Metal Swarm - Kevin J. Anderson [72]
'She had only to ask,' Yarrod said. 'We would have considered it legitimate.'
'She doesn't like to ask. It's her damned independent streak.'
'Captain Kett can't solve our problem,' Peter said. 'We need some other way to defend Theroc'
Thinking of green priests, Estarra looked at Celli, and both sisters seemed to have the same idea simultaneously. 'Beneto!' Estarra turned to Peter and spoke in a rush. 'The verdani battleships! Could we call Beneto back?'
When he and the other treeships departed, Beneto had said he would not see her again. But they needed him so much now!
'The verdani seedships are travelling among the stars,' Yarrod said dubiously. 'The fused green priest pilots have a new mission now, continuing the work to spread the verdani across the cosmos. They are no longer concerned with humans.'
'I don't believe that!' Celli said. 'They were sons and daughters of Theroc. They can't ignore a threat to their people, their planet. Beneto will understand. The green priests will understand.'
'They must already know what happened to Nahton,' Estarra added. 'They heard the same telink message.' Perhaps they were already on their way back?
'It is worth asking them,' said Solimar, nodding grimly. 'It is even worth begging.'
'We promise nothing.' Yarrod went to a treeling beside Queen Estarra's ornate chair.
'We can promise to try our best.' Solimar, unmoved by the older green priest's scepticism, went to another treeling.
Both of them sent their plea, communicating not just to the worldforest, but questing for the specific green priest minds connected to the thorny battleships. Celli leaned close to Solimar, holding onto his arm. Though she couldn't connect through telink yet, she hoped her need would somehow be communicated through him to the trees.
Long minutes later, the two green priests blinked simultaneously and released the treelings. 'Nine of them have agreed to come back.' Yarrod sounded surprised. 'They, too, heard Nahton's message, and they know what the Hansa is doing. They will be here soon.'
'They will be here in time,' Solimar added. 'And Beneto will be with them.'
Forty-two
General Kurt Lanyan
General Lanyan gathered four hundred of his men for the first deployment through the reactivated transportal. In preparation for passage, the peacekeeper soldiers crowded the Klikiss tunnels, their weapons shouldered and their buttons polished. They would march through to Pym in formation, double-time, and scare the absolute piss out of the colonists. According to survey records, Pym was a chalky place with shallow lakes of tepid, briny water and tufa towers built out of salt and sand. The landscape was relentlessly flat, mostly alkaline desert with a few oases of pure water where cane grasses and tamarisk-equivalents grew in profusion.
Lanyan couldn't imagine colonists so desperate they would actually want to move there, but given ingenuity and a modicum of hard work, the settlers could make a profitable business out of extracting the wealth of chemicals in the salt flats. He was only there to make sure that the people on Pym continued to walk the straight-and-narrow and did not slip out of the Hansa's grasp. Once those people had their fear of the EDF thoroughly reaffirmed, he would graciously set up a guardian force to remind them of all the unknown hazards still abroad in the Spiral Arm. Such hazards, of course, included the sedition of King Peter and his ill-advised rebellion.
In the Rheindic Co tunnels, Lanyan stood at the head of his troops like a cavalry leader about to sound a charge. He briefly