Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [24]
Davlin pushed past skinny old Hud Steinman and activated the coordinate tile that would take him to Corribus. Some Hansa technicians looked up; one raised a hand as if to call him back. But Davlin was beyond their control. He had a direct mandate from Chairman Wenceslas himself. He stepped through into windy silence.
The Klikiss city on Corribus looked precisely as it had appeared in the images submitted by the Colicos team: Towering granite canyon walls formed a sheltered valley with termite-mound structures on the ground, as well as dwellings built into cliff faces that were lined with large, blocky crystals. Steinman had been correct—the terrain was unmistakable.
Davlin studied the ghostly world, where watery sunshine illuminated cliffs studded with lumps of crystal. The Klikiss must have considered the sheer granite walls to be protective, like fortress barricades. The stone looked shiny, half-melted, as if it had been subjected to some inconceivable destructive force.
He tried to imagine what could have struck the insectoid civilization. What enemy had been powerful enough to make them create the Klikiss Torch? The hydrogues? In the end, even the Torch hadn’t been enough to protect them, and their race had been wiped out.
Davlin knew the Hansa would send colonists to Corribus. He just prayed that whatever had happened here would not occur again.
Chapter 9—MAGE-IMPERATOR JORA’H
In the private ossuarium chamber beneath the PrismPalace, where no one could see him, Jora’h stood before the skull of his father—and hated him. “You’re forcing me to continue the most dishonorable of schemes.” His unbraided living hair writhed like crackling strands of static electricity, and his words came back to him as mocking echoes in the eerie silence. “Bekh! Not even the humans have developed foul enough words to convey my anger over what you were—and what I have become.”
Only a day had passed since the funeral blaze, and his father’s skull had already been installed in the cold ossuarium, a private, silent place where a Mage-Imperator could ponder his rule. He wished he could just hide in a deep sub-thism sleep, like the Hyrillka Designate.
The skull, glowing pearly white, remained mute, its eye sockets hollow and empty, the smooth teeth grinning, as if the dead Mage-Imperator were laughing at his son’s predicament.
Almost a century ago, no doubt Cyroc’h had faced the same knowledge and decisions when he, too, learned of the breeding program and the captive humans—like Nira. Had his father felt even a twinge of guilt, or had he simply grasped the new “resources” and turned them to the service of the Empire?
Jora’h now regarded the glowing bones of his grandfather, who had been Mage-Imperator when the human generation ship Burton was found. For millennia, success had eluded the Ildirans in their ongoing efforts to create an interspecies bridge in the form of a powerful telepath who could meld thoughts and images with the hydrogues and represent both species. In a desperate twisted attempt to boost the experiments on the splinter colony of Dobro, his grandfather had decided to mix the bloodlines of the Burton descendants with talented Ildirans. The experimenters impregnated the human women, used the men as studs, and kept the breeding work going.
As soon as possible, Jora’h swore he would go to Dobro and find his beloved Nira. As Mage-Imperator he had the power to free her at last from her breeding servitude, and he would also meet his daughter Osira’h. He would begin to make amends to her, and even to the enslaved humans…
He shuddered to think of the secrets that his father had kept, knowing his naïve son would not understand everything until he took his father’s place. He now knew about the part Ildirans had played in the previous hydrogue war, and he also understood why the peaceful Empire—which had supposedly never faced an outside enemy in a thousand years—maintained such a large and powerful Solar Navy and kept such a vast stockpile of ekti in reserve.