Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [217]
As the trio of diamond spheres shot toward her, still barreling after the Tamblyn ships, Cesca pulled up to expose the tanker's lower hull like a submissive animal baring its belly. When she released the cargo bay doors, the wentals lunged out like a hurricane made of living water.
The rolling cloud of vengeful fog expanded into an insubstantial barrier before the warglobes. When the spiked spheres tore through it, they were suddenly swathed in clinging, destructive mist. Cesca had time only to see the water elementals begin to do damage, a caustic film sizzling through the supposedly indestructible diamond shells.
The hydrogues careened left and right. Two of them cracked into each other, then ricocheted like billiard balls. Cesca's tanker was right in the path of all three blinded warglobes.
When the impact came, the flash of light and fury was all around her. She felt as if her entire body were a gong being pounded by a band of cruel gremlins with hammers. Then she was falling, floating, spinning within a shooting gallery of hull shrapnel, freezing air vapor, and energized water.
The wentals kept her alive. Cesca had not meant to test her indestructibility, had not thought about putting herself or the valuable tanker in harm's way. She had done what was necessary. She turned to see the three tankers flown by the Tamblyn brothers circling around. She floated alone, without a radio or any means of communicating with them.
To her grim satisfaction, though, the three warglobes were blotchy and leprous, mortally wounded. When the spheres shattered, curved fragments glittered in the distant sunlight, beginning a slow orbital spiral back down toward the clouds of Haphine. The wental mist, moving of its own volition, swooped down past the wreckage like a swarm of angry hornets to the clouds, where the other wentals were already spreading destruction.
Experimenting, Cesca found that she could make herself move, impelling herself through the vacuum simply by willing herself to do so. Caleb, Wynn, and Torin Tamblyn must have thought she had been killed in the explosion, for as she rose in front of one of their cockpit windows, waving her hands, she could see Caleb's jaw drop. He grabbed the communications transmitter, excitedly spreading the news to his brothers.
She grinned and mimed that she wanted to be picked up through one of the hull hatches. Now they had one less tanker--and one less hydrogue world to recapture. But they had plenty more to do before the day was over.
127
TASIA TAMBLYN
Tasia had never understood most of what she could view through the jeweled membrane of their preservation cell, but now things were crazier than she had ever seen them. "Something's going on out there again, and it doesn't look like a party."
Warglobes cruised over the streets, exiting through the barrier that surrounded the drifting citysphere. Liquid-metal hydrogues flowed like schools of startled fish, and Klikiss robots marched about.
"They've always been crazy," groaned Keffa. "Why don't they just kill us and be done with it?"
"Maybe they're trying to see how we hold up under stress," Robb said.
"Not very damn well," said Belinda; the haggard-looking female captive had never told Tasia her last name.
After EA's murder, anger still simmered inside Tasia like molten metal. She longed for a way to smash a Klikiss robot or two. The hydrogues were alien, sure, but the big mechanical cockroaches were actually evil. Klikiss robots enjoyed inflicting pain, dominating, and destroying. It was part of their programming.
She had always relied on her own toughness and brains, using Roamer skills and any scraps of material she could find. Tasia Tamblyn had never expected a white knight on a horse to ride in and save her from her imprisonment. She knew that no heroic cavalry--not even an EDF commando squad--would swoop in to take them away from this nightmare.
However, the sudden sight of her brother Jess on the other side of the translucent membrane was so ridiculous and unexpected