Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [207]
"Yes, I know that part."
Ridek'h stood in front of the cutter, staring as the brisk wind played across his face. The boy's eyes were full of emotion. His gangly body trembled with impotent anger. "I tried my best, but I failed."
"You never really had a chance to start," Yazra'h said. "Neither your father nor the Mage-Imperator could have done better."
"I hate the hydrogues."
"As do we all."
They remained among the empty buildings in uneasy silence for a long time. Ridek'h walked once more up the citadel palace hill to survey the half-completed structures and the newly repaved streets. With a flash of fire in his eyes, the boy turned. "Take me back to the warliners. It is time for us to leave."
When they returned to the battleship, the young Designate gave Tal O'nh the official order to depart.
The implacable struggles of the faeros and hydrogues continued inside the primary sun. The myriad diamond warglobes swirled around, pouring out icewave blasts as if rallying to deliver a coup de grâce. Solar flares shot out in all directions, giant curls of plasma confined within magnetic loops. Anton wondered what last desperate weapon the faeros might unleash.
Before Tal O'nh's warliner could leave Hyrillka, the sensor technician cried out. "The sun has undergone a dramatic shift. It is brightening!"
Without warning, a surging eruption hurled an uncountable number of incandescent shapes into space. Like sparks from a grinding wheel, hot ellipsoids sprayed from the beleaguered star in an ever-increasing flow.
The scientist kithmen scrambled to take data and interpret it.
"The sun is blowing up!" Ridek'h said. The command nucleus crew gasped.
Yazra'h studied the scene carefully. "No, it is not exploding. It has spawned thousands of faeros ships. Thousands!"
Anton was amazed. "Maybe it's . . . all of them."
Like spores ejected from an overripe fungus, a new wave of faeros swept outward, and they outnumbered the hydrogues ten to one. The hydrogues swirled to mount their defenses, but the fireballs kept coming . . . and kept coming--a seemingly infinite number.
Anton supposed the faeros had opened their own transgates deep within Hyrillka's primary sun. "It almost looks like those fireballs are streaming through from every other inhabited faeros star, all them coming here, all at once. Talk about a showdown!"
On the screen, the overwhelming number of ellipsoids disintegrated the diamond specks one by one. Faeros continued to surge out of the plasma like lava from an erupting volcano, fireball after fireball, and the blue-white star brightened again, revitalized.
Within hours, every warglobe had been annihilated. Hundreds of shattered diamond vessels formed a field of rubble and debris close to the primary sun.
Like a cloud of ignited tinder, the faeros withdrew to the safe layers of the star. They dove into the flaming pool like otters playing in warm water, contributing once again to the stellar fire. Anton wondered if the damaged sun would ever return to normal.
In the flagship's command nucleus, few words were spoken. Finally Designate Ridek'h looked hopefully at Yazra'h. "Does this mean . . . is there a chance the sun will keep shining? That we do not need to abandon Hyrillka, after all? If the hydrogues are beaten, then my planet is safe--is it not?"
Yazra'h remained uneasy. "Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Hyrillka may always be a dangerous place."
Anton looked over at her. "Then I will be very glad to be back on Ildira, safe and sound."
121
OSIRA'H
The hydrogues know what we have done," Mage-Imperator Jora'h said to Osira'h. "And we did not succeed." The thism bond between her father and his son Zan'nh had already told him what he needed to know. "The Adar expended all of his automated ships, and I do not think they were enough. The hydrogues launched many more warglobes than the small fleet they specified when they explained their plan." Jora'h bowed his head, gripped the sides of his chrysalis chair. "Far too many warglobes remain."
Osira'h did not share her father's sense of defeat. Not yet. In the days