Dominion (43 page)

They rose, and Steven's mother led him to a bunk. He removed his boots and lay down, while his mother placed a blanket over him, brushed his hair away from his face, and kissed him softly on the forehead.

And Steven smiled. He was asleep just moments later, and slept with a peace that he had not felt in many, many months.

•  •  •

They spent two days hunting Cutters for analysis, while shuttles from the
Satia
brought men to the surface so they could spend some time on the planet. Contact was made with survivors in Scandinavia, France, and Germany, and families briefly reunited. Information was shared, including details of what had been discovered about the brains of the Others.

The hunt was a dangerous business, because they needed to kill the Cutters without damaging them so badly that any Others they might be carrying were destroyed. The
Revenge
targeted Cutters moving in their spheres, or solitary specimens on the ground. Biela proved adept at using the light cannon to fire single shots, disabling the creatures sufficiently for the
Revenge
to be able to land and send in soldiers to finish them off. In the end, they succeeded in gathering more than a dozen dead Others. It wouldn't have been enough for a proper scientific study, but it would do for now.

And while Fremd and his assistants examined them, Steven, aided by Trask in the cockpit, went looking for the nests of the creatures in the major cities in Ireland and the United Kingdom, bombing and burning as they went. They didn't get them all—that would have required teams on the ground moving house to house—but they got a lot. More to the point, they targeted clusters of spheres, limiting the Cutters' movement. In addition, as soon as they felt sure an area was safe enough, they'd search out dust-covered supermarkets and restaurants, laden with tins of food, and jar after jar of sealed jam, sauce, pickles, and tomatoes, and these they piled high in the
Revenge
, taking them back to the west coast of Ireland to restock the bunker's stores.

But this was just a cluster of small islands at the edge of Europe. They couldn't do this indefinitely. Already they'd been forced to replenish the
Revenge
's ammunition from the destroyer's reserves. They could have exhausted them entirely, and still only have secured a handful of territories from the predations of the Cutters. The Cutters were also getting clever, or the Others in their heads were. They knew they were being hunted from the air, and had started hiding. By the end of five days, there was not a Cutter to be seen, but they were out there, somewhere.

After the sixth day, Steven took Trask and Fremd aside, and told them that the
Revenge
would be leaving. He'd thought long and hard about the decision, and discussed it with Alis and Hague. They had agreed with him, Hague more reluctantly than Alis. The war was not here. The war was elsewhere.

The news did not come as a total surprise to Trask. He had been anticipating it, as had Steven's mother, although it did not stop her from losing her temper with her son, and scalding tears ran unchecked down her cheeks after he confirmed it to her. Devastated to be upsetting his mother, and also to be leaving her again, Steven promised to return with Paul once the Others and their Illyri allies were defeated, but they both knew it was scant consolation, and quite probably an empty promise too.

“You'd better be back,” said Katherine Kerr fiercely, “or I swear I'll come and get you, both of you, and when I find you, you'll wish I hadn't.”

And then she found herself unable to say any more, for she was forcing down an animal howl of desolation. Her son was returning to the stars, to a war in which the possibility of victory seemed remote. If her two boys died out there on a distant world, she might never learn of it, and the rest of her life would be spent wondering.

But Steven trusted this Illyri named Syl, the one whom Paul apparently loved, the one who had saved her sons from the gallows. Syl gave him hope, he said, and his mother latched on to some of that hope, and fanned the flames of it.

And Fremd gave them more hope. Of the specimens that had been brought to him, half showed serious signs of deterioration, and three more were in the first stages of it. It seemed the original sample was not an isolated case.

On the morning of the
Revenge
's departure, messages were received from Copenhagen and Paris. Signs of nerve degeneration had been found in the brains of more of the Others.

The creatures were dying.

•  •  •

The goodbyes were short, but no less sad for it. They exchanged their hugs, their handshakes, their kisses underground. Then the crew of the
Revenge
suited up and left the bunker. They waved one last time from the door of the ship before it closed and they ascended. Within days, the
Revenge
and the
Satia
had left the solar system.

For the first time in two decades, no Illyri ships flew above the earth.

A
ni waited in one of the towering crystal atriums of the Palace of Erebos, looking out over the Grand Hall that stood at the center of the complex, like a sparkling crystal heart, but it was a heart that had ceased to beat long ago. The little jewel of a moon now lay silent, the historic celebrations and commemorations it had hosted in its fabled heyday just the glamorous ghosts of another era. It had been this way for years now, shrouded in quiet save for the rustle of its maintenance staff of engineers and caretakers, all handpicked from within the Sisterhood. Since the brutal events that had provided the backdrop to Syrene's rushed wedding ceremony over four years previously, the Sisterhood had maintained control of Erebos, declaring itself to be custodian of the historic buildings until a time when peace might be restored to the ravaged Illyri race. Nobody had complained, for both the Military and the Diplomatic Corps were already neck-deep in bloodshed and tangled strategy; the fate of the great Palace of Erebos had been the least of their concerns. Naturally, the Sisterhood ensured that it took payment from the authorities for this custodianship, but in truth it suited Ani very well to have these private, elegant spaces to do with as she wished, unseen, and unheard.

The Palace had sustained catastrophic systemic damage during the attack by the
Nomad
, when it rescued Syl from the moon. While the
Nomad
had opened fire on only a small portion of the Palace, all of its structures were interconnected, and so harm to one meant harm to all. Blood still stained the floor, and the stars left by pulse blasts were burned onto the glass like lines of braille, ending at the exclamation mark where the
Nomad 
's cannon had ripped a new exit into a sealed tunnel, commencing the destruction of the ancient structure.

Yet again, Ani traced the story of Syl's escape with her eyes, even though she knew its details by heart. She kept the scene untouched as a memento, because everything that had happened that day felt as though it had befallen someone else, like a scene in a book or film the title of which she had forgotten, with an ending that was similarly lost to her. All she knew was that it had broken her heart.

•  •  •

In a rarely visited section of Erebos, near the vast catering and service kitchens on the far side of the glimmering Palace, rooms were being prepared for the arrival of the terrorist known as Aron. Ani had first encountered Aron, a member of the Military, on Earth, when she was but a child. Back then, Aron had been Captain Peris's second in command in the Edinburgh Castle Guard, but he'd been redeployed from Earth soon after Peris left for the Brigades, and now was leader of one of the Military units fighting the Diplomats in the systems closest to Illyr. For his insurrection, Aron was a named and wanted traitor, with a death sentence already passed upon him.

However, Ani remembered Aron as being smart, and calculating, and he'd always been friendly too, so when she had learned that he was believed to be central to the Military efforts, she had sent him secret word, evoking Peris's name. In time he had responded, and so she had courted him until she earned his trust, or at least until he trusted her motives enough to meet with her.

At that first meeting, he had been angry. Very angry.

“We can help each other,” she had promised him.

“Do you know that some of us are starving out there, Ani, stuck in the cesspits of outer space, dying like rats lost down a sewer, and now we're rats running out of even crap to eat? Do you understand me when I tell you how my troops suffer?”

The Diplomats deliberately targeted planets capable of sustaining life, knowing that these were most likely to be bases for Military operations. It meant that the Military struggled to grow food, and most of its outlying units were reduced to scavenging, and targeting Diplomatic supply routes.

“Yes,” said Ani, “I do understand you, and that is why I am glad you agreed to see me today, Aron. I have news for you—a symbol of my goodwill, if you will.”

Ani walked over to a carved cabinet and opened it.

“I have hybrid seeds,” she said, removing a small glass vial from a hidden drawer inside. She handed it to Aron, and he examined the label.

“Given that these are coming from you, I'm presuming they're not just any ordinary seeds,” he said.

“Of course not! These are the latest genetic modifications, unknown even on Illyr. They're suitable for growth in the poorest soils, particularly sand or rock, for they take their nourishment from the air. The soil is just to anchor them—even broken glass would suffice. And yet they grow three times as fast, while containing many times the standard nutritional value.”

“But what about water?” he said, frowning at the vial.

“That's the clincher, for these little seeds will germinate in salt water with no trouble at all—no need for desalination. That's precisely what my labs have been working on. Of course, it doesn't have to be salt water; any alkaline solution up to a pH of eight-point-four will do, and it goes without saying that they're self-propagating. It was a significant challenge, of course, but one that my scientists turned out to be more than up to.”

And it had been her scientists, not those on Illyr. They had achieved these little miracles unaided by the Others, relying instead on the Sisterhood's oldest resource: knowledge. At Ani's command and by her express wish, Avila Minor was the only part of the Illyr system in which Illyri did not carry Others inside them. The Marque had been quietly purged—or most of it had. The thing in its depths remained a threat.

“And I brought several more vials with different varietals,” Ani continued, “so you'll even have a selection to grow. I'll have them packed on the ship when you leave. Plant them when you get back and you should be harvesting within a month.”

Ani thought there might actually have been traces of tears in Aron's eyes. Whatever he had been expecting when he came here, it was not this. He started to thank her effusively, but she held up her hand, and they got down to business. The seeds carried a price. In return for them, she wanted the Corps' Alien communications relay taken down, if only temporarily—just long enough for the Diplomats to have to reroute their communications, just long enough for her Sisters to infiltrate them, and crack the code. Aron agreed to see to it. It suited the Military's purposes anyway, because it would disrupt Diplomatic communications for the coming Military assault.

Ever since that first meeting, Ani and Aron had enjoyed a cautious, highly secretive arrangement: she let him know of the intended attacks that would cause the biggest losses of life, and he told her . . . well, he told her what he could, and what he dared—anything that might support his quest to win the backing of the Sisterhood and its new Archmage.

Aron didn't yet understand that, even under Ani, the Sisterhood only backed itself.

But he did know about the Others. He knew that there was a strange force intervening in Illyri affairs. The discovery by the Military leadership of the truth about the Others had come about when a Diplomatic vessel was found drifting in the Cormor system: a hull breach had left its crew dead, and frozen. Two had been carrying Others, and one had been sufficiently alive to attempt to infect the Military salvage team, although their suits had saved them. The second Other had been retrieved intact, and it was this that had confirmed rumors long whispered. The information remained restricted, though; Aron had been allowed into the loop because one of his tasks was to convince, via a network of sympathizers, important Illyri with no love for the Diplomats to side with the Military. That was one of the reasons why he had accepted Ani's original request to meet, but it turned out that Ani needed no convincing about the Others.

Aron met Ani every few months, or more frequently if one of them requested it. The soldier flew in undetected on a nippy red Sisterhood ship that picked him up on the other side of a small, somewhat unstable wormhole—unimaginatively, Ani referred to it as the Wobbly wormhole—designated solely for the use of the Sisterhood, an arrangement reached by Syrene with the Diplomatic Corps, and one that Ani had seen no reason to discontinue.

Now, as Ani received word of the incoming Nairene transport, she hurried to await Aron. The rooms in which they would meet were in an isolated, heavily shielded lodge at the eastern edge of the Palace, far from any prying eyes and ears, although Ani was certain that Erebos was now almost as secure as the Marque. Aron was escorted to the lodge straight from the little transporter, his face pale. Ani thought she detected a whiff of vomit when he entered the room too, but she said nothing, not wishing to embarrass him.

“It is good to see you again, Aron,” she said, moving to embrace him. He turned his cheek from hers crossly.