Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [206]
Zan'nh's flagship sat in the eye of a deadly hurricane, the last surviving vessel of the Solar Navy at Earth. In his single overwhelming gambit, he had lost all of his warliners, and now he had nothing other than his ship's standard defensive systems, which could do little or no damage to the hydrogues. The hellstorm of weapons fire sparkled and exploded all around him.
All but defenseless, they watched the battle rage. Several shots slammed into the side of the warliner, causing the systems in the command nucleus to spark and overload.
"Emergency stabilization!" Zan'nh shouted. "Our task here may be done, but the war is not over."
"We have no effective weapons, Adar."
Zan'nh stood alone, staring. Even if he could have moved, it would have accomplished nothing. The feeling of helplessness left him very angry.
He did not make excuses, did not apologize to his crew. The Adar had done what he had sworn to do, but now he and his brave group of soldiers were no longer relevant to the continuing battle. They could only sit like fallen leaves while the furious storm of conflict roiled around them.
120
ANTON COLICOS
When the work was done and the planet evacuated, Tal O'nh's flagship and seven warliners remained to watch the final death throes of Hyrillka's primary sun. Anton and Vao'sh kept careful notes.
Though the one-eyed commander had insisted that his priority was to get the young Designate safely back to Ildira, Ridek'h stood firm. "Hyrillka is my world, my responsibility. I will stay to the end. I want to go down there one last time."
Yazra'h turned her head away from the boy to hide a proud smile.
O'nh fixed him with an intense stare from his single eye. "To what purpose, Designate? Everyone is gone. You have done your duty."
"I wish to say farewell. I should be the last one there--along with my rememberer." He looked at Vao'sh.
Yazra'h stepped forward. "I can guarantee the Designate's safety, as well as that of Rememberers Anton and Vao'sh."
The tal could find no excuse. "Hyrillka will be stable for a short while yet. However, we shouldn't disrupt our schedule."
"My entire planet is disrupted." Ridek'h sounded alarmingly strong and stern. Anton blinked in surprise.
And so their small party had gone down. Piloted by Yazra'h, the cutter descended to the ghost town of Hyrillka's main city. Clouds in the sky were a soup of smoke. Angry weather patterns already seemed to be conspiring to unleash their wrath upon the helpless planet. Anton had a small electronic pad for recording his thoughts, but he had not input a single sentence. "Vao'sh, I think I'm completely out of words for something like this."
The cutter landed at the base of the hill by the empty citadel palace. Some of the buildings looked painfully new, with fresh wood and bright stone. A few green shoots poked up from the fertilized plantings in what had been burned nialia fields. Plants rustled in the breezes. The city itself, though empty, seemed aware of its fate.
To Anton, the spaceport looked like an empty field after a huge carnival had passed through. A few broken-down ships and forgotten belongings cluttered the ground. Discarded supplies and abandoned equipment sat in piles where they had been dumped. Everything would be left behind.
Anton drank it all in, unable to push from his mind the words of the classic Shelley poem. He recited aloud,
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The old rememberer frowned. "Is that a tale about the fall of one of your great human empires?"
"More a reminder of the transience of all things, and how even our most enduring works crumble in the end."
"We have similar stanzas in the Saga of Seven Suns. ‘There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.'"