Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [11]
She pretended to be innocent and cooperative, but in her secret heart Osira’h suspected everything, distrusted everyone since learning the dark truth of what her uncle Udru’h and his fellow experimenters were doing here on Dobro. Her beloved mentor had deceived her, distorted the truth so that she would be a more willing pawn. Her mother had been kept from her, and her real father—the powerful Mage-Imperator—pretended not to know what had happened. What was the girl to believe?
They watched her every minute. Osira’h and her brothers and sisters strained to impress the Dobro mentalists and lens kithmen. They had all been born for this specific purpose, and one of them had to succeed in breaking the communication barrier with the hydrogues. Day after day, their heads ached and their minds were exhausted by the time the children collapsed into a few hours of rest.
In silence, Osira’h listened and observed, but she could find no obvious answer to her dilemma. She would give the Ildirans what they wanted...and hope they might eventually see the error of their ways.
As darkness fell outside the well-lit Ildiran settlement and the fenced-in breeding compound, Osira’h and her siblings sat cross-legged on a woven rug. One of the mentalists scrutinized their exercises from an observation chair. They spoke no words; the two youngest squeezed their eyes shut to aid their concentration, while the others could turn their vision inside without such a crutch.
Osira’h knew how to do this. Once her mind’s eye saw inside herself, she flung her mental gaze outside of the room, outside of the Ildiran settlement, and into the fenced camp that held the descendants of human captives. For years, she’d never dreamed that her mother was out there, so close and yet isolated, raped, tortured...and then she’d been killed.
Now every time Osira’h saw the fences, the breeding barracks, the medical kithmen with their fertility monitors, she knew exactly what went on inside those chambers. She thought of Nira dragged into a room with a single bed, forced to endure repeated assaults by soldier kithmen, lens kithmen, even Designate Udru’h himself. That was how Nira had conceived her other half-breed children.
Rod’h, fathered by Udru’h himself, worked even harder than her other siblings, attempting to achieve the levels of success that Osira’h had. Ostensibly they shared the same goals. She longed to tell her brother the truth, but she doubted he would listen.
Of all the siblings, only Osira’h had any inkling about what had happened to their shared mother. Nira had vanished like an erased file, just after she had revealed everything to her daughter.
Completely persuaded of their importance for the destiny of the Ildiran race, Osira’h’s gullible brothers and sisters suspected nothing of their origins. But they did not have their mother’s memories inside them, as she did.
Sometimes during the dark Dobro night that frightened the other Ildirans, Osira’h received tantalizing thoughts, even prophetic images that made her suspect beyond any reasonable hope that her mother might still be alive. The girl had used all the powers in her mind to shout out a response, to call back to the faint whisper of existence that made her think of Nira. But though she searched with her mind until it felt as if her skull would crack open, she found no tangible link to the female green priest.
In the exercise now, Osira’h let her troubled thoughts drift like snowflakes across the human prisoners, touching them, brushing against their experiences. Though their mind-set was quite different from an Ildiran’s, these humans were far less alien than the hydrogues would be...
When the exercise was over, the mentalist instructor stood, nodding. “All your lives you have been taught your skills and your duty. It is up to you to save the Ildiran Empire.”
The children nodded in unison. Osira’h, who had believed those words for years, was now pulled in several different