“The wental water here is holding the hydrogues in check,” Jess pointed out. “We don’t dare deplete too much of it.”

The young girl Osira’h had remained quiet beside Nira, but now she spoke with a strange, obsessive look in her large eyes. “And what about the hydrogues? They hate the faeros more than anything.”

Del Kellum gave a loud, angry retort. “Even more than they hate humans? After all the destruction they caused, all those skymines wrecked, thousands and thousands of Roamers dead?”

“Including my brother,” Jess said.

Mage-Imperator Jora’h looked at his daughter. “The hydrogues cannot be trusted. They destroy. They betray. I made that mistake once, and we are not that desperate.”

“But if the faeros are so powerful, we need equally powerful allies to defeat them,” Osira’h insisted.

“We have the wentals,” Cesca pointed out, and that ended the discussion.

111

Nikko Chan Tylar

Even though he had been stranded and miserable for weeks, Caleb Tamblyn didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave Jonah 12. He fussed and dithered inside his makeshift shelter, gathering his few possessions, although Nikko couldn’t see anything worth keeping among the bits of wreckage.

Even the wentals seemed enthusiastic and impatient to depart, thawing themselves from the chunks of ice and flowing voluntarily into the cargo hold of theAquarius. The whole icy planet was by now infused with them, and they were strong and eager to fight the faeros.

Finally, Crim put his foot down and told Caleb, “Enough of this, man. Get aboard theAquarius — we’ve got places to go, wentals to deliver, wars to win!”

After boarding the ship, Caleb took one last look at the rough, frozen landscape, and sealed the airlock hatch behind him. Nikko raised theAquarius from the ice, keying in the next set of coordinates. Following their timetable, all the water bearers were supposed to rendezvous back at Theroc. Thanks to Jess and Cesca, the water elementals now held a spark of courage and determination as they rallied to stand against the faeros in ways they had never fought before.

Caleb hunched behind the two seats in the cockpit, relieved and excited now that they were finally on their way. Nikko accelerated away from the small frozen planetoid and headed out of the system.

“You sure you set the right course?” his father asked.

“I double-checked the nav calculations while we were waiting for Caleb to gather all his things.”

“Oh. So you had plenty of time then.”

Caleb made a sour face at him.

They hadn’t gone far, though, before the wentals on theAquarius began to churn. Thrumming through the deck and bulkheads, straining inside the hold, the living water sent out a wordless signal of alarm. Nikko knew what it meant. He quickly sent out a sensor sweep.

Nine swollen fireballs shot toward them from the outskirts of the Jonah system. Having sensed the water elementals inside the ship, they meant to destroy theAquarius and its precious cargo.

Caleb’s voice turned into a squawk of anger and fear. “I bet those are the same bastards that got my water tanker.”

Nikko frantically reversed course and looped around, squeezing everything he could from theAquarius ’s engines. The sudden acceleration smashed him and his father back against their seats, while Caleb stumbled and fell to the deck.

The ship raced away — and the fiery ellipsoids rushed after them. Nikko tried to guess the limits to which he could push the hybrid vessel. “I can’t engage the stardrives yet.”

“Then just dodge the fireballs, boy!” his father said.

“Sure, I’ll get right on that.” Nikko made another radical course change and dropped back down into the Jonah system. He could sense the wentals boiling and angry, and suddenly he knew what he had to do. The watery entities made him realize it. “I’m heading back to the planetoid.”

Caleb yelped, “Where are you planning to hide down there?”

“We’re not going to hide. The wentals want me to go there. They’re extremely agitated right now.”

“No kidding.” Crim’s teeth were clenched tightly together. “I thought you said you couldn’t communicate with them.”

“Not entirely, and not clearly, but. I canfeel that it’s what they want.” He felt the anger of the wentals onboard, a pounding sense that was entirely different from their previous passivity.

The nine faeros poured after them, trailing fire. Nikko dodged like a maniac, but he didn’t see how the pool of wental water aboard his ship could fight off the fireballs pursuing them.

Nikko hurtled toward Jonah 12, which looked like no more than a speck of cosmic lint in the vast black emptiness. The planetoid glinted, its icy surface reflecting the distant sunlight. At the wentals’ insistence, Nikko calculated an orbital vector, swinging low. He would practically scrape his underbelly on the crater rims and the frozen mounds of low mountains. It was going to take some fancy flying.

He couldn’t imagine what the wentals had in mind, but he trusted them implicitly.

With the faeros careening in its wake, theAquarius whisked like a swift-moving shadow across the rugged landscape. His father and Caleb were so frightened they didn’t even criticize his flying, and Nikko’s terror helped keep his concentration as focused as a laser. He didn’t know how much longer he could fly like this.

The relentless fireballs pressed ever closer, and curtains of heat rippled out, melting the surface wherever they touched.

Then, as theAquarius cruised over the wide melted crater from the reactor explosion, the trap was sprung. Emerging from where they had been locked in the ice, wentals erupted as great, gushing geysers.

The faeros could not back away or change their course swiftly enough from the cannon blasts of charged water. Like watery volcanoes, the surge of liquid struck the nine ellipsoids. More living water streamed from the thick ice and engulfed the faeros, who could not fight back. The warrior wentals snuffed out the elemental fires.

A surge of exhilaration rushed through his bloodstream as Nikko raced away in theAquarius.

“Neat trick,” Caleb said, “and a very auspicious start to this big battle you keep talking about.”

The three laughed out loud with relief. Nikko’s father clapped both of the others on the shoulders. “Now let’s head to Theroc and get on with it.”

112

Robb Brindle

Days after their arrival, Robb stood with Fleet Admiral Willis aboard theJupiter, gazing out at the Earth with feelings as jumbled as the scattered chunks of lunar debris. This place had been Robb’s home, where his parents had been stationed throughout his youth, where he had first filled out the forms to join the EDF, eager to go out and fight the hydrogues.