Saga of Shadows 1: The Dark Between the Stars (52 page)

And the Shana Rei believed him, for now.

When their initial annihilation was finished, the robot ships landed in the smoking ruins of the research camp. Exxos and his comrades filed out, scuttling forward on clusters of fingerlike legs. They inspected the charred bodies of the human colonists and used metallic pincers to tear apart a few who still groaned and tried to crawl away. Exxos declared the settlement lifeless before he and his robots moved toward the abandoned Klikiss city to finish their work.

A thick briarpatch of Whistler cactus had grown up around the base of the ruins, and the hollow thorny growths moaned and hummed, as if the smoking devastation had changed their tune. When the robots set fire to the Whistler grove, the roaring flames and rising heat made the fluting sounds even more shrill. The Shana Rei seemed even more pleased when the Whistlers fell silent.

Exxos and his companions entered the ruined city. Millennia ago, when the Klikiss had created their sophisticated robots, they gave them personalities, emotions; they also designed the robots to feel pain, weakness, and defeat—simply so the malicious Klikiss could torment them. How could the insect race have been surprised when their own robots turned on them?

Now, when Exxos came upon the numerous mummified bodies left behind in the final swarming, the black robots remembered the awful tortures that had been inflicted upon them. Unified in their rage, they fell upon the Klikiss corpses and tore them to pieces with snapping pincer claws.

The violence did little to salve their hatred, and the mutilation seemed petty when compared with the grand cosmic plans of the Shana Rei to eradicate all sentient life. Exxos was pleased nevertheless. After destroying the Klikiss towers, the black robots flew away into the greasy smoke that rose from the Whistler grove and the blackened human settlement.

The ships returned to the simmering shadow cloud and rejoined the enormous hex ships, which withdrew into the swirling nebula. As the Shana Rei erased their newly manifested ships from existence, uncreating the raw matter, their own pain decreased.

When the shadow cloud departed from Eljiid, it left a very quiet place in its wake.

S
EVENTY-EIGHT

O
SIRA
’
H

Even though Osira’h and her siblings could not feel the same affinity with the worldforest as a green priest did, they knew their mother took great solace among the trees. Because Nira longed to help poor Gale’nh, she asked him to meet her in the lush greenhouse on top of the Prism Palace. She wanted to see if the verdani could help.

Osira’h accompanied her brother, leading him up the glowing corridors to the rooftop. Gale’nh seemed so empty and fragile, as if the depths of the shadow remained inside him. Osira’h shared her own thoughts with her brother, whatever energy she could dredge up from her mind, but Gale’nh’s close connection with his halfbreed siblings had been damaged. Nevertheless, alone he had found an inner strength, a way of propping himself up so that he could move through the days.

The grove of tall worldtrees in the rooftop garden stood invigorated by the seven Ildiran suns. The treelings, planted there many years ago, now served as the point of contact for green priests with the rest of the Spiral Arm. The worldtree fronds whispered together.

Nira waited for them by the trees, her skin a bright, rich green. She smiled, but Osira’h could see the concern hidden just beneath the expression. Her fingertips touched the gold-scaled bark of the nearest tree. Nira closed her eyes briefly and let her thoughts flow into the verdani mind, then she sighed and reached out to take Gale’nh’s hand, drawing him close, as if completing a circuit.

“I will help you in any way I can,” she said.

Gale’nh held her hand, but remained unmoved, clearly feeling nothing from the green priest’s contact. “If I knew a way you could help, Mother, I would accept it.” He released her grip, ran his own hand over the trunk of the tree, but he didn’t seem to find what he was looking for.

Osira’h took her brother’s hand and grasped her mother’s, trying harder. As she concentrated, she did feel the innate power of the worldtrees, a presence that connected the vast forest across the entire Spiral Arm.

“Sometimes we can share strength,” Gale’nh said, “and sometimes we’re all alone. I was there all alone aboard the
Kolpraxa.
My entire crew included hundreds of Ildirans woven together with their
thism
—but that didn’t give them enough strength to stand against the shadow cloud.”

His entire body shuddered. Osira’h squeezed his hand harder. Nira’s eyes widened as if she caught a hint of what he was seeing inside his mind.

“The blackness didn’t understand us either,” Gale’nh continued, as if the memories were growing sharper in his mind. “It engulfed us, devoured us—and found all of my crew wanting. I watched Rememberer Ko’sh standing in terror, shouting that it was the Shana Rei. He raised his fist, howled for them to go back to the void—and then he disappeared. Uncreated.” His voice hitched. “I used everything I had, gathering those closest to me. I tried to protect them, tried to hold on to them, but I felt them fade, as if they were bled down to nothing.” He blinked at Nira. “I want to say that I was stronger than the others, Mother . . . but I think I was just different. I could feel the
thism
being torn up all around me. The mental threads snapped. There was nothing I could do.” He hung his head.

“You survived,” Nira said. “You came back to us. You’re still here.”

Osira’h added her encouragement as well. “You’re the only one who has touched the Shana Rei. You’ll remember something. You know something.”

Gale’nh shook his head. “What if I brought back some residue with me? When Rememberer Ko’sh told the stories, I thought he was just trying to frighten my crew, but maybe he wanted to prepare them for what was out there. He couldn’t prepare them enough.”

Neither Osira’h nor Nira had an answer for him.

“While I was alone in the dark on the
Kolpraxa,
swallowed up by that suffocating nothingness, I remembered the planet Orryx and Tal Bria’nh.” He turned his reddened gaze to his sister. “Now I know the story is true.”

“Orryx?” Nira asked.

Osira’h said, “It was the first Ildiran planet to succumb to the Shana Rei, ages ago, a fertile place with a strong population, but the Shana Rei spread out from dark nebulae and covered the entire planet with a black shroud that absorbed all light. When Mage-Imperator Xiba’h sensed Orryx being engulfed, he rushed a septa of warliners to fight for them.”

Gale’nh interrupted his sister’s story. “They vanished into the blackness.”

“The Mage-Imperator commanded his engineers and scientists to develop new weapons. A brave military commander named Tal Bria’nh rushed to Orryx with even more warliners and a hundred new sun bombs, which produced as much purifying brightness as a star. They burned the Shana Rei like acid, searing away the black shroud that surrounded the planet, but even the light from a hundred sun bombs eventually dwindled. The Shana Rei attacked again. They swallowed up Tal Bria’nh’s entire cohort, painted the whole world black.

“When more Ildiran ships arrived, they found all the warliners wrapped in cocoons of shadow. Tal Bria’nh and his brave crew were literally smothered in darkness.”

“Like the
Kolpraxa,
” Nira whispered.

Gale’nh said, “I can imagine their last moments, Tal Bria’nh alone on the command nucleus, suffocating in the dark. That was all I could think of as I drifted and waited. How long did he survive before his own soulfire was extinguished?”

Nira held on to the worldtree, closing her eyes, listening to Gale’nh speak and moving her lips as she repeated his words into the verdani network. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could have been there to help you.”

Gale’nh hardened. “No, Mother. No one should have been there. I encountered the Shana Rei, I lost my crew. I lost a fundamental part of myself, and I can’t even remember it.” Gale’nh’s eyes widened, and he turned abruptly to her. “Wait . . .” He let the word trail off.

Osira’h pressed closer. “Did you remember something?”

The worldtrees stirred, their fronds rustling.

Gale’nh seemed surprised by what he had just realized. “The Shana Rei came back, not because they wanted war, not because they wish to attack us.” He shook his head as if trying to grasp an intangible thing just beyond his reach. “The Shana Rei are
afraid.
”

S
EVENTY-NINE

T
OM
R
OM

After purchasing medical records of the Ildiran genetic misfits on Kuivahr, Tom Rom stopped at the Ulio transfer station to stock up on supplies and refill his ship’s expanded tanks with stardrive fuel.

When he finished at Ulio, his funds were depleted, but he didn’t have to worry about money, and Zoe Alakis never begrudged a single credit he spent. Nevertheless, he would have to go to the trouble of obtaining more prisdiamonds. He set course for Vaconda.

He knew his ship inside and out. The vessel had been built to his specifications, modified, reinforced, and expanded over the years. It had emergency fuel reserves, triple backups of computerized navigation systems, spare parts, and a separate self-contained quarantine laboratory with its own generator systems and independent in-system engines; the quarantine chamber could be used as an evacuation pod under extreme circumstances. Tom Rom did not require luxuries, but he needed the room and facilities to do his work.

He was a self-sufficient man who spent much of his time imagining how things could go wrong and preparing for the eventuality. Tom Rom was not paranoid; he was diligent and reliable.

During the flight, he noted some anomalous flickers on his long-range scans, but he found nothing, so he recalibrated the sensors.

As he orbited Vaconda, the continents looked pale and ghostly, covered with lichentree forests, tall spiky growths of lavender and white. According to legal Hansa paperwork, which had been grandfathered into Confederation rules, the forest watchstation on Vaconda belonged entirely to Zoe Alakis. He supposed that on other parts of the continent there could be outlaws or squatters. Nobody cared. The planet was basically uninhabited.

More than twenty years ago, he had incinerated a swath of forest, per Zoe’s request. Together, they let the fires rage uncontrollably until nature itself shut down the blaze, but in only a few years, the fecund jungle had subsumed the area, erasing any remaining scar. Now there was no hint of the watchstation where Zoe and her father had made their home for so long.

Even without familiar landmarks, Tom Rom knew the exact location. In the years since, he had returned here often to retrieve prisdiamonds, and had deposited tremendous fortunes in numerous planetary banks in Zoe’s name.

When she decided that her goal in life was to create a disease library and research installation, Tom Rom had set aside all the funds she could possibly need. Following in her father’s footsteps, she offered to partner with other research teams, join her wealth to major facilities, but they took her investment, put her name on a new research wing, and then politely—then less politely—told her to go away and let “professionals” handle the important matters.

They viewed Zoe as a backward, socially maladjusted girl who had grown up on a wilderness planet, little different from a feral child. She was innocent of commercial and academic politics, accepted promises at their face value (Tom Rom was her only example of a man who was true to his word), and she did not fit in well among them. She funded huge projects that were swallowed up in bureaucracies and regulations, with results lost in delays or obscurity. Other people took the fruits of her teams’ research and called it proprietary information that became lost in a deep gravity well of “development” and “profitability assessments.” When she tried to take the discoveries she had funded, they shut her out, ousted her from their boards, but graciously kept her name on the research wing she had built.

Afterward, Zoe abandoned all thoughts of kindness and cooperation. She decided to do it herself, her own way, with all results under her control.

In preparing to build Pergamus on her own terms, she came to regret her impetuous decision to burn down the forest watchtower station along with all records and research her father had compiled during his years on Vaconda. When Zoe poured out her feelings of guilt over destroying her father’s work, Tom Rom had stared at her, his expression flat. Finally, he admitted that out of a sense of obligation to Adam, he had backed up her father’s data, preserving it despite her instructions. She had wept, then thrown her arms around him. Tom Rom could not recall ever having been so moved.

Zoe spared no expense in setting up her complete private facility on Pergamus—and even that depleted only a small fraction of her wealth. She wanted it, and Tom Rom made it happen. He arranged to build the domed research facilities and orbital research stations for her. Zoe tracked down the best scientists in a variety of fields—medicine, biochemistry, genetics—and sent Tom Rom to approach them discreetly.

Her first order of business, of course, had been to develop a cure for Heidegger’s Syndrome. It felt like a twist of the knife when the cure did not even prove to be difficult, once researchers applied resources and time to the problem. If only someone had been able to do that for her father . . .

While she lived, her work would be her own obsession, her own masterpiece. She agreed to share all her results after her eventual death, not because she was generous, but because she didn’t care what happened afterward. She had no interest in fame, or history, or making any mark. She didn’t have to explain her priorities to anyone.

Now, as Tom Rom descended through Vaconda’s atmosphere, he caught a strange echo on his sensor map, but lost the flicker again when he reached the lichentree forests.