Pathways - Jeri Taylor [154]
He had to admit that when he heard the heartrending tales from the front, he felt relieved not to be a part of it. It all sounded so futile, so needless—fighting for weeks over a kilometer-wide strip of land, taking and retaking it countless times, back and forth until the corpses were stacked like deadwood and no one could even remember why that strip of land was so important.
They heard rumors that the Haakonian populace was out of control, threatening to storm the governmental buildings unless the war was terminated. Hope sprang in many hearts that, soon, it would all be over.
And so it was.
The end of the war occurred on a warm spring night, and the terminus took no more than four minutes.
Neelix was sitting outside, in the walled compound of their hideaway. A wild yute bird sounded, reminding him of home, and somewhere someone was playing a gentle melody on the ixxel. For a moment, it was possible to believe that, soon, life would become normal once more, that love and joy would return to their hearts, that bellies would be full and spirits nourished. That he would see his family again.
He inhaled the spring air deeply, and gazed up at Rinax, luminous in the night sky, half in shadow at this time of the month. He imagined his parents and his sisters, and hoped they weren’t suffering too badly from the war. He’d supposed his sisters’ husbands had been pressed into service, unless they were protestors and avoided conscription. He had had no contact with any of them for two years, since he’d been taken off Rinax crammed in a cargo container loaded onto a freighter piloted by a friend of Uxxin.
As he stared upward, a curious brightness illuminated Rinax, turning its whiteness briefly to a cold blue.
Then it began to disappear.
Neelix stared upward, trying to reconcile the puzzling sight with some understandable phenomenon.
He couldn’t do it.
It was as though dark fingers began to obscure the moon, creeping swiftly over the surface, occluding it completely. Dust clouds, he thought, or some unusual space storm. But a coldness in his heart told him this was something far worse than a storm.
As he stared upward, the call of the yute bird still wafting through the night air—and forever afterward, he would associate that sound with the catastrophe that had struck— Rinax disappeared completely. He knew it was there; he could see its faint outline, as one does in an eclipse, but it was a dark disk in the sky.
It hadn’t been an eclipse. It didn’t behave like one. What were those strange fingers of darkness that clawed at his home, like bony talons of death?
He wasn’t sure how long he stood staring up at the darkness where Rinax had been, but after a time he heard a commotion inside. People were shouting. Then he heard an unearthly wailing.
Lixxisa, a good friend, came running toward him. Her eyes were wide, and her face was pale in the darkness. “Neelix . . .” she began; then her knees buckled and she sank to the ground. Alarmed, he crouched beside her. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“Unthinkable . . . unthinkable . . .”
“Lixxisa, tell me!”
“Rinax . . . destroyed . . .”
Neelix’s mind froze, and he willed time to reverse itself, to return him to the pleasant reverie of mere minutes ago. If he could back up just those few minutes in time, all would be righted. Rinax would still gleam in the night sky, and this time, events would proceed differently. It would not disappear before his eyes, Lixxisa would not come running, pallid, from the house and crumple at his feet. She would not say the awful words she had just spoken.
But his will wasn’t strong enough. Time pressed inexorably on. Lixxisa gasped for air, as though she’d been hit in the abdomen. “A weapon . . . horrible weapon . . . a cascade