The Ashes of Worlds - Kevin J. Anderson [162]
Finally, Crim put his foot down and told Caleb, “Enough of this, man. Get aboard the Aquarius — we’ve got places to go, wentals to deliver, wars to win!”
After boarding the ship, Caleb took one last look at the rough, frozen landscape, and sealed the airlock hatch behind him. Nikko raised the Aquarius from the ice, keying in the next set of coordinates. Following their timetable, all the water bearers were supposed to rendezvous back at Theroc. Thanks to Jess and Cesca, the water elementals now held a spark of courage and determination as they rallied to stand against the faeros in ways they had never fought before.
Caleb hunched behind the two seats in the cockpit, relieved and excited now that they were finally on their way. Nikko accelerated away from the small frozen planetoid and headed out of the system.
“You sure you set the right course?” his father asked.
“I double-checked the nav calculations while we were waiting for Caleb to gather all his things.”
“Oh. So you had plenty of time then.”
Caleb made a sour face at him.
They hadn’t gone far, though, before the wentals on the Aquarius began to churn. Thrumming through the deck and bulkheads, straining inside the hold, the living water sent out a wordless signal of alarm. Nikko knew what it meant. He quickly sent out a sensor sweep.
Nine swollen fireballs shot toward them from the outskirts of the Jonah system. Having sensed the water elementals inside the ship, they meant to destroy the Aquarius and its precious cargo.
Caleb’s voice turned into a squawk of anger and fear. “I bet those are the same bastards that got my water tanker.”
Nikko frantically reversed course and looped around, squeezing everything he could from the Aquarius’s engines. The sudden acceleration smashed him and his father back against their seats, while Caleb stumbled and fell to the deck.
The ship raced away — and the fiery ellipsoids rushed after them. Nikko tried to guess the limits to which he could push the hybrid vessel. “I can’t engage the stardrives yet.”
“Then just dodge the fireballs, boy!” his father said.
“Sure, I’ll get right on that.” Nikko made another radical course change and dropped back down into the Jonah system. He could sense the wentals boiling and angry, and suddenly he knew what he had to do. The watery entities made him realize it. “I’m heading back to the planetoid.”
Caleb yelped, “Where are you planning to hide down there?”
“We’re not going to hide. The wentals want me to go there. They’re extremely agitated right now.”
“No kidding.” Crim’s teeth were clenched tightly together. “I thought you said you couldn’t communicate with them.”
“Not entirely, and not clearly, but . . . I can feel that it’s what they want.” He felt the anger of the wentals onboard, a pounding sense that was entirely different from their previous passivity.
The nine faeros poured after them, trailing fire. Nikko dodged like a maniac, but he didn’t see how the pool of wental water aboard his ship could fight off the fireballs pursuing them.
Nikko hurtled toward Jonah 12, which looked like no more than a speck of cosmic lint in the vast black emptiness. The planetoid glinted, its icy surface reflecting the distant sunlight. At the wentals’ insistence, Nikko calculated an orbital vector, swinging low. He would practically scrape his underbelly on the crater rims and the frozen mounds of low mountains. It was going to take some fancy flying.
He couldn’t imagine what the wentals had in mind, but he trusted them implicitly.
With the faeros careening in its wake, the Aquarius whisked like a swift-moving shadow across the rugged landscape. His father and Caleb were so frightened they didn’t even criticize his flying, and Nikko’s terror helped keep his concentration as focused as a laser. He didn’t know how much longer he could