He was embarrassed, shuffling his feet. “I just did what I do best.”

“That’s exactly what we need from you now,” Jess said. “And it’s more important than ever before.”

Intrigued, Orli moved closer to the shifting, flexible water shapes. “Can I touch them?” Once Jess assured her the strange water was safe, the girl touched her fingertip to the shimmering quicksilver skin, then plunged her hand in all the way up to the elbow.

“Don’t you have a speck of caution, girl?” Steinman cried.

“When it’s appropriate.” Orli withdrew her hand. Her skin glistened for a moment, but then it dried as the droplets pulled themselves back into the self-contained wentals. The two shapes twisted, jiggled, then braided themselves together to form one large, bouncing shape.

Kotto observed, amazed and delighted.

Cesca spread her hands. “The wentals need your help to stand against the faeros.”

“The faeros. I’ve been trying to figure that out, but I’m stumped. Thermal armor? Some kind of cold beam? Heat-resistant technologies?” Kotto grinned, trying to impress her. “In the meantime, we’ve been working on a gadget to use against the Klikiss. A melodic siren that could shut down the hive mind — ”

“Thefaeros,” Jess said, forcing the engineer to return his focus. “Maybe you just need the right raw materials.” He stepped aside so the wental shape could lurch forward. “These wentals are here for you, as specimens. I promise they’ll cooperate in any way possible.”

Kotto blinked. “To do what? You mean. experiment with them?”

“Help them become effective weapons. We need you to be brilliant, Kotto.” Cesca’s eyes glowed warm with pride. “Do things that have never been done before — that’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

Kotto bent over to pick up the curved spanner he had dropped on the floor. He walked around the pulsing, shapeless mass of water, both perplexed and fascinated. “When have I ever let you down, Speaker?”

66

Caleb Tamblyn

Even with the extra equipment he had brought down from low orbit, Caleb didn’t stand much of a chance for long-term survival. But he felt less edgy, less desperate.

After he returned to the crashed escape pod with his last sled full of recovered material from the satellite, Caleb recharged his suitpack, used the air regenerator to refill his tanks with fresh oxygen cooked out of the ice, and finally went out to investigate the strange lights that glimmered across the landscape.

For hours now, the ice around the great meltdown crater had shimmered as if auroral curtains had somehow been locked into the frozen matrix. Caleb had never seen anything like it. In his years living in the water mines under the thick Plumas ice sheet, he had experienced some bizarre things, and these sparkling lights reminded him of the wentals he had seen.

He wasn’t particularly keen to face another tainted elemental force like the one that had reanimated Karla Tamblyn. On the other hand, Jess and Cesca had used the power of wentals to restore the ruined water mines. so the exotic water entities couldn’t be all bad. Besides, he wasn’t in a position to be choosy.

As he trudged around the rim of the frozen crater, he saw more lights sparkling deep beneath the iron-gray lake. The whole disaster site seemed to be awakening. Far below, he saw liquid water, quicksilver streams that spread out in a network like a circulatory system. Runnels flowed of their own accord, changed direction, gathered strength.

Yes, these were wentals. He could tell. Standing on an uphill slope at the edge of the blasted rim, Caleb watched trickles of water flowingupward against gravity — directly toward him. The ground beneath him became uncertain as ice turned to slush. Clumsy in his protective boots, he tried to move away, but the frozen surface melted further, and he started to sink into a sort of icy quicksand.

After a moment of hesitation he decided not to flee. Jess had said that the wentals meant no harm. Caleb stopped in his tracks and braced himself. He stopped sinking.

The ankle-deep slushy water around his boots ran up his suit, covered his legs, then his waist. He felt tingling energy pass directly through the fabric, but there was no fundamental physical change in his cells. The wentals sensed him here. Were they trying to understand him?

Slowly, Caleb began to walk away from the crater back toward his cramped escape pod. The wentals followed him. His boots left clear footprints in the slushy ice. As he took more plodding steps, he saw identical footprints spontaneously formingahead of him, a trail of ghostly steps marking a path all the way to his pod.

So, the wentals knew who he was and where he had come from.

Picking up the pace in the low gravity, Caleb returned to his small simple home. Silvery lines of liquefied water shot through the ice, and the glowing lights became brighter.

“Are you trying to communicate? What do you want?” he shouted into his suit radio. “By the Guiding Star, can you at least give me a hint?”

Either the wentals couldn’t speak in a language he understood, or they couldn’t pick up radio transmissions. or they simply chose not to respond. He waited outside the escape pod for a long time, watching the light show, but little changed.

When he cycled back through the airlock into his shelter, he was astonished to discover that all of his power sources, including his system batteries, were now fully charged. His gas exchangers operated at full capacity; he had plenty of air, water, and power. And with what he had retrieved from the satellite, he even had a little extra food.

The wentals were consciously trying to keep him alive. Caleb decided that, for once, he wasn’t going to complain.

67

Tasia Tamblyn

Talking with Rlinda Kett had gotten her worked up again, and Tasia was ready to launch every ship available with every weapon installed. She had wanted to charge after the Klikiss as soon as she got back with the Llaro refugees, but the faeros crisis on Theroc — and more recently, General Lanyan’s stupid attack on the shipyards — had sidetracked everyone.

Nevertheless, she and Brindle had time to plan and prepare.

Admiral Willis joined them in the admin complex, where wallscreens reported the large number of vessels in spacedock and temporary repair facilities. After the surprise EDF strike here, Willis had declined to send her ships back into the Osquivel docks for a complete refit and reconditioning. “We can’t afford to have them out of service right now, considering what might drop in our laps at any moment.”

On the screen, Tasia spotted a fast space yacht entering the Osquivel system. Since it broadcast an appropriate Confederation ID signal, the ship triggered no alarms, but Tasia perked up when she saw the pilots listed as Patrick Fitzpatrick III and Zhett Kellum.