Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (75 page)

So did the rest of the ship, when the countdown reached zero and the tanks exploded, turning the
Hellfire
, and by collateral damage the
Zizka
, into a tiny, bright nova. Forewarned by her trips onto the timeplains, Ia did not block off the inferno, like the other two. Instead, she embraced it, swelling outward as the energy rushed through her, using the part of her mind that dealt with, that comprehended, that controlled and manipulated Time itself to withstand the overwhelming flows.

Expanding and twisting, she snatched up the two Feyori with her thoughts, swirling them into her grasp. Ia watched them carefully as she spun them around her expanded sense of self. There, in the wake of the energies thrust aside by her vortex, were the little hyperthreads that attached each alien to their faction-allies, their favorite places.

Seizing those threads, Ia
pulled
. It was a variation on the summoning spark that alerted each attached Meddler that they were needed, a variation that could only succeed if the Feyori
doing the summoning had access to a great deal of power. A solar flare, a massive thunderstorm, even the surface of a dying star could be used. Or an explosion caused by the catalytic conversion of tens of thousands of metric tons of purified water fused into a muddled, white-hot plasma of pure hydrogen and supercharged oxygen.

When each Feyori popped into range, dragged there by her summons, she grabbed
their
threads and yanked. Grabbed
those
threads and pulled. Grabbed the next set and tugged. Four degrees out was all the strength she had to spare for her task, and only with the first cycle’s worth of Meddlers did she literally pull any of them through the aether of hyperspace.

But the others came out of alarm and curiosity and boredom as she summoned each clutch. They crowded around her, dozens, hundreds, then roughly two thousand strong, brushing through each other, bobbing in empty space. Demanding in pulses of energy and empathy and telepathy to know what was going on, even as they drank in the remnants of the explosion she had made.

Spun out to an almost tenuous level, Ia enveloped the last ones to arrive and
pulled
them all inward, spinning around and down, flipping everyone in, up, and out. Landing on the banks of the timestreams in her Human form, she looked at the mass of tiny silver beads clinging to her left hand. They huddled close to her skin not because they willed it, but because
her
will trapped them there. Ruthlessly, Ia forced them to see the verdant fields, the golden waters, the blazing-hot skies in her mind.

“Welcome to
my
chessboard, gentlebeings. Welcome to
Time
itself,”
she warned them, letting the word roar across the plains like wind from a thunderstorm, letting the force of that word shift them forward by three centuries and a little more.
“And if you do
not
faction with me…welcome to the end of your precious little Game.”