Blood of the Cosmos (61 page)

Gale'nh's screens were filled with static, half of his systems were failing from the Shana Rei entropy as well as damage from the space battle. “Rod'h!” He could feel his brother surrounded by darkness, but there was no conceivable way Gale'nh could rescue him. At least not now.

The gaping hole in the obsidian Dyson sphere continued to collapse as more and more hexagonal plates were incorporated into the Shana Rei ships, rebuilding them. The angled cylinders were already larger and more powerful than any Shana Rei ship they had ever encountered.

Then, with a reservoir of ebony material available, the loose hex plates began building
another
black cylinder, like a crystal growing out of a new seed.

Entropy distortions shimmered out of the shadow cloud, and power began to die in Gale'nh's warliner.

“Our engines are failing, Tal,” cried his chief engineer. “If we don't leave now, we may never be able to activate our stardrive.”

The Adar's loud and implacable voice broke through the static. “All Solar Navy ships—return to Ildira. Now!”

The black robots closed in.

Gale'nh's heart wrenched as he came to the only possible decision. Rod'h was lost to the Shana Rei. “Follow the Adar's orders. Withdraw immediately.”

He held on to the command rail, but his knees were weak. He wanted to sag to the deck, but he could not show such weakness. When he closed his eyes, Gale'nh could not bear the darkness he found there, so he opened them again in the bright lights of the command nucleus.

With a lurch, the stardrive activated, and his warliner reeled away from the Gardeners' dead star system.

 

CHAPTER

103

ELISA ENTURI

And the ekti-extraction operations had been going so well.…

With his avuncular management style, Alec Pannebaker somehow managed to get people to work at peak performance because they wanted to, not because he commanded it. He was an adequate man to have in that role, provided all operations ran smoothly.

Unfortunately, operations did not always run smoothly. In those instances, harder choices needed to be made—and Elisa was in charge of those.

After Lee Iswander had departed for Newstation, armed with his evidence to challenge Speaker Ricks, Elisa watched over the operations like a hawk while preparing for the next run to Ulio Station. They were producing so much stardrive fuel that distribution was now their bottleneck. Kett Shipping couldn't handle all that ekti-X, even with other vessels picking up the slack.

Now, when the
Voracious Curiosity
blundered into the bloater fields, Elisa realized that Kett Shipping had voided their agreement.

Reacting faster even than the supposed security ships, she roared out in her ship to intercept the intruder. It annoyed her that she was more dedicated to protecting the industrial secret than the mercenaries who got paid to do so.

After eradicating the Duquesne operations, she remained tense and alert, sure she would be called upon to extinguish more competitors before the secret got out.

On the comm, Robb Brindle tried to sound so reasonable, as if his ship had merely stumbled upon an awkward situation. The gall! Neither he nor Tasia Tamblyn seemed to realize the magnitude of their blunder, and she knew they couldn't be allowed to leave.

As her ship accelerated so hard she could barely breathe, Elisa powered up her weapons. The accompanying security ships did the same, but they probably thought the posturing was merely a bluff. Well, they were going to be in for a surprise! Fortunately, she was willing to do what was necessary.

On the private channel she informed the other security ships. “We cannot let them get away after what they witnessed. Iswander Industries depends on us now. Your livelihood depends on this.”

“Understood, Ms. Enturi,” said one of the pilots, amidst overlapping acknowledgments. As the ships closed in on the
Curiosity
, one of the attack pilots prepared his weapons. He spoke to the squadron. “Target engines only—cripple them.”

“Agreed,” Elisa said, although she had no intention of doing so.

With shields at full strength, the
Voracious Curiosity
scrambled to retreat beyond the fringe of the bloater cluster. Elisa accelerated, closing in; then she opened fire.

The
Curiosity
spun and dodged, accelerating away in high-G evasive maneuvers. Elisa hissed when her shots missed.

The other ships fired their compact jazers, but they seemed reticent. “Unable to get a lock on the engines,” said a pilot. “Use low intensity—damage only.”

“Just
stop them
.” Elisa continued to fire as she bore down on the
Curiosity
.

Her own ship had been enhanced with the best technology Iswander Industries could buy, for protection and speed. Given her business, it was always possible she could encounter pirates or, as with the Duquesne operations, she might need to take extreme preemptive actions. She closed in and fired again.

But the
Curiosity
also possessed enhanced systems, probably some sort of Roamer hodgepodge technology, that nevertheless seemed superior to her own. Garrison had always bragged how any clan member could fix problems that others in the Confederation considered impossible.

Elisa fired another spray of jazer blasts, and somehow Tasia Tamblyn anticipated the attack and did a barrel roll in the opposite direction. Jazers grazed the bottom hull, but the
Curiosity
looped upward and accelerated away. Either the pilot was telepathic or damn lucky!

Tasia's voice sounded mocking over the comm. “That's no way to treat a business partner.”

When the
Curiosity
's cockpit appeared on the screen, Elisa spotted another woman she recognized. Orli Covitz—the woman who had gone away with Garrison, taking Seth with them … and now she was here!

“We can't let you leave. Surrender now.” Elisa doubted that Tasia Tamblyn would do any such thing, since she was merely making a pro forma demand and had no intention of letting them surrender. No one aboard the
Curiosity
would survive capture. Tasia knew that, and Elisa knew it.

The rest of the Iswander security ships were oblivious … at the moment.

Elisa continued her pursuit, firing furiously, and the
Curiosity
flew remarkable maneuvers. Elisa would have been impressed by the pilot's skill if she hadn't been so angry. Tasia Tamblyn and Robb Brindle had both been EDF fighter pilots during the Elemental War. But this was a different kind of battle.

Orli Covitz used the comm now, broadcasting on a wideband channel so that everyone in the extraction field could hear. Annoying. The ekti workers were all watching this space chase; Pannebaker was probably even recording it, since he loved to observe daredevil activities.

“We've been to the site of the clan Duquesne extraction field,” Orli transmitted. “Their log entry shows
you
destroying their ships, Elisa. You murdered all those people just to stop them from harvesting ekti. Are you ready to murder us as well because we got a look at your operations? Is that what everybody here wants you to do?”

“Surrender! Right now, or be destroyed.”

Tasia quipped back, “Shizz, you'll destroy us anyway—I may as well prolong the fun.”

One of the security pilots scolded Elisa. “Be careful, ma'am! We're just trying to detain that ship.”

“I don't believe you understand what's at stake here, Captain. I'm following Mr. Iswander's orders.”

Then the
Curiosity
broadcast the last log entry from the Duquesne cargo hauler that showed Elisa Enturi opening fire, the screams, the explosions.

She knew that Lee Iswander wanted her to protect the extraction field at all costs.
At all costs.
Elisa would not let him think she had failed him. Now she wondered how Tamblyn had found these operations at all. Or the Duquesne mess? She felt a sudden chill. Had someone secretly placed a tracker on
her
ship? Elisa could not believe she would have missed such a thing. A passive tracker, maybe … something that silently recorded her movements and then downloaded to a receiver when the ship was docked elsewhere?

Elisa gritted her teeth. If so, that would mean they had found the extraction field because of
her
mistake. And if the
Curiosity
exposed the ekti-X business, then
Elisa
herself would be responsible.

She could not let Iswander be so disappointed in her.

Pannebaker transmitted from the admin hub. “Hey, Elisa, calm down—what are you doing? We'll need to contact Mr. Iswander back at Newstation.”

One of the pilots broke away from the formation and stopped firing. “This isn't what we signed up for.”

“They cannot be allowed to get away,” she said, and kept firing.

The
Curiosity
flew in random, extreme patterns far from the perimeter of the extraction field. Fortunately, they were all headed away from the bloaters, or a stray blast could have ignited one of the gas bags.

As they raced past discarded bloater husks, the
Curiosity
opened fire on the debris. Though little ekti remained in the deflated sacks, the explosions cast a thermal glare and sent organic shrapnel flying in all directions. Elisa dodged, but now the
Curiosity
was in open space, pulling ahead of the pursuers. Their stardrive engine blazed bright.

Elisa took one more shot with full-strength jazers. The blast spread out exactly where the intruders should have been, but the
Curiosity
vanished into lightspeed.

Elisa's heart sank into a pit of despair. They had escaped!

She heard shouts of outrage coming from the other security ships, the industrial vessels in the extraction field, and the admin hub. Elisa had been so focused on her escaping quarry that she hadn't at first realized that their shock and outrage was directed
at her
.

Elisa didn't care what Pannebaker and the other workers thought, though. What she dreaded most was the idea of facing Lee Iswander and explaining how she had let him down.

 

CHAPTER

104

EXXOS

Another forty-nine robots destroyed!

After their triumph at Ulio Station, Exxos had expected to travel to the dead Onthos system and secure material for the shadows to build a vast, invincible fleet. But they had never planned on going into battle in a forgotten, dead star system.

Nevertheless, the robots had responded and had wrecked warliners, killed Ildirans, damaged a CDF battleship. There were so many of those noxious, insidious life-forms. So many! And they continued to breed. It would have been a satisfying experience, but the surprise confrontation had cost more irreplaceable robots. This could not continue!

Exxos had run and rerun calculations, and the arithmetic was appalling. Fewer than a hundred black robots remained, and every one of them would likely be wiped out long before the other sentient races suffered irrevocable harm. So long as one robot survived, however—so long as
he
survived—then victory was possible. And Exxos had no shortage of schemes.

The Shana Rei were shocked and wounded by the weapons used by the humans and Ildirans. The sun bombs ate away at the black hex cylinders, crippling the Shana Rei, but the robots and the shadows had ultimately driven away the enemy.

And they had captured one vital prisoner, a halfbreed with unsettling powers of resistance. That specimen needed to be studied.

With so much already-created dark matter available from the Dyson sphere around the dead star, the Shana Rei could replenish their hex cylinders. More importantly, Exxos now had virtually infinite resources for his own schemes. Now, when he demanded to have more vessels, more weapons, the Shana Rei would no longer resist or complain. The creatures of darkness could build thousands of invincible automated warships, and each surviving black robot could command an entire fleet.

For a time, the shadow cloud remained in real space over the black sphere, reassimilating the hexagonal plates. The Shana Rei seemed to be gorging themselves, building their cylindrical vessels larger and larger, replacing all the lost matter in order to salve the wounds they had endured.

Though the pulsing inkblots seemed hurt now, they were also angered, and they wanted to fight. At last, they were willing to listen to Exxos's commands, and while he still had their capricious attention, he took advantage of it. The ninety-eight remaining robots busied themselves mapping out how they would conquer and exterminate intelligent life. With all that material available, they designed even larger ships, more destructive weapons. The next generation of ships would be far more powerful.

But Exxos had grander plans than a single objective. The robots had many enemies to crush: the humans, the Ildirans … and the Shana Rei, which were likely to be the most dangerous and difficult to destroy. All of his identical incarnations pondered the same question. While they guided the construction of the titanic new fleet from the Dyson sphere material, the robots interlinked their communications with complex coded networking. With parallel and multiplicative processing, the ninety-eight versions of Exxos developed other secret designs.

Though the shadows were allies, they were also the robots' mortal enemies. Since forming this abusive alliance, the Shana Rei had torn apart many robots, but Exxos and his comrades had observed the shadows as well, searching for any chink, any flaw. Each time the Shana Rei felt pain, each time they suffered a blow that visibly weakened them, the black robots added that data to the larger pool.

With the knowledge gathered over many centuries as slaves of the Klikiss race, the robots understood the dimensional mathematics that made the Klikiss transportals possible. By walking among Ildirans and humans for so many years as supposed friends, the robots had absorbed Ildiran science as well as human physics … all of which pooled together into a vast knowledge base.