Authors: Kevin J. Anderson
Suddenly a group of ellipsoidal fireballs spurted away from the cooling solar material. Like hungry wolves, the hydrogues raced after them.
“Now’s our chance,” Rlinda said. “Come on, BeBob!” The two ships moved out of the shelter of the cold planet and accelerated toward open space, away from the titanic fight.
Warglobes surrounded the fleeing faeros one at a time. Energy discharges hammered the flaming elementals, bleeding their power dry.
Under the relentless attack, one of the faeros flickered, then winked out, a dead cinder in cold space.
BeBob transmitted, “Better increase acceleration, Rlinda. Doesn’t look like we have much longer before the drogues finish mopping up.”
“With all these people aboard, this is as fast as the Curiosity will go.”
Davlin watched on the screens as the vengeful warglobes methodically trapped and killed another of the fireballs. Then another.
Before long, when the last of the flaming elementals had been snuffed, the warglobes accelerated back down along the path they had traveled.
Rlinda heaved a brief sigh of relief—but now the four diamond spheres hesitated and altered course. They moved toward the two fleeing cargo ships, as if finally noticing them.
“This isn’t good,” BeBob said. “It’s not a coincidence.”
Rlinda wrestled with the controls, but her ship was already at maxi-
mum speed. Since even EDF Juggernauts and Ildiran warliners couldn’t fight the hydrogues, the Curiosity didn’t stand a chance.
The ominous diamond spheres quickly reached them and surrounded the two ships just as they had when vanquishing the faeros. Rlinda swallowed hard. The alien globes looked as big as planets in front of her. She didn’t even consider powering up her minimal weapons. “Anybody got a white flag?” she asked.
The spiked globes shimmered, looming there, but making no move.
Rlinda wondered what they were waiting for. She and her passengers—as well as all those aboard the Blind Faith—were certainly doomed.
Finally, with typical incomprehensibility, the hydrogues separated and streaked off at high speed, as if responding to some unheard signal. They left Rlinda shaking inside her cockpit.
“What the hell?” BeBob transmitted.
She just shook her head and took deep breaths, unable to speak.
Davlin stared out the cockpit window and finally said, “I’m all done with this system—and my sabbatical.”
1125CELLI
In the ruins of the worldforest, some areas were so dense with fallen trees and deadwood that they formed barriers impenetrable even to heavy Roamer machinery. The worst tangles, though, were the most fascinating to Celli.
What was the forest hiding in there?
She bounded through thickets, curious about the shielded islands of fallen trees that seemed to her like consciously protective barricades.
Standing before a huge deadfall, Celli looked at the tightly packed trunks and broken branches. In the midst of the furious attack, had the worldfor-413
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est intentionally drawn down its doomed hulks to form an armored dome to shelter something vitally important?
And why would that be so strange? With her own eyes she had seen the rush of verdant rebirth as the forest used its stored energy to regrow foliage as fast as the hydrogues could destroy it. That miracle had lasted only briefly, wondrous and lush and green, but it showed the worldforest’s unique power and majesty. She could think of no reason why there might not be other miracles in the offing.
Ever curious, Celli worked her way into the thicket. Gnarled branches scratched like claws, warning intruders away. Withered fronds hung like witches’ brooms, blocking her way, but Celli felt no sinister presence here.
She wasn’t a green priest and could not sense the worldtrees; nevertheless, she belonged here on Theroc. The trees, even these wounded or dying ones, would know she meant them no harm.
She wormed her way forward. She had always been able to get into tight places and awkward situations, often to her dismay. Her body was whip-thin and resilient, and she found openings that no machine, or even a broad-shouldered man like Solimar, could have gotten through.
Pushing more branches aside, Celli ignored the scratches she received.
Some brittle twigs broke into charcoal as she pressed against them; others were surprisingly resilient and flexible. She smelled fresh moisture again, proof that parts of the forest had escaped being scorched or frozen.
This sheltered place was still remarkably alive, gathering energy during an exhausted rest. It was like a secret and magical glen. . . .
Celli had often enjoyed eavesdropping on green priest acolytes as they told stories to the worldforest. Now she recalled the story of Sleeping Beauty and her spellbound castle protected by an unbreakable wall of thorny vines.
As she worked her way deeper, Celli noticed to her surprise that the branches were actually shifting and stirring. They moved of their own accord, stretching out of the way to make her passage easier—to let her through.
At first she thought it was just her imagination, but as she turned slightly, she could see the twigs rustle and flex, opening another path, guiding her. Grinning, she hurried forward, wondering where the foliage might want her to go. “What are you hiding inside there?”
She drew closer to the heart of the thicket and with each step she took, the branches continued to part for her. Only glimmers could penetrate the clumped wickerwork of tumbled branches overhead, and so the light was dim. But she found her way without a single misstep.
Finally, she reached the center of the thicket under an interlocked dome of tree branches. Beneath the dome lay a shadowed meadow where condorflies had once flitted and large flowers had grown.
Celli saw a single wooden pillar growing there in the open space. The trunk, as tall as she was, looked too thick and gnarled to be a treeling. It stood like an obelisk, a totem pole, or some sort of shrine that the trees themselves had created, thrusting it out of the Theron soil.
Obviously, this was what the worldtrees had been protecting.
She moved closer, carefully, reverently. She still didn’t know what she was seeing. As she paced around the wooden obelisk, she saw that its cylindrical shape was grooved and swirled with long bumps, like thick branches twisted in a knot.
With a start, she realized that it oddly resembled a human form, as if a shuddering man had wrapped his arms tightly around himself, tucked his head down, and crouched. But the detail had not yet finished forming. The shape remained vague, for now.
The worldtrees had created this on purpose. But for what reason? She went closer, drawn and intrigued as she looked into the rounded lump that would have been the carved man’s face. The features were crude but smooth, as if modeled in stiff clay without any refinements. After looking carefully, Celli got the feeling it was still completing itself.
Smiling with wonder, she reached out to touch what would have been a wooden cheek. The eyes opened.
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Though she was stuck on the sidelines, the war still went on. EDF ships went out on recon flights in search of the faeros in hopes of convincing them to become formal allies; other ships attempted to keep track of hydrogue movements. Far too much military energy, however, was devoted to the stupid, red-herring conflict with the Roamer clans.
After destroying Hurricane Depot, the Eddies had gone to two other Roamer outposts whose locations they had discovered, only to find them hastily abandoned. The clans had always closely guarded their hiding places, and now they were slipping without difficulty through the fingers of the EDF. Tasia noted with no surprise whatsoever that the Hansa did not mention their failures.
Because of their doubts and suspicions about her loyalties, Tasia’s superior officers had stuck her here on Mars as a schoolteacher for bottom-of-the-barrel kleebs, most of them obnoxious and unmotivated. She wasn’t in a mood to take any crap from them.
Under olive skies, with her boots planted on rusty rock, she stood on high ground in her environment suit, watching the new batch of cadets as they went through routine on-foot drills. During her downtime the evening before, Tasia had planned the day’s exercises. The students hadn’t learned yet that the worse they performed and the ruder they were to her, the tougher she made their assignments.
In the canyons below, the kleebs marched in four separate groups, struggling to follow computerized topographic maps through convoluted terrain in order to reach a goal. It seemed a simple chart-reading problem, a team orienteering exercise, but she had spiced up the challenge by doctoring their air tanks so that some trainees had a surplus of oxygen and others did not have enough. As soon as their low-tank alarms went off, the cadets had the option of calling for pickup and rescue, but Tasia hoped each group would work together as a team to share resources.
From what she’d seen, though, most of the Eddy recruits had never learned how to think outside the box to fix an emergency. The Big Goose
could learn much about survival and innovation from the Roamers; unfortunately, they had made up their minds to harass the clans instead. Their loss. . . .
Here on Mars, Tasia was completely out of the information loop. Without her Manta command, she had no need to know about military actions, and she found out about full-scale operations like Hurricane Depot only long after the fact. Right now, General Lanyan might already be planning another idiotic attack and she would never be able to warn the Roamers, as she had done at Osquivel.
Later that day, her trainees returned to the base, some having failed, some completing their assignment. All together in the waiting room, they shucked off their suits to look at the exercise scores and see what they had done wrong. And they had all done plenty of things wrong. Tasia didn’t pull any punches in her debriefing assessment. She just hoped her students would eventually use their skills against the hydrogues instead of other Roamer outposts.
Two of the kleebs had called in for an emergency rescue. Only one team had taken the obvious solution of sharing air from their tanks so that the entire crew could move on. The fastest hiker from the second team, seeing that they wouldn’t all make it, had abandoned the rest of them for emergency rescue and run ahead just so he could claim a personal win.
Tasia came down on that team the hardest—the alleged winner for making such a selfish decision, and the rest of his comrades for letting him.
“It was within the parameters of the exercise, Commander,” said the scolded cadet. “As a representative of our team, I wanted us to win.”
“By abandoning all your comrades? I don’t care if we did have pickup teams waiting. That’s not what we do, Cadet Elwich,” she said. “We don’t leave members of our team behind. I have half a mind just to give the lot of you to the drogues.”
“It’s what the EDF did at Osquivel,” one of the cadets grumbled.
“They left a lot of people behind without even trying to rescue them.
Didn’t they, Commander? You were there.”
The implicit question stung her. How many did you leave behind, Commander Tamblyn?
Tasia stared at them, reminded of the horrors of that battle. Even though she had gotten her own ship and crew out of danger, they had left 418
behind innumerable wounded soldiers, damaged ships, and floating lifetubes. And Robb was gone, too. . . .
“We were all under fire. Nobody was guaranteed to get out alive. There were no pickup squads. You think that’s comparable to goofing around in an empty canyon to win a game? Shizz, I’m trying to teach you what I know. Listening may increase your chances for survival when you face a real enemy.”
“What’s a Roacher going to teach us? How to run and hide?” the same cadet muttered, barely loud enough for her to hear.
“Elwich!” she roared, and the young man moved to attention, slower than she would have liked. She stepped close to him. “Do you know how to read a rank insignia? Do you understand what this means?” She indicated the polished clusters on her lapels.
“It signifies that you are—were—in command of a Manta battle-cruiser.”
“And tell me your rank again, kleeb.”
“Private, ma’am.”
“And in which military does a private speak with such disrespect to a commander?”
“In . . . in none that I’m aware of, ma’am.”
“This rank means that you are a worm beneath the heel of my boot, regardless of where I was born, how I was raised, or the clan I belong to.
Spend less time thinking about my parentage and more time remembering my military service record, Private Elwich. I fought the hydrogues at Jupiter, Boone’s Crossing, Osquivel, and Ptoro. I wiped out a whole drogue world with a Klikiss Torch. My piloting scores are the best the EDF has on record. If I looked into your parentage, Private, what species would I find?
How much inbreeding?”
Some of the cadets snickered, but she silenced them. “This is the Earth Defense Forces. There is a chain of command. I am your ranking officer, and in all probability I will forever outrank you. Now, as a token of your newfound respect for me, Private Elwich, I want you to give me a hundred push-ups.”
The cadet looked at her in calm surprise. Here on Mars, with only forty percent of Earth’s gravity, simple physical exercise was easy. “Ma’am, yes ma’am. Right now in your presence, Commander?”
“No, Private. I want you to do them in the gravity chamber at a setting of 1.5 Earth normal.”
At last, he gave a satisfactory gulp.
“If anyone else would like to insult my parents, my clan, or my service record, please volunteer now.” When no one answered her, Tasia continued to stare, making sure they understood she meant business. She could not hide her Roamer heritage, nor did she want to.