Peter let the joke slide. “You and your ships couldn’t have arrived at a better time, Admiral.”

“Better late than never. Does this mean you accept us as part of the Confederation military?”

“Part of it? Most of it, I’d say. When you finish basic operations here, I want you to report to the Osquivel shipyards. That’s where most of our fleet is being constructed. You’ll have to work out the details with my current. commanding officers, I suppose you’d call them. Robb Brindle and Tasia Tamblyn.”

Willis chuckled. “Brindle and Tamblyn? I should have known they’d find themselves in the thick of things. Brindle’s father served as my exec, but he. elected not to change his employment at the present time.”

“You left him behind when your ships mutinied?” Estarra clarified.

Willis tried not to look scandalized by the Queen’s choice of words. “Some people are just a little slow to make the right choices.”

Estarra adjusted the baby tucked against her side, careful not to wake him; he had finally fallen asleep with salve on his burns. “Peter, if Admiral Willis is going to the Osquivel shipyards, she should take the hydrogue derelict with her. We need to get it to Kotto Okiah.”

He nodded. “Yes, it’s about time for that — although I’m glad it was here when we needed it.”

The silvery wental ship landed in the middle of the meadow, where droplets from the sparkling downpour continued to drip from the high trees. Jess Tamblyn and Cesca Peroni, crackling with internal wental energy, stepped through the flexible membrane of their vessel and stood glistening, coated with a permanent sheen of living water. They exchanged smiles of hard satisfaction.

“I’m glad we got your message,” Cesca said. “The green priests signaled this emergency loud and clear.”

Jess looked very pleased with himself. “We needed to show the wentals how they could fight. The faeros have already done them enough harm. It’s time for us to go on the offensive.”

A shadow crossed Cesca’s face. “The faeros will strike and burn everything they can: the Confederation, the Hansa, the wentals, the verdani —everything. That’s why we need everything to fight them.”

Jess added. “As you saw here, the wentals have truly awakened, and we’ll lead them.” He looked at the sky, watching the colorful sunset deepen. “I’ve already summoned my water bearers to help spread the wentals, as before. We met with Nikko Chan Tylar and his father in the Osquivel shipyards, and they are already taking theAquarius on new missions.”

A deeply satisfied expression overlaid Cesca’s anger. “The faeros don’t know it yet, but the rules have changed. They’re in for a surprise.”

31

Caleb Tamblyn

Cold. Lonely. Hopeless.

During the seemingly endless days he’d been stuck here, Caleb had thought of many words to describe his situation. Escape pods weren’t designed to be luxury accommodations, but at least he was alive. Still.

Stranded. Isolated. At his wits’ end.

When the faeros had closed in on the Tamblyn tanker, Denn Peroni and Caleb had been on the edge of the Jonah system, minding their own business, carrying a load of wentals. Who could have foreseen that Denn’s bizarre new religion that allowed him to see the interconnected universe would make him vulnerable to the fiery elementals?

Denn had known that he himself couldn’t get away, but he’d forced Caleb to stumble into the escape pod, and the emergency engines had blasted him free before he’d known what was really happening. The water tanker exploded behind him, and the fireballs had dragged the dispersed wentals into the sun.

Caleb had tumbled for a day in empty space before crashing on the icy lump of Jonah 12. Not long ago this place had been a Roamer outpost, a hydrogen-processing plant designed by Kotto Okiah himself. But it had been devastated. something to do with rampaging Klikiss robots, if he remembered correctly.

Little remained on Jonah 12’s cratered ice fields — no transports, no buildings, no way of transmitting an emergency signal. and no one within range to detect it even if he could shout out. Caleb didn’t have the slightest idea how he was going to get out of this.

A sophisticated and serviceable Roamer model, the escape pod had its own life-support engine and batteries designed to keep passengers alive for a week at most. Even though he rationed his supplies and kept exertion to a minimum, Caleb wouldn’t last long enough for anyone to notice he was missing.

He did, however, have a survival suit, a basic chemical generator, and a few tools. He spent the first day and a half cobbling together a simple chemical extractor, the kind of device a ten-year-old Roamer child could build. With it, he derived all the water and oxygen and hydrogen fuel he needed from the ice outside. With his Roamer know-how, Caleb would be able to extend his survival for a few more weeks — a remarkable achievement, though he doubted anyone would ever find him to admire his fortitude.

Halfway between boredom and desperation, he suited up, cycled through the small airlock, and went outside into the “daylight.” The distant sun was no more than a bright star among all the others. Jonah 12 was a rock, a bleak and cold one at that. He took a toolkit and sample-collection container and trudged off across the rough, frozen surface.

Taking giant strides in the low gravity, he needed less than an hour to reach the large melted crater and the wreckage of what had been Kotto’s hydrogen-extraction facility. He hoped to find some ruined huts, perhaps something he could patch up and use as a base camp. As he strode along, Caleb had dreams of discovering a generator, a cache of food supplies, maybe even a satellite dish transmitter.

Instead, he found only wreckage, a few scraps of metal, some melted lumps of alloys. nothing that seemed immediately useful, but he scavenged it anyway. Most of the outpost had been vaporized in a reactor explosion, and anything else had vanished permanently into the flash-melted ice, which then froze into an iron-hard steel-gray lake with a few slushy patches kept liquid by the heat of radioactive decay.

As Caleb stared, reality sank in: He would probably be here for a long while, and his last days without food would not be pleasant. He stood in total silence for several minutes, but no flashes of inspiration came to him.

He turned and made his way back to his little escape pod.

32

Nira

Knowing that Jora’h must be battling to hold on to sanity itself, Nira was too upset to concentrate on anything else. When Sarein and Captain McCammon arrived at the lunar EDF base and asked to see her, she feared they brought terrible news.

“Come with us to the Whisper Palace, Nira.” Sarein sounded almost compassionate. “The Chairman needs your green priest skills.”