“I have always had time for you,” Nicole told her, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. She gently touched what looked like an unbruised spot on Jodi’s cheek. “And I always will.”
“I love you,” Jodi said simply. They were words she had said to Nicole a thousand and more times in her dreams and daydreams, but never once in the flesh. She loved her too much to drive her away.
Nicole had no words to answer her. Instead, she leaned forward and kissed Jodi gently on her tattered lips. “I will be back for you, Jodi,” she whispered. “I promise. Then… then we will have time together, to talk about things.”
Jodi tried hard to smile, but her beaten face made it look more like a grimace. “I’m not going anywhere, babe,” she said. “But you’d better. You’ve wasted enough time on me. Good luck, Nikki.”
With bitter tears burning her eyes, Nicole quickly left to join the others at the ramp.
Time was running out.
Fifty-Six
“Where is everyone?” Enya whispered. They had been moving through the halls of the Great Tower toward the Throne Room for what seemed like half an hour, and they had not seen a single Kreelan – alive or dead – anywhere. Rooms and alcoves that were obviously meant to be occupied stood open and empty, and the halls through which they crept were eerily silent, devoid of any sound at all except the occasional boom of a bomb exploding somewhere outside, or perhaps a stray energy bolt from an attacking fighter. The invading Marines had apparently assumed the tower would be the most heavily defended position, and so had not attacked it directly. But, if the rest of the city were like this, they would make their way here very quickly, indeed.
“I am not sure,” Reza answered uneasily as he saw the bluish glow from the Throne Room grow stronger with each step. His second sight told him that the entire Imperial City was dead. Or, more exactly, he thought with a tingling in his spine, the city was completely lifeless: none of the millions of Her Children who had once lived and toiled here in Her service remained. Except in the Throne Room. From there, and there alone, did he sense the faintest tremor of life.
“The Empress,” he whispered to himself. “Let it be She.”
“Could the Marines have already gotten here?” Enya asked.
“No bodies, no sign of firing,” Braddock answered. He felt vulnerable in the business suit he usually wore under his councilman’s robe, no Marine combat dress having been handy. But the blaster in his hand reassured him, and his political self had easily stepped aside to let the old Marine inside take charge. “It seems as if they just vanished into thin air, walked off a cliff or something.”
Eustus, walking backward most of the time to keep an eye on whatever might be behind them, took the opportunity to turn around and add his two bits to the whispered conversation. “Then what happened?”
He almost blundered into Enya, who stood with the others at the massive doors to the Throne Room. None of them, except for Shera-Khan and Reza, who had both been inside before, had any idea of what to expect, other than something ornate, something alien. They had been awed by the halls through which they had come, the walls rising tens of meters to crystalline domes overhead, any one of which human architects could only dream of. But the Throne Room, hundreds of meters across and as many high, its hectares of sloping and curving walls graced with the work of artisans who had lived and died millennia before Michelangelo, overwhelmed them into stunned silence, immobility.
And in the great room’s center, at the literal heart of the Empire, stood the Throne itself, poised upon a pyramid of steps that formed the watermark of the Empire’s social ranking, the guiding weave of its cultural fabric. But She was not there. Instead, an unholy wall of cyan light, a kaleidoscope of turbulent lightning, encircled the great dais that stood above the highest steps, blocking the Throne itself from view. And only then did Reza understand why there was no one left in the city.
“It is as Tesh-Dar feared,” he said quietly. “They are gone, all of them. Dead.”
“Who… who is dead?” Nicole managed. She was not quite as stunned as the others, for she carried Reza’s blood in her veins, and had seen this place before in her dreams. But to actually be here…
“The inhabitants of the city, of this moon,” he explained bleakly. “All of them are dead.”
“How can that be?” Eustus whispered, still unable to tear his eyes away from the incredible wonders that lay before him. “How did they die? Our Marines didn’t kill them. Where did the bodies go? There must have been… well, millions living here. They couldn’t have just disappeared!”
“Yes,” he said, “they could have.” Reza nodded toward the light that swirled as if something alive dwelt within. “They tried to reach Her, the Empress, through that,” he explained quietly, “to save Her, to save the Empire itself. But the light…” He paused, a chill creeping up his spine. “The light is the essence of the guardians of the First Empress’s spirit. It is a barrier, a fire that burns hot as the sun.”
“Like in the cave, on Erlang…” Enya said slowly.
“You’re right,” Eustus murmured, a chill running down his spine at the eerie glow. “The light – it looks the same.”
“But why here?” Nicole demanded. “Why now?”
“Because this was to be the time the circle closed,” Reza told her, “the time when the First Empress’s spirit rejoined with us, and fused Her Own power with that of the living Empress.”
“That’s what was in the crystal heart,” Enya said quietly, “the spirit of this First Empress.” She had no idea how such a thing was possible, but she had once read that the technology of an advanced civilization would seem like magic to more primitive people. And the Empire had been around for a very, very long time. Humans had been plying the stars for hundreds of years. The Kreelans had been a spacefaring race for
“Yes, the crystal heart,” Reza said, “the vessel containing the spirit of the First Empress, whose power – and spirit – Esah-Zhurah also inherited, making Her the most powerful Empress, the most powerful Kreela, ever born. But with her heart and spirit broken, all the Empire was cast into darkness.” He looked again at the swirling wall of light that blazed defiantly above them. “And that is the power of the Imperial Guard,” he told them. “You saw their physical remains in the chamber on Erlang. Now do you witness the power of their spirit.”
“Then what are we supposed to do?” Braddock asked. “Won’t it kill you, too?”
“My blood is Her blood,” he said cryptically. “My heart is Her heart, my spirit Her spirit. And my love shall be Her love, Her life.” He turned to Nicole. “I must challenge them, to fight them as is our Way. If I do not survive,” he told her, “I would ask that you and Tony… care for Shera-Khan.”
“I will fight beside you,” Shera-Khan proclaimed fiercely, his talons tightly gripping his sword in want of battle.
Reza held the young warrior’s shoulders, his own talons digging into the hardened metal of Shera-Khan’s armor as he met his son’s gaze with his own. “I am your father,” he told him softly in the rapid lilt of the New Tongue, “and you are my son, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh. Proud am I of you, of what you are, and of the great warrior you will become as you follow the Way. Many battles have you yet to fight, and great victories shall you win for Her honor. But not this day. Not here, not now. This battle was preordained upon the deathbed of Keel-Tath in a prophecy that has passed from mothers to their daughters for thousands of generations, and this is the day of reckoning.” He smiled at Shera-Khan, the Kreelan way, wishing he could wipe away the black stripes of the mourning marks on his son’s face as he might the salty streaks of his own tears. “To fight are we born, I know,” he told him, softer still, “and so it is difficult not to seek out the Challenge that to your heart calls. But patience is a skill well-suited to the warrior, Shera-Khan, and patience this day must be yours.”
Shera-Khan nodded as Kreelans do, and said, “What shall become of me should you… not return?”
Reza nodded toward Nicole and Braddock. “They are my peers, fellow warriors of my old race; they are my
