A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [257]
In the darkness, she bumped into the opposite wall. The smooth padded rock startled her back to reality. She reached out, brushed her fingers against one of the metal grab bars, then caught hold before the ricochet momentum sent her back out into the open chamber.
Cesca held on, blinking yet seeing nothing in the pitch blackness. Her body remained weightless, but her heart was heavy. Though alone and isolated, she held on.
Roamers were self-sufficient, with more than their share of ingenuity. She would find a way to get Jess back.
131
JESS TAMBLYN
After the annihilation of his ship above the uncharted water world, after the bright explosion and the endless shower of debris, Jess felt himself falling forever through the air. He experienced a giddy surge of such power that he was unable to hold it all within him…
He tuned his mind’s focus, drawing consciousness back into his body—only to find himself floating in a shallow, warm inland sea. Slate gray water tinged with green plankton spread out around him to the fearsome lost horizon.
But Jess was not concerned. He was miraculously intact and feeling more alive than he ever had before, supercharged with the force of an ancient incomprehensible entity. For a time, the last wental had been dispersed as a diffuse mist between the stars—and it had survived. Now it was even stronger. Around him as he drifted, Jess felt the comforting sea like the warmth of amniotic fluid.
He had been transformed…turned into something vastly greater than he had been before. He couldn’t understand it, but now as he viewed everything through new sparkling eyes, each detail around him seemed sharper and clearer. His reactions were faster; his instincts expanded immeasurably.
His jettisoned cargo and the larger wental cylinder had already tumbled into the alien sea. Now the wental that filled the tissues of his body also spread through his pores, touching this fertile new territory. The entity had already expanded from him into the strange ocean, a burst of light and life that spread away from Jess’s skin and swept like a shock wave of rebirth across the hungry water.
As the wental flowed from his cells, invigorating the new ocean, he himself was a part of it. It was the most wondrous sensation he could ever have imagined. Now, accidentally through the hydrogue attack, he had propagated the wental’s essence again.
He could carry more of the haunted water from world to world, like a strange baptism, rapidly and efficiently increasing the humans’ allies against the deep-core aliens.
If only he could get away from here…
As he floated, Jess looked around himself with wonder, studying his perfect hands, the strange luminosity of his skin. The glow increased when he concentrated on his surroundings, feeling the waters roil. He didn’t completely understand what he was or what he must do with his life.
But then the deeper reality sank in, penetrating his peaceful thoughts. He understood where he was, what he was. He saw a vision of Cesca, alone, and sorrow welled up within him.
Despite the exhilaration of his new circumstances, Jess realized he was lost, floating in an uncharted sea, his body completely transformed. He was stranded here. And he was no longer merely human.
Though he still loved her, he no longer had any chance of going back to Cesca. That part had changed forever.
132
BASIL WENCESLAS
Nothing frustrated Chairman Wenceslas more than when carefully laid plans went awry. Imposing order on the turmoil of the Spiral Arm offered his only sense of reassurance and confidence. Schedules must be kept, jobs must be brought to completion, and the business of the Hansa must continue.
But sometimes precisely scheduled schemes fell apart, revealing them to be no more than a fragile house of cards. King Peter should have been dead by now, the Roamers painted into a corner, and the Hansa cleanly back on track assimilating their innocuous new leader, King Daniel.
Basil sipped his cardamom coffee, lost in thought. He still hadn’t figured out how Peter had averted the assassination plot.