Saga of Shadows 1: The Dark Between the Stars (53 page)

The thick spiky treetops did not mesh into a solid canopy, and the forest floor was too dense and cluttered for him to land his ship there. Rather, he dropped a pontoon tarpaulin that self-inflated and expanded, anchoring itself to the lichentrees. This gave his ship a tough temporary spot to land.

Settling down on the suspended tarpaulin, the craft swayed, then stabilized. He collected specimen cases and extraction tools, filled the fuel tank in his torch gun for clearing underbrush. Wearing a headlamp and two shoulder-mounted lamps to penetrate the murk, he strapped everything to his back, emerged from the hatch, and looked around the pale and silent forest. After activating the locator beacon on his ship, he strung his cables and rappelled down the hollow-sounding trunk of a lichentree all the way to the forest floor.

The lower levels were lit by ghostly sunlight filtered through a mist of fine spores. The ground was a chaos of deadfall. Large-eyed salamanders scuttled away, leaving faint trails of phosphorescent slime behind. Mushroom globules jittered and wobbled as if in secret laughter as Tom Rom crashed past.

The lichentree forest seemed to be closing in around him, but his locator gave him his bearings. Down here in the gloom, everything looked the same, but he knew where he was going.

He unshouldered his torch gun and began blasting. A large blue slime mold tried to slump away, shrugging and rolling at glacial speed. Tom Rom played bright flames over the area, igniting the lichentree deadfall and the squirming mosses. He continued to focus the torch, burning the vegetation, then burning the ash. The heat itself activated the prisdiamonds, which made them easier to find.

Putting on a breather mask and thick gloves, he cleared away the powdery residue to reveal sparkling clusters like geological ice crystals bursting out of the rocks. He struck them with a rock hammer, snapped off the valuable gems, and scooped up the glittery debris until he had filled his satchel.

The torch gun’s fuel chamber was empty, and Tom Rom discarded it, not wanting to bother carrying it back up to the treetops. Tired and sweaty, he stripped off his heavy protective gear and dropped it on the ground so he could make good time back to the ship. He followed the signal from his locator.

When he reached the rope at the base of the tall lichentree, he could see the bright fabric of his pontoon tarpaulin high above and the shadow of his waiting ship. He secured his satchel of prisdiamonds, clipped onto the rope, and activated the climber, which scrolled him back up to the treetops.

Reaching the spore-hazed daylight above, he blinked in disoriented surprise. Another ship had landed adjacent to his own vessel. It was a battered, disreputable-looking craft without any markings. Tom Rom reached for his torch gun, but he had left it down on the forest floor.

Four men in ragged jumpsuits were waiting for him, two had Roamer clan markings that had been scuffed and covered. He did not recognize the men. He did recognize their type. They might well be Roamers but they were definitely outcasts, better labeled as pirates. The men crossed a metal gangplank from their own ship to his pontoon tarpaulin.

“See? Told you he’d come back,” said a thin man with sideburns so long he clearly had poor judgment in shaving.

“And I told you it was better just to wait here than to go looking for him,” said a second man.

All four withdrew hand jazers.

Tom Rom regarded them. “I think I saw you at Ulio. You must have gotten lost on your way here.”

“No, we followed you just fine,” said the man with the sideburns.

“I should be more careful, then.”

The men chuckled and kept the weapons trained on him. “Yes, you probably should.”

Tom Rom did not like to feel so helpless. He could fight, but he had no weapons. They would cut him down.

“Let’s just see what he’s got in that case,” said the quietest man, who seemed to be the leader. He had a head of thick red hair combed back away from his forehead. He looked at Tom Rom. “We ransacked your ship, but didn’t find much of value. So we figured there must be something more important here.”

“Yeah,” interjected the man with the sideburns. “Who ever goes to Vaconda?”

“Maybe
you
shouldn’t have come here,” Tom Rom said.

They relieved him of his case, and when they opened it to reveal the prisdiamonds, they nearly fell off the pontoon tarpaulin. “Prisdiamonds! Where the hell did he get those?”

“Obviously down there.” The quiet leader pointed toward the forest floor.

“We could each buy two starships with this load,” said Sideburns.

Probably three,
Tom Rom thought, but he kept the comment to himself.

“This will be very satisfactory,” said the leader. “Well worth the trip.”

“We’ll have to remember this place,” said Sideburns. “We should just kill him now and get it over with.” The other pirates muttered in halfhearted agreement.

Tom Rom looked at the quiet leader without blinking. “You’ve already proved yourselves to be thieves, but not all thieves are murderers.”

The leader apparently wasn’t. “Go inside his ship and wreck the control panels, smash the engine conduits. He won’t be going anywhere.”

“You mean you’re just stranding him here?” said Sideburns, as if that were a more horrendous fate.

“I can survive,” Tom Rom said in a quiet voice, stating a fact.

“Good enough, then,” the leader said. He turned his comrades loose inside Tom Rom’s ship, where they destroyed the systems. When they came out, their expressions were aglow with the satisfaction of vandalism.

The quiet leader held the satchel of prisdiamonds, pleased with the haul. “I assume there’s more down there?”

Tom Rom didn’t nod, but the answer was clear enough.

“We’ll be back, maybe rescue you. If you survive that long.”

“I’ll survive,” Tom Rom repeated.

Carrying the prisdiamonds, the four Roamer outcasts walked back across the makeshift gangplank and pulled it up before climbing aboard their battered vessel. Sideburns gave Tom Rom a taunting look before sealing the hatch.

He didn’t wait for the pirates to leave before ducking into his own ship. With a fast glance, Tom Rom scanned the damage: a few smashed power blocks, a peeled-off circuit film, a navigator control overlay, cracked instrument plates, two shattered viewscreens. His engines were quite durable, and he doubted they had sustained serious damage. The men had no organized sabotage plan, simply let loose with random destruction. Good, that would be easier to fix.

As he heard the Roamer ship priming its engines to leave, Tom Rom opened a locker, rummaged around, and withdrew a boomerang limpet. He’d never had occasion to use one before, but he came prepared. It seemed simple enough.

He stepped back out onto the uncertain surface of the pontoon tarpaulin and watched the battered pirate ship lift off. It accelerated into the sky, curving south as it climbed above the tops of the lichentree forest.

Tom Rom gripped the curved handle of the boomerang limpet, bent over to coil his muscles, and hurled it up into the air. It spun with a soft whistling sound, gathering speed until its motivators fired up. The limpet’s sensors cast a wide net, then the device altered its trajectory, accelerated, and rose up to strike the bottom hull of the pirate ship. It clamped on to the metal plates and started its timer.

Tom Rom had set the countdown for forty seconds, which should allow the ship to fly high enough and far enough away that he wouldn’t be bombarded with debris.

He counted silently, then watched a blossom of flames and shrapnel expand outward as the boomerang limpet detonated. Wreckage rained down into the pale white treetops, far from his position.

Tom Rom went back inside his ship to start the repairs. He knew how to jury-rig most of the systems, and he had spare parts and replacement circuitry for the vital components. He was able to tap into the independent propulsion system linked to the quarantine chamber/lifepod, which would give him the boost he needed. He could implement the rest of the repairs once he got back to Pergamus. Despite the inconvenience, he never had any doubt that he would make it.

The repairs took him three days.

Before flying away from Vaconda again, though, he had to return to the forest floor, using his spare protective suit. After so much trouble, he wasn’t about to leave without a load of prisdiamonds.

E
IGHTY

A
ELIN

Full of wonder, Aelin arrived with Iswander at the ekti-extraction yard that accompanied the moving bloater cluster, and the industrialist gave him a full tour of the operations. Aelin felt overwhelmed with the sights and experiences.

“You cannot reveal anything about our operations, green priest,” Iswander cautioned him for the third time, “but it’s important for you to understand the full scope of what we’re doing here.”

Aelin recognized that the man was showing a remarkable amount of trust in him. While he understood the necessity for keeping secrets from Iswander’s competitors, he found it disorienting to withhold thoughts and impressions from the worldforest network, acting only as a passive observer. After growing up in the wide-open worldforest, he was not well practiced in keeping secrets, but he kept his word to Lee Iswander.

He knew his brother must be in a similar situation on the mysterious Onthos city. Shelud had delivered reports of the vanished aliens and the interesting discoveries aboard the derelict, which the worldforest had translated, but he had given no details about the location of the new clan Reeves home of Okiah.

Neither brother could share his wondrous and amazing secrets, but Aelin and Shelud could share their excitement, if nothing else. Though they had disagreed in philosophy, they both found themselves in similar situations. Aelin realized that they might be closer than he expected.

Out here at the extraction field, bloaters drifted along in empty space, with a clear trajectory toward the nearest star, which was only a brighter spot in the forest of twinkling stars. The bloater cluster had no obvious means of propulsion, but it was accelerating.

Aelin stared out at the mysterious nodules floating together. Even the verdani knew nothing about them; he had searched the entire worldforest database, while being careful not to reveal where he was or what he knew.

As he watched the drifting bloaters, Aelin could sense something there, a distant slumbering force, a brooding . . .
presence.
No one believed those gas bags were actually alive, but they did not seem to be a mere natural phenomenon either. Iswander, who considered them nothing more than space plankton, had promised that as soon as his operations were stabilized and running smoothly, he would bring in scientific teams for a full analysis, but so far he concentrated on the extraction. There would be time enough for the rest later.

When returning from Theroc, Iswander brought in six more tanker ships, which he used to drain raw ekti-X from the bloaters. Alec Pannebaker spent much of his time hauling away the empty, deflated husks, towing them from the rest of the cluster so they wouldn’t get in the way. Even after all the ambitious extraction efforts, many hundreds of bloaters remained, crowded close in a great drifting cloud.

After the phenomenal success of the first ekti-extraction operations, Lee Iswander established a pilot industrial station in a second bloater cluster that Elisa Enturi had located. More and more workers arrived weekly for their isolated job assignments. And they produced more and more stardrive fuel.

Aelin often remained with Lee Iswander in the admin module, trying to learn the operations. “If this cluster still has so much ekti, why was it necessary to set up a second harvesting field?”

Iswander was patient with him, explaining the business, as if Aelin were still that bright-eyed young acolyte with a broken leg. “A secondary source of ekti-X at a different part of the Spiral Arm eases our distribution bottleneck. And,” he added with just a small smile, “when our delivery ships originate from two different points, it’s more difficult to backtrack our source. That should let us keep our secrets longer.”

Iswander stretched his arms. “I have to take advantage of this boom and bank my fortune while I can. It’s such a simple operation, sometimes I think this is too good to be true. As soon as bloaters are discovered elsewhere—and somebody
will
stumble upon a cluster—then anyone can harvest ekti-X. So much for our edge on the market. If there’s such a glut, our operations might not be worthwhile anymore.” He paused. “I want to keep this secret long enough to rebuild my family name, and make a future for Arden.”

As a green priest, Aelin had never bothered to consider those nuances before. He realized that Iswander had made the last comment for his son to hear, since Arden had appeared at the hatch of the admin module. The young man cast a frown toward the green priest. “Then today’s lesson should be about the ekti business, not history and legends and culture—that’s all Aelin wants to talk about.”

Because he had few actual duties in the bloater refinery yard, Aelin also tutored Iswander’s son. He was not trained as a teacher, nor had he planned a curriculum, but whenever he needed information for a lesson, he used his treeling to tap into the verdani mind.

Iswander chuckled. “That sounds exactly like my own complaints when I was your age! Trust me, son, it’s important. You need a background and a perspective on where things come from.”

“But those stories are so old they don’t mean anything,” Arden said.

Iswander shook his head and explained; Aelin couldn’t have made the argument better. “It’s the foundation of what we do—you need to understand that the whole basis of the ekti market is predicated on the Ildiran stardrive. Humans didn’t invent it. Without the gift of the stardrive, we would still be crawling across the Spiral Arm in slow generation ships. And while the Hansa was expanding their colonies, the Roamer clans earned great power by taking over cloud-harvesting operations from the Ildirans, running their old skymines, and then building new ones of their own.” He frowned at Arden. “It caused quite a bit of friction, and that’s one reason that the Roamers were looked on with skepticism—or jealousy—by the rest of the Hansa. It’s why we were made into scapegoats during the Elemental War.”