The Ashes of Worlds - Kevin J. Anderson [176]
Jess knew that Rusa’h must be the wentals’ main target.
Cesca understood as well. “If we can defeat him here, then there will be no need to go to Ildira. He chose this battlefield. Now let’s turn it against him.”
Sparking a deep and implacable determination among the wentals, the two directed their water ship up toward the central ellipsoid. Rusa’h led his charge to find and destroy the Mage-Imperator among the numerous Solar Navy warliners, but so far he had been unsuccessful.
A sudden intense turmoil occurred from below, though — different from the battle above. He could feel what was about to emerge. Cesca looked at him, startled. “Hydrogues.”
Hydrogues, the wentals said inside his mind. They will fight here.
Jess could not curb his surge of anger and disbelief. “The drogues will turn on us! It’s like letting loose a wolf to fight a mad dog.”
The wentals, though, responded with a firm confidence Jess did not feel. We will keep them chained.
When the clouds parted, a large armada of spiked spheres shot into the open, bright skies — dozens, and then dozens more. And tumbling along with them, drawn up by the warglobes, came the small derelict. From inside the diamond globe, Osira’h used her communication systems. “The hydrogues are outraged that the faeros have come to their world. I convinced them to help turn the battle.”
“I don’t believe this,” Cesca said.
We are warrior wentals. We learned to fight from you, said the voice inside him. We learned to consider alternatives. The hydrogues do not battle for us, or for humanity, but for themselves. They fight only to destroy faeros, nothing more.
“I compelled them, as I did before,” Osira’h said. “They have accepted limited terms.”
The wentals will contain them.
Jess was not entirely reassured, but he accepted the wentals’ confidence. Osira’h had acted independently, and the water elementals believed there was some advantage to unleashing the deep-core aliens, at least for the moment.
Bottled up in the high-pressure depths, the hydrogues had stewed in their own anger for far too long. Now, with elemental chains loosened, numerous warglobes flew upward. Their abiding and ancient loathing of the fiery elementals far exceeded their relatively new resentment for humans. They chose their targets, and they did not waver.
Diamond spheres rocketed into the flaming ellipsoids, unleashing skittery patterns of blue electrical bolts. The fireballs pulsed and struggled, and some of the weaker ones diminished like candle flames extinguished by the wind.
But even as the warglobes raced into the clash, tendrils of wental vapor clung to them in a strange symbiosis. When the hydrogue spheres approached a group of fireballs, the sentient mists expanded and lifted up in filmy nets to snarl the faeros.
The hydrogues spewed their shattering cold weapons in icy white ripples that weakened and then extinguished the fireballs. Previously, the warglobes had used those terrible frigid blasts to lay waste to the worldforest, and Jess felt his stomach roiling as he observed them now. He doubted the deep-core aliens had any interest in earning forgiveness or redemption.
But they were certainly wreaking a lot of unexpected destruction here.
As the faeros fought back, however, one of the warglobes exploded, its shattered diamond hull raining back down into the clouds. Several other hydrogue ships were wiped out as well, but more of them emerged from the depths.
“Jess, we have to reach the faeros incarnate,” Cesca said.
He shook free of his anger. “You’re right — let’s keep our eyes on the target.”
Intent again, Jess drove their water sphere up into the path of Rusa’h’s blazing ellipsoid. He could sense that although the other avatar was shaken by the sudden turnabout, he would not back away. He continued to dart among the Solar Navy ships, intent on finding the Mage-Imperator and destroying any