Of Fire and Night (16 page)

38

MAGE-IMPERATOR JORA’H

J
ora’h rushed from the skysphere at the head of a group of guard kithmen. When he reached his contemplation chamber, he found Yazra’h still blocking the green priest from the treeling. Her cats prowled and paced. His daughter remained cool and strong, but it was clear she was fighting impatience. He knew she wanted to unleash her cats.

“Hold,” Jora’h said.

He stared at Kolker, who squatted on the floor holding his knees, weeping. His head was lowered, chin tucked against his chest, but the green priest could not keep his eyes from the treeling. Like a shiing addict, he kept glancing toward it, then at Jora’h, desperate and pleading.

“The green priest knows you have a treeling, Liege,” Yazra’h said. “If there are . . . things you wish to keep from the humans, then you cannot let him live.”

Jora’h met her gaze. “I will not have you kill him.”

Kolker had seemed broken and lost since arriving here from Qronha 3. Remembering how vitally connected Nira had been to her treeling, he thought he understood the withdrawal this green priest was experiencing. Perhaps it was like an Ildiran suffering in complete isolation, without the reassuring touch of
thism
. How could he not sympathize?

Kolker climbed to his feet, red-eyed. “Please. I
have
to touch the forest mind. I am blind and starving without telink.” He glared at Yazra’h. “She thinks I was trying to betray you. I just needed to contact the trees. That’s all.”

The Mage-Imperator regarded the green priest. Was he lying, or just naïve? “Contact with your worldtrees would send a signal to all your counterparts. Every green priest would know what you know.”

“No. It doesn’t work like that. Besides, I don’t know anything!”

“You know you are alive, along with all the other Hansa skyminers, who are presumed dead. You know that we have not let you go home. And you have seen the hydrogues here. I cannot let that knowledge reach the humans. The Ildiran Empire cannot risk it.” Jora’h felt a knot in his chest and heard an echo of his father’s twisted plans in his head. “I am sorry for what I am forced to do, but I have no choice. I never wanted to hold you here.”

“Then let us go free! We’re no threat to you.” The green priest truly did not understand.

Jora’h gestured. “Hold him.”

Two guards folded in beside Kolker to take his arms, but he was meek and submissive. Yazra’h tossed her long coppery hair and looked at her father. “I will increase our security. This cannot happen again.”

“That will not be necessary.” Jora’h closed his eyes, holding the thoughts inside his hammering head. “I have a better solution.”

He picked up the potted treeling. Looking at the delicate fronds and slender trunk, he was amazed that such a small plant could have so many tremendous repercussions. There was a power here that neither he nor any other Ildiran understood. He fondly recalled Queen Estarra’s recent visit along with King Peter and Chairman Wenceslas. Jora’h had been honored to receive the treeling as a gift. Now he recognized the danger it posed.

As black jaws of regret clamped down on his heart, Jora’h carried the pot to the high balcony. He stood outside where the light was clear and the clean winds were brisk against his face. His long braid twitched.

Behind him, his arms held by guards, Kolker struggled in growing horror. “What are you going to do?”

From the high balcony, the view was spectacular, showing the faceted skyline of great buildings and towers. Here, Jora’h had stood with Nira. The beautiful green priest had laughed at how the balcony’s slight curvature and the transparent floor segments made her feel as if the two of them were floating on air. How he missed her. He hoped she and Osira’h were together now, and that both of them could one day forgive him.

When Jora’h gazed out over his city, foremost in his mind was how the hydrogues had threatened to destroy the whole Ildiran Empire. Until he found a way to defeat the deep-core aliens, he knew only one way to escape that, even if he cursed himself for it. The humans could not know.

He held the potted treeling out over the open air. Kolker screamed, “No! Please, don’t! You can’t!”

Jora’h could not allow himself to be swayed. As a wave of self-disappointment rippled through his chest, he opened his fingers, and the pot fell. Buffeted by the breezes, it tumbled twice, dwindling to a speck, and then smashed against the interlocked paving stones.

Now there were no treelings on Ildira. The threat was gone. Behind him, he could hear Kolker’s miserable sobs, but he refused to turn around. “Now you can take him back to his people. There is nothing more to worry about.”

Alone on the balcony, Jora’h’s eyes filled with hot tears. He stared across the city for a long time, seeing nothing. Again, he wished Nira could be there with him. Would she hate him for what he had just done? How much would this all cost him?

I am becoming more and more like my father every day
.

39

RLINDA KETT

I
ce shards showered down like broken glass. BeBob yelped when a fist-sized chunk struck him on the shoulder. “The sky is falling!”

Freezing mist spangled the air. Rlinda could not tell how close the reanimated woman was to shattering the ceiling. If she broke through the crust, all the atmosphere trapped underground would erupt like a volcano of air. Karla Tamblyn seemed intent on knocking down every solid wall, leveling every unnatural structure, turning all of Plumas into a slurry of rubble and water.

Karla gestured toward the water-dissociation plant, breaking pipes and releasing jets of stored gas. Fortunately, nothing exploded. Yet.

Scrambling along as low and out of sight as possible, Rlinda and BeBob hid behind mounds of piled snow and frost, wove among conduits and the wreckage of smashed huts. Sooty residue rose from burst fuel containers and combustible materials in the habitation domes. Vaporized ice and water formed a fog that was as good as a smokescreen. Even when Rlinda couldn’t see what was happening, the din was enough to set her teeth on edge.

Directed by Karla’s demonic force, hundreds of scarlet nematodes swarmed forward, like a basket of angry cobras dumped onto the ice. Their rudimentary brains weren’t sufficient for complex hunting behavior, but the creatures could sense movement and heat. Their smooth bodies hissed across the ice pack, and their round mouths emitted eerie hooting sounds. Looking at them, Rlinda could tell these creatures were not self-aware, but mere tools of the reanimated woman.

As patchy mist drifted in and out, Rlinda watched three water miners stand their ground against the worms that writhed forward like inflated bags of blood. Two men jabbed and poked with makeshift spears while the third hammered with a club.

The nearest nematode convulsed, contracted, and squirmed, but the concerted blows were too much. The skin split open, and bright red fluid splashed the ice. The miners barely managed a cheer before dozens more worms lunged at them.

Without thinking, Rlinda grabbed her shovel and barked at BeBob, “Come on!” Springing several meters with each bound—she loved low gravity!—she flew in among the chewing nematodes. With her wide shovel, she knocked aside several of the heavy, soft worms. A backstroke with the flat blade splattered another one against the ice. BeBob used his tool like a gravedigger’s spade, driving the edge down on a flaccid body and cutting it in two. He scowled as thick gelatinous blood sprayed him, but turned his attention to five more nematodes coming at him.

“I wish I knew what we did to piss that lady off,” BeBob said.

The three water miners were yelling and fighting, smashing and chopping the worms, but the numbers didn’t seem to be diminishing. Rlinda swung her shovel, each time rewarded with a hard, wet impact. Elsewhere in the wrecked base, dozens of groups clustered together to make their last stands.

Karla continued her rampage, striding into the center of the mining base. From the other side of the settlement, two men yelled something and then unleashed a gushing explosion. Wynn and Torin had hooked a wide-diameter outflow tube to an emergency valve on one of the pipes that pumped water to the surface. The twins struggled to direct the explosive stream toward the reanimated woman. The torrent swept over Karla in a storm of frigid water, but she anchored herself like a statue. A flash-frozen wall of ice rose around her, creating a shield. As the high-pressure jet continued to bombard her, the frozen shield thickened, encapsulating Karla.

The twins shouted over the roar of the flow. “We’ve trapped her!”

As if she’d heard them, Karla shattered the cementlike white shell and easily parted the spray of water. With another burst of power, she sent a shockwave that backed up through the emergency valve and burst the tree-trunk-thick pipe. Frigid water exploded everywhere at once. Wynn and Torin dove out of the way.

Closer to Rlinda, one of the miners slipped on the ice, jabbing his spear in a last attempt to save himself. More than a dozen nematodes plunged in, tiny diamond teeth fastening, then chewing. The other Roamers tried to defend their fallen friend, but another mass of worms struck them from behind. Too many.

Rlinda watched the men die, but when four nematodes reared up in front of her, she couldn’t spare any time for the horror welling up within her. She swung the shovel like a Viking wielding an axe on a battlefield. BeBob was barely holding his own, and then the handle of his shovel cracked. Time for Plan B.

“Can you run faster than a worm, BeBob?” Rlinda delivered a few blows to clear the way, and they sprinted across the uneven ice pack, dodging among half-ruined structures. When another nematode lunged, Rlinda swung one of her heavy legs, hitting the worm’s soft membrane with her thick insulated boot. The hissing creature tumbled sideways. Rlinda made a disgusted face. “Like stepping in a bag of wet, runny shit.”

“There’s a lot more of them!” BeBob pointed to a new group of nematodes that squirmed in their direction, hissing and hooting. “Thousands, I think.”

Rlinda made a snap decision. “We’ve got to make it to the lift shaft and ride our way to the surface. Unless you plan to squash them all?”

“Not me—my arm’s already tired.”

Though the mist and smoke made it difficult to see, they ran. She and BeBob outdistanced the squirming nematodes, but Rlinda assumed the two of them were still being tracked.

As she had anticipated, an equipment shed stood unlocked next to the elevator, whose shaft ran parallel to one of the primary water wellheads. Always before, the Plumas workers had guarded the lift shafts to make sure the two hostages couldn’t escape. Now, though, the Roamers were rather preoccupied.

“Something’s hit the lift, Rlinda.” BeBob indicated a dark blotch next to the controls. “The access door is off track and wedged open.”

“Better jammed open than shut. Or would you rather circle the base, find another lift, and hope that one’s in better shape?”

With haunted eyes, he glanced back to see the cadre of scarlet nematodes coming closer, fixated on attacking them. The squirming worms were unbelievably single-minded. “Uh, no thanks. Let’s try this one.”

Rlinda yanked open the shed to reveal a rack of heavy-duty environment suits. She threw an average-sized one to BeBob and ransacked the garments, hoping to find one large enough to accommodate her. “Roamers are so damned lean and trim!” She went through one after another, breathing heavily, aware of how little time they had. She couldn’t drive away the image of the hapless Roamer men who had fallen to the nematodes, their skin chewed away.

Rlinda saw the approaching nematodes as serpentine shadows in the curling mist. She grabbed the largest of the available suits. “I hope this thing stretches.” She bounded to the damaged lift doors, which hung partly open like the slack mouth of a man who had died from a spacesuit rupture. “We’ll get dressed inside the chamber. Quit dawdling!”

BeBob didn’t need further encouragement. “At least the car is where it’s supposed to be.” Rlinda struggled to manhandle the damaged doors shut, but they were caught. As the nematodes squirmed forward like drunken inchworms, she decided there was no time for niceties. She pushed the controls, and after a brief, unpleasant grinding sound, the lift began to crawl upward.

“We’ll be fine now,” she said loudly enough to try to convince herself as well as BeBob. Adrenaline made time slow around her, now that she realized how close they’d come to being killed. “The nematodes won’t bother to follow us. Out of sight, out of mind.”

BeBob was fumbling to put on his suit. “Yeah, but they’re being guided by that demon woman. And she really doesn’t seem the forgetful type.”

“How can they climb up the shaft? They’re just worms.”

“Worms with very pointy teeth.” He fastened his belt, connected the air regulator. “Didn’t you see how easily they slithered up the walls in the grotto?”

“You’ve got a cheery answer for everything, don’t you?” Rlinda struggled with her too-small suit, getting both feet inside but not making much more progress than that. “I’m going to need your help with this, BeBob.”

“As soon as I figure the suit out for myself,” he answered, still fumbling with the unfamiliar garment. He pulled his arms into the sleeves, attached one of the gloves, then nodded. “Not like Hansa designs, but it’s a lot easier to don.”

“We need to be all dressed and ready to go as soon as we reach the surface.” Once they cycled through the external airlock, they could run across the ice to the waiting
Curiosity
. Already she imagined they were home free. “I sure hope we can take off before the ice ceiling collapses beneath us.”

She tugged on the reinforced multilayer fabric, working her way into the suit. It wasn’t quite stretchy enough. BeBob, who was mostly dressed except for his helmet and left glove, worked with her, massaging her into the constricting legs and sleeves.

“I was never a big fan of formfitting garments,” Rlinda said.

Beneath the lift’s floor, a bone-chilling sound grew louder . . . whispery, like wet socks being swirled in a glass bottle. BeBob looked at his feet. “They’re climbing up the shaft after us.”

“Actually, I think they got to one of the lift-stage platforms. Now they’ve crawled onto the reinforcement struts on our undercarriage.”

“In other words, they’re right under our feet.” He looked down, alarmed. She pulled his attention back to helping her with the suit. BeBob swallowed hard. “Maybe it’s only one or two of them.”

The first one struck the underside of the lift chamber with enough force to make a visible dent in the inner floor. The lift lurched, then slowed as if suddenly weighted down. “Uh, Rlinda . . .”

“Let me think a minute, BeBob.”

With another slam, several more nematodes smashed into the elevator and anchored themselves to the pipes and struts beneath the lifting chamber. Then came a chilling scraping sound as the worms, with their small diamond teeth, began to chew through the metal floor.