Metal Swarm - Kevin J. Anderson [166]
Robb's face was drawn. ‘We need to keep watch around the perimeter.'
‘I'll rig weapons for personal defence. I think I can still fire some of the ship's guns. Let's hope we managed to, uh, crash unobtrusively.' Tasia suddenly bolted back into the ship, realizing that the emergency locator beacon was still pinging. She disconnected it swiftly, came out, and stood next to Robb. She put her arms around him and hugged him as they stared off into the night.
One hundred and two
Jess Tamblyn
Their wental ship flew away from the scarred ice and tragic memories of Jonah 12, leaving behind a glimmering presence on the empty planetoid. The water beings guided them to a colourful, swirling soup of ionized gases and dissociated molecules, a nebula lit by the fires of newborn nearby stars. Jess now knew it was the site of an ancient battlefield where wentals had been torn apart by hydrogues and faeros, their molecules spattered like blood across the emptiness.
‘But what sort of war was it?' Cesca asked. ‘Why were you fighting the faeros as well as the hydrogues?'
‘I thought the faeros turned against the drogues,' Jess added.
The faeros are allies of no one. They cooperate when it suits them, hut they mean only to destroy. Us. The hydrogues. Everything.
The water-bubble ship flitted into the densest knots of vapour and molecules coalesced around it. Together, he and Cesca used their skills in controlling the wentals to reintegrate the scattered water that had once belonged to the elementals, and the globe began to expand. Individual entities formed a collective strength
How many more of the water beings had been spread across the cold vacuum? The silvery ship drank tiny droplets, pulling out pools that would become more wentals. Healing, strengthening, growing, living. Those were concepts and motivations that neither the hydrogues nor the chaotic faeros embraced.
Jess felt a burgeoning satisfaction fill him. Cesca pressed her fingers to the flexible membrane, watching and touching the wentals as they were resurrected. Visiting Jonah 12 had been a vivid reminder of the robot attack, the deaths of all the Roamers there, and how she herself had nearly died. Now they both felt so alive.
As their ship continued to cruise through the nebula, it grew ever larger, absorbing a multitude of anxious voices. We have been rejoined. Now we must be distributed again, disseminated widely.
Jess wasn't sure if he could find Nikko Chan Tylar or the water-bearer volunteers who had previously helped him spread the wentals. But he had another idea. ‘We could go to Plumas. My uncles can use the Tamblyn water tankers to distribute these new nebula wentals.'
‘While we gather even more,' Cesca added.
* * * * *
When they returned to the ice moon, Cesca was surprised and delighted to find her father visiting. He and Caleb Tamblyn often worked together, planned oddball business schemes together, and got into trouble together. Denn Peroni had come back to see that the water mines were now back in business.
In the completely refashioned underground chambers, a smiling Caleb explained, ‘With the new availability of ekti and plenty of Confederation planets to serve, trade ships are sure going to need the water, oxygen, and other by-products we provide.' Chill steam puffed from his mouth as he spoke. ‘Each day, more and more ships dock at our wellheads to fill their reservoirs.'
After trading with the Ildiran Empire, Denn had returned successful - and somehow changed. Even Jess picked up on the difference, sensing an unexpected resonance with the wentals in his own bloodstream.
When Cesca asked her father about it, Denn brushed most ‘- questions aside, but he could not stop his eyes from sparkling. 'Everything's different now! That green priest on Ildira, the Hansa engineers, they all changed, like an evolution. They found a new way of thinking and showed it to me.‘ Though he wore only a light vest and shirt in the cold underground grotto, he did not appear cold. Though not infused with wental energy, Denn seemed able to sense