Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [157]
Forgetting himself, the green priest lunged for it. “No!”
Sullivan seized a support railing with his left hand. At the same time his right hand shot out and caught the green priest by his naked ankle.
Beseeching, Kolker stretched out his hand, trying to elongate himself—but the treeling spilled over the edge of the cloud harvester and out into the open atmosphere—falling...falling.
Kolker stared after it, his eyes round with horror and disbelief, as if he had just lost one of his children. The treeling looked tiny as it dwindled to an insignificant speck against the vast battleground in the sky.
Somehow the hydrogues saw it. In a purely spiteful gesture, a warglobe unleashed a blast that vaporized the treeling into a smear of ash that drifted on the angry winds.
Clamping his grip tighter around Kolker’s ankle, Sullivan sweated and strained, but the green priest simply stared as he dangled, open-mouthed and silent in despair at being completely cut off from the worldforest.
Detonations continued beneath the cloud harvester. The unstable complex began to wobble, swaying through a pendulum swing. As the observation deck became more level, Sullivan saw his chance. Before the wounded cloud harvester could tip in the other direction, he hauled Kolker back to safety. “Come on, snap out of it! We have to get out of here!”
“But my tree—”
“Nothing you can do about that now, and I’m not going to let you just sit here.” He dragged the green priest to his feet, and they raced off to the command decks where the supervisory personnel had already loaded themselves into the escape modules.
“Let’s go!” Sullivan pushed Kolker ahead of him through the hatch, then prepared to seal the module door behind him. He scanned the people crowded in the interior. “Have you taken attendance? Is everyone in place?”
“Module seven is missing three,” said his supervisor.
Crammed into a corner, Tabitha Huck looked down at her screen. “Module four has an extra two.”
“Are we full?” Sullivan asked.
“We’ve got the required complement, but we could fit another dozen or so if somebody else’s module is damaged.”
“I didn’t see anybody up on the command deck, but we’ll give ’em thirty more seconds.” Another explosion rocked the structure. “Tell everyone else to launch.”
Everything about the evacuation had looked good on paper, but now the greatest question remained: Once all the modules disengaged and flew away, would the hydrogues follow them? The evacuation modules couldn’t hope to outrun a warglobe.
Kolker sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, looking utterly miserable, a green priest without a tree. “No one will know what’s happening now. All contact has been cut off. They’ll think we’re dead.”
Sullivan tried to sound encouraging, “You sent out the alarm in time, Kolker. The EDF knows. But we’ve got to get ourselves out of here.” He glanced at his chronometer. “Time’s up. Let’s launch.”
They held on as their escape module broke free from the doomed cloud harvester. The crude vessel rocketed away from the attacking hydrogues. Around them, other self-propelled and autonomous escape vessels launched like spores from a mushroom.
As the module rattled and vibrated, Sullivan peered through the port. Below, the hydrogues continued to attack the remnants of the sky facility.
“They don’t seem to be pursuing us, Sullivan,” said Tabitha. “Not yet.” A sigh of relief, then a shudder of delayed terror passed through the refugees.
As the escape module rotated in its ascent, Sullivan got a good view across the ocean of clouds to the much larger Ildiran sky-harvesting city. The hydrogues were brutally dismantling Hroa’x’s facility as well, surrounding the immense platform and opening fire. Already, smoke and flames gushed from myriad breaches in the other complex’s hull.
“The Ildirans are under attack too,” Sullivan called. “But their design didn’t allow for the escape and rescue of their crew. They’re all going