Saga of Shadows 1: The Dark Between the Stars (65 page)

Orli saw red at the fringes of her vision. “And you’re not listening to me. Every person aboard that station died of the plague—one hundred percent mortality rate! It has to end here. I can’t let anyone else be exposed.”

Tom Rom seemed unimpressed. “I have adequate quarantine measures. The organism will remain safely contained. There is no need for concern.”

She muted the comm when DD returned to the pilot deck. “It’s prepared, Orli. What is our next step?”

“We’ll jettison the canister and detonate it. Can you rig the signal through my station?”

“I have already done so, Orli.”

“This may be our last chance.”

The compy moved to the rear of the
Proud Mary
and inserted the ekti canister into the disposal bay.

Orli reopened contact with her pursuer. “I don’t know what kind of sick hobbies your boss has, but you don’t get a sample of this disease.” She leaned closer to the screen, hoping to impress her determination upon Tom Rom. “Look, this plague is going to kill me, and it’ll be a long and horrible end. I saw the bodies of the other victims. Between you and me, I’d rather just self-destruct here—quick, clean, a final flash of glory.”

Tom Rom seemed surprised by that. “You don’t appear to show any symptoms. You can’t be so eager to die.”

“Who said I was eager? But I’m looking at the big picture.”

“You are bluffing,” Tom Rom said.

On the screen, DD signaled that he was ready. Orli’s hand raced across the control panel. “Am I?”

She jettisoned the ekti canister, and two seconds later she pressed the detonation signal. The fuel tank exploded in a bright flash, sufficient to blind Tom Rom’s sensors, to startle him . . . and maybe, she hoped, confuse him. She only needed a few seconds.

Orli instantly changed course, not caring how much fuel she burned. She shot off at maximum acceleration along the course she had already laid. The
Proud Mary
plunged down like a launched projectile. Orli shut off all her engines, all lights, every external power source.

Her ship hurtled along in dark silence under its own momentum, leaving Tom Rom’s vessel behind. With his sensors blinded, he wouldn’t be able to see where she had gone.

The
Proud Mary
slipped into the expanding, simmering debris cloud. Her pursuer would never find them in the glowing thunderstorm of wreckage and radiation.

DD returned to the pilot deck. “Did it work, Orli?”

“Well enough—I think.” Her pulse was racing, and she felt feverish. Before she could catch herself, she vomited on the deck. Maybe it was just the tension, a response to the terror, the adrenaline rush.

But probably not.

She wiped her mouth while DD hurried to find a cleanup kit for the mess on the deck.

“Now we sit here and wait for him to go away,” Orli said. “This isn’t exactly how I had hoped to spend my last days.”

N
INETY
-
NINE

A
ELIN

No one in the ekti-extraction field objected when Aelin asked to use an inspection pod so he could see the strange nodules up close. The controls were simple enough, and he accessed information from the worldforest. The bloaters called to him, a powerful, weighty presence that seemed to promise so much more. He wondered why no one else could sense it. . . .

He left the industrial complex, with its cold metal decks and artificial light, and headed toward the majesty of the drifting cluster. The thrumming sensation in the back of his mind indicated a presence greater than and different from the huge tapestry of the verdani mind—possibly only a hint of something even more vast.

He needed to comprehend it better. The bloaters were much more than mere space plankton. He wished he could have shared this experience with Shelud, even if only through telink before his brother died of the plague. . . .

Now he tried to recapture his sense of wonder so that it brightened his shadowy depression. He had never felt like this before. Aelin always had dreams, always looked to the sky and imagined places beyond the worldforest, but now that he had ventured far out into the Spiral Arm, he had not found what he expected. Neither had Shelud.

The inspection pod was cramped, built for only one person; it had external arms and manipulator tools for servicing space equipment. Aelin set his potted treeling beside him and flew forward, paying little attention to the lights of other Iswander ships and facilities.

Hundreds of bloaters had been drained of ekti and the cluster was diminished by half. The remaining nodules continued to drift toward the nearest star, which grew brighter every day.

The pod approached the greenish tan spheres. He touched the treeling, opened his thoughts as a green priest, but the phantom half-entity he sensed out there had nothing to do with the verdani mind. In fact, the looming presence seemed to make the stars themselves insignificant.

Suddenly an alert notice skittered across the comm channels, and the ekti-field workers withdrew. Extraction operations raised their shields. Alarms began to ring.

Aelin barely knew how to work the pod controls, and he didn’t understand what was happening until he saw one of the distant bloaters glow, then a closer one responded with a bright flash, followed by a flare from the nucleus of a third bloater. The floating spheres lit up like scattered firecrackers in a staccato pattern.

So quickly that it seemed instantaneous, Aelin felt a tingle through his skin, a flicker in the treeling beneath his fingertips. He looked out at the gentle curve of the swollen nodule drifting right in front of him—

A chain lightning of mysterious signals ricocheted from one bloater to another, and the one directly before Aelin lit up with an explosive flash. It sent a surge through telink, an avalanche of light that continued to build as other bloaters flared, spark after spark.

He gasped, and his mind ignited. The flash was entirely inside of him, behind his eyes, throughout his mind. An overwhelming flood filled him with awe and ecstasy . . . and continued to build.

The flash was over in an instant, but Aelin could barely see. He tried to focus again, but the light was everywhere. He saw that his treeling had died, burned out in the pot beside him. His pod reeled, tumbling end over end.

Within him, the flare grew brighter and brighter, and Aelin had no way to stop it. Even retreating into unconsciousness was not enough. He couldn’t get the light out of his head.

O
NE
HUNDRED

J
ESS
T
AMBLYN

Inside the hollow comet of Academ, streams of energized wental water poured from the walls and pooled into the spherical zero-gravity ocean. The water thundered in from all directions, aerating the pool, and droplets orbited in sparkling rings.

Academ’s air was rich with mist, and residual wental energy added a glow to the walls. Jess drifted outside the fringes of the water as he watched a group of students at their exercise time, jetting through the water, launching themselves through the surface tension. Their activities were monitored by three Governess compies, who hovered like overprotective hawks.

Seth Reeves joined his classmates in an enthusiastic game of tag that had questionable and inconsistent rules. Jess had noticed that the boy missed his father even more than most of the children here did, because Garrison was all he had left, but Seth had thrived here in the classes. He truly loved being at Academ.

Sadly, a few days ago, Seth’s father had sent the terrible news about clan Reeves and how their new Okiah colony, including the young students withdrawn from Academ, had perished from the alien plague. All of them.

Jess had been there when Seth received the message. The boy had shifted from side to side, clearly not sure how to react. “I didn’t really know them,” he mumbled. “I only met my grandfather once, and . . . well, they should never have left Rendezvous. They wanted us to go with them. And if we had—”

Tears stung Jess’s eyes when he thought of Jamie and Scott Reeves, rambunctious boys with overactive imaginations. But he couldn’t control the Guiding Star that other Roamers might see. . . .

Cesca drifted up to him in the zero gravity, maneuvering with a compressed-air pack. She bumped against him and slipped her arm around his waist. Back when they had both been possessed with wental energy, he had been able to sense Cesca from star systems away; now they were just normal human beings again, although occasionally the water elementals initiated a flash of contact.

Jess and Cesca remained quiet, watching the students, remembering how they themselves had once played, overjoyed in the sharing of their bodies. Maybe as a residual effect of the wental energy, they had not aged much in the twenty years since losing the elementals inside them. Cesca’s dark brown hair, high cheekbones, and generous mouth were exactly as he remembered when he had first fallen in love with her.

Now, though, her fine dark brows drew together. “Do you sense it, Jess?” When he took her hand, he instinctively felt the tingle that the electric elemental touch used to have. “The wentals seem uneasy.”

Jess looked at the glowing comet walls. Though the wentals had lost the ability to communicate with them in clear words and concepts, he did feel a throbbing of buried turmoil. “Yes. I don’t sense any imminent danger to Academ. But . . . something’s changing, something big—out in the Spiral Arm.”

Their conversation was interrupted when a strange woman jetted across the open sky, heading like an aimed projectile toward the splashing children. Two Roamer teachers followed her, looking flustered, but the woman knew exactly where she meant to go. Her brown hair had highlights of gold and her brittle expression diminished her natural beauty. She wore normal business clothes, not traditional Roamer garb, and Jess noted an insignia on her jacket—Iswander Industries.

He and Cesca moved to intercept her, and she sped directly up to them, using a compressed-air pack to kill her forward momentum. “My name is Elisa Enturi. My son is Seth Reeves. You have him here.”

Cesca tried to stall. “Seth?” The boy was playing with his classmates and hadn’t noticed the woman yet.

Jess asked, “You’re Elisa Reeves?”

“
Enturi.
Seth’s father kidnapped him and placed him here without my knowledge or consent. He let me think my son was dead! I will initiate legal proceedings soon enough, but for now I need to take Seth to safety.”

“But he’s perfectly safe here,” Jess said. “Everyone thought you died in an explosion. Seth said he saw it himself. I know Garrison believes you’re dead.”

“I am obviously very much alive, and I am the boy’s mother. His father stole him, placed him in extreme danger—” She calmed herself with a visible effort. “I am relieved my child is unharmed. Thank you for watching over him, but I will take him. Now.”

“I don’t think he’ll want to go. He’s doing very well among the other students,” Cesca said.

Two Roamer teachers finally caught up with Elisa, looking breathless. “Sorry, Jess. She docked here and just barged in! She says she’s taking one of our students away.”

“She’s Seth’s mother,” Cesca said.

Elisa looked toward the children playing in the water, narrowing her eyes as if she were doing a deep scan, until she spotted her son. She jetted forward. “Seth!”

The Governess compies broke up a squabble when a quick game of splashing got out of hand. Seth dove out, rose above the water, shaking droplets off of him and rubbing his eyes.

Then he saw his mother, and Jess saw his expression change—more to confusion than delight. “Mother? You’re alive!” He stared for a moment and then started to cry.

“That explosion . . . your father never should have taken you out there. He put you in harm’s way. You could have died.”

“But . . . but you fired the shot—”

Elisa intercepted the boy, took his arm, and held on—not a warm and motherly embrace but more like a capture. “I was trying to protect you.”

Seth seemed cowed. He didn’t cling to his mother, but said, “I’m glad you’re alive. I was so scared when all those bloaters exploded. . . .”

Cesca said, “We’d better send a message to Garrison. He’s at Earth, so it’ll take him a few days to get here. In the meantime—”

“I’m taking custody of my boy now.”

Jess felt a knot in his stomach. “Seth
asked
to be here. He’s doing well in his studies and has a good life with the other Roamer children. Let’s discuss this like adults.”

“If Garrison acted like an adult, he wouldn’t have tried to kill my son,” Elisa snapped.

Alarmed, Seth found the courage to say, “Dad always protected me!”

Cesca said, “Your version differs significantly from the account that we received, Ms. Enturi.”

Elisa was adamant. “You cannot prevent me from taking my own son.”

Jess and Cesca both felt a pang, especially after the domineering Olaf Reeves had withdrawn Retroamer children from Academ and taken them with his clan out to deep space; now they were all dead. But Academ operated under certain rules. Even Garrison had signed the agreement that any parent could remove their child from the school.

Cesca’s voice was cold. “Come with us to the administration office, Ms. Enturi. If you insist on taking him without letting his father have input, we’ll require documentation. . . .”

Seth was well behaved, clearly disappointed, but he did as his mother told him. “I’d rather stay here,” he muttered.

Inside the administration office, Cesca called up the files on the screen. “We need to know where you’re taking him. There has to be some way for us to contact the boy.”

“After Garrison stole my boy and hid him from me?” Elisa said. “I’m afraid not. Seth will be just fine. I have everything he needs. I’ll see that his education continues properly.”

Jess wished he saw more warmth in her and less possessiveness. He unsealed a locker in his desk and withdrew a small vial filled with a sample of wental water. A keepsake. Handing it to Seth, he said, “Take this as a souvenir of your time here.”