fighting the enemy. Making sure Roamer prisoners weren’t abused might be the next best thing.

“Rest assured, Admiral,” she keyed into the response window, “Tamblyn wants to do it.”

Here on Mars, her talents were being wasted. She was bored, forced to stay where absolutely nothing was going on. Anyplace had to be better than this.