Metal Swarm - Kevin J. Anderson [233]
Davlin did not let go, and the immature breedex began to falter. Never in its experience had it encountered such mental intensity and determination instead of fear. The malleable hive mind was forced to change. Davlin knew he could not survive, but that didn’t mean he would accept defeat. The grubs swarmed over him.
One hundred and forty-four
Jess Tamblyn
When they finally reached isolated Charybdis, he and Cesca found only a smoking ruin. The primordial atmosphere was thick and poisoned with sour, sulphurous clouds. The rocks, once submerged, were now baked and blackened. Whole oceans had been boiled away. These wentals had been eradicated.
'It looks like hell came here.’Jess’s words were little more than a haunted whisper. He didn’t need to speak. Cesca was as horrified as he was.
'We can’t leave them like this. We have to do something.’
'We will, Cesca. Oh, we will.’
Yes, we must set things right, the wentals said in their minds. Through you, we will become strong. Perhaps we will be strong enough.
They already knew what had happened here from receiving the thoughts of the distant, devastated beings. Jess had needed all of the elemental strength in his body to drive back the fury and stop the boiling backlash in their bubble ship. They were alive, but he didn’t think they would ever be safe again.
Before, he and Cesca had felt the wondrous strength of the water entities swirling through them, now, they experienced ripple after ripple of pain and loss, just by standing in the ruins of Charybdis. This must be how the wentals felt when they were torn apart in space, their molecules strewn across a cosmic expanse. And this must be how the water elementals felt when they were dragged silently screaming into the hot atmosphere of a sun.
Jess and Cesca emerged trembling from their bubble ship, the only living things on the scalded planet. The water they had retrieved from the nebula clouds remained protected within the energy membrane. Some craters held sterile, bubbling pools, but the water here was dead. The life force of the wentals had been purged from the water on Charybdis. The clouds were heavy and suffocating, the corpses of wentals thrown into a sky battlefield.
The energy that the faeros had unleashed was unimaginable. Jess could not comprehend the anger of the fiery beings.
'Why would the faeros do this?’ Cesca was weeping, and Jess held her. Even the energized water seeping from her tear ducts would not be potent enough to reawaken the water here. Would Charybdis be forever tainted? 'Why do they want to destroy the wentals?’
Because they are chaos. They are fire.
Fury began to build in his very core. 'That’s not a good enough explanation. Not for me.’ Jess remembered the esoteric balance between order and chaos, entropy and construction, life and un-life. But it wasn’t a reason. ,
He walked barefoot on the smoking black stones. 'There is no reason for it, but it is. We must stand against it. We will!’ He inhaled, purposely filling his chest with the weak steam, the last gasps of a few now-dead wentals. Somehow, he felt the strength increase within him. 'I don’t care how devastated this planet is, we will bring wentals back to Charybdis. We’ll gather more and more of them out in the Spiral Arm. And I swear that never again will the faeros take us by surprise.'
A swell of hope and determination filled them, husband and wife. Even the wentals inside Jess and Cesca and in the bubble ship took heart and rallied their energies. Jess understood that they were not facing the end. Not at all.
'This is war,' he said.
One hundred and forty-five
Faeros Incarnate Rusa’h
Ensconced in the Prism Palace where he belonged, Rusa’h glowed and shimmered, shedding animated fire and light at the heart of an immense magnifying prism. The bright reflections passed through the crystal walls and blazed outward in a beacon. The light on Ildira was bright, very bright indeed.
Now that the fiery elementals had reignited the darkened