Horizon Storms (47 page)

Nira wondered how the Dobro Designate would react when he came back to her island and found her gone. He had kept her alive in order to use her for some grim purpose . . . but she had let herself be used too often by that terrible man, and she vowed it would not happen again.

The nights were lonely. Her leaf sail bowed outward as the wind picked up again. Overhead, the stars were obscured by thickening clouds. She could not see the gathering storm, but she could smell moisture and ozone in the air, hear far-off bursts of thunder. Rain began to pelt down, drenching her green skin. She clung to the sides of her raft as the choppy water began to buffet her.

Waves splashed over the logs. Though she had done her best to ensure that the bindings were strong, Nira’s floating craft was too fragile to withstand the power of this storm for long. But she had no place else to go, so she held on and rode out the weather.

Rain slashed down. Blinding forks of lightning burst across the sky.

Shivering, Nira grasped the slick wooden logs and waited, not counting the endless minutes or hours.

She had been through worse ordeals when she’d been in the breeding barracks. She could endure this.

Exhausted, Nira wanted to sink into the oblivion of sleep and hide 292

there until the gale was over, but she dared not, for fear that she would lose her grip. Drowning in a deep lake far from any forest would be a terrible end for a green priest. She longed to set foot onshore again, to find trees and plants—and a way back to Theroc.

She told herself again, I can endure this. . . .

Morning came with the murky darkness of lingering rain clouds in the sky, but the worst of the storm had passed and the choppy waves calmed.

She was delighted to see a smear of brown land, cast into relief by the light of the rising sun on the horizon. At first she was afraid the currents and the wind had hurled her back to her isolated island, but the shoreline extended too straight and too far. This must be a main continent.

She began to paddle furiously. Helpful winds gusted now, so she adjusted her sail and rode the breezes toward the ever-growing line of solid land. It took her most of the day to reach shore, and as she approached she surveyed the brown and rocky landscape with dismay. A bleak nothingness stretched as far as she could see.

With a knot in her stomach, Nira thought briefly that she might have been better off remaining a prisoner on her lush island, but then she chided herself. She had made a choice to fight back and disrupt the Designate’s plans in any way possible, even if she had to die to do so.

When her raft finally reached the brown, sandy slope, she stumbled off the wet logs and fell to her knees on the beach, just appreciating the firmness of earth beneath her again. Her legs were wobbly, but she drew a deep breath and felt the energy cycling through her skin.

Straining and panting, she dragged her raft high up onto dry ground and anchored it, though she didn’t know why. She never intended to use the raft again—certainly not to go back to her island, even if she could have navigated her way there.

Finally she shaded her eyes to look into the distance as far as she could see. Behind her lay the open water, and ahead—no matter how barren and daunting the landscape appeared—was her path. She would find her destination out there somewhere.

Leaving the shore behind, Nira began to walk forward.

805ANTON COLICOS

When the sudden, suffocating blackness engulfed Maratha Prime, panic and disbelief set in simultaneously.

The thirty-seven Ildiran workers drew a collective breath, as if anticipating the fall of an executioner’s axe. Anton heard a skitter of wavering footsteps and the clatter of dishes as groping, frightened hands searched for something to hold on to. The lens kithman, Ilure’l, cried out, as if hoping to call back the last glimmers of escaping photons that ricocheted off the crystalline walls and then passed through, vanishing into the gulf of darkness.

“What are we going to do?” cried someone else. Mhas’k? Anton couldn’t identify the speaker.

Though startled and disoriented, Anton pushed away from the table, willing himself to maintain his composure. “I guess a fuse must have blown.” His voice sounded eerie and disembodied. “Calm down, everyone.”

“Where is my engineer?” the voice of the Designate shrilled, then cracked with anxiety. “What is his name again?”

“Nur’of, Designate.” The thin voice of Bhali’v.

Finally, Vik’k, one of the diggers, ignited a handheld emergency blazer he kept with him for work in the tunnels. A gasp of relief rippled through the clustered Ildirans. They crowded close to the somber digger, inadvertently blocking the glow from the others.

“What happened? Who did this?” Designate Avi’h demanded.

“It’s the Shana Rei! They’ve descended upon us.” It was Ilure’l again; Anton thought the well-educated lens kithman should have known better.

“Come on now, don’t be silly.” He turned to Vao’sh, who sat in shock.

“I guess maybe we shouldn’t tell any more frightening stories today.”

“Yes, Rememberer Anton, that would be wise.”

Another broad-shouldered digger fumbled out a second emergency blazer from his pack, doubling the light in the cavernous dining hall.

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Anton spoke reassuringly: “There, see? It’ll be all right. Nothing to be afraid of.” He seemed to be the only one not panicked.

During the previous day season, when he’d asked a group of Ildiran tourists to go to the dark-side construction site of Maratha Secda, they had clearly thought Anton unbalanced. But he had egged them on with stories of human bravery and finally gotten a large enough group to go. Now the skeleton crew stared at him as if he were a fool for not understanding their peril. Therefore, instead of just talking about bravery, Anton would have to show his mettle and be an actual hero. As a bookish, lifelong scholar, he smiled at the irony of it.

“All right, let’s think about this. Until we can get the generators fixed, do you have any candles?” In the uncertain light, he pointed to the kithmen who served and prepared food. “Any cooking flames or torches in the kitchens?”

When the Ildirans nodded uncertainly, Anton gathered two of them and took one of the emergency blazers. In the dining hall, the rest of the crew was reluctant to let a light source go away, even temporarily, but Anton was firm about it. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring back even more light.

Think of it as an investment!”

Forcibly keeping his good cheer, he hurried his reluctant volunteers along before the Designate could countermand his instructions. The three of them followed the blazer down the frighteningly dark passageways until they reached the kitchens. Inside storage cabinets they found boxes of ignition sticks and flammable gels. When Anton led them all back to the dining room and lit the new lights, the Ildirans clutched them like lifelines.

Finally the Maratha Designate quelled enough of his blinding panic to grow angry. “Nur’of, you are my engineer. Learn what has gone wrong, and get those lights back on.”

“I will need to take one of the blazers, and several workers to do what—”

“Hurry!” Designate Avi’h cried. “These ignition sticks won’t last forever.”

Anton rested a reassuring hand on Rememberer Vao’sh’s arm. “I’ll go with Nur’of’s team and keep them company until we find out what caused the blackout. Stay here and tell funny stories to the rest of these people.

Keep them entertained and distracted. Shine a light on your face so they can see the colors in your lobes.”

Accompanied by Anton, the engineer and four of his technicians hastened down a succession of ramps into the lower levels of the domed city.

The underground silence was oppressive. One of the technicians rummaged in an equipment locker and found three more emergency blazers, which he quickly switched on.

Always before, the thumping rhythm of generators and the buzzing of complex equipment in these levels had sounded like a growing storm.

Now the chambers were quiet as death. All of Maratha Prime’s power, all of the machinery, had been shut down.

“I heard an explosion or two immediately before the lights went out,”

Anton said to Nur’of. “Is it possible that one of the generators blew up or broke down?”

The large-eyed engineer turned to him, his face thrown into sharp relief by the stark light of the blazer in his hand. “Bekh! We have redundant power systems, and backup generators. It is not conceivable that all of them failed simultaneously.”

Nevertheless, when they entered the equipment room, Anton saw his answer. The energy production and distribution machinery had been ruined, turbines blasted open, cables severed, generators torn apart.

And clearly, it was no accident.

When at last some of the lights flickered on again, Anton and the team of technicians returned to the central dining hall. They received giddy cheers and a look of great satisfaction on the Designate’s drawn face.

Anton had surprised himself by remaining cool throughout the crisis, since he had always been a book-learner, someone who looked at life from a detached and objective position—not a man of action! However, his parents had taught him to solve problems, to rely on himself, and not to panic. With pleasant conversation and suggestions, knowing that he was the only one who could handle this particular situation, Anton had kept the uneasy engineer and his technicians on track, offering them hope and confidence while he helped them find emergency systems and backup power supplies so they could rig up a way to draw power for the main 296

dome from the undamaged energy reservoirs. In the process of reassuring and encouraging them, he had ended up feeling more optimistic himself.

Nur’of stood in front of the Designate. “We are drawing on our backup batteries to make the life-support systems functional again—but the generators are completely destroyed. All of our main machinery has been sabotaged. Sabotaged! Someone, or something, came in through the tunnels and attacked our primary equipment.”

“It is the Shana Rei!” the lens kithman insisted.

“The Shana Rei could not possibly have come here,” the rememberer said firmly, but Anton could see flickers of uncertainty and confusion in his multicolored expression.

Anton added, “We don’t need to go inventing mythical creatures to explain this.”

“Nothing in the Saga is mythical,” Ilure’l said.

“Our power systems will not last long,” Nur’of said, getting to con-crete business again. “I can give us light and warmth for a few days at most.

There will be enough illumination for us to make plans, but never enough for us to feel safe or comfortable. The collector reserves have been destroyed, and only a small trickle from my new thermal conduits supplies power, but that won’t last long. All systems will fail again. Even my best batteries will soon be drained.”

The bureaucrat hovered close to Avi’h, babbling his questions. “Then what are we going to do, Designate? How shall we escape? Where will we go? Who can help us?”

Avi’h lifted his chin, giving a command like a true Designate. “We must divert power to our communications systems. We will send a signal.”

Anton knew that without a green priest, no call for help would ever reach another Ildiran planet or even a Solar Navy ship in time. The septa of warliners that had dropped off Designate Avi’h had departed some time ago and would already be many star systems away.

“Can the Mage-Imperator sense what happened through the thism?

Will he sound an alarm and send rescuers?” Anton asked.

Vao’sh shook his head. “The Maratha Designate is his brother, not his son. The connection is not perfect. If his attention is not focused elsewhere, the Mage-Imperator may sense our distress, but not sharply enough to know he must dispatch helpers right away.”

“Who else can help us?” Ilure’l struggled to keep his fear under control.

The bureaucrat grasped at an idea. “We can contact the Klikiss robots over on Maratha Secda.”

Avi’h brightened. “An excellent suggestion, Bhali’v. Yes, the city should be nearly completed by now, and they are in the daylight. The robots can assist us, and we will wait there for rescue.”

The people babbled with relief. “We’ll escape.”

“We can be in the sunlight again!”

Anton felt momentarily uneasy. “Wait a minute. We don’t know that the Klikiss robots weren’t the culprits who did this in the first place. Who else is on Maratha?”

“The Shana Rei!” Ilure’l insisted. “Maybe they are the ones that built all those tunnels underground—where it’s always dark.”

Bhali’v looked indignant at Anton’s suggestion. “Those robots have worked with us here for decades and shown no sign of treachery. Why should we not trust them?”

Anton raised his eyebrows. “Well, for starters, because someone just blew up all of our generators and snuffed out the lights.”

Instead of listening to him, the Designate and the engineer hurried off to the communications room, carrying blazers and one of the makeshift candles as a precaution, although there was now plenty of light.

Vao’sh sat in troubled silence and Anton took his place beside the rememberer, who shook his many-lobed head. “They believe it is the Shana Rei because they can think of no other enemy who might have done this . . . but that cannot be true! It simply cannot.”

Later, when Nur’of accompanied Designate Avi’h back into the dining chamber, both were beaming. “Excellent news!” Avi’h said. “I have spoken to the Klikiss robots at the Secda dome. I explained our situation, and they have offered sufficient facilities, supplies, and stored food to accommodate us while we wait for a rescue mission. But they do not have vehicles to come for us. We will have to make our own way over there.”

“But how will we do that?” Ilure’l asked. “Maratha Secda is on the other side of the world.”