Crown Of Fire (28 page)

Save me by your mercy,

Cradle my loved ones in your mighty hands.

He glimpsed the rest of Day Flight, engaging Shuhr fighters as Mari's ship plunged toward Three Zed, followed by Micahel's.

I will be with that remnant.

I will refine and test them as meteor steel

And make them a sword in my hand....

Focusing any original thought was a struggle now.
Catch and hold her, Holy One. Hold her. Keep her.
In his mind's eye he saw Kinnor and Kiel.
And them,
he managed.
And... Terza's daughter.

Then he let his mind tumble into the remembered hymn.

...
Where you are the light, and there is no darkness at all.

Fresh terror blasted through him. What if it all was a lie, a figment of desperate human imagination?

No darkness at all.

No Eternal Speaker. No reason to be dying. No country to Cross to.

No
darkness at all.

He had been a fool. Now he would die ... insane ... for nothing.

No darkness at all....

Firebird couldn't sense Brennen any longer, but Master Dabarrah had told her she'd know if pair bonding ever were broken.

This anguish must be something else. Must! She screamed and pounded her console. . . .

And then steadied herself. She was conscious after fusion, for the first time. She had to do this alone.

She refocused her mind's eye, thrusting the energy storm outside the ruins of her imagined wall. Massive spasms wrenched her chest. More long, silvery spikes drove into her forearms and up her calves.

"General?" someone else called in her headset. "Caldwell, come in. Come in, General."

She knew Brennen couldn't answer. The only transmitter in an EV unit was the rescue transponder, calibrated to an identifying frequency—for retrieval.

He'd given the triage order himself.

Infuriated, she fell into the fielding team's mental hold. She felt it tighten on her soul. This time, she deliberately did to them what she'd done to Harcourt Terrell, to Cassia, and to Micahel. If evil called to the Shuhr, she would call them deep. Let evil rise out of her tainted heart— and let it claim them! Anything at all to stop them from destroying Brennen.

The energy storm swirled around her, and she had the sensation that she couldn't slip out of her turn if she wanted to. Micahel had blasted down the wall. Black flames licked up, and a fire burned in the middle of her head.

"Remote pilot," she muttered, "you have firing control. I'm so close. Will my missiles launch?" Ground side guns fired up at her. On her targeting display, the fielding site flashed rapidly. She had it in range. She recognized a toothy crag near the entry she'd used before. Her fighter lurched as all four missiles fired simultaneously. As they accelerated, she plummeted behind them.

Seemingly in another world, she felt the fielding techs plunge deeper into her mind, stabbing as they came. She poured vengeful fury into the RIA link, pulling them in as all her other senses expanded, exploded, diffused. Focusing desperately on the task, unsure how Brennen would've accomplished it, she brushed aside their incinerated epsilon shields, traced the power lines that connected their flickering mental input with . . .

There. The fielding station's main energy banks.

As she poured fusion energy through the RIA unit, she felt the first of the fielding operators die. Her missiles pierced the mountainside. A moment's explosion burned after-images on her brain. Out of sheer instinct, she wrenched her stick aside.

The fighter responded this time. The spiked silver mesh in her cabin evaporated. "Fielding down," she shouted into the interlink. "Night Flight, go in!" Compared with the Shuhr cacophony, the cackle of transceiver voices sounded like music.

Then she spotted Micahel's Netaian fighter. It kept falling, following her previous trajectory. Micahel might be dead on board, but his heavy-fighter was about to hit his own city.

Justice! But she didn't care. Brennen . . . was he alive, was he sane? Where had the blast sent him?

As if a fuse had burned down, the fire in her head exploded, wiping out all thought. . . and all awareness of Brennen.

The bond link was gone.

She collapsed across her flight controls.

Micahel groped back up to an agonized consciousness. He got an eye open, but no other part of his body responded. He recognized his trajectory. He couldn't work his hands. He couldn't pull out of his own suicide dive. Like one of his own voice-commanded pilots, he was headed straight into the target, accelerating.

The tightness in his chest surged out in a scream.

Shel glanced aside. Ellet Dardy sat at station, tears streaming down her cheeks. Uri remained at stiff attention.

"Remote pilot," barked Colonel Keeson. "Full override. She's gone unconscious. Her signs are critical. Get her out of there."

Like every other Sentinel who could see Firebird's life signs, Shel understood. Firebird was falling into bereavement shock.

Brennen was lost. For his sake, she hoped the blast had knocked him unconscious before the fielding team could torment him to death.

Behind Shirak's hijacked Netaian fighter, Night Flight dropped toward Three Zed. Thyrian bombers flew a steady course between their fighter escorts.

Juddis Adiyn stood over a tracking console, cursing under his breath as Micahel's fighter hit the city. The horizon flashed. The ground shook.

"Particle shielding holds," a voice announced. "Ninety-two percent of impact energy absorbed by planet's surface."

Adiyn pushed up from his console. Naturally, the colony's powerful defenses had drained most of Micahel's momentum away from the city itself. Caldwell was gone, but the Angelo woman vectored out and away. Adiyn reached toward his transceiver to alert the larger ships.

Then without any effort on his part, the shebiyl thrust itself into his mind. All of its stream-like paths unraveled like a vast web, flickering wildly—and then twined again, this time into a swift, unstoppable river of fire and light. A single figure straddled time's flow, robed in billowing, blinding white robes. He raised his left hand in imperious challenge. His right hand gripped a glimmering sword, poised to strike. His face was too brilliant to see.

Beneath Adiyn's feet, a throaty rumble answered the impact of Mi-cahel's fall. The shebiyl faded and dissolved.

Adiyn tried to cry out a warning, but the ground shook again. Voices around him cut off in midsentence. He grabbed the console with hands that were suddenly slick with sweat.

There was one second's silence.

Shel stared at the monitor screens. Firebird's ship vectored back, escorted by three Day Flight pilots. Brennen's body had tumbled out of sensor range. Fragments of Micahel's heavy fighter rolled out across Three Zed's basaltic surface.

Abruptly, the Golden City's amber external lights went dark.

Shel glanced over at Sensors, a fortyish woman in Tallan ash gray. "That impact shouldn't have knocked out the main generator," Shel said. Brennen had described that obsidian generator chamber, protected underground. . . .

"No, but it triggered a ground quake," Sensors answered. "Big one, getting bigger."

And those lights had probably been on auxiliary power.

Sensors gasped.
North Ice's
boards painted a superheated plume rising into the mountain from beneath. "Magma," shouted Sensors. "No, it's gaseous!"

In front of Shel's eyes, the Golden City dissolved in a haze of scarlet dust, expanding like a bubble. Then it imploded, collapsing in on itself. Waves of blue lightning played back and forth over Three Zed's surface. A second blast sent fighter-sized globs of molten metal and stone into space. A glowing cloud of superheated air and ash flowed out along the planet's basaltic plain.

Shel shook her head, stunned. Basaltic lava didn't explode like this on a dry world. Either Three Zed was a geological oddity, or else the Shuhr had created an unstable situation.
. . . Or is it your wrath, after all, that destroys them?

Colonel Keeson was already shouting orders. "Night Flight, all bombers, pull back. Fighters, break off. Pursue the ships they've launched."

Shel glanced down at Ellet, who was still working furiously over her transcorder, though tears spilled down her cheeks. Shel brushed her own cheek and realized it was wet, too. On screen, the ash cloud continued to flow away from the ruined city.

A flight of Shuhr fighters vanished. "Tallis vector," called Sensors.

Shel wiped her cheeks with both palms. Brennen had warned Tallis. Regional command would be on full alert.

On another display, the aft fuselage of Brennen's fighter spun toward a rogue asteroid cluster. Uri stared, setting his jaw.

Shel shut her eyes, not wanting to see the impact. His EV transponder had been sending for several minutes—but Firebird's life signs already told her everything she did not want to know.

Torment seared Firebird from her throat to her groin, and sweat rolled off her forehead. Someone bumped her, reaching into her Light-Five's cockpit. In the next instant, she recognized a crewer unhooking connectors. Brilliant light flooded the hangar-bay.

Her remote pilot had brought her back to
North Ice,
unconscious. Either the crewers had bumped her awake, or else the lights and fresh air roused her. Like the dying vibrations from a huge bell, her senses still rang with fusion energy. All of her senses except the bond-link to Brennen ...

"No," she shrieked, "no!" She clutched the nearest arm.

"Don't move," she heard in her helmet. Someone pushed something hard against her shoulder. It stung. "Please, Firebird."

These were meds, then, not crewers, and they'd just hit her with a stimulant. Two more stood by with a heavy stretcher unit.

Pain throttled her, grief and fury so exquisitely compounded she could think of nothing else. She tumbled without caring how hard or far she fell. Someone, something, pulled her legs and torso straight and bound her to a flat surface. Something squeezed her upper arms.

Nauseating otherness flooded through her. Swallowing hard, she opened her eyes to see Shel's face. It bobbed as the Sentinel walked alongside her. "What was his vector?" Firebird cried. "Maybe he's alive, maybe he's still out there—" Talking drove new knives of pain into her chest.

The nausea intensified as Shel probed deeper. The Sentinel laid a hand on her arm. "Oh, Firebird, be strong. I'm so sorry. This is bereavement shock." Shel turned aside, speaking to a med in a yellow tunic. "I've been through this."

"No," Firebird groaned, "no, he can't be—"

Couldn't he? He had accelerated directly into that missile's path. Wouldn't she rather he'd crossed into the Speaker's country. . . than that he survived out there, deranged and terrorized?

And this time, she had deliberately used the evil inside her—wielded it like a weapon, instead of letting the evil ones be drawn in—

Forgive me,
she pleaded,
forgive and cleanse me. Oh, Singer
—

"Be calm," muttered a med alongside her, "be strong, Commander. We'll help you." They propelled her around a corner into a passway.

Shel kept up, one hand gripping Firebird's shoulder. The tender gesture raked Firebird's agony into red-hot fire. "Firebird, I've been there. I remember. I won't leave you."

The meds transferred her again, this time from the litter onto one more sickbay unit. Another field projector dropped over her chest. Two meds clamped it down, binding her to a life she despised, if this really was bereavement shock—if Brennen was gone, and she'd done such an abhorrent thing.

Another med swept a translucent mask toward her face. "You have to rest," he said.

"Let me go!"

The vapors flooding her lungs smelled of Hesed House. "Breathe deeply," ordered the med.

She felt herself relax. The pain's knife-edge dulled. Her head started to clear.

He'd put himself in harm's way, dying in her place. . . .

It wasn't atonement, not the way Path instructors described it. But clearly, he had saved her with his own life—while she plunged into evil, fouling his sacrifice.

"He shouldn't have," she managed. It sounded and felt like a groan.

She barely felt Shel pull away.

"Major Mattason, this is Colonel Keeson."

Shel slipped out of Firebird's sickbay cubicle and raised her interlink. "Mattason here. Go ahead, Colonel." She glanced back into the cubicle. Firebird thrashed on her cot, plainly in the deepest throes of bereavement shock, her mental and emotional savor burning with loss.

"General Caldwell's ship impacted one of those asteroids. His EV transponder was still active when he tumbled out of range, but our people gave his final vector a thorough sweep and found no life signs. Other damaged fighters are sending positive signs. I'm sure you understand."

Shel's hand tightened on the interlink. "Yes. Yes, I do."
Welcome him home, Holy One. We will miss him terribly.

"I'm sorry, Major Mattason. There are many other wounded to rescue. That's talcing all our resources."

Shel slumped, wondering what Uri was feeling, as Brennen's personal guard. He'd already transshipped to
Weatherway,
ordered by Colonel Keeson to report to the battle group's chaplain. "I understand, Colonel. I'll tell her."

She slipped back into the cubicle and checked Firebird's monitor board. Plainly, she'd suffered a deep mental injury that endangered all her life functions.
We need to get her to Hesed,
Shel observed,
with the other bereaved.

"Shel," Firebird pleaded, seizing her arm with both hands. Plainly, she'd heard some of that conversation. "Shel, if anyone could've survived that attack, he could. He might be in t-sleep. He could—" Her eyes widened, and Shel sensed her panic.

Shel turned around. A muscular young med advanced, brandishing a sub-Q injector. "I'll put her down," he said. "She'll kill herself if she doesn't rest."

Firebird's body arched against the field projector with terrorized strength. "No," she shrieked. "Shel, help! The Shuhr... the fielding ... it was Phoena all along! Phoena and one of the other heirs—"

They play on our greatest fears.
Firebird was making no sense, but Shel guessed how the Shuhr had tormented her. She thrust herself between Firebird and the med. "Wait," she said. "The woman is phobic. Let me talk to her."

"Shel, please." Firebird tried to grab her hand again, missed, then wedged both hands under the regen arch. "Aren't there med runners coming in with the wounded? Or isn't there some kind of a courier ship? Let me into one. Let me go out. I'm fit. I can fly. I have to see him. I must."

Shel shook her head. "Firebird," she murmured, "there's no need. And you're
not
fit. No one can think rationally in fresh bereavement shock. I couldn't. What would you accomplish out there? The forces will recover all the dead before we leave." There. She'd said it. Dead.

The med laid down his injector. "Please, Lady Firebird. You must rest. A retrieval crew will bring him to you. You've been through torments, and in your present state, stress could literally
kill
you."

"I wouldn't care," Firebird muttered.

Shel frowned. "You have to care. You have children. Brennen just gave you, and them, everything that was in his power. Don't throw that away as if it meant nothing."

Firebird tried once more to push the regen arch off her chest by bodily strength and adrenaline. Then she collapsed, surrendering.

Shel was right. If she couldn't accept Brennen's last gift, then she spurned him. Besides fouling his sacrifice, she called it valueless. . . .

She couldn't tell Shel what she'd done, though. She couldn't stop pleading. "Shel, Brennen survived so much at Three Zed. Couldn't he have lived through this?"

"I might have hoped so, when he was an ES 97." The tall Sentinel's chin lifted. "But Firebird, remember. Dying EV is just fainting in the cold. He wouldn't have wanted to survive mindless. Give him up to the Holy One."

Firebird envisioned his deep eyes blank, his dancer's body nerveless. "Master Jenner could help him," she managed, though she knew this was wrongheaded thinking. "Even if the Shuhr damaged his mind, even if. . ." She shivered. "Even if they destroyed it, I'd gladly spend the rest of my life taking care of him."
Just as Carradee will gladly care for Daithi. Let me atone for what I did, Mighty Singer.
"I'd make him happy," she promised.

Shel shook her head. "Firebird," she murmured, "he's gone."

"Then let me help bring back what's left," Firebird whispered.

Shel's eyes narrowed. She glanced over at the med, up at the life-signs display, and then to Firebird's surprise, she dropped to a crouch and gripped Firebird's hand. "Listen. Colonel Keeson did assign Uri and me to retrieval. There is a courier, and I'm cleared to use it if necessary. If you need ..." She cleared her throat. "They wouldn't let me go back out for Wald. I never saw his body. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Firebird gasped, though she didn't.

Shel frowned. "Search-and-rescue has right-of-way over retrieval. We may have to wait for them to get a ship."

She understood that.

Shel's eyebrows arched. "And you mustn't hope he's physically alive. Let go. Think of him, not yourself."

"I'm trying," Firebird managed, but she could think of only one thing. Whatever remained of her bond mate, she must take him home to Hesed.

Most of an hour later, Firebird slumped against the little courier craft's starboard bulkhead and tried not to shiver. Stars seemed to quiver around her. Clearly, something was wrong with her senses. It could be bereavement shock. It could, but until she saw . . . until she was certain . . .

She shut her eyes and made one more promise.
Mighty Singer, I deserve nothing from you. If we can find him alive and whole, I'll give you the rest of my life in service. I'll serve wherever you send me.

Just as at Hunter Height, though, it didn't feel right to bargain with the Almighty. She let go of all her pretended claims.
Truly, I owe you a life. One way or the other, it's yours.

It always was,
she realized.

Flying along Brennen's last known vector, far out of the search area, they finally got a weak transponder signal. It took several more minutes on thrusters to home in on the tumbling shape of an inflated EV suit. The pale gray curl brightened and dimmed as it rotated in the Zed star's feeble light.

"Four minutes to close approach," Shel murmured.

The stars kept shimmering. Firebird squeezed her eyes shut. There would be no way to go on, raising her children alone, except by accepting Brennen's sacrifice. She tried imagining him in the Singer's country, strong and whole, shining with new light.

Actually, that wasn't hard to imagine.
Bless him, Mighty Singer. Bathe him in your magnificent music. He has longed for that all his life. Give him back all he lost, down in the Golden City. And give me peace,
she finished weakly,
with whatever we find here.

Really, she hadn't diminished his sacrifice at all.

Shel glanced aside. Firebird sat slump shouldered, her brown eyes dulled by pain medication—when they opened at all. She hadn't spoken since they launched. Shel hadn't mentioned the shivering. She remembered bereavement, with its mental and physical disorientation. Watching Firebird, Shel realized how far she had come, herself—how much she'd recovered.

Something old, hard, and cold seemed to be melting in her heart. Wald, long safe with the Speaker, would have understood what she was doing. Until Firebird saw Brennen's body, she would cling to false hope. She needed the assurance that Shel had been denied, the sense she had done all that she could, trying to save him.

Please, Holy One. Let us find that he went to you peacefully.

Shel matched her course with the spinning body, then slowly decelerated. The life suit didn't look as if it had been badly holed.
He probably did suffer, then,
she realized bleakly. The Shuhr must have tormented him.

Firebird roused. "Hurry," she whispered.

Shel took her time. At least Firebird would be able to see him here, against the chill beauty of space.

She activated the courier's low-power catchfield and tugged him closer. She and Firebird had both slipped into extravehicular suits on board
North Ice.
Now she pulled the umbilicals from her chest plate, attached a temp tank, and slipped a furled rescue bag over her shoulder.

Firebird disconnected too, and Shel didn't try to stop her. Instead, she double-checked Firebird's temp tank, shut down their ship's grav-idics, and then helped Firebird steer herself into the airlock. As its outer hatch opened, Shel tethered to the dull gray exterior. Firebird followed, moving weakly, like a half-charged automaton.