Of Fire and Night (3 page)

4

JESS TAMBLYN

L
eaving Jonah 12, where renegade Klikiss robots had wiped out an entire Roamer base, Jess’s water-and-pearl craft accelerated out of the dark system like a liquid cannonball. His living vessel carried within it a damaged ship and two injured passengers. One of them was Cesca—and she was dying.

Floating in the energized water, Jess peered through a porthole of the damaged
Aquarius
to observe a harried and hurt Nikko Chan Tylar. The young pilot huddled over the woman Jess loved, but he could do little to help Cesca. She lay on the deck, looking gray and clammy, unconscious. Her body had been snapped and broken when the
Aquarius
was shot down; it was a miracle they had survived at all.

Tending her despite his own painful injuries, Nikko seemed to have aged a decade in the past few hours. Though the young man had a sprained wrist, probably a few broken ribs, scrapes, and bruises—nothing his ship’s first-aid packs and painkillers couldn’t take care of—he had barely left Cesca’s side. Jess desperately wished he could touch her himself, kiss her or hold her hand.

But he had given up much of his humanity when he’d become part of the wentals. It had been the only way to stay alive. He couldn’t lose Cesca, too! The wentals had been part of his body for some time now, had fundamentally changed him, but he still didn’t understand the powerful entities. Jess had told the wentals to find any nearby Roamer base, even a Hansa colony with a medical center. But everything was too far away.

Why wouldn’t the wentals help her? He knew they had the power to do it.

In saving him years ago, the wentals had altered his body chemistry, transforming him into a strange dynamo whose touch would kill any other human. He could do great things with this newfound power—even become a tremendous weapon in the war against the hydrogues.

But some of the simplest acts were denied him. What good were his spectacular abilities if he couldn’t do what he wanted most in the universe? How he longed to hold Cesca and soothe her pain. He couldn’t even stroke her sweat-damp forehead as she died. But he had to get as close to her as possible.

Moving through the warm water, Jess cycled through the
Aquarius
’s hatch and stood dripping on the deck. A filmy white garment clung to him, and his hair waved about like seaweed in a current. Nikko looked up at him, almond eyes full of hope, as if he believed that Jess could work miracles—which he could. But not this one.

“I’ve scanned the medical database, Jess, but she’s way beyond my ability to patch up.” He held his freshly bandaged arm in front of him. “By the Guiding Star, I can barely take care of a sprained wrist, and she’s all smashed inside. Internal bleeding for sure, probably a punctured lung. Who knows what else.”

With his unbandaged arm, Nikko gave Cesca a stimulant, hoping to stave off the worst effects of shock. Drifting closer to wakefulness, Cesca began to cough. Blood bubbled from between her lips. Though the water-and-pearl ship raced between the stars at incomprehensible speeds, Jess knew she wouldn’t survive much longer—unless the wentals did something.

“She has to live, Nikko.” Jess stood with his fists at his sides, feeling hopelessly isolated. He couldn’t even touch her! “She’s . . . the Speaker for the Roamers.” The reason sounded noble, but both he and Nikko knew that such an esoteric argument was nothing compared to the fact that Jess loved her.

The wentals spoke inside his mind.
The woman will die soon
.

He was angry at them for coldly stating the obvious. “Then save her.”

Some things cannot be changed
.

He tried to pinpoint the source, as if one particular wental might be the origin of this pessimism. “And some things
can
be changed.” Elemental force made his voice boom against the walls of the
Aquarius
loudly enough to make Nikko cringe. “I’ll give her wental water to drink, like I did! Then you’ll be in her tissues, and you can help her.”

Mere contact with wental water will not transform her as we transformed you. It must be a conscious act on our part
.

“Then do it. You don’t know how much she means to me.”

We know how much she means to you. We understand
.

“Then how can you refuse to help? You saved me, why not save her?” He owed everything to the wentals, but right now he wanted to hate them.

Saving you was necessary. Without you, the wentals would have remained extinct. This woman, however, is not a point of failure for us
.

“So the wentals are utterly selfish? She’s a point of failure for me. If you refuse to save Cesca, how can I know that you’re as benevolent as you claim? Maybe wentals are as evil as the hydrogues, but just trickier.” He had never allowed himself even to consider those suspicions before.

You know that is not true, Jess Tamblyn
.

Desperation drove him. “I know that Cesca’s going to die—and that my own allies refuse to save her.”

Helpless and miserable, Nikko propped cushions around Cesca, adjusted her blanket. “Why is this any different from how green priests join with the worldforest? The trees don’t have a problem doing that whenever they want to. Aren’t the wentals similar?”

We do not bond in the same way that verdani join with green priests. Worldtrees are passive, the joining symbiotic. Wentals are fluid, uncontrollable, more easily tainted. Selfish actions inspire corruption. When we change you, we change ourselves. Sometimes the reflection splinters, distorts. You cannot comprehend the destructive power of a tainted wental. There is great risk
.

“What kind of risk?” Jess demanded. All he could see was Cesca.

See how you yourself are changed. You know how much you lost
.

“None of that matters if I lose her.” The sudden realization sparked within him. “But if you save her in the same way, then she’ll be like me—and I won’t be alone anymore. Make us two of a kind.”

After a resounding silence, the wentals said,
We cannot simply transform her. It must be her choice, and ours, before she changes
.

In his mind, Jess received an image of the storm-swept but sterile ocean planet where he’d first delivered the wentals.
That is our nearest world. Go to our primary sea. There, we will decide her fate
.

5

RLINDA KETT

I
n the water-mining grotto beneath the crust of Plumas, the reanimated woman stood with ice-white skin. Her inhuman eyes were ablaze with a strange inner energy. Karla Tamblyn’s hair crackled and waved about, thawed from the ice that had imprisoned her.

“That’s something you don’t see every day,” Rlinda Kett said with automatic, but forced, humor. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream, but she definitely wanted to run. The Roamer workers didn’t know what to do.

The reanimated woman had already left Andrew Tamblyn dead in her wake. Karla took another gliding step, sizzling a clear, hot footprint in the Plumas ice pack. Her body was supercharged like a pressure vessel without a release valve, building up power and ready to explode.

While BeBob continued to gawp in childish astonishment, Rlinda pulled him out of the way. “I suggest we give her all the room she wants.”

He let out a moan. “Coming here wasn’t such a good idea after all.”

“Does a court-martial and death sentence back on Earth sound better?”

“This isn’t really my idea of a viable alternative. Ever since we escaped, nothing’s gone right. The
Blind Faith
was destroyed, Davlin was killed, and we were kidnapped by these crazy Roamers. You’d think that would be enough penance.” He pressed both palms against his forehead. “Now this monster lady is going to kill all of us.”

“Normally, I’d swat your cute behind for being such a pessimist, but right now I can’t argue with you.”

Moving with deliberate steps, Karla did not give a second thought to the dead man sprawled behind her on the ice. Andrew had run forward to bring the woman to her senses, but her merest touch had killed him.

“Karla, what have you done?” cried Wynn, staring at his fallen brother.

“Wait! Don’t get in her way!” his twin brother Torin warned.

Uninterested, she plodded toward the edge of the ice shelf and the deep steel-gray sea. Caleb and Wynn seized the opportunity to rush to the crumpled figure and dragged Andrew’s body away. Torin, the more impressionable of the twins, shouted in a beseeching tone, “Karla, why are you
doing
this? Don’t you know any of us?”

Like a confused mobile statue, Karla Tamblyn turned her crackling gaze back toward the habitation and administrative domes beneath the thick ceiling of ice. She stared without comprehension at the water-mining machinery, the hydrostatic pumps that lifted liquid to the surface for filling starship tanks. She continued moving without responding. The cold sea seemed to call to her. When she stared at the subterranean ocean, her eyes took on a hungry look.

BeBob looked at Rlinda. “Do you think the Roamers will let us go now?”

“I doubt that’s their highest priority.”

Jess Tamblyn, another member of the Roamer clan (Rlinda wasn’t sure about the whole family tree), had used exotic powers to retrieve his mother’s body from deep within the ice. But after he’d rushed away on some emergency, Karla had thawed on her own and come alive, as if possessed by some kind of demon.

The woman stepped to where the ice abruptly met the water. She lifted her hands, and an invisible energy rippled out like the force of gravity. Powerful, distinct tides pulled the water as if it were clay, stretching and shaping it like magnetic forces pulling iron filings into lines.

The ice cracked behind Karla’s feet, calving away. She did not seem alarmed. When the ice sloughed off, Karla stood motionless on the broken chunk. In complete silence she dropped into the deep ocean. Without thrashing or uttering a single sound, she vanished beneath the waves. A geyser of bubbles and white vapor swirled for a few moments, then subsided into stillness.

Rlinda looked around for someone who might explain what was going on. “Does this sort of thing happen often around here?”

6

KOTTO OKIAH

A
fter the drogues had been roundly defeated at Theroc—for the second time—a very pleased Kotto Okiah departed from the forested planet.

He’d left his mining base on Jonah 12 to help the Therons rebuild their settlement, after which he had gone to the Kellum shipyards at Osquivel, studied a small intact hydrogue derelict they had found, developed a simple defense against the warglobes, and rushed back to Theroc with his “doorbells.”

In the meantime, the Eddies had destroyed Rendezvous, and his mother had vanished along with many other scattered clans. Although she could take care of herself, he wished he knew where old Jhy Okiah was. She was probably safe somewhere with Speaker Cesca Peroni. Kotto loved the way Speaker Peroni smiled at him whenever he demonstrated “Roamer ingenuity” in solving a problem. She was bound to be particularly proud of his most recent invention.

His ships had arrived at Theroc like the cavalry, dispersing hundreds of adhesive mats that vibrated at a resonance frequency to blow the warglobes’ hatches to the vacuum of space. One after another, the enemy globes had reeled away like whirligigs. Single-handedly, Kotto had saved the worldforest.

Well, maybe not single-handedly
.

“Even without that wental comet coming in at the last minute,” Kotto said to his two Analytical compies, KR and GU, “we had those drogues on the run.” He kept up a constant internal monologue, and occasionally parts of it came out in comments spoken without context. The compies, always interested, answered as best they could.

“If the wental comet had not come, there is a high probability we would have been destroyed, Kotto Okiah,” KR pointed out.

“All of our doorbells had already been deployed,” GU added. His polymer body was still battered from when he’d unexpectedly opened the pressurized hatch of the hydrogue derelict. “We had no remaining defenses.”

Kotto nodded absently as their small ship flew on. “I’m not complaining that reinforcements came at a good time. Even so, we proved the principle, right? Our only mistake was in not bringing enough doorbells. We can fix that. Massive quantities—that’s what we need.”

Before leaving Theroc, Kotto had copied the blueprints, then sent the ragtag group of Roamer captains out to find any clan fabrication center to make more of the doorbells. As soon as he got back to the Osquivel shipyards, Kotto would make sure Del Kellum began manufacturing them by the thousands. From now on, nobody needed to be defenseless against hydrogue depredations.

Unlike his mother, Kotto wasn’t a politician (and he’d never envied her role as Speaker), but he wanted to send doorbells to Hansa colonies as well. He mused, “If we help the Big Goose wipe out the drogues, maybe they’ll stop being so pissy toward the clans.”

“Please define ‘pissy,’ Kotto Okiah,” GU said. The compies loved learning, so Kotto provided a rough explanation of the term.

KR said, “You suggest that if we assist the Terran Hanseatic League, they will show their gratitude by calling a halt to their attacks on Roamer facilities?”

“Makes perfect sense to me. We shouldn’t have to be enemies. But then, that’s not my area of expertise. I’ll leave it to the professionals.”

“Another conundrum,” GU said.

“Yes, a conundrum.” He flew toward Osquivel, anxious to get back to work on that fascinating hydrogue derelict. He’d been cut off from news, but he had already thought of twenty new tests to run on the alien systems and was particularly intrigued by the transportal he found inside. Letting the two compies take care of the ship, he made notes and sketched out some ideas. . . .

When Kotto arrived at the ringed gas giant, however, he found no sign of the Roamer shipyards. The whole planet seemed completely abandoned.

“Hello? Where is everybody? I’ve got good news.” He hoped that such a message would be enough to bring out anyone who might be listening. “Hello?”

The entire facility—smelters, storage rocks, habitation domes, space- docks, ore processors, construction frameworks, everything—was empty.

KR and GU continued transmitting on the frequencies commonly used by Roamers. “Perhaps the hydrogues destroyed them all,” GU suggested.

“Don’t be a pessimist,” Kotto said, though his stomach knotted at the very suggestion.

As they flew around the languid rubble of the rings, Kotto found no sign of the hydrogue ship he had so carefully mothballed far from any other stations. “The derelict’s gone, too! Somebody took it!”

Confused, fearful, even a bit angry, Kotto piloted the ship down into the main shipyard complex. He encountered debris and abandoned scraps, but few intact structures—and no signs of life whatsoever. The whole place had a haunting aura of emptiness, as if the shipyards had been plundered and then discarded. Nothing useful remained.

“I detect signs of a struggle or an accident,” KR said. “But the damage does not appear significant enough to have disintegrated all facilities and personnel.”

GU added, “This appears to be an intentional departure. Perhaps an evacuation.”

Kotto stared at the readings as he circled the rings twice more. “The shipyards are all gone. Not wiped out—just . . .
gone,
as if Del and his crew pulled up stakes and vanished.”

What could have driven off a man like Del Kellum? Could the EDF have done this—just like they destroyed Rendezvous? He cringed to think of it. And they’d taken the derelict! How was Kotto supposed to find anybody now—Del Kellum, Speaker Peroni, his mother, anybody?

“Just when I thought we were fresh out of conundrums.”