Jodi did everything she knew to shake the weapon, but to no avail. She knew that their time was up.
“I’m sorry, Eustus,” she said as the cockpit filled with the blood-red fusion glow from the approaching torpedo. “I’m so sorry.”
Neither she nor Eustus noticed as metal claws took hold of them, just as the torpedo exploded above the cockpit.
Sinclaire turned away, sickened at the lives he had just seen wasted. And he probably would never know why Mackenzie had done what she did, or even what she was trying to accomplish. But it did not matter now. “That’s it, then,” he said angrily.
“The fleet reports ready for jump, admiral,” Captain Amadi said quietly. Commander Mackenzie had not been with him for very long, but he had enjoyed her company greatly. Her loss, and the effective combat retirement of Captain Carre, was indeed tragic.
Sinclaire nodded. “Let’s be off, then. If you need anything or there’s any news, I’ll be in my cabin.” Two of his finest officers, a good destroyer and her crew, a full Marine regiment, and over a million civilians on Erlang, all written off. He wished he was planetside already, where he could find a nice dark pub and get thoroughly, utterly drunk. He kept his hands close to his sides, hoping that no one would notice that they were shaking.
“Aye, aye, sir.” Amadi turned and began issuing the instructions that would take the fleet home.
In the landing bay, the Marines had been watching the holo display, howling their support of Jodi’s run through the Kreelan lines as if they were at a Marine-Navy soccer game, evening up the score. But the bay was filled with shocked silence as the display showed the icon representing Jodi’s fighter wink yellow and then disappear after her desperate attempts to get away from the brain-damaged torpedo. She and Eustus were gone.
A moment later, the display cleared entirely as the fleet jumped into hyperspace.
The Marines who now belonged to brevet Captain Hawthorne turned away, sadness and exhaustion etched on their features.
Enya found a corner to herself where she slumped down and rested her head in her hands, too tired even to cry. Her world was gone, her people gone, and now Eustus was gone, too. She had nothing left.
“Hey,” she heard someone say, “do you feel that?”
“Feel what?” someone snapped angrily. “Your hand on my butt?”
And then she felt it, too. The air had suddenly grown heavy and still, as if they had dived under water. Her ears popped. As she looked up she was blinded by a searing blue-white flash.
“Explosion in starboard bay!” someone shouted in the maelstrom of lights that clouded her vision. She heard an alarm braying and running feet guided only by flash-blinded eyes. But there had been no sound, just the flash, and then the heavy feeling in the air disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.
As the others crowded their way out of the bay, fearful of a hull breach, Enya stayed in her corner, her eyes shut, waiting for her vision to clear. She did not know the bay like the Marines did, and could just as easily find herself running out the shielded landing door.
After a moment that seemed like forever, she opened her eyes. And there, in a heap of tangled arms and legs on the floor, looking wide-eyed at their surroundings as if they had never seen this place before, were Eustus and Jodi, with Reza’s torn body between them.
“Eustus!” she cried as she leaped to her feet and ran toward them, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him. The remaining Marines, shocked by what they saw, slowly gathered around the new arrivals, looking at them as if they were ghosts, the result of a mass hallucination.
“Lord of All,” someone whispered.
“Get Captain Gard to sickbay, now,” Jodi managed, still in shock. She was conscious only of two totally unrelated things: that Reza was somehow still alive, and that she had peed herself. The change of laundry, she decided, could wait; Reza came first. She struggled to her knees as helping hands pried Reza’s talons from her numb shoulder and Eustus’s thigh before they carried the stricken captain at a run to the sickbay. She did not try to dissuade the hands that picked her up, carrying her after him. Eustus, helped by Enya and a babbling Washington Hawthorne, trailed dazedly behind.
Book Three
FINAL BATTLE
Thirty-Nine
The world was strangely white, so unlike the darkness of Death, so unlike the place where the First Empress’s spirit had waited all these generations for Her awakening, and where only he, among all mortals, had ever been. He could not imagine the power, the wonder that must come to the Empire upon Her return, and his heart stopped beating for a moment as he thought of Keel-Tath’s spirit encased in Esah-Zhurah’s body. He would have given anything, everything he had ever had, to see her in the white robes and slender golden collar, high upon the throne, the most powerful Empress his people had ever known. His only regret would be that he could never again call her by her birth name.
In the whiteness that was now the Universe, he saw strange shadows hovering above him like odd birds fluttering above a snow-covered field. Their jerky movements were accompanied by noises that were sharp and purposeful, but not threatening. Were they other spirits, perhaps?
But he knew that this could not be; the place of the banished was forever dark and cold, and all those who dwelled there did so in eternal solitude. Or did they?
The world seemed to turn slowly, the white turning to gray, the strange noises drifting away into silence.
He slept.
If any time had passed, he was unaware. Dreams of life, and things that were beyond life as any other human had ever known, came to him, played their parts upon the stage that was his slumbering mind, and left to wherever such dreams go. While he would never be able to recall the exact moment, at some point he became aware that he did, in fact, possess a body. He gradually became sure of this because of what his mind perceived with gradually increasing clarity: pain. It was not the sharp, excruciating pain of a weapon cutting flesh, the kind of pain that he had been trained and toughened to withstand, to endure; it was the slow, throbbing pain of his body struggling to heal itself. This pain also was something he was well accustomed to. But this was deep, to his very core, and he realized in that instant that he was still alive.
The shock of that realization was sufficient to send enough adrenaline through his sluggish body to bring him to the threshold of consciousness. He opened his eyes. He was still in the white place, but saw no shadows.
“Reza,” said a voice, so softly that he could barely hear it. “Can you hear me? Squeeze your right hand if you can. Do not try to talk.”
Not questioning the instructions, Reza tried to carry them out. Sluggishly, he traced the nerves from his brain to his right hand, commanding it to close. Nothing. He concentrated harder, ordering his hand to obey. At last, he was rewarded with a slight twitching of the muscles in his forearm, causing his fingers to move fractionally.
“Can you feel this?” the voice asked with barely contained excitement. Reza felt a gentle pressure around his fingers, the squeeze of another’s hand. He replied with another feeble movement of his fingers.
In his vision, he saw a shadow appear above him that gradually resolved into something that, after a
