Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [23]
Sweat beads appeared on the outside of the water-and-pearl vessel, transmitted through the armored liquid hull. The droplets grew larger and thicker until they flew off like silver bullets into the restless storm layers.
We can calm the turbulence, dampen the disrupted weather, and tame Golgen again. Our wental essence will survive.
“You mean you’ll occupy an entire hydrogue world?”
Not completely, but we will be here. Already, wental energy seeps through the clouds, questing up and down to fill the ruined heart of this planet. There are no longer any hydrogues here, and we will disrupt their transgates so they can never return.
“Now I know why my Guiding Star brought me here.”
Golgen is safe. You may direct your Roamers to bring their skymines here again and gather all the ekti they desire.
Jess’s heart leaped. A safe planet for skymining! “I am due to meet with my water bearers soon, and together we will spread the word.”
Chapter 10—TASIA TAMBLYN
This wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she signed up for the Earth Defense Forces. Not at all. After her brother Ross was killed, Tasia had sneaked away from her family at the ice mines on Plumas in order to fight the hydrogues. The hydrogues. She wanted to be in the thick of things, right in the middle of the war. Isolated on Mars, though, watching over a bunch of bottom-of-the-barrel students, she was as far from the conflict as she could possibly be.
Yanked from her Manta command, Tasia had been sent here to run kleebs through training exercises. What a waste! Admiral Willis insisted it wasn’t a demotion, though the new assignment was obviously intended to keep her out of the way while the Eddies tilted at windmills in an infuriatingly unnecessary crackdown against Roamer clans.
Standing alone on the red rock outcropping, Tasia made a disgusted sound into her suit helmet, after making sure the comm was off. General Lanyan’s Guiding Star must be a black hole...or a whole cluster of black holes, pulling him in a dozen different directions—all of them wrong! Wrong enemy, wrong priority, wrong war.
It hadn’t been easy for her to leave her clan in the first place, to leave all the Roamers and her way of life, but she’d done it to fight against the monstrous aliens that preyed upon Roamer skymines—including Ross’s. She wasn’t like one of the shiny-eyed new cadets from Earth who joined the Eddies because they thought it was glamorous, or because the uniform would help them get laid. Tasia had thrown her not-insubstantial skills in with the EDF because she wanted to hurt the drogues.
The Roamer clans were not timid—hell, they lived in places that would have made most Hansa members wet their environment suits!—but the loose confederation of families kept no organized military force. If Tasia wanted to fight the drogues, then she had to do it with the EDF. Their goals coincided with her own. Supposedly.
Though she had served faithfully, no one had forgotten her roots. Since Roamers were considered hostiles, Tasia had been pulled to the sidelines, where she set up mock surface battles, guided raw recruits on high-atmospheric drops, and drilled them on tactical exercises in the classroom. Waiting in her bulky and uncomfortable EDF-issue environment suit, she stood facing the mock combat area on the rusty surface of Mars. She had chosen a high vantage from which she could watch the teams. She had deposited them out in the tangled canyons of Labyrinthus Noctis, the “Labyrinth of Night.” The troops marched according to coordinated plans, like two sports teams vying for a championship.
At her side, her compy EA stared in the same direction she did; Tasia couldn’t tell if the Listener model was actually seeing and absorbing details, or just imitating her owner.
Buzzing ramjet flyers soared through the thin Martian atmosphere, deploying a squadron of parachute troops that leaped out of cargo bays in the low Martian