Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [69]
Before engaging the stardrive, she paused to take a final glance back at Relleker. Her sensors picked up moving objects, large ones approaching at high velocity. From nearby Crenna?
The Curiosity lurched as Rlinda cut the engines, bouncing her passengers around, but she wasn’t ready to sound the alarm yet. Grim-faced, Rlinda increased magnification on the images, and groaned. She had seen this sort of thing before—too damned many times. While the ship drifted, she made out a stream of diamond-hulled warglobes swooping into the Relleker system like glistening buckshot. “Holy crap, look at them come!”
When they’d left the dead Crenna system, Rlinda’s ship had faced the victorious hydrogue warglobes. The deep-core aliens had just vanquished their faeros enemies in the sun, and the diamond warships had hovered in front of the Voracious Curiosity. Rlinda still didn’t know how she had escaped destruction then, but she didn’t want to test her luck again.
The stream of warglobes came from the high, cold reaches above the planetary orbits. She counted fourteen of them, a massive assault force. Her heart sank. They must have traveled to the next sun after Crenna to fight the faeros in Relleker’s star. If the results of the struggle were the same as before, within a week or so this system would be cold and dead as well, uninhabitable.
Rlinda didn’t usually think unkind thoughts, but she wondered how smug Governor Pekar would feel when she had to evacuate her entire population and go hat in hand in search of help.
But the warglobes did not head for Relleker’s sun. Instead, they flew toward the planet itself. According to the Curiosity ’s long-range sensors, the enemy ships were descending directly above the main human settlement. The deep-core aliens knew exactly what they were doing.
Within moments, Governor Pekar squawked into the comm system, sounding a general alarm and calling out for help. “Warglobes are attacking! They have begun to open fire.” The governor’s words cut off with a scream, and Rlinda heard an explosion in the distance. “Mayday! Help! We need an immediate evacuation!”
Rlinda restarted the Curiosity ’s engines, turned about, and raced back toward Relleker, her heart pounding. She didn’t know what she could do. Already overloaded, she could take no more people aboard. Her decks were full, her corridors crowded with far more evacuees than the Curiosity had ever been meant to carry. Simply landing and taking off again would be a major undertaking. Without a green priest, she had no way even of calling for help in time.
The warglobes swept over the main colony, unleashed their electric-blue weapons, then dumped icewaves that crackled and shattered all trees and buildings and any humans who were in the way.
Having seen the attack from one of the observation screens, Crenna’s mayor, Lupe Ruis, stumbled into her cockpit. His round face was florid. “What’s going on down there? Don’t we have to help them?”
“Tell me how, and I’ll do it.” Together, they listened to the incessant screams. The diamond-hulled warglobes continued to unleash their fury, hammering away at the settlement, ripping up every structure. “In fact—” Rlinda shifted course and headed at an extreme angle away from the direction in which the warglobes had come, then shut all her systems down to drift without producing an energy signature. “I don’t want the drogues to notice us when they get bored with their attack down there.”
“But those people on Relleker...they helped us. We have to—”
She looked at him with her large brown eyes. “I’m not having a snit, Mayor. And I’m not just trying to save my pretty hide. You know I’ve put my butt on the line for every last one of you. I just can’t think of any way to assist them.”
Her scans were at the highest magnification, but thankfully she couldn’t see the devastation the warglobes continued to wreak down below. The hydrogues kept pounding and pounding.
The destruction of Boone’s Crossing,