Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

  The scream cut through her, searing the phantom parts of her body, of the vessel’s body, like the hot focused light the Weavers sometimes used to bind metal to metal. It was like nothing she had ever experienced.

  She thought she was being torn to bits. Parts of the vessel seemed to rip and tear at one moment, only to be pristine and working in the next. The vessel’s voice, her constant companion since their bonding, spoke nonsense in her mind. She felt she was going mad, that Erykon was finally meting out her punishment for not destroying the soulless beings quickly enough.

  She thought she heard her Mater’s voice and her siblings playing hop-skip nearby, but it was only a fantasy. The burning inside her became a series of soul-rending pains, each more excruciating than the last.

  Suddenly the vessel spoke to her again, telling her that they were being somehow forced out of the ghost state by the scream of the alien orb.

  Even as she processed that news, she and the vessel were solid again. This time when the vessel screamed, she screamed along with it.

  The storm of destructive waves that had been unleashed when the Eye had awakened, the chaos from which the ghost state had protected her, now ripped through A’churak’zen as it had everything else in this creation.

  It was worse, far worse, than the shrieking of the alien orb. Worse even than the pain of being bonded to her vessel. This was agony beyond understanding, beyond thought, beyond questions.

   This, she thought as her torment shredded her rationality. Can this be death?

  But it wasn’t death. It was only pain and therefore something she understood. They had forced her back into Erykon’s creation, which, of course, made her subject to Erykon’s wrath.

  She was pounded as they had been, buffeted as they had been, the contours of her vessel scored and battered as theirs had been. She had watched them suffer and had found pleasure in it. She had made them suffer a little herself and had found it just. But, if that was justice, what was this? Was Erykon’s punishment so indiscriminate, so random and impersonal?

  She wondered, before the pain overwhelmed her senses, how they had done this to her, how they had thwarted Erykon’s will and wrath. She couldn’t. She couldn’t escape or thwart or do anything but suffer and fear her god’s next inscrutable whim.

   “The Orishan vessel is in phase with normal space,”said Tuvok’s voice in Riker’s ear. Not knowing what sort of conditions to expect on the alien ship, he and his team had been outfitted with tactical EV suits. “They are experiencing catastrophic failures to many key systems. Stand by.”

  The team stood beside him on the transporter pad-Rriarr, Denken, Pava, and Hriss-while a somber-faced Lieutenant Radowski looked over his controls as he waited for the go order.

   Titanlurched suddenly, and before he could be asked, Tuvok said, “The Orishan grappler has disengaged. Shield strength is returning to previous levels. All internal systems nominal.”

  “Put us as close to their bridge as possible, Lieutenant,” said the captain. “I don’t want to lose anyone fighting our way in.”

  Radowski nodded and began tapping in commands. Presently a look of puzzlement crossed his face.

  “Sir,” he said. “I don’t read anything like a bridge over there. It may be distortion from the quantum flux, but the whole place seems to be tunnels and crawl spaces. No decks or specialized areas at all.”

  “What does that mean?” said Pava without too much obvious trepidation. “It’s like a Borg ship?”

  “Inconclusive,” said Radowski still trying to make sense of what he was seeing. “Frankly, Captain, with all this distortion, it’s lucky we’re able to get a solid lock in there at all.”

   “Lieutenant Radowski is correct,”said Tuvok’s voice. “Sensors indicate a network of thin interlocking tunnels radiating from a single aft chamber.”

  “How many aboard?”

   “One, sir. Sensors read one living being aboard the Orishan vessel.”

  The Orishan ship was nothing like a Borg cube. It was brightly lit, its tunnels easily large enough to accommodate the members of the team walking two abreast. It was, aside from them, empty.

  Everywhere there was light. Some came from obvious sources like the faceted blue crystals embedded at intervals in every wall. The rest seemed to be an effect of some sort of esoteric energy exchange between various systems.

  Every aperture was hexagonal, giving many of the visible surfaces a honeycomb appearance. Delicate webs of microfilaments crisscrossed half of them, some seeming to emerge from the walls and disappear again into the deck.

  “Oh!” said Pava, running one graceful hand along the wall nearest to her. “There’s a pulse.”

  Indeed there was. They could all feel it now; a steady staccato beat thrumming through every surface that was very much like the pulse of a living thing.

  The whole place smacked as much of organism as machine, Riker thought, but in a perfectly synergistic way. Whatever else they might have done, the Orishans had apparently created a unique technology that melded organic and inorganic materials in a manner that somehow seemed more, well, natural than anything the Borg had achieved.

  Telling the others to form on him, Riker moved ahead. His phaser, like all of theirs, was already in hand. He hadn’t known what sort of resistance to expect, but he had expected some. Perhaps a few attack ’bots or automated traps. He’d been on enough hostile alien vessels to be ready for anything.

  But there was nothing, only the sound of their footfalls on the deck and the hum of the alien machines.

  They found the probe, or half of it, still sparking on the deck. The rematerialization of one of the walls had cut the thing neatly in two as they had tried and failed to occupy the same space.

  What Tuvok had called the anterior chamber was just ahead. Pava and Rriarr flanked their captain as he surged forward, while the other two brought up the rear.

  As predicted, their little corridor opened up a few paces on into a much larger chamber whose every surface was covered in crimson and gold hexagons.

  There were no computers visible, no workstations or control panels. The chamber was just that, an empty room, but for the one odd, vaguely oval shaped object that hung from the ceiling, supported by thousands of glowing microfilaments.

  It was mildly translucent, obviously containing something suspended in what appeared to be fluid of some kind. It was very large, more than two meters from end to end and half as wide.

  At first they supposed that it was just some damaged bit of the ship that had been shocked free of its normal position by the vessel’s wrenching return to normal space. On close inspection it turned out to be the farthest thing from that that was possible.

  Tiny sparks of light traveled along the translucent filaments, disappearing into the strange, vaguely plasticine oval. It was soft to the touch, almost leathery in fact, which Rriarr found out when he prodded it gently with his finger.

  Whatever was inside shuddered when he sustained the contact longer than a few seconds.

  “Relax,” said Riker, feeling Pava tense beside him. “Everyone, relax.”

  As they watched, a seam opened wide along the bottom of the oval container, allowing the thing’s viscous internal fluid to spill out on the floor below. When the thing was empty, the skin rapidly dried to the point of brittleness and simply flaked off in large clumps before their eyes. When it was gone, Pava stifled a gasp.

  Inside what everyone present now realized had been a cocoon, suspended by and intertwined with the thousands of microfilaments, was an Orishan. Or rather, most of one.

  All six of its limbs had been removed at the second joint and replaced with caps composed of some organic resin into which tightly bound clusters of the filaments disappeared.

  There were similar, albeit smaller, versions of the caps attached to the creature’s head and corresponding to where its eyes and antennae had been. Three thick cables, also translucent and also carrying streams of unknown glowing particles into the Orishan’s body, were connected to its spine, with a similar one running into a plate on its abdomen.

  It shuddered again, though none of them touched it, its mouth and lower mandibles flexing uselessly.

  “It’s alive,” said Rriarr, holding up his tricorder for a quick scan. “Higher brain functions are active.”

  “It’s trying to speak, sir,” said Pava.

  Ignoring the warnings of his subordinates, Riker moved close to the shuddering alien. He had come here full of rage, not knowing until this instant what he might do to the person he held responsible for all this, for Deanna.

  His thoughts had frightened him, so he had put them in a box. He knew he would do something and that he might regret it and he hadn’t cared. Of all the fears he’d ever had to master, the loss of Deanna, the real permanent loss of her touch and smile, of her presence inside him, was the worst he could imagine. So he didn’t. He put it in the box as well and sealed it tight. It was the only way he could live this life and live with her at the same time.

  After all their escapes and adventures he even began to think that maybe, just maybe, they had the sort of luck that would always allow them to cheat the reaper.

  Then they decided on making a child and the boxes opened their lids, spewing all that fear inside him again like an uncapped geyser. Some days it was so awful he couldn’t look at her.

  He knew it was irrational and he knew he couldn’t ever let her feel the brunt of it. So he had used techniques he knew to keep her out, techniques she had taught him.

  It had opened a chasm between, and if he relaxed for one moment, he knew he would fall in. The idea of losing her or, worse, losing any child they had made, hung over him like a headsman’s blade, and nothing he did could make it dissipate.

  Now it had happened. She was gone. These Orishans and their dangerous tinkering had done to her what they had done to Charon, and someone would answer for it.

  Only, looking at this mutilated creature writhing gently in its web of cables, all he could feel was pity.

  What sort of mind could have conceived something like this and then made it acceptable, even desirable? What sort of fear had these Orishans felt to do this to one of their own?

  He lowered his phaser and reached out a hand to gently caress the Orishan’s cheek. It shuddered again dramatically, perhaps unused to physical contact, but then grew still.

  “You are just flesh,” it said in its low clicking voice. “Only flesh.” It seemed surprised. What had it expected?

  He bent close to it then, stroking it gently as he would an injured child. He tried to speak to it, to make it understand that all this could have been avoided, that there was still the danger of the expanding wave to thwart and the rest of his crew to save. Could it, would it, help them?

  “Titan to away team,”came Tuvok’s voice in his ear.

  “Go ahead, Commander,” said Riker.

   “We are receiving a signal from the Orishan vessel, sir,”said the Vulcan. “ I believe they are logs. Sensor data, schematics-the vessel is uploading its entire datastore toTitan.”

  “Thank you,” said Riker, smiling down into the Orishan’s destroyed face.

  “Fear,” it said. “Why is there always so much fear?”

  The Orishan convulsed, a bone-wrenching tremor that set its body shaking as if caught in a storm, and then went still. Rriarr scanned it and confirmed that it was dead.

  There was no mistaking the cheers that rippled through Titanas her systems, most significantly her warp core, returned to nearly fully operational status.

  The Orishan database was full of information that was either totally alien or, if not alien, impossible to implement with Titan’s technology, but what they could use, they did, and to amazing effect.

  The condition of quantum flux that existed in this system that so confounded Starfleet technology was simply the norm for Orisha. Almost all their science was based on manipulating or drawing power from the flux in some way, and many of the tricks they learned served Titanas well.

  The consensus from his officers was to evacuate as soon as possible, to get Titanwell clear of this system and its effects. Then they could contact Starfleet and any local spacefaring races about how to check or reverse the expansion of the wave of quantum flux.

  The Orishan database had given them some ideas on the subject of collapsing the wave in on itself with a series of counterpulses directed at what some were now calling the Eye of the storm.

  Leaving was the right thing to do. Orisha was gone. Charonwas gone. The Ellingtonwas gone. Once the flux wave reached its sun, the rest of the system would go too. In fact, Titanwould be cutting its escape close to the bone if they left within a few hours.

  Riker knew the prudent course, what the manuals required him to do, but as he and Doctor Ree examined the body of the dead Orishan pilot, he wasn’t sure the prudent course was the one he wanted.

  “Suicide, sir,” said Ree, looking up from his autopsy. “This female released poison into her body from her own stores of venom.”

  “She killed herself,” said Riker. Ree only cocked his head and watched his captain mull. “Why? The fight was over.”

  “May I suggest, sir, that this may be precisely why she did it?”

  “What do you mean, Doctor?”

  “From your account of her logs, this poor creature allowed her people to modify her this way in order to make contact with their deity,” said Ree, sealing the corpse again and sliding it into a cooling bay for quick freeze. “She made contact. Perhaps it proved unsatisfactory.”

  “That thing isn’t a god,” said Riker.

  “I was under the impression that we don’t know what it is,” said Ree. Riker snorted.

  “You don’t think it’s really a god, do you?” he said.

  “My beliefs are immaterial,” said Ree. “Pahkwa-thanh do not see ourselves as separate from nature, Captain. We have many deities, hundreds, and all of them are equally enmeshed.”

  “I’m surprised by that,” said Riker. “Your species isn’t noted for its esoteric lifeview.”

  “We do not promote our beliefs,” said Ree as he sealed up the samples of the Orishan poison and secured them for later study. “They are ourbeliefs. They inform us. Do you see?”

  Riker wasn’t sure he did. As he watched the doctor run his long slender digits through the sterilization field, he wondered about his home planet and the raptorlike carnivores who were its dominant species.

  He had seen Ree eat-live animals if he could, raw flesh when he couldn’t-and it indicated a homeworld of extreme violence, at least by human standards. But Ree was, with the possible exception of an android Riker had known for many years, the most gentle, even serene being he’d ever met. Was that the result of Ree’s nature, or was he implying that the nature of the apparently aggressively pantheistic Pahkwa-thanh faith was somehow responsible?

  “We do not separate in this way,” said Ree when the question was put to him. “Instead let us consider: What is the function of belief in any deity? It is an attempt to better understand the universe, to see the order and structure that defines it. It is, in essence, the beginning of scientific inquiry. In my experience, deities bind societies; sometimes they define them. So, we must ask ourselves, what definition did this Eye of theirs inspire in the Orishans? How did its presence inform them?”

   Why? Why is there always so much fear?came the wisps of her voice in his memory.

  Riker thought about it. He thought about the Klingons, who had supposedly killed their troublesome gods only to elevate their murderer to a nearly divine focus of worship.

  He thought about the Bajorans, whose deities were certainly real and present but so obscure and alien that it was a wonder that either group could interact with or understand the other. Yet they seemed to.

  He thought about the Q Continuum, whose members were possessed of seeming omnipotence, omniscience, and, in at least one case, functional omnipresence. Even they didn’t claim to be gods, but if the Q weren’t, who was?

  Then he thought about Orisha and what he knew of its people. Whatever the Eye actually was, its presence had tortured an entire civilization for millennia. Either with actual cataclysmic violence or with the perpetual threat that such violence might be visited upon them at any moment, the Eye of Erykon had taught its people only one lesson.

  Fear.

  He pictured the flux wave now expanding out from the Eye, sweeping over entire systems, destroying them, yes, but before that destruction, infecting them with the very same fear that had ultimately killed Orisha.

  He suddenly found the idea of that intolerable. This thing had to be stopped, and it had to be stopped here and now.

  He’d argued with Deanna about the Prime Directive, about the consequences of abandoning the rule book on a whim.

  “Sure, jazz is improvisational,” he would say when she would inevitably toss up his love for the form as an example of the beauty of stepping outside. “But there are still rules.”

  “No one is telling you to abandon them,” she would say. “Only that you’re always at your best when you are interpreting them in your own way.”

  She was right. He loved her and she was right.

  “Captain?” said Ree as the other turned and moved to exit the autopsy area. “Are we finished here?”

  “Not quite yet, Doctor,” said Riker. “But thank you for the talk.”

  “It is an extremely powerful, extremely delicate network of space fold devices,” said Ra-Havreii as he and Modan continued to struggle with the alien controls.

  “Not a warp field?” said Vale, deciding that the seated position might be best for riding out these damned quakes.

  “Not exactly, no,” said Ra-Havreii. “I presume you know the difference?”

  Vale did, and it didn’t bode well. Space folding was monumentally dangerous under the best conditions.

  “What does it mean, Xin?” said Troi.

  There was a pause as Ra-Havreii asked Modan to move to an adjacent console and translate the pictograms there. She rattled off something that Ra-Havreii apparently understood but which was just so much babble to Vale and Troi.

  “What it means, Counselor, Commander,” he said, picking up where he’d left off, “is that the Orishans have been aggressively folding the space around this planet.”

  “Define aggressively,” said Vale, not at all sure she wanted to hear it.

  “The Spire generates a folding field large enough to englobe the planet,” said Ra-Havreii. “There are eighteen identical Spires dispersed around Orisha, each generating folds of the same dimensions.”

  “You mean simultaneously?” asked Vale, scarcely believing it. Ra-Havreii took the time to look back at her and nod before joining Modan at the second console. “That’s insane.”

  “What is it meant to accomplish?” Troi asked.

  “They call it the Veil, yes?” said the engineer. Modan was back at the first console again, translating the new symbols that flickered on the viewing screens. “This implies they are trying to cover something. Since the fields encompass the planet…”

  He didn’t have to finish. The Orishans had wrapped their planet in multiple, fantastically large space folds in an effort to-what? Space folds were for travel. These were stationary, centered around a single set of points in space-time. And why eighteen of them?

  Then it hit her. This had never been an attempt to create interstellar travel. It was an attempt at a cloak, one big enough to hide an entire world.

  “There’s more, Commander,” said Modan.

  “Spit it out, Ensign,” said Vale. She was doing her best not to hate Modan, but it wasn’t easy. Every time she looked at the golden metallic flesh, all she could think about was Jaza.

  “The folds are reacting with each other,” said the Selenean. “The interaction has caused the fields to link into a single four-dimensional object.”

  “A tesseract,” said Troi in a small voice. “We’re inside a tesseract.”

  “I’m guessing that’s worse than the space folds,” said Vale.

  “Monumentally,” said Ra-Havreii.

  All at once the tremors stopped. Modan and Ra-Havreii stepped back from their respective consoles with identical masks of relief on their faces.

  “Tell me that’s it,” said Vale, getting to her feet and brushing the dust out of her hair. “We’re done, the Veil is offline, and we can concentrate on getting the hell off this planet. Tell me that.”

  “We’re not finished, Commander,” said Ra-Havreii.

   Of course we’re not, she thought. Things can always get worse.

  “Tesseracts are objects that exist both inside and outside of normal space-time,” he said. “Their contours can, with precise mapping, be used to navigate temporal jumps.”

  “Which is what happened to us when we passed through the field, Chris,” said Modan, sounding too much like Jaza again. “When the computer beamed us out, the tesseract split the transport beams like light going through a prism. You materialized here, a few days before Titanarrived. Najem and I ended up in the distant past.”

   But you’re here now, aren’t you?thought Vale. And he’s still stuck back there.

  “All right,” said Troi, her face showing tiny creases as she turned it all over in her mind. “The Spires make the space folds and the folds have collapsed into each other to form this tesseract.”

  “Correct,” said Ra-Havreii.

  “And we’re inside the tesseract,” she said.

  “Also correct,” said the engineer.

  “And that is causing these ground quakes and the eruptions from the sky?”

  “Ah,” he said. “Not exactly.”

  Modan and Ra-Havreii gave each other a pregnant look, and Troi felt something like resignation wafting off them. They asked the two senior officers to join them at a breach in the wall where the sky showed through.

  Things had calmed somewhat now that the Spire network was stable, but there was still that unnatural tint and occasional clusters of what Modan claimed were tachyons flickering in and out of sight.

  “You see that?” said Ra-Havreii, gesturing toward the barely visible Eye of Erykon still floating, seemingly dozing now, just beyond the Veil field. “That is the planet Orisha.”

  “This is the planet Orisha,” said Vale.

  “Yes,” said Ra-Havreii. “And so is that. The tesseract effect is shunting the planet in and out of regular space-time at random intervals. When the network is stable, there is relative calm, as there is now. When the network destabilizes, Orisha tries to reenter regular space.”

  “Tries?” said Troi. “Tries and fails, you mean.”

  “Yes,” said Modan. “Whenever the planet Orisha tries to reenter normal space-time at a point in the past, something is there to block it.”

  “What?” said Vale.

  “The planet Orisha,” said Ra-Havreii. “You may not understand all of the math or physics, Commander, but you must know what happens when two objects attempt to occupy the same space at the same moment in time.”

  Indeed she did. Vale had seen a transporter malfunction once while attempting to beam down some machinery from a spacedock above Izar. Due to the fault in the reintegration matrix, a crate of microprocessors and another of copper filaments that had dematerialized on two separate pads, had tried to reintegrate on a single pad at the end of their trip.

  The result had been an explosion of shrapnel and energy that had left Vale hospitalized for two weeks while her pockmarks and burns were repaired. Now these two were saying Orisha was trying to do the same thing?

   Yes, she thought. Things can always get worse.

  “There’s more, Commander,” said Ra-Havreii. Of course there was. “While time moves as we expect inside the tesseract, outside it is completely random. It is my suspicion that each time the network destabilizes, we appear in the Orishan sky of the past and inspire the same effects or worse on the planet up there just as its proximity creates the same effects here. When the Veil fails completely, when the planet reenters normal space, both versions of Orisha will be destroyed.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Troi. “You said whenit fails.”

  “Yes,” said Ra-Havreii.

  “Not ‘if.’ ”

  “Correct,” said the engineer. “The network will fail eventually. That is guaranteed. It’s over a century old, and it’s been taking too much punishment from overuse.”

  “We can keep it stable for a little while,” said Modan. “But the Veil will fail. Soon.”

  “So we’re back to where we started,” said Vale. “Turn the damned thing off.”

  “There may be a way to implement a controlled step-down of the individual Spires,” said Ra-Havreii, suddenly thoughtful.

  “Yes!” said Modan, jumping on. It was odd watching her light up the way Jaza would have over concepts she wouldn’t have understood only days ago. “We remove the components and the tesserect just fades away. We should reenter normal space-time in Orisha’s present.”

  “With no previous version of itself blocking reentry, everything should be fine,” said Ra-Havreii.

  “ Shouldbe isn’t willbe,” said Vale. “Tampering with this could make things worse, couldn’t it?”

  “It’s the best we can do, I’m afraid, Commander,” he said. “It’s your decision, of course, but you had better make it quickly.”

  As if to punctuate Ra-Havreii’s words, the ground beneath them seized ever so slightly and there was a spark of the rainbow lightning in the distance.

  “All right,” said Vale. “What do you need to get this done?”

  Keru was up and looking like his old self when the three women returned to the shuttle. He had stripped off his torn garments and replaced them with the same gray and white undermesh that Modan wore.

  As the ensign rummaged for the tools Ra-Havreii had requested, Vale brought Keru up to speed.

  “So,” he said when she was done. “We’re in it. Again.”

  “Looks that way,” she said.

  “All right,” he said, sucking it up. “What are your orders, Commander?”

  “Just keep an eye on her for now,” said Vale, indicating A’yujae’Tak, still trapped in her corner of the hold. The Orishan was also up again, lucid and watching their every move. She had, apparently, only tested the force field once before settling back on her haunches to watch and wait.

  “No worries,” said the big Trill. “She’s been quiet the whole time.”

  “Good,” said Vale, moving toward their prisoner. “Maybe she’s calm enough to listen.”

  A’yujae’Tak shifted her position slightly when Vale drew near. Two of her arms extended to the floor while the higher ones flexed outward like some raptor bird testing its wings. It was easy to see that she meant to pounce on her captor the instant the shield went down. Ignoring the threatening pose, Vale dropped down to one knee to meet the alien’s gaze face-to-face.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry about all this. I can let you out of there if you promise not to attack any of us.”

  “You should have killed me,” said A’yujae’Tak.

  “We don’t do that,” said Vale. “Not unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “I will kill you,” said the prisoner. “For what you have done to us, I will murder you all.”

  “We’re trying to help you,” said Vale. “This Veil network of yours is the thing you want to kill.”

  “Do not touch the Veil!” yelled A’yujae’Tak, lunging at Vale so quickly she barely had time to register the movement. “You will leave us naked before Erykon! Do you mean to kill us all?”

  “As I said,” said Vale, rising. “We’re trying to help.”

  “I’m ready, Chris,” said Modan, emerging from one of the lockers with a small satchel full of the necessary tools.

   “Commander,”said Vale, sharply enough for Keru to raise an eyebrow. Troi looked about to intervene, but a look from Vale told her to save it for later. “Commander Vale, Ensign. Not Chris. My friends call me that. Understand?”

  “Yes, Commander,” said Modan stiffly. “I understand.”

  Just as Modan transported back to the surface, another quake rippled through the ground. From their vantage they could actually see the soil liquefying, spewing giant shards of the blue crystals into the air like missiles while conversely sucking vast tracts of the jungle down to oblivion.

  “It’s one of their cities,” Troi said to Vale. “The quake is causing a cave-in. They’re dying, Christine. Thousands of them.”

  “Murderers,” screamed A’yujae’Tak, lunging at the force field again and again. “This is your doing! Erykon will destroy us all!”

  “Not if I can bloody help it,” said Vale. “Shuttle to Ra-Havreii.”

   “Hands full right now, Commander,”said the engineer’s voice. “ What is it?”

  “Are you still all right there?” she said.

   “We’re fine,”he said, clearly through his obviously clenched teeth. “Stop talking to me and let us work.”

  She switched off and told Keru to join her on the flight deck. She had been feeling useless with all the technical mumbo jumbo. The destruction of the Orishan city was something she might actually be able to handle on her own.

  They would have found it even without the scanners. A great canyon was in the process of ripping itself open in the ground some fifty kilometers from the Spire. The noise alone was excruciatingly loud. Each time the earth split, it was as if an impossibly large fist were being smashed into an infinite number of cymbals and drums.

  Great jets of combustible gas shot up from smaller cracks that opened near the new canyon, some igniting when they were struck by one of the bolts of multicolored lightning. There was smoke everywhere, and above them, the sky, once again, seemed to burn.

  Vale could only imagine what the primitive Orishans had thought the first time their god had appeared in the sky. Without a framework for understanding what was killing them, it was small wonder that they learned quickly to fear Erykon’s wrath.

  As Keru deftly avoided a sudden burst of flaming gas, Vale told him to get lower. The clouds of dust rising up from the upheaval below, coupled with the smoke from the burning jungle, made targeting whatever survivors there might be impossible. If she was going to salvage any of this, she needed a closer look.