“While I was alone in the dark on the Kolpraxa, swallowed up by that suffocating nothingness, I remembered the planet Orryx and Tal Bria’nh.” He turned his reddened gaze to his sister. “Now I know the story is true.”
“Orryx?” Nira asked.
Osira’h said, “It was the first Ildiran planet to succumb to the Shana Rei, ages ago, a fertile place with a strong population, but the Shana Rei spread out from dark nebulae and covered the entire planet with a black shroud that absorbed all light. When Mage-Imperator Xiba’h sensed Orryx being engulfed, he rushed a septa of warliners to fight for them.”
Gale’nh interrupted his sister’s story. “They vanished into the blackness.”
“The Mage-Imperator commanded his engineers and scientists to develop new weapons. A brave military commander named Tal Bria’nh rushed to Orryx with even more warliners and a hundred new sun bombs, which produced as much purifying brightness as a star. They burned the Shana Rei like acid, searing away the black shroud that surrounded the planet, but even the light from a hundred sun bombs eventually dwindled. The Shana Rei attacked again. They swallowed up Tal Bria’nh’s entire cohort, painted the whole world black.
“When more Ildiran ships arrived, they found all the warliners wrapped in cocoons of shadow. Tal Bria’nh and his brave crew were literally smothered in darkness.”
“Like the Kolpraxa,” Nira whispered.
Gale’nh said, “I can imagine their last moments, Tal Bria’nh alone on the command nucleus, suffocating in the dark. That was all I could think of as I drifted and waited. How long did he survive before his own soulfire was extinguished?”
Nira held on to the worldtree, closing her eyes, listening to Gale’nh speak and moving her lips as she repeated his words into the verdani network. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could have been there to help you.”
Gale’nh hardened. “No, Mother. No one should have been there. I encountered the Shana Rei, I lost my crew. I lost a fundamental part of myself, and I can’t even remember it.” Gale’nh’s eyes widened, and he turned abruptly to her. “Wait…” He let the word trail off.
Osira’h pressed closer. “Did you remember something?”
The worldtrees stirred, their fronds rustling.
Gale’nh seemed surprised by what he had just realized. “The Shana Rei came back, not because they wanted war, not because they wish to attack us.” He shook his head as if trying to grasp an intangible thing just beyond his reach. “The Shana Rei are afraid.”
SEVENTY-NINE
TOM ROM
After purchasing medical records of the Ildiran genetic misfits on Kuivahr, Tom Rom stopped at the Ulio transfer station to stock up on supplies and refill his ship’s expanded tanks with stardrive fuel.
When he finished at Ulio, his funds were depleted, but he didn’t have to worry about money, and Zoe Alakis never begrudged a single credit he spent. Nevertheless, he would have to go to the trouble of obtaining more prisdiamonds. He set course for Vaconda.
He knew his ship inside and out. The vessel had been built to his specifications, modified, reinforced, and expanded over the years. It had emergency fuel reserves, triple backups of computerized navigation systems, spare parts, and a separate self-contained quarantine laboratory with its own generator systems and independent in-system engines; the quarantine chamber could be used as an evacuation pod under extreme circumstances. Tom Rom did not require luxuries, but he needed the room and facilities to do his work.
He was a self-sufficient man who spent much of his time imagining how things could go wrong and preparing for the eventuality. Tom Rom was not paranoid; he was diligent and reliable.
During the flight, he noted some anomalous flickers on his long-range scans, but he found nothing, so he recalibrated the sensors.
As he orbited Vaconda, the continents looked pale and ghostly, covered with lichentree forests, tall spiky growths of lavender and white. According to legal Hansa paperwork, which had been grandfathered into Confederation rules, the forest watchstation on Vaconda belonged entirely to Zoe Alakis. He supposed that on other parts of the continent there could be outlaws or squatters. Nobody cared. The planet was basically uninhabited.
More than twenty years ago, he had incinerated a swath of forest, per Zoe’s request. Together, they let the fires rage uncontrollably until nature itself shut down the blaze, but in only a few years, the fecund jungle had subsumed the area, erasing any remaining scar. Now there was no hint of the watchstation where Zoe and her father had made their home for so long.
Even without familiar landmarks, Tom Rom knew the exact location. In the years since, he had returned here often to retrieve prisdiamonds, and had deposited tremendous fortunes in numerous planetary banks in Zoe’s name.
When she decided that her goal in life was to create a disease library and research installation, Tom Rom had set aside all the funds she could possibly need. Following in her father’s footsteps, she offered to partner with other research teams, join her wealth to major facilities, but they took her investment, put her name on a new research wing, and then politely—then less politely—told her to go away and let “professionals” handle the important matters.
They viewed Zoe as a backward, socially maladjusted girl who had grown up on a wilderness planet, little different from a feral child. She was innocent of commercial and academic politics, accepted promises at their face value (Tom Rom was her only example of a man who was true to his word), and she did not fit in well among them. She funded huge projects that were swallowed up in bureaucracies and regulations, with results lost in delays or obscurity. Other people took the fruits of her teams’ research and called it proprietary information that became lost in a deep gravity well of “development” and “profitability assessments.” When she tried to take the discoveries she had funded, they shut her out, ousted her from their boards, but graciously kept her name on the research wing she had built.
Afterward, Zoe abandoned all thoughts of kindness and cooperation. She decided to do it herself, her own way, with all results under her control.
In preparing to build Pergamus on her own terms, she came to regret her impetuous decision to burn down the forest watchtower station along with all records and research her father had compiled during his years on Vaconda. When Zoe poured out her feelings of guilt over destroying her father’s work, Tom Rom had stared at her, his expression flat. Finally, he admitted that out of a sense of obligation to Adam, he had backed up her father’s data, preserving it despite her instructions. She had wept, then thrown her arms around him. Tom Rom could not recall ever having been so moved.
Zoe spared no expense in setting up her complete private facility on Pergamus—and even that depleted only a small fraction of her wealth. She wanted it, and Tom Rom made it happen. He arranged to build the domed research facilities and orbital research stations for her. Zoe tracked down the best scientists in a variety of fields—medicine, biochemistry, genetics—and sent Tom Rom to approach them discreetly.
Her first order of business, of course, had been to develop a cure for Heidegger’s Syndrome. It felt like a twist of the knife when the cure did not even prove to be difficult, once researchers applied resources and time to the problem. If only someone had been able to do that for her father…
While she lived, her work would be her own obsession, her own masterpiece. She agreed to share all her results after her eventual death, not because she was generous, but because she didn’t care what happened afterward. She had no interest in fame, or history, or making any mark. She didn’t have to explain her priorities to anyone.