After they had discussed their plans once again, they saw the Riallna come down from the hill, bearing a breakfast of cheeses and fresh rolls filled with fruit.
They spread the food out into a circle and ate, watching one another in the morning light, and Maggie’s heart was full.
And Orick the bear ate his rolls with fruit, licking the jam from his upper lips so that his tongue almost wrapped around his snout.
Gallen and Maggie silently held hands as they ate, sharing secret glances. The Bock gathered down at the banks of the pool and stood with their toes stretching out into the water, while the Riallna washed their feet with a paste of nutrients.
And so it was that as they finished eating, a few meadowlarks began to sing, and Orick began to speak slowly. Maggie had always known that Orick wanted to be a priest, and she had imagined him as an ascetic, perhaps some monastic brother living in the woods. She’d never thought him to be one with any missionary tendencies, but he spoke softly to Ceravanne then of the things that were in his heart.
“You know,” he told her, “it hasn’t escaped my notice that you don’t have any proper churches here.”
“The Riallna have their temples, the Bock have their woods,” Ceravanne said. “And others build places to worship.”
“But what of Catholic churches?” Orick asked. “What of Christianity?”
“What is that?” Ceravanne asked. And Maggie suspected that because she respected the bear and saw him as a friend, she asked kindly, as if she were truly interested.
“I’ve had a mind to tell you about it,” Orick said, and then he told her of a young man named Jesus who, like her, sued for peace among mankind thousands of years ago, then gave his life for others. Orick told her how Jesus had died, betrayed by a friend, and how on the night before his death, he had broken bread and blessed wine, asking his disciples to always do this act in remembrance of his sacrifice.
Then, to Maggie’s surprise, the bear said, “Normally, I don’t have proper authority from the Church to do these things, but I think that they must be done. Today we go into Moree.” And with that apology he began singing the words to the Sacrament, and he took some rolls and passed them around, and Gallen fetched a skin of wine, and each of them took it.
Orick then gave a brief prayer, asking God to bless them on their journey and deliver them from harm, and Maggie felt the solemnity of the occasion.
After the sacrament they each made final preparations for the battle. Gallen checked his weapons, while the Bock stood gazing at the sky. Ceravanne laid her pack on the grass. She reached into it, put on a gray silk cloak with a deep hood. Then she unwrapped her mantle and put it on her head, its golden ringlets falling down her shoulders. Last of all, she pulled up the hood to her robe, to conceal her mantle.
Maggie saw that Orick was shaken, pacing nervously, but Ceravanne rumpled the coarse black hair on the back of his neck, and whispered, “Now, let us go, but not in haste, and not in fear. If we go to our deaths, remember that it is but a brief sleep.”
Those words held no comfort for Gallen, Orick, or Maggie. Though Maggie had a mantle herself, it could not save her, and Gallen already had Tallea’s memories stored in his own mantle. And Orick looked resigned. Though he had his faith to sustain him, Maggie knew he hungered for love and a life of peace, yet the road to any greater reward led down this dark path.
And suddenly Ceravanne caught her breath as she realized that what she had meant as a comforting word was only a cruel reminder to the others, since none had their memories recorded, none of them could be reborn, as Ceravanne could.
Orick growled lightly, and bounded forward to the aircar, followed by Ceravanne, the Bock, Gallen, and Maggie.
Maggie went to the cockpit, did a manual system’s check, and as she did so, Gallen came in behind her, and she slid back up out of the pilot’s seat, into his arms. They held each other for a long time. Gallen kissed her, brushing her forehead with his lips, and she leaned into him. “Promise me,” he whispered fervently, “that once you drop me off, you’ll get the transport away quickly. I don’t want you sitting there, a target for the dronon’s walking fortresses.”
“I may be brave, but I’m not stupid.” Maggie smiled up at him sweetly. “And you promise me-come back alive?”
“I guarantee, I plan to grow old with you,” Gallen whispered. Then they kissed so long and tenderly that Maggie was sure that the others must be getting impatient. Gallen was slow to leave, to close the bulkhead door behind him.
Maggie strapped herself into the pilot’s seat and had her mantle silently radio the ship’s AI, link intelligence with it so that the ship would know her commands before she could articulate them.
Their flight time would be short, a swift hop at low altitudes over the ocean, with the ship’s antidetection equipment operating at full capacity. Once they reached the Telgood Mountains, the ship’s intelligent missiles would fire, taking out their primary targets, if those were still available, or taking the secondary or tertiary targets that Maggie had already chosen.
And so they slipped quietly over the ocean for the next few minutes as Maggie’s mantle displayed the view ahead. The sky was clear until they reached the coasts of Babel, and there a thin line of dark clouds showed on the horizon, an approaching thunderstorm.
“Buckle in back there and prepare for rapid descent,” Maggie called to the others.
The aircar dropped low and screamed over the hills and valleys just above the treetops at mach 9. The clouds and rain obscured her vision out the windows, so Maggie relied completely on the head-up holo that her mantle displayed. The holo showed the Telgoods looming ahead, a line of bony white teeth, and Maggie fired her smart missiles, then opened her eyes and looked out the front windows to verify that they left. The missiles streaked ahead of her on antigrav, leaving a flash as the air around them became superheated.
The aircar whirled, dove through some narrow canyons, and the AI fired a burst on the incendiary cannons, blasting a lone wingman from its path. And suddenly the aircar seemed to leap in the air as it cleared a mountain, then lurched as it plummeted toward Moree.
“Four targets hit, three destroyed-” the AI flashed a message on her screen as soon as the ship had visuals. The head-up holo displayed the scene-three of the five dome-shaped spaceships going up in mushroom clouds. A fourth had been hit, but had not exploded. Maggie looked out the windows through a heavy rain, saw the trunk of fiery mushroom cloud begin billowing up as she passed, an incredible inferno. They were diving right through the periphery of its flames.
Two dronon walking fortresses had taken fire from the explosions. One was flying apart, huge metallic chunks spewing out in odd angles as its munitions blew. The other had flames boiling out its cargo hold and was trying to retreat from the white inferno that had once been a starship. The dronon walking fortress left a trail of flames and burning debris as it crawled away, looking for all the world like some great black spider in its death throes.
A smart missile was coming in from directly ahead, launched from one of the intact walking fortresses ten kilometers to the south, and Maggie almost subconsciously fired both plasma cannons, detonating the missile in midair so that a brilliant flash blinded her for a moment.
Their aircar was still dropping toward ground-toward the perpendicular rocky cliff face where the Harvester’s chambers should be-when the AI flashed a message in red letters through the head-up holodisplay: “Permission to abort mission?”
Maggie looked about desperately at the scene below, wondering why the AI would ask that, wondering why one of her missiles hadn’t taken out the Tekkar’s airfield instead of a starship, its secondary target. She looked toward the dun-colored fields below and saw the reason: none of the Tekkar’s military transports were on the field. They’d all been moved.