Saga of Shadows 1: The Dark Between the Stars (29 page)

In their apartment, Orli obsessed over which dress to wear. Expensive business attire? Something flirtatious to welcome him home after his long trip? Muted colors to acknowledge a serious occasion, or just a casual outfit to downplay any sort of concern she might have?

Finally, she asked DD for his advice. The Friendly compy lectured her about alternatives until she sighed and held up a hand for him to stop. “Make a random selection for me, DD. That’ll do.” He selected a maroon blouse over a pair of tailored black slacks made from merh-silk. Orli added a necklace of polished reef pearls from Rhejak—a gift from old Mr. Steinman, and more expensive than she liked to think about.

Orli was reluctant to wear anything with too much sentimental value. She and Matthew had weathered plenty of rough patches in their relationship, but they had worked through the serious ones, varnished over the pain, and didn’t pick at the scabs, careful not to draw blood. In their marriage, they’d had five good years and five not-so-good years, with the issue of children being the primary thorn in their relationship.

“You seem sad, Orli,” DD said.

“Maybe a little sad. Maybe a little worried. I don’t know what Matthew has on his mind.”

“Would you like me to transmit a message and ask him?”

She gave him a wan smile. “It’s not that simple, DD. This is something we have to explore for ourselves.”

“Oh, like a research project.”

She gave DD a hug, then went off to Rlinda’s restaurant.

She was on her second glass of wine by the time Matthew arrived. He was always five minutes late; Orli was used to that. His personal clock was irreparably off by the same amount. Tonight, though, he was fifteen minutes late, and that told Orli a great deal. He would have some mundane excuse—a shuttle was delayed, traffic was bad, or Orli must have gotten the time wrong.

He knew where to find their table. Seeing him come in, Orli raised her hand in a signal. With a brief nod, he came over to her.

At the beginning of their relationship, there had been warm greetings, happy kisses and hugs, but public displays of affection were not Matthew’s habit. She initiated an embrace to make herself feel better. He kissed her on the lips, but to Orli it felt more like a misplaced peck on the cheek.

“Welcome home,” she said. “How was your trip?”

Matthew seemed relieved to fall into a business conversation, rattling off a summary of his talks and presentations, remarking on which universities drew large audiences and which ones gave him a less-enthusiastic reception.

She knew the places he visited, knew the other researchers he talked about, knew the concerns and the high points of their work. Their passion about compies gave them so much in common that getting married had been the obvious, logical thing to do. Work partners and life partners.

When the waiter came, they ordered appetizers, their usual. The restaurant’s excellent food represented a range of cultures and exotic flavors, traditional dishes from Theroc, the Roamer clans, and Earth. Rlinda’s chef made a special platter of flaming buttery grubs from Theroc, which they particularly liked.

They had first tried the dish during dinner on their fifth anniversary—the last good anniversary. Matthew was squeamish, but Orli had eaten many disgusting things during desperate times on Dremen, Corribus, and other places. Rlinda had joined them for a few minutes during that anniversary meal, insisting that the appetizer was her favorite thing on the menu. So Orli and Matthew dared each other to eat the grubs, which were indeed as tasty as promised.

Now, however, Orli poked at them. The waiter raised his eyebrows knowingly, as if accustomed to patrons who ordered the grubs but couldn’t find the nerve to eat them. Orli frowned and took one, swallowed it whole. When the waiter hovered to take their dinner order, she sent him away. “We’re not ready yet.” She turned to Matthew, got serious. “What is it you needed to talk about?”

He swallowed, and she saw his Adam’s apple move up and down. He straightened in his chair, getting down to business, and his expression changed. His eyes grew distant, and she knew he was about to deliver words he had memorized and probably practiced again and again as he traveled back to Relleker.

“I had a surprise visitor after my lecture on New Portugal,” he said.

She waited, and realization began to dawn. New Portugal had already raised her suspicions.

Matthew said, “Henna came to see me.”

Though Orli knew it was coming, she couldn’t stop her heart from skipping a beat. “I thought she promised not to see you.
You
promised you wouldn’t.”

He nodded. “That’s how it was supposed to be.”

The crisis had been only four months ago, when she discovered his affair with Henna Gann . . . or maybe he had confessed it. The timing was murky in Orli’s mind, and the argument had been so severe that the details were fractured and not something she wanted to recall.

It was a hard twist of the knife, coming so soon after their most recent fight about having children. When Orli learned of the affair, she was deeply hurt, but in a quiet corner of her heart she realized she had put up walls and added distance between them too. She had buried herself in her work, surrounded herself with her compies, sent Matthew away on his rigorous speaking schedule. Somehow, even with all those work commitments, Matthew found the time and energy to sleep with another woman.

Orli had been through ordeals before. She’d seen the slaughter of the Corribus colony, including her father, had been a captive of the Klikiss race, fended for herself while she was lost and starving. So, she put the hurt behind her, and they had worked it out. She and Matthew decided to give it another try.

The buttery grubs on the plate now gave off a nauseating smell. Orli couldn’t tear her eyes from him. He had more to say.

“She told me something’s changed,” he said.

“How would you know, if you’d kept your promise not to see her again?”

“Henna came to me after my lecture. I didn’t ask to see her. She was just there.” He seemed about to unravel a long string of excuses and rationalizations, but he stopped himself, looked Orli in the eye. “She’s pregnant. I didn’t know. The affair was over, I swear to you—but now she’s carrying my child.” He clasped his hands together. “
My child.
That changes everything.”

Orli felt as if someone had tripped her when she wasn’t looking, knocked her facedown on the ground. Yes, that did change everything.

At the beginning of their relationship, Matthew had wanted children, but Orli convinced him to wait; later, when she was ready, Matthew had been preoccupied with his busy career. He said no, not yet. Without any sort of goal or time frame, the idea of a family kept vanishing beyond the horizon. And now . . .

“Henna and I are going to have a baby,” he repeated. From the look on his face, the hint of expression behind his eyes, she wondered if he expected her to leap for joy and congratulate him. She rose from the table and walked away.

He called after her, “I hope we can still work together.”

She paused without turning, thought of several retorts, and dismissed them all. She kept walking.

When she got home Orli couldn’t stop herself from crying. Tears rolled down her face, and she ran into their main living room where DD waited for her.

“How was your dinner?” he asked brightly. “How was Matthew?” Then even the childlike Friendly compy noticed that something was wrong. “Oh, Orli, I am so sorry.”

She couldn’t guess how he knew to say that, but she caught him up in an embrace and sobbed onto his polymer shoulder.

F
OURTY

G
ENERAL
N
ALANI
K
EAH

Within fifteen minutes, General Keah ran out of expletives. This was supposed to have been a routine patrol with the Ildirans, not even a surprise war-game exercise—and the ships had stumbled upon an infestation of black robots.

“Those bugbots should have been wiped out twenty years ago,” Keah said. The beetlelike machines had caused incalculable damage to all sides in the Elemental War. “Let’s finish this damn job—it’ll increase my career satisfaction.”

After seeing his exploration crew slaughtered on the screens, Adar Zan’nh’s expression clouded like a storm as he called on his ships to retaliate. Keah had never seen the cool Ildiran commander so furious. She liked him this way.

Their ships reeled in the ferocious surprise attack from the frozen base, the bombardment of high-velocity ice projectiles, but General Keah could give as good as she got.

“Full jazer bursts, Mr. Patton. Fire up the railguns and use kinetic projectiles—hell, use harsh language! Pass the word to all ships in our battle group. Hit them with everything. And if we do this right, each crewmember gets a piece of bugbot shrapnel for a souvenir.”

The moon’s surface cracked and collapsed as implanted explosives blasted away the ice sheet to expose a half-dozen monstrous angular vessels that sent a chill down her spine. She leaned forward in the command chair. “I’d say that’s an invitation for a full carpet bombing, Mr. Patton.”

The weapons officer responded with a hard grin. “On it, General.”

Six robot ships began to rise from their cold underground base, heaving up out of the curtains of steam and flash-melted ice. Gases boiled around the black vessels like a smoke screen.

She addressed the Solar Navy flagship. “We better hit them before they head off into space, Z. They’re vulnerable now.”

“That is my intention, General.”

When she saw the heavy armor on the ships, Keah realized the bugbots must have been planning for defense and outright combat for some time. The massive vessels ascended from gaping craters blasted through the ice, and the first four headed out to open space. The Solar Navy warliners and CDF battleships closed in.

Their main targets were the last two robot ships, which were still rising from the crevasses. Concentrated bombardment damaged the fifth sufficiently that it barely managed to lift itself above the surface before it crashed down like a dying whale. The sixth fleeing ship exploded just as it cleared the ice.

The other four robot ships did not turn back to defend their comrades, did not work together—they simply increased engine power and accelerated away from the Dhula moon cluster.

Keah yelled, “Helm, increase engine speed. Keep pace, and keep firing.”

The Ildiran warliners spread their extravagant sails, fired up the stardrives, and accelerated as they blasted at the fleeing vessels. They gained on the robot ships, and the rearmost enemy vessels launched a fusillade of energy bursts that struck the shields of the CDF battle group, forcing three Mantas to veer off so their systems could recharge.

Adar Zan’nh’s flagship took point as the Solar Navy septa closed in. One robot vessel fired another round of energy blasts—targeted on the lagging robot ship. The barrage damaged its engines in a sacrifice play, and a crippling explosion sent the vessel tumbling backward in an uncontrolled spiral. It careened into the oncoming warliners, striking one and caroming off into a second warliner, taking both out of the chase.

Adar Zan’nh let out a loud curse. “Bekh!”

Keah had never even heard him raise his voice before. While her battle group streaked past the reeling Ildiran ships, she gave him a reassuring smile. “We’ve got it, Z.”

The engines of the last three enemy vessels were bright and hot as they burned their systems to tolerance levels. Black robots could withstand far more acceleration than any fragile biological body, but Keah pushed the
Kutuzov
’s engines as hard as she dared.

She loathed the bugbots, and it was more than just a philosophical disagreement—this was personal. She had been there on Earth when the robots launched their worst betrayal, wrecking numerous EDF ships, including hers. As a young bridge officer, Keah had seen the explosions all around her, watched her commander killed, could still recall the names of her fallen comrades.

Keah gritted her teeth and ordered another full weapons volley, just because she was pissed. She raised her voice to the green priest on the bridge. “Mr. Nadd, use your tree to tell the King that we’ve flushed out an infestation of leftover black robots, but we’re in pursuit.”

Nadd blinked. “Shouldn’t I wait until we’re done, General?”

“Some news is too good to sit on.”

The three surviving robot ships had left the ruddy gas giant behind and plunged headlong into open space, racing beyond even the cometary cloud.

The five intact Solar Navy warliners caught up with the
Kutuzov
. “We’re causing damage,” she transmitted to the Adar, “but the bugbots will get away if they can keep up that acceleration without exploding their engines. We can’t match it.”

On the tracking screens, the three robot vessels increased their lead, pulling ahead into the emptiness. Keah yelled to her sensor chief, “Lieutenant Saliba, do not lose track of them—that’s an order!”

“Scanning ahead, General, keeping my eyes on—” Saliba paused. “Detecting something odd outside the system. Some sort of black nebula or dust cloud. I can only tell it’s there because I can’t read anything else through it.” She shrugged. “It’s giving no readings at all—like a hole in space, and I swear it wasn’t there when we entered the Dhula system.”

On screen, the black nebula swirled, darkness mixed with deeper darkness. Keah thought it must be an illusion, because any dust cloud so large would grow and change on a cosmic timescale, nothing the human eye could ever notice. She hit the comm again. “Z, do you see that shadow cloud up ahead?”

“There is a deep shadow, and I find it unsettling—we have no record of anything in that area.”

“There’s definitely something now.”

The three robot battleships changed course and veered directly toward the cloud.

“They probably want to hide in the dust,” her navigator said. “If we lose them inside the nebula, they’ll get away.”

“Then don’t let them get there,” Keah said.