Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [115]
And she couldn't move, couldn't fight.
66
JESS TAMBLYN
Jess clenched his fists at his sides as if to contain the elemental creatures within him. They seemed as uncontrollable as the tainted wental inside his mother. He could barely hear anything over the uproar in his head, over the clash and clamor of destruction.
When Karla spoke, the words emerged from the familiar face he had missed so much, but his mother's voice was a hollow, alien sound. "Jess . . . why are you afraid of me? Don't you remember?" She walked forward, and steam swirled around her like the smoke from a wildfire. Overhead, the damaged ceiling continued to crack. "My little boy."
His mother's reanimated body seemed to be growing more accustomed to speaking, though each word was flat, without any spark of emotion. "I remember the padded sweater I made for you when you were nine." Her static-charged hair was calmer, her face more peaceful, as if the memories helped his mother wrest brief control over the possessing energy within her. "I remember your compy EA . . . Did you give that to Tasia? Where is Tasia? Where is Ross? My children . . ."
Even surrounded by the horrific turmoil, with slithering nematodes and crackling explosions, Jess recalled the years his parents had spent together, how they'd raised their family beneath the crust of Plumas. Karla had taught Jess how to drive a surface rover when he was only twelve. She had shown him how to operate pumping machinery, how to hook hoses to Roamer ships and fill their tanks with pristine water.
Jess shouted out loud, realizing what had happened. "She was frozen, trapped in the deep ice for all these years. There must have been some small spark of life still within her. Suspended animation. When I touched her, started to thaw her, I must have released power into her somehow. And now a tainted wental has control of her."
No life remained. She was dead. She remains dead.
"I don't believe it. There's something still inside of her!" Jess faced Karla, willingly taking the brunt of her attack. "Mother, listen to me. Please!"
As Karla took another step closer, the wental voices thrummed insistently. She is not truly your mother. She is not alive.
"But she remembers me."
The tainted wental is accessing chemical signatures frozen in the tissue of her brain. Your mother is no longer there.
He could not escape the thought of those previous tainted wentals--the Ildiran septar who wanted the power to fight for his Mage-Imperator, and the Klikiss breedex who wanted to conquer encroaching hives. He had simply wanted to bring his mother back out of her icy tomb, not to bring Karla Tamblyn alive again. Some strange spark from him had caused this corruption.
We must remove all of the tainted water from her.
The wentals surged out of him, becoming a mist of droplets in the air. The energized moisture began to swirl around Karla like a scouring blast of abrasive hail. Jess's body shuddered. His teeth chattered.
"Bring her back! Save her. My mother's still in there, somewhere."
She no longer exists. Do not be fooled. We must withdraw every droplet, every molecule.
Jess could not fight what they were doing. The wentals simply used him as a conduit, channeling themselves through his body. He silently called out for his mother to hear him, to exert control over the tainted energies.
Feeling a strange urgency, sensing that Karla was trying to distract him, Jess forced his body to turn. To his shock, he saw dozens of the attacking nematodes wrapped around Cesca. She moved, struggled . . . still alive!
But when he tried, he couldn't