Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [11]
"Karla, what have you done?" cried Wynn, staring at his fallen brother.
"Wait! Don't get in her way!" his twin brother Torin warned.
Uninterested, she plodded toward the edge of the ice shelf and the deep steel-gray sea. Caleb and Wynn seized the opportunity to rush to the crumpled figure and dragged Andrew's body away. Torin, the more impressionable of the twins, shouted in a beseeching tone, "Karla, why are you doing this? Don't you know any of us?"
Like a confused mobile statue, Karla Tamblyn turned her crackling gaze back toward the habitation and administrative domes beneath the thick ceiling of ice. She stared without comprehension at the water-mining machinery, the hydrostatic pumps that lifted liquid to the surface for filling starship tanks. She continued moving without responding. The cold sea seemed to call to her. When she stared at the subterranean ocean, her eyes took on a hungry look.
BeBob looked at Rlinda. "Do you think the Roamers will let us go now?"
"I doubt that's their highest priority."
Jess Tamblyn, another member of the Roamer clan (Rlinda wasn't sure about the whole family tree), had used exotic powers to retrieve his mother's body from deep within the ice. But after he'd rushed away on some emergency, Karla had thawed on her own and come alive, as if possessed by some kind of demon.
The woman stepped to where the ice abruptly met the water. She lifted her hands, and an invisible energy rippled out like the force of gravity. Powerful, distinct tides pulled the water as if it were clay, stretching and shaping it like magnetic forces pulling iron filings into lines.
The ice cracked behind Karla's feet, calving away. She did not seem alarmed. When the ice sloughed off, Karla stood motionless on the broken chunk. In complete silence she dropped into the deep ocean. Without thrashing or uttering a single sound, she vanished beneath the waves. A geyser of bubbles and white vapor swirled for a few moments, then subsided into stillness.
Rlinda looked around for someone who might explain what was going on. "Does this sort of thing happen often around here?"
6
KOTTO OKIAH
After the drogues had been roundly defeated at Theroc--for the second time--a very pleased Kotto Okiah departed from the forested planet.
He'd left his mining base on Jonah 12 to help the Therons rebuild their settlement, after which he had gone to the Kellum shipyards at Osquivel, studied a small intact hydrogue derelict they had found, developed a simple defense against the warglobes, and rushed back to Theroc with his "doorbells."
In the meantime, the Eddies had destroyed Rendezvous, and his mother had vanished along with many other scattered clans. Although she could take care of herself, he wished he knew where old Jhy Okiah was. She was probably safe somewhere with Speaker Cesca Peroni. Kotto loved the way Speaker Peroni smiled at him whenever he demonstrated "Roamer ingenuity" in solving a problem. She was bound to be particularly proud of his most recent invention.
His ships had arrived at Theroc like the cavalry, dispersing hundreds of adhesive mats that vibrated at a resonance frequency to blow the warglobes' hatches to the vacuum of space. One after another, the enemy globes had reeled away like whirligigs. Single-handedly, Kotto had saved the worldforest.
Well, maybe not single-handedly.
"Even without that wental comet coming in at the last minute," Kotto said to his two Analytical compies, KR and GU, "we had those drogues on the run." He kept up a constant internal monologue, and occasionally parts of it came out in comments spoken without context. The compies, always interested, answered as best they could.
"If the wental comet had not come, there is a high probability we would have been destroyed, Kotto Okiah," KR pointed out.
"All of our doorbells had already been deployed," GU added. His polymer body was still battered from when he'd unexpectedly opened the pressurized hatch of the hydrogue derelict. "We had no remaining