Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [106]
"That'll take some getting used to." She drifted closer to him. "But I can accept the circumstances--especially in exchange for this . . ."
At last, he no longer felt a sense of betrayal toward Ross. If his brother hadn't been killed by the hydrogues, Jess knew he would have stayed on the honorable path. His love for Cesca would have remained unrequited. But the Guiding Star shone steadily now.
When they reached the ice moon, Cesca stared through the curved bubble. The shimmering alien vessel came to rest on the frozen surface, lit with splintered reflections. Below, on the cracked plains of ice, they could make out the silent facilities, the standing wellheads--and fourteen large water tankers.
"There they are," Jess said. Once filled with wental water, those tankers would become incredible weapons against the drogues. They would find Roamer volunteers to fly them to infested gas giants and release their cargoes into the high clouds. The wentals would recapture one gas giant after another.
He knew his uncles would be glad to see him again, anxious to help with this new challenge. After retrieving his mother's frozen body from the crevasse, Jess had just left her in the grotto and raced off to rescue Cesca. Now maybe he could give her a proper Roamer funeral. Mourning was a way of life for the clans. The last time Cesca had been to Plumas was when his father had died, and before that, Ross. . . .
Jess took her by the hand and drew her through the vessel's permeable hull. She stood next to him on the rugged ice, exposed to open vacuum and completely unharmed. The Speaker for the Roamer clans looked like a surprised little girl, filled with a sense of wonder.
But Jess could sense unusual vibrations with his bare feet, disruptions so severe they penetrated the thick crust. The wentals seemed to knot within him. There is danger. The waters here are angry. Something separate from us . . . Once again, the wentals were being mysterious. Jess was anxious to get to the water-mine settlement beneath the ice.
Uneasy, he led Cesca across the rippled terrain to the nearest lift shaft. The airlock had been forced open from the inside, and the ice outside the door was splattered with an iron-hard film, as if someone had dumped out buckets of red paint. Scraps of translucent tissue, like burst and discarded polymer bags, lay frozen on the ground.
The airlock controls showed that the lift shaft had automatically sealed itself when exposed to the vacuum. He would have to find another way inside. "Come with me."
Calling up wental energy, he showed her how to shift aside the molecules of frozen water and drop through the ice as if they had a parachute. It should have been a time of wonder for Cesca as she accompanied him, but her alarm grew as she too felt the violent vibrations from below.
When the two of them descended into the grotto, they encountered a scene of appalling chaos. Crashing sounds and hissing steam filled the chamber. Geysers erupted from split well pipes. Torrents of meltwater and shattered chunks of ice tumbled as an irresistible force repeatedly slammed the ceiling.
The light here was far dimmer than he remembered. Jess saw empty craters where two of the artificial suns had once been. Roamer workers ran about, screaming and shouting as they dove for shelter. More than a dozen bodies lay on the ground, many of them encased in cocoons of ice, others simply dead where they had fallen. Cesca pointed to elongated flashes of scarlet, a pack of wormlike creatures that slithered along the ice in pursuit of a fleeing man.
Another explosion slammed into the roof like a tantrum-throwing child pounding on a door. Jess and Cesca spun to the sound. The mists briefly cleared, and he saw the unmistakable form at the heart of the rampage.
When he'd brought her body back out of the crevasse, Karla Tamblyn had been encased in ice. Seeing her alive again but impossibly altered, he experienced a flood of memories,