“Who?” Admiral Sinclaire demanded.
“It looks like that yacht, sir, the Golden Pearl,” the tactical officer replied quickly as his fingers stabbed angrily at his console, “but I’m not getting an IFF response, no datalink, and no voice, either. She’s not responding at all.”
“What’s she targeting?”
“Don’t know, sir. There aren’t any Kreelan ships in that quadrant.” Pause. “The torpedoes are headed right into the sun.”
What the Devil? Sinclaire thought. He had just gotten the fleet back into some kind of order, strange as it was, and he was not about to let things fall back into chaos, especially with the Marine transports still en route back from the Kreelan moon.
He was about to ask something else when the comms officer suddenly shouted, “Fleet emergency broadcast, admiral!”
“On screen!” Sinclaire demanded immediately. He was shocked by what he saw.
“All ships, all ships, this is the Golden Pearl.”
“Jodi,” Nicole whispered, fighting to keep the tears of rage held in check at the sight of her friend’s mutilated face, guilt surging through her for abandoning Jodi in her hour of need.
“This is Admiral Sinclaire aboard Sandhurst. Go ahead, commander.”
“Sir,” Jodi said thickly, obviously in excruciating pain, “you’ve got to get the fleet away from here as fast as you can. You’re all in great danger.”
“Commander, the Kreelans have given us time–”
“It’s not the Kreelans, sir,” she interrupted him, “it’s the weapons General Thorella, who’s aboard this ship, just launched. You should be tracking two torpedoes, heading into the sun.” A nod to Sinclaire from the tactical officer. Two maroon streaks were rapidly making their way across the holo image of this part of the system to the star at its center. “I think they’re fitted with kryolon warheads.” She paused in the sudden silence that enveloped Sandhurst’s bridge.
“Thorella launched these things?” Sinclaire managed to say with what felt like someone else’s tongue, so shocked was he to be hearing this. “On whose authority?”
She gave him a bitter smile through blood-caked lips. “His own, of course,” she rasped. “He’s never needed anyone else’s.”
“I am coming to get you, Jodi,” Nicole said suddenly. She had made a quick mental calculation from the tactical display. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Nicole,” Tony said from behind her, putting a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off angrily.
Jodi shook her head slowly, wincing at the pain the movement caused. “You can’t risk it, Nicole. There’s no time. And… I don’t think I’ll last that long now, anyway.” A bitter smile.
Sinclaire could feel the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Kryolons, of all things. Could it be true? More to the point, could he discount the possibility? And what could he do about it? Run like hell, he told himself, a shudder rippling up his spine. “Mister Zhirinovski!” he bellowed to the acting fleet operations officer.
“Sir?”
“How much longer to jump?”
“We should be ready in seventeen minutes, sir.” Five assault transports were still coming in; their carriers would jump as soon as they were aboard, and Sandhurst would follow them out, the last human ship to leave. The only ones now being left behind would never be coming home, anyway, their drives dead, their life support failing. There were simply not enough able ships left to rescue all the stragglers.
Sinclaire turned on his tactical officer. “How long before the torpedoes reach the corona?”
“Just under two minutes, sir,” he replied, noting that the torpedoes had now run out of fuel and were coasting on toward their target. “If what I’ve heard about the kryolons is right, we’ll have about fifteen minutes from initiation of the kryolon reaction – that’ll be upon detonation in the corona – to the first stellar debris reaching us here.” He looked helpless for a moment. “But that’s just a guess.”
“Better than nothing, lad,” Sinclaire said quickly. “Zhirinovski, you’ve got ten minutes to get the other ships out of here. Tell the transports to push it past the limit. If they’re not back aboard by then, they get left behind.” Five minutes was not much of a safety margin, but it was all he could give them.
“Aye, sir!”
“Captain Jorgensen,” Sinclaire spoke into the comm link to the ship’s bridge, “we’ve got a problem.”
“Sir?” the captain answered immediately, her attention riveted on the old sailor’s face in the screen.
“Have Sandhurst ready for her jump in ten minutes, captain. The Kreelan sun may be… unstable. We’re pushing up the timetable.”
“Aye, admiral,” Jorgensen answered. “We’re ready any time, sir.”
Sinclaire nodded.
“What about her?” Nicole demanded quietly, nodding toward Jodi’s image. Her eyes were closed, head down.
“She’s right, lass,” Sinclaire said as gently as he could. “You couldn’t get there in time to help her. You’d only die, too. Perhaps… keeping her company might be best. No one likes to go out of this world alone, and Lord knows she’s earned what little comfort any of us can provide.”
Nicole nodded in resignation, now welcoming Braddock’s arm around her shoulder. But she looked up suddenly at Jodi’s voice.
“Nicole,” she said in a whisper, “It’s Thorella. I think he’s coming…”
Fifty-Nine
Reza did not have to see what was taking place throughout the Empire; he could sense it. He was spiritually reconnected with Her Children, with the Bloodsong again echoing in his veins. He could again sense Her will, and knew that a great Change was about to take place, something that would alter his people forever and take them to the next step in their evolution as a species. Wherever they were, warriors and clawless ones waited for the rapture that they knew was about to come, only moments away now. Even the hapless males that had been evacuated from the nurseries knew that something was happening, for while they were witless creatures with but a single function in life, they, too, were bound to Her will. And in their own way, they felt the tremor in the life force that bound them all to one another, that was the endless thread of life that the Kreela called the Way. While they did not realize it in their blissful ignorance, they had been redeemed, and the glory and honor that had once been theirs was about to be again in the new form that was soon to come.
But Reza’s mind was yet troubled, for there remained one task for him to complete. He did not have to ask his Empress for what he desired, for in Her great wisdom, She already knew.
“I know of the one you seek,” She told him. “Do this thing and return to Me, my love. For our time here grows short; the new dawn is soon upon us.”
“I shall not be long, my Empress,” he replied, his hand fastened about the handle of the ancient sword Tesh-Dar had once given him.
“Let it be done.”
And Reza vanished.
Jodi’s plan would have worked completely had she only remembered to turn off the display monitors on the drones like the one that had brought her to engineering. She had finally cut Thorella off from accessing any of the other systems on the ship. But she had forgotten that one little thing.
Thorella was laying on his back, his head and shoulders buried in the ship’s central computer core in a vain attempt to figure out what was ailing the Pearl when one of the idiot machines came up to him, intent on dislodging this odd parasite from its electronic parent. Thorella kicked at it in fury, not understanding or caring what the machine was trying to do, and accidentally turned up the volume control on the machine’s internal voice relay.