A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [250]
Suspicious, Sarein narrowed her eyes. Basil kept watching the royal yacht as it drifted past. Peter made a special point of putting an arm around Estarra and waving at the Chairman. Stiffly, Basil raised a hand in acknowledgment.
“What do you mean?” Sarein said, feeling a new rush of fear.
The royal yacht approached a bend in the canal, and Basil gripped the railing of the observation stand. He refused to answer Sarein. She watched, dreading what he might have meant. “Are you expecting some sort of ‘accident,’ Basil? What have you done? ”
But the honeymoon festival continued without incident. The King and Queen waved and played their roles perfectly. The boat drifted on, undisturbed.
“Nothing,” Basil said. His shoulders seemed to slump in defeat, though Sarein had not seen anything to cause such a reaction. “Nothing is going to happen, of course. No tragedy, no accident. Everything is under control.” He watched the procession along the RoyalCanal, his face intent.
The green priest Nahton continued to relay details of the horrific destruction on Theroc. As Sarein listened to the terrible description with tears in her eyes, Basil seemed barely to hear him, more preoccupied with a personal and secret disaster of his own.
128
FATHER REYNALD
On Theroc, as the worldtrees died, the telink news of the devastation traveled like lightning among the green priests distributed across the Spiral Arm.
But no one could help in time.
Beside Reynald, the tattooed priest looked up, and Reynald could already read the message from the man’s bleak face. “According to Clydia and Nahton, the nearest EDF battleships are a full day off, even at top speed.”
Swooping low like a frozen meteor, a warglobe hurtled across the forest, spraying withering icewaves. The worldtree canopy blackened, exhaling wisps of frigid white steam that rose like ghosts. Both green priests sank to their knees, unable to bear the pain of the worldforest.
“Can’t the trees do anything else?” Reynald demanded. “If the hydrogues are their ancient enemies, then they must have battled effectively before. How did they defend themselves?” He grasped a worldtree frond as if he could communicate with the verdant mind by sheer force of will.
“Yes,” the priests said in eerie unison. “It is time to strike.”
A thrumming new energy rippled through the dense forest as the immense combined mind of all the trees tensed, gathered its strength, and produced its living weapons.
The plated trunks twitched open, revealing masses of iron-hard black seed pellets, each one the size of a man’s hand. As the low-flying warglobes approached, devastating the treetops with their icewaves, the trees launched showers of the dark seed projectiles, each one covered with a thick, gummy sap. The barrage sprayed upward in a desperate rain just before the destructive frigid blasts crisped the canopy.
The seed pellets seemed like grains of sand thrown into a storm. They pattered against the warglobe’s hull, striking hard enough to make sharp sounds. The sap coating adhered them to the slick curved hull, where they stuck and burned…eating their way through the diamond walls.
“How can a seed eat through that armor?” Reynald asked.
“The roots of a tree can shatter mountains, given time,” one green priest said.
“We don’t have that much time.”
As Reynald watched, the interior of the nearest warglobe seemed to change, growing murkier and full of shadows…green shadows. Knotted growths swelled in an astonishing mass of forest growth, rampant roots and stems and leaves bursting in an explosion of life. The warglobe swerved back around and tumbled, knocked off its axis.
Then it shattered in the sky. A writhing mass of vegetation split open the armored sphere in a gush of vaporous white atmosphere. The hydrogue crashed into an already-ruined swath of forest, and the new growth pounced into the barren area, taking root like a gasping fish in search of water. Shards of the broken warglobe fell around it.
Close to the horizon, a second seed-penetrated hydrogue ship crashed into the