The Devil's Heart - Carmen Carter [0]
Iconia was dead.
The planet itself would remain intact until its sun went nova, but the world he had known, the soft tissue of life rooted on the fragile mantle, had already been destroyed. Constant weapons bombardment had vaporized its shallow seas, incinerated its verdant plains, and eradicated all who had once inhabited its surface.
Barbarians.
Kanda Jiak swayed on his feet as yet another tremor rocked the Gateway chamber.
The station was shielded against detection and proof against even a direct photon blow, but the land itself was shifting under the impact of ceaseless explosions.
Could there be anything left worth attacking on Iconia, any city that had not been razed by the firestorms? Or was their hatred so fierce that they prolonged this holocaust out of sheer bloodlust?
After First Contact, the philosopher Senega had warned that a disparity in technologies could unsettle other races; she predicted that knowledge of Iconian superiority would foster fear and distrust; and as a final legacy before her death, she prophesied the final fatal connection between fear and the rage to destroy what could not be understood.
Demons of air and darkness, that is what they call us.
Ironically, after the diplomats failed to turn back the space-faring hordes gnawing at the edges of the Empire, the Gateways that inspired such superstitions had provided the ultimate salvation for the surviving Iconians.
Over the last few days, ten thousand of his people had slipped through narrow rips in the fabric of space; they and their descendants would build new homes on the remote outposts of Ikkabar, DiWahn, and Dynasia. Iconian language and culture would survive even if this world was pummeled into dust.
Now it was Jiak’s turn to cross the threshold.
He settled the weight of the Gem into the crook of his arm. In a room of gleaming metal panels, humming consoles, and the crackling blue energy of the Gatekey, this rough rock seemed strangely out of place, yet it had built this structure just as surely as the legions of architects, engineers, and technicians. The secrets of the entire universe were locked inside this ancient relic, and three generations of Iconians had only begun to coax out that knowledge.
Blue. Red. Blue. Jiak tapped out a familiar sequence on triangular buttons.
A jagged bolt of light shot out of the central control globe, forming a dancing umbilical cord to the narrow frame of an activated Gateway.
He scanned the cycle of shifting landscapes.
Three habitable worlds were open to him, yet his final choice meant nothing to him; all were primitive compared to Iconia.
Farewell.
Jiak stepped forward, and through.
No! This is wrong!
On the other side, the blare of a red sun seared his eyes, and a gust of dry, heated air sucked the moisture from his lungs. He sank deep into the ground as shifting grains of sand gave way beneath his feet; his weight had doubled under the force of a heavier gravity.
This desert world was not of his choosing, and he could not survive in this harsh climate.
“Save me!”
For the past three decades, the Gem had been his talisman. He stroked the stone in supplication, but in the midst of this blazing oven it had turned ice cold.
Jiak collapsed onto the ground. The Gem fell from his weakened grasp, and he watched it roll out of his reach.
“Betrayed,” he whispered hoarsely. “You have betrayed me. Why?”
Alone out of all the Iconians, Senega had called the Gem a curse rather than a blessing … the price of True Knowledge comes high … too high.
As he slipped toward death’s embrace, Jiak dreamed that his life was nothing but a mirage shimmering in another mind …
She cried out her fear of dying alone in the desert until her flailing arms wrapped themselves around the stone.
Not lost after all. Not dying.
She awakened enough to separate her own thoughts from Jiak’s identity, to remember that she was safe in her own bed on a planet called Atropos. Her covers were tangled about her feet, but the Gem’s heat warded off the chill night air seeping into her tent. With a sigh of relief,