Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [66]
Sarein kissed him with such passion that she startled him back to the present. “I’ll never let you down, Basil.”
“That remains to be seen.” Concentrating fully on her body, he grasped Sarein and pulled her to him with surprising force. She gasped, and he almost let himself fall completely into the pleasurable distraction, but he kept just a little part of himself separate…and safe.
As Chairman, he was dedicated to getting the job done, any job, to perfection. It was a long time before they were both spent.
Chapter 32—YARROD
When he finally arrived home, the scarred worldforest was worse than Yarrod had imagined. Even though he’d experienced the events directly through telink, he still felt like weeping as soon as he set foot on the scorched ground.
The surviving green priests had selected a ring of damaged trees—five massive stumps, each one twisted like an amputated limb—as their memorial for fallen trees and people. Though severely wounded, the five burned and blasted trunks remained alive, standing like a wooden version of Earth’s Stonehenge. With uneven steps, Yarrod hurried from the shuttle to the templelike tree ring.
Forced to view all the damage through the eyes of the forest, the surviving priests were stunned or crippled by the constant agony that screamed through telink. The clamor of the worldforest made it difficult for them to see and understand small details inside the tree mind. But each time a priest helped to rescue and shore up a living tree, saving it, they all rejoiced. In many surprising instances, worldtrees had sacrificed themselves to shield small treelings. Each green shoot was a gesture of defiance against all that Theroc had suffered.
Alexa and Idriss came to greet Yarrod. His sister and her husband had always been mellow leaders, with calm personalities, never overreacting, ruling in times of quiet prosperity. They had never been prepared for anything like this. Now both of them looked gaunt and drained, as if they’d been broken into pieces and poorly reassembled.
“Oh, Alexa…oh, my forest.” Yarrod could think of nothing else to say. He embraced her, experiencing the still-echoing screams of the burned and frozen trees. He endured it like a flagellant punishing himself. “What can I do? I need to know what I can do.”
“The same as all of us.” Idriss wiped sooty dust from his cheek. “You work until you drop, do every task you see that needs doing, and when you must rest, you gather your energy to start it all again the next day.”
Yarrod tore off his provisional EDF uniform so that he stood in only his green priest’s loincloth. With his emerald skin exposed to the air of Theroc, he walked to the nearest of the five scorched trees and pressed his chest against the bark. He wrapped his arms around the tree and just held it, feeling the contact with the worldforest on every centimeter of his skin.
The flood of sensations was more than he could bear, but Yarrod clutched desperately, drinking it all in. His mind expanded to see through the eyes of millions of surviving worldtrees.
Over the ten millennia since the last conflict, after the hydrogues assumed they’d exterminated the verdani, the scraps of the forest mind had settled here and gradually spread to cover all the landmass of Theroc. For almost two centuries now, green priests had carried treelings to other planets, once again spreading the ancient forest entity. And now the hydrogues had returned, intent on finishing the task of extinguishing their rival. Coming from space, they had attacked everywhere, intending to annihilate every last shred of the worldforest.
On uninhabited continents, some blazes continued to eat away at the forest. Yarrod felt the urgency, the crisis, the pull of the overwhelming and desperate