Veriasse had rarely seen Everynne angry. Never had he heard her say an unkind word, yet he had to remind himself that emotionally she was still a child, and he had to make allowances for that. “Everynne, don’t torture yourself this way. No good will come of it.”
“I’m not torturing myself,” she said. “You’re torturing me. You’re killing me! “ She rolled away from him and began weeping.
Veriasse wanted to say something to comfort her, but there was so little he could say. At last he whispered, “If you want to walk away from this, then tell me, and I swear I will do everything in my power to get you home safely. If this is what you want, we can raise armies, take our keys and open the gates. People everywhere love you. They would fight if you asked them to, and in a matter of days I swear I could raise an army of billions to fight in your behalf. They would scream across the worlds in a rampage of blood and fire. Terrors could be unleashed on a thousand worlds. If this is what you want.”
He did not have to tell her that the losses from such a war would be immeasurable. The dronon would begin destroying those worlds they had already captured. The images of mushroom clouds were still fresh in his mind from this afternoon, and images from the terror-burned world of Bregnel lay in his mind like a black clot, but this war would be far worse than anything that had occurred before. The dead would pile up quickly, mountains of corpses so vast that no one could ever begin to count them.
But Everynne already knew that. She could not turn away from so many in need. She lay crying, and said at last, “Hold me, Father. Please?”
Veriasse put his arm over her shoulder and snuggled against her back. She gripped his hand, hard. He held her until she stopped shaking, nearly an hour, and at last he whispered, “Are you all right? Do you feel better?”
“I’m all right,” she said firmly. “I just wish it were over. I was frightened for a minute.”
“There’s my brave girl,” Veriasse said, and he lay with his body cupped around hers, smelling the sweet scent of her hair. After awhile she began to breathe deeply, as if she would soon fall asleep, and he wondered about Maggie and Gallen. Though they had been in the dead hive city for a long time, he reminded himself that it was a huge place. He imagined that they might keep exploring for hours. He gave himself permission to sleep, and soon fell into a fitful dream.
Maggie rushed through the dead dronon hive city, feeling wild and free. Her nerves jangled in anticipation, and Gallen ran behind her. They would meet the dronon soon, and she fully expected to die, but for the moment, the mantle she wore wanted images of this city. It drove her forward in a mad rush through the beast, gleaning images of an engine room where monstrously large hydraulics assemblies had once driven the massive legs. She studied the power system and the exhaust nacelles.
Though the city was dead and much of the equipment had been scavenged, the dronon took great care of their equipment; they had even protected the abandoned machinery by coating it with oil.
The heavy odor of rusting iron and dust filled the city. The corridors were dark. Wind whistled through the hallways high overhead.
For an hour Maggie and Gallen studied the engine rooms, then found what could only have been egg warmers in a huge nursery. But Maggie’s mantle drove her on, ever curious. It fed its discoveries to her in a constant barrage, so that she felt as if she would burst at the wonder of it all.
She ran laughing into the bowels of the city, and Gallen ran beside her, bearing the torch, sometimes touching her shyly. At last they reached a storage chamber and walked down a long corridor. Various implements of unknown intent had been piled along the walls, the machinery of a forgotten age. Enormous capacitor coils rose up for ten meters, sitting like huge thimbles. Spare legs for the hive city were strung from the ceiling. Bits of round, antique flying message pods lay heaped in a pile, and Maggie’s mantle warned her to fill her pockets with them so she could disassemble them later. Things that looked like dronon heads made of glass-with three sets of compound eyes-lay in a heap, as if in some distant past the dronon had tried creating androids. Or perhaps, Maggie wondered, there were even now dronon-shaped androids running about in the hive cities. But her mantle whispered that if such things existed, they had never been seen on any world.
Much of what she saw her mantle could understand-bits of cabling, servomotors, a shelf heaped with mechanical brains, outdated egg-warming chambers. These things she would explain to Gallen. Yet much of it was equally mysterious to her. Most of the dronon equipment was bulky, five times as heavy as anything a human would use. The dronon seemed to prefer their machinery to be durable rather than lightweight or convenient.
In one vast chamber, they found what could have only been a spaceship. It was a small vessel, eighty feet long, forty wide, shaped like a Y. Maggie didn’t know if she could fly it.
She opened the hatch, went inside, and her mantle whispered to her as she studied the engines. She told Gallen, “This has a gravity-wave drive. We couldn’t take it out of the solar system. Still, I’ll bet it’s fast.” She went to the control board. The chairs before the panel were saddle-shaped affairs meant to hold a dronon body, and various foot pedals on the floor looked too intricate for any being with less than four legs to operate. The hand controls were set on a dashboard nearly five feet away and could only be manipulated by something with long arms. Maggie grinned, realizing that this must be an ancient dronon warship, for only the vanquishers with their long battle arms could have worked those controls.
She was giddy with excitement, grinning in wonder. She laughed, then laid back on one of the saddle-shaped chairs and stretched. Gallen set the torch in a groove on the ship’s control panel, then turned and looked at her, perplexed. “I’ve never seen you in this kind of mood before.”
“What kind of mood?”
“So ecstatic. So free.”
Maggie laughed. “That’s because I’ve never been happy or free before,” and she realized that there was more truth in it than she would have dared admit to herself.
“Your smile looks good on you,” Gallen said. He swung his leg over the saddle, sat facing her, his legs wrapped around hers. He lay back with his arms folded behind his head. His half-closed eyes looked tired, and the flames from the torch flickered, showing only half of his face. She felt electric, wanted to kiss him now, make love, but Gallen only studied her a moment.
Maggie’s mantle whispered for her to get up, look deeper into the storage chambers. She took it off and held it in one hand, not wanting to be distracted by its insistent promptings.
Gallen leaned forward, stroked her jawbone tenderly with his fingers, and kissed her. It was an odd kiss, she thought. It wasn’t insistent with desire, nor was it one of the guilty little pecks that Gallen had given her back home. It was slower than dripping honey and tasted just as sweet. It spoke to her, saying, “I love you just as you are, and right now I am content with that.”
They held each other and kissed for a few minutes, then Gallen leaned back again, pillowing his head with his hands.
“Damn you, Gallen O’Day,” Maggie said. “It took you long enough.”
“I suppose it did,” Gallen smiled, self-satisfied. “When we get back to Tihrglas, will you marry me?”
Of course I’ll marry you, she thought. But then her heart fell. “I’m not going back to Tihrglas.”
“Not going back?” Gallen asked.
“Why would I want to go back? What’s for me there? You said it yourself not a moment ago. In all my life, you’ve never seen me so happy. Gallen, how can I begin to explain this-right now, I want to tear this city apart,” she said, waving toward the ship and the dronon city around her, “and discover exactly how it works. Like those little dronon message pods. Until two hundred years ago, that was the only form of communication the dronon used. They hadn’t discovered radio waves at all, until we showed them. The pods have miniature antigravity drives in them, and no technician that I’ve ever heard of has disassembled one of the buggers and figured out how it worked. Gallen, I’ve got a pocket full of dronon technology, and right now I feel as rich as can be. It’s amazement and discovery. Here I’m free to learn and grow. I can’t get that on Tihrglas. Pick any other world we’ve been to. I don’t care which. I could go back and be happy, but you’ll never see me smile again on Tihrglas.”