Scattered Suns (48 page)

Chapter 101—OSIRA’H

Inside her protective chamber deep within Qronha 3, Osira’h felt like a specimen in an exotic zoo. Through reinforced crystal panes, she stared out at the utterly alien landscape inhabited by hydrogues.

Somehow, she had to become an intermediary between them and the Mage-Imperator. She wasn’t supposed to agree to anything, just convince them to speak with her father. Even so, she hoped she could make them understand there was no reason for any war. Hydrogues and “rock dwellers” had no conflicting needs, did not compete for resources. But they also had no common ground, no shared experience, no mutual understanding...unless Osira’h became a bridge.

The quicksilver bodies stood in front of her like large toy soldiers. She felt a vibration in her thoughts, as if they were trying to reach her through the atmosphere of her crystal chamber. Osira’h let her eyes fall half closed and called on all her abilities: the inherited telepathy from her green priest mother, the skills she’d been taught by Designate Udru’h on Dobro, the tingle of
thism
from her father and the love she’d sensed the first time they met.

She drove aside all of her doubts and dark thoughts. Focus. Focus...

There.
When the connection was made, it felt as if an electric arc sparked from the hydrogues to Osira’h herself. Communication, an open door, the first step toward mutual understanding. But they were so alien!

Her initial impulse was to shut down her mind and drive away the inhuman presence, but she forced herself to maintain the contact. Her small hands clenched. She must become a conduit between hydrogue concepts and Ildiran thoughts. There had to be a shared means of expression. Klikiss robots had served in that capacity millennia ago. Osira’h would do the same now.

Although she could not at first pick up clear terms and concepts, her comprehension was progressing rapidly—much more so, she hoped, than the hydrogues guessed. In touching their vague and mostly incomprehensible thoughts, she began to sense that the hydrogues were agitated or distressed. Their citysphere was a blur of activity, swept up in actions and plans that she couldn’t decipher.

Finally she received a clutter of concepts with images that made her understand: A group of human battleships had arrived in the clouds above, bringing a new kind of weapon. At the same time, she could sense that the hydrogues had a terrible surprise for the human vessels.

In the images she saw that her own Ildiran septa had departed, and Osira’h’s heart fell. So, Yazra’h had abandoned her down in the clouds...But that had been her sister’s mission, under orders from the Mage-Imperator. They could never have rescued her anyway. Everything depended on Osira’h’s success with the hydrogues.

Next, with a sudden rush of surprise and fear, she learned that the deep-core aliens were also ready to launch another devastating attack against the verdani. She sensed hatred curdling through the hydrogue thoughts.

Theroc, the home of the worldforest!

Osira’h stiffened with alarm, careful not to send out a readable message with her reaction. Her mother’s world! The girl had never visited the planet herself, but Nira had shared so many vivid images that Osira’h felt as if she herself belonged among the worldtrees. She had touched the delicate treeling in the Mage-Imperator’s private chamber, and it had felt
right.

Yet she also belonged with the Ildirans. Perhaps she could accomplish something for both races. She had to do more than just convince the hydrogues to communicate with the Mage-Imperator.

She pressed her small hands against the curved crystal wall, attempting to send a distinct, nonverbal message. She peered out at the amorphous structures of the citysphere and was astonished to see two black Klikiss robots marching down ramps and over curved loops to approach her. They had broken their agreement to keep the Ildiran Empire safe, yet they remained among the hydrogues!

She felt a chill. More secrets, more treachery? The beetlelike machines stood beside the quicksilver hydrogues, buzzing and clicking in a brisk exchange of information that sounded like music. Red optical sensors flashed under ebony carapaces. Osira’h knew the robots had betrayed her people and broken their alliance, but why were they here now?

Just then, a new concept became apparent to her. The hydrogues were not afraid of the human rammers above. The deep-core aliens had planned a deadly ambush. Did the whole universe thrive on betrayal?

She was a child, just seven standard years old. That could work to her advantage if enemies underestimated her. She would have to be smarter, wilier, more unexpected than either the hydrogues or the Klikiss robots.

Making her mental message as clear as possible, she resonated her need through the hydrogues’ thought patterns, forming the concepts in images to communicate. She tried to show the aliens that Ildirans did not wish to continue this war, had not provoked it in the first place. The Mage-Imperator wanted to communicate with them.

As distinctly as she could, she thought, Millennia ago, Klikiss robots acted as intermediaries to arrange a nonaggression pact between Ildirans and hydrogues
, while you fought other enemies.

Inside her head, Osira’h sensed an inexplicable loathing for the “turncoat” faeros, as well as a furious resentment against the verdani, and an equivalent group of water-based beings they called the wentals. They had made many enemies.

She continued, staying focused.
But the Klikiss robots are not to be trusted. They poisoned you against us.
She looked at the black machines just outside her crystal walls. She couldn’t guess whom the hydrogues would believe.
But I will be your bridge. I am the conduit between hydrogue and Ildiran. Never before has there been direct communication between our races. We wish to understand you. I can facilitate a discussion with the Ildiran leader.

Her glass-walled bubble lurched and began to move. The hydrogues propelled it smoothly to hover near another, more crudely fashioned encounter vessel that sat empty in the high-pressure environment. As the aliens responded to her, Osira’h felt their antipathy toward the humans.

Overlapping hydrogue voices rang like a gong inside her head. They allied themselves with the verdani. They destroyed hydrogue worlds. They must be extinguished—as the original Klikiss race was.

Now the hydrogues brought her chamber to a low translucent structure that held a group of hapless human captives who looked forlorn and beaten behind the angled, transparent walls. They were dressed in an assortment of clothing, some military uniforms, some Hansa civilian attire, yet all wore the same hollow-eyed expression of endless fear. She wanted to know who they were, why the hydrogues kept them.

For experimentation. For amusement. For understanding. Humans must be destroyed. They used the Klikiss Torch to annihilate our worlds.

Osira’h urgently tried to get them to change their minds. Her only duty was to act as a conduit, but she didn’t think her father would object.
Forgive them. They did not know you existed.

They have used the weapon again and again.

She frowned. There was so much she didn’t know!

Next she received a violent, insistent image of all humanity exterminated. And the verdani. And the faeros. The three quicksilver hydrogues transmitted a stream of thoughts so strong that they struck her like physical shockwaves.
If you came to speak for humans, then we will destroy you now.

She sensed only a faint willingness to hear her plea in the name of the Ildiran Empire, but the hydrogues were adamant against including the humans in their consideration. Osira’h stared at the despondent prisoners within the geometrical cell, unable to help them. As the hydrogues moved her bubble away, she locked eyes with several hostages until she was drawn out of view.

She forced herself to focus her abilities once more. This was likely to be her only chance to deliver the Mage-Imperator’s invitation. For better or worse. Her siblings—indeed, all of the previous generations leading up to this culmination of the breeding experiments—had been genetically created for this single purpose. Osira’h had to fulfill the function for which she had been born: Through directly shared concepts, she would make the hydrogues
see
. She would save the Ildiran people, as they required of her...and they might be damned for it. The Mage-Imperator had claimed that no price was too high.

Jora’h had insisted there was no other way. Had he lied to her too? In this matter, he was forced to act as
Mage-Imperator,
not as her father or her mother’s lover. And she had to obey him...or at least try.

The half-breed girl did exactly as she’d been trained. Dropping her last self-protective mental walls and surrendering all resistance, she became a conduit between two races that were so fundamentally different.

With her mind ablaze and her thoughts entirely exposed, an absolute connection seared between her and the hydrogues, full and complete. Her greatest abilities blossomed out, brighter than ever before.

And then the hydrogues were in her grasp.

Chapter 102—ROBB BRINDLE

Robb and his fellow prisoners stared in disbelief through the murky wall membrane of their holding cell. Inside her own chamber, the strange little girl looked helpless and entirely out of her realm.

“Is that another prisoner?” he asked. “What are they doing?”

“Look at the way the drogues are taking her around—like they’re escorting her,” Anjea Telton said.

The girl stared out at the captives, as if concerned about
them
instead of herself. The haggard captives watched as the strange child’s chamber was lifted away and taken out of view.

“That looked a lot more sophisticated than my encounter vessel.” Robb could still see his intact old diving bell outside, not far away. He wondered if history would remember him as a selfless hero willing to make the supreme sacrifice, or a deluded fool who had been doomed from the start. If he could have come up with an escape plan that had even a marginal chance for success, he would have risked anything to make the attempt.

“Maybe they’ll squash her like a bug, like they did to Charles.” Anjea sounded miserable. “Like they mean to do to the rest of us.”

She looked meaningfully to the opposite side of their confinement chamber, where the hydrogues had brought in another of their encasement shells. This one conformed more closely to a human shape than the transparent coffin the drogues had used to kill Gomez. It reminded Robb of a sarcophagus. The silent aliens had carried the case into the prison cell, probably intending to take another prisoner with them, but then the quicksilver creatures had rushed away, as if distracted or alarmed. Perhaps the arrival of the strange little girl?

Anjea caught her breath with an idea. “Brindle, you think the systems still work in your encounter vessel?”

“They were functioning when the drogues grabbed me. But there’s a one-in-a-million chance someone could get over there alive, and another chance in a million that he could seal the chamber and bring it to proper pressure. And another chance in a million that anyone could escape drogue pursuit even if the systems all still worked.”

“If, if, if,” Anjea said. “Still sounds like better odds than waiting here for Dr. Hydrogue Frankenstein to come back.”

The new sarcophagus had small manipulating fields, and when the prisoners toyed with it, they found that a passenger inside had the ability to crudely guide the protective exoskeleton forward, up, and down.

“Maybe the hydrogues want us to take a walk around their city,” one of the prisoners suggested.

“Who knows what they’re thinking?” Robb countered. “Their minds are made of liquid crystal.”

“Well, mine isn’t—and I know what I’m thinking.” Before Robb could react, Anjea threw herself into the armored shell. “I’m getting out of here. I plan to make it to that encounter vessel. Wish me luck.”

“I should be the one to take the risk,” Robb said. “It’s my encounter vessel.”

“I’ll figure it out myself.”

“But how are you gonna come back for us?” cried one of the others.

They all knew that even if Anjea did manage to escape, get picked up, make it back to Earth, and convince the EDF of her story, the Earth military could never mount a rescue so deep down here. No, Anjea couldn’t possibly bring help for anyone else.

Still, she said, “I’ll do what I can.”

She sealed herself into the mobile exoskeleton. Robb could barely see her face through the angled outer plates. The hard-bitten woman looked terrified, but then she always did.

“Good luck, anyway,” Robb said, and he meant it.

The hydrogues had gone away, accompanying the little girl’s crystal chamber, and every creature in the citysphere seemed preoccupied with the strange visitor. Now was Anjea’s chance.

Clumsily experimenting with the fields inside her sealed shell, she found ways to make it move. It was like a remote-controlled mummy case, with all the grace and maneuverability that implied.

Robb fought back the anxiety inside his chest. This crackpot plan had virtually no chance of succeeding, yet it was their only glimmer of hope since the compy DD had spoken to them deep in the bowels of some other gas planet. DD had not found a way to free them, either.

“Even a chance in a million is one more chance than we’ve had up until now,” he said, trying to sound bright and confident. He and the other prisoners helped guide the enclosed shell toward the membrane wall. They pushed, and the shell slid through like a baby emerging from a slick birth canal. Then Anjea was on her own.

Once she reached the outside, Anjea had difficulty operating the controls, as if she were being buffeted by heavy storm winds and impossible gravity. But after a moment of disorientation, she managed to propel the chamber forward, adjusting her course. She only needed to cross a few dozen meters of atmospheric ocean to reach Robb’s empty diving bell.

“She’s going to make it!” said one of the prisoners.

Jerking forward in fits and starts, the protective shell hovered outside the hatch of the EDF vessel. Anjea struggled to get some kind of grip, to adjust the outer hatch using the coffin’s crude manipulators. The diving bell’s door was a simple mechanism designed to be foolproof and without unnecessary complexity.

When she succeeded in opening the hatch, Robb saw no venting of trapped air. Maybe the hydrogues already kept it at equilibrium pressure so they could study the interior. He prayed for Anjea’s sake that the mechanical systems had been shielded well enough to withstand the gas giant’s environment.

She managed to maneuver the stiff human-shaped shell into place and cautiously guided it into the interior of the diving bell.

The prisoners cheered. “She’s doing it!”

Robb didn’t point out that Anjea still had a full list of impossible tasks to accomplish before she got away. Even so, he was amazed she had made it this far.

First, she had to depressurize and repressurize the encounter vessel, if the tank reservoirs remained intact. The diving-bell hatch sealed again, and for an interminable moment nothing happened. Then Anjea used the crude manipulators to work the internal systems of the encounter pod. Status lights began to flash on the outside of the diving bell.

The ducts opened, and swirling jets pumped out the high-pressure atmosphere. Plumes of escaping steam sparkled upward.

“The systems are still working,” Robb said. “She’s venting their atmosphere! It’ll be like an air bubble rising to the surface of the ocean. She has a chance!”

“Not much of one,” said another prisoner in a hollow, hopeless voice.

Two Klikiss robots suddenly appeared atop a parabolic bridge. The robots moved their articulated arms, apparently signaling an alarm.

Curly metal pseudopods collected like puddles of solder and streamed upward. They gathered into larger pools, coalesced along ramps and polygonal platforms until they became individual hydrogues closing in on the encounter vessel.

Feeling sick inside, Robb gritted his teeth. “Come on, come on! Hurry, Anjea!”

A cluster of hydrogues surrounded the encounter pod, elongating into lumpy pillars much taller than their familiar copied Roamer form. Three Klikiss robots joined them.

The robots approached the diving bell. Hydrogues clung like ominous parasites to the sides of the armored chamber. The robots extended their articulated claws, scrabbling against the diving bell’s outer hull, looking for a way in.

The encounter vessel’s lower jets sputtered, and another plume burst out. Anjea was trying to activate the engines and get away. The prisoners shouted for her to hurry.

The Klikiss robots found the hatch mechanism. They tore at the controls and easily broke the seal, ripping open the heavy door and disengaging the plate from its solid hinges.

Hydrogue atmosphere pounded into the encounter chamber like a battering ram. Rising like ghosts made of molten silver, the hydrogues poured through the opening.

As the humans watched in horror, the aliens ejected first one half of the exoskeleton shell, then the other. Even if Anjea had managed to get back inside the protective skin before the Klikiss robots breached the hatch, she was now crushed and splattered into a biological jelly.

Robb fell to his knees inside their confinement chamber. The other prisoners groaned.

The Klikiss robots spent the next hour using their claws and metal tools to dismantle Robb’s encounter vessel plate by plate, until the components lay strewn in a pile of wreckage.