Zhett served herself and passed the pot down to Howard, while Del took his place at the head of the table. The big man cleared his throat and called them to attention. “I want you to know I’ve figured out what’s best for my granddaughter.”
Zhett bit her tongue with a visible effort.
“She needs something more challenging than this distillery has to offer. At the Golgen skymine she could have met her potential, taken over a major clan business, but not here. It’s not grand enough for her. You know where she belongs?” Del looked over at Shareen.
“Do you want me to guess?” she asked.
He chuckled. “Shareen—and Howard, of course—belong at Fireheart Station!” He grinned into the sudden silence, waiting for the reaction.
Patrick ventured, “That’s where Kotto Okiah is working. There could be worse places. Unless she wants to go back to the private school on Earth?”
“No!” Shareen said quickly.
Del continued in a rush, not wanting anyone to steal his thunder. “I made arrangements. I’m going to escort Shareen, and Howard—if his parents agree—to Fireheart Station, make sure they arrive safely.” He turned to Zhett. “Meanwhile, my sweet, you and Marius Denva can handle the distillery operations.” He hooked his thumbs in his waistband and waited for someone to hand him a dish of food. “In fact, I may just stay at Fireheart for a while.”
Zhett remained skeptical. “You’re just handing your distillery over to us, Dad?”
Del sniffed. “You’re my daughter, and you lost your gainful employment when the Golgen skymine was destroyed. You can handle these operations better than I can.”
Patrick was too quick to agree. “Sounds like a good deal to me.” He intercepted Rex from throwing food on the deck.
“Good,” Del said. “It’s decided then.”
Shareen straightened in her chair. “Wait, nobody bothered to ask me.”
Her grandfather just rolled his eyes. “Oh? Are you telling me you don’t want to go to Fireheart Station?”
Shareen looked away, but not before she glimpsed the excitement on Howard’s face. “What I want is to be consulted beforehand.”
Del said, “All right, then I’m consulting you. You want to go to Fireheart Station?”
Shareen grinned as she imagined the giant glowing nebula, the processing stations, the huge experimental superconducting ring that Kotto Okiah was building, all the special films bathed in stellar radiation to be used in power blocks… and a thousand other innovative scientific projects that she hadn’t even heard of yet.
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Then you two better pack up. I’m ready to take you right away.”
ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE
EXXOS
Sealed inside the entropy bubble after the Shana Rei retreat from Theroc, Exxos and his black robots assessed their losses. Though each of them had synchronized their memory cores to a stable parallel with Exxos, the rate of attrition was highly disturbing. So many ships had been destroyed.
A thousand Klikiss robots had hidden in the ice moon of Dhula to wait for the return of their comrades, but that had not happened. They had suffered setback after setback in what should have been a glorious victory. The universe itself seemed to want to destroy them. Since their reemergence, Exxos had lost three quarters of his robots. As far as he knew, these were the last Klikiss robots in existence.
Accidentally encountering the Shana Rei might be their greatest opportunity, or their ultimate devastation. Now the black robots were trapped among them, allies or prisoners… depending on how well Exxos could convince the creatures of darkness. The Shana Rei were insane.
Now, as the shadow creatures retreated into the folds of the universe, Exxos could sense the fury and accompanying agony of the Shana Rei, and he knew that he was about to lose more of his comrades. No doubt about it. He hoped at least some of them would survive. And himself, at all costs.
Exxos had forged a dangerous alliance with the Shana Rei—it had seemed the only way to survive—and now the robots could not escape. At Theroc, the Shana Rei had insisted on killing the planet with their nightshade, while they remained at a safe distance from the still-formidable worldforest. That was much too time-consuming! Exxos and his robots were ready to attack any vestige of humans anywhere, and would have preferred a more direct and active role in destroying the world and the trees. But the Shana Rei had not been willing to engage in outright battle against the verdani. The worldforest was too powerful.
With the eclipse darkening and the landscape and sentient trees beginning to weaken and wither, the robots had satisfied themselves with destroying numerous human vessels: battleships, small fighters, larger cruisers. Exxos was able to test new modifications that the Shana Rei had implemented when they manifested the new robot ships.
Theroc should have died in the dark, thereby extinguishing part of the shrill agony the Shana Rei experienced from the verdani. The robots would have moved ahead with their own extermination agenda.
Exxos had never expected such a crushing defeat.
The Confederation military had caused no serious harm to the Shana Rei, and even the verdani battleships were not strong enough to tear apart the nightshade, but the faeros and the Ildiran sun bombs tore apart the Shana Rei’s plans and forced a full retreat. The creatures of darkness abandoned the matter they had ripped into existence, and their gigantic hex ships were heavily damaged.
The agony of the Shana Rei was now like jabbering madness, and Exxos could barely stand it. They lashed out, making indescribable sounds. And they needed something to blame.
“Your failure!” the nearest inkblot said. “You robots are not as powerful as you promised. The tree mind fought back, and now our pain is greater.”
Three black robots drifting in the emptiness of the entropy bubble were whisked upward, twirled about, and slowly ripped apart, dismantled piece by piece until they were nothing more than atoms.
The thunderous shadow voice continued. “And now the faeros have been awakened and turned against us—the fire that defeated us before!”
More black robots were separated from the group and surrounded by entropy bubbles. Exxos could still view his hapless comrades, but all transmission and communication cut off as soon as their bubbles sealed. The Shana Rei collapsed the entropy bubbles, and the robots winked out of existence.
They intended to erase all of the robots, one by one. “We are your allies!” Exxos insisted. “Without us, the Shana Rei would fight alone.” But he knew his bluff had failed.
“You created great pain,” said the pulsing black blot. “Additional pain.”
“The humans created great pain. The Ildirans create pain. The verdani and the faeros create pain. We robots are your only allies. Only we understand what is at stake.”
“You say you understand,” the Shana Rei said, and the central eye glowed brighter. “But you do not feel our pain. If you fail, we will make your robots feel our agony—a hundredfold!”
More robots were torn apart in front of Exxos, and he was helpless to prevent it.
He knew that the Shana Rei were afraid of the tremendous enemy that was awakening in the universe, the mysterious but powerful force that had driven them out of the dark corners of the cosmos.
Despite his fear, Exxos began to make contingency plans. Perhaps the black robots would have to find this other mysterious enemy, switch sides, and help destroy the Shana Rei.