Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [202]
Jora’h had insisted there was no other way. Had he lied to her too? In this matter, he was forced to act as Mage-Imperator, not as her father or her mother’s lover. And she had to obey him...or at least try.
The half-breed girl did exactly as she’d been trained. Dropping her last self-protective mental walls and surrendering all resistance, she became a conduit between two races that were so fundamentally different.
With her mind ablaze and her thoughts entirely exposed, an absolute connection seared between her and the hydrogues, full and complete. Her greatest abilities blossomed out, brighter than ever before.
And then the hydrogues were in her grasp.
Chapter 102—ROBB BRINDLE
Robb and his fellow prisoners stared in disbelief through the murky wall membrane of their holding cell. Inside her own chamber, the strange little girl looked helpless and entirely out of her realm.
“Is that another prisoner?” he asked. “What are they doing?”
“Look at the way the drogues are taking her around—like they’re escorting her,” Anjea Telton said.
The girl stared out at the captives, as if concerned about them instead of herself. The haggard captives watched as the strange child’s chamber was lifted away and taken out of view.
“That looked a lot more sophisticated than my encounter vessel.” Robb could still see his intact old diving bell outside, not far away. He wondered if history would remember him as a selfless hero willing to make the supreme sacrifice, or a deluded fool who had been doomed from the start. If he could have come up with an escape plan that had even a marginal chance for success, he would have risked anything to make the attempt.
“Maybe they’ll squash her like a bug, like they did to Charles.” Anjea sounded miserable. “Like they mean to do to the rest of us.”
She looked meaningfully to the opposite side of their confinement chamber, where the hydrogues had brought in another of their encasement shells. This one conformed more closely to a human shape than the transparent coffin the drogues had used to kill Gomez. It reminded Robb of a sarcophagus. The silent aliens had carried the case into the prison cell, probably intending to take another prisoner with them, but then the quicksilver creatures had rushed away, as if distracted or alarmed. Perhaps the arrival of the strange little girl?
Anjea caught her breath with an idea. “Brindle, you think the systems still work in your encounter vessel?”
“They were functioning when the drogues grabbed me. But there’s a one-in-a-million chance someone could get over there alive, and another chance in a million that he could seal the chamber and bring it to proper pressure. And another chance in a million that anyone could escape drogue pursuit even if the systems all still worked.”
“If, if, if,” Anjea said. “Still sounds like better odds than waiting here for Dr. Hydrogue Frankenstein to come back.”
The new sarcophagus had small manipulating fields, and when the prisoners toyed with it, they found that a passenger inside had the ability to crudely guide the protective exoskeleton forward, up, and down.
“Maybe the hydrogues want us to take a walk around their city,” one of the prisoners suggested.
“Who knows what they’re thinking?” Robb countered. “Their minds are made of liquid crystal.”
“Well, mine isn’t—and I know what I’m thinking.” Before Robb could react, Anjea threw herself into the armored shell. “I’m getting out of here. I plan to make it to that encounter vessel. Wish me luck.”
“I should be the one to take the risk,” Robb said. “It’s my encounter vessel.”
“I’ll figure it out myself.”
“But how are you gonna come back for us?” cried one of the others.
They all knew that even if Anjea did manage to escape, get picked up, make it back to Earth, and convince the EDF