Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [148]
It was time to act.
Yes, he would order Tal O’nh to launch his cohort of warliners. Rusa’h must be stopped, and that would require a mind-numbing degree of bloodshed. But the necessity for slaughter would only grow worse if Jora’h allowed his deluded brother to capture other worlds. And he, the Mage-Imperator, must go along. In person. He would ask no surrogate to accept all that blood on his hands.
As he watched through the window, Jora’h saw the embattled sun of Durris flicker as the faeros used a titanic flare as a weapon. According to Solar Navy patrol ships, hundreds of thousands of warglobes swarmed around the wounded star. Once the hydrogues vanquished the faeros on Durris-B, what would stop them from moving to other suns in the sky? He had to find some way to stop it.
And what would happen if the faeros demanded Ildiran help, as they had done so long ago?
When he departed for the Horizon Cluster, the Mage-Imperator would also send Osira’h on her mission to smash the barrier of communication with the hydrogues. According to Yazra’h, the preparations were ready. Did Jora’h dare send the little girl among the warglobes at Durris-B in the middle of their stellar conflict? He feared she would be caught in the crossfire, killed before she could even begin her work. But where else could she be sure of finding the hydrogues?
That talented half-breed girl was all that remained of Nira. She was also the Empire’s only hope of speaking to the hydrogues. How could a child convince the impossibly alien creatures to parley with the Mage-Imperator? And if the hydrogues did agree to talk, what unconscionable terms would they force the Ildirans to accept?
He wished Nira were here to help him make this decision, or at least offer him comfort as he faced the inevitable consequences of his choice. Because of generations-old plans, Jora’h now had to send his own daughter—their daughter—into peril to save his whole race.
No matter how much he loved his daughter and Nira, a Mage-Imperator’s obligations transcended his personal feelings. Osira’h seemed to understand. He doubted that her mother ever would have.
Chapter 71—NIRA
Dobro was vast and endless to a woman traveling on foot. Long ago, in much brighter days when she’d journeyed from Theroc to Ildira, Nira had looked out at the emptiness spangled with stars. Back then, the view had inspired awe, showing her new layers of the universe like the petals of an expanding flower. As a child of the dense worldforest, she had never conceived of the distances involved, had known them only theoretically. Light-years, parsecs, astronomical units. While flying to Ildira, Nira had gazed through the Voracious Curiosity’s observation ports and seen the galaxy as an ocean of worlds filled with scattered inhabited islands.
But now that she’d spent a month on her trek across this unknown landscape, Nira began to comprehend distances on an entirely new scale. It was not all bad. As she stared toward the far horizons across jagged arroyos, dry prairies, and stretches of stunted forest, her bruised mind had a chance to wander. And heal.
In captivity, she’d felt claustrophobic for so many years, unable to communicate with Jora’h or see her beloved daughter...or any of the other half-breed children that she’d been forced to bear. Here in the wild open, her thoughts could breathe and expand.
She still felt cut off from her trees, deaf to telink, blind to any connection with her daughter. Yet even the blind or deaf could find ways to live. After all Nira had endured, she refused to give up now. She would hope.
She spent two days crossing a line of rolling hills. In one broad valley, she encountered the thickest forest she had yet seen on Dobro. The trees rose higher than her head, with their