Hellhole: Awakening

by Brian Herbert

  Devon’s ears rang, and he had a ferocious headache. This had been a much more difficult exercise than any of their combined military maneuvers. “After succeeding here, defending against the Constellation fleet should be no trouble at all.”

  Deep in his consciousness, like something rumbling up out of Hellhole, he felt Birzh stirring, reading his thoughts, but his alien companion seemed unable—or unwilling—to give further explanations.

  Encix had promised that all the shadow-Xayans would use their abilities to protect against the Constellation before letting the converts achieve their racial ascension. Both sides could be satisfied. When he looked at beautiful Antonia, Devon thought she might be thinking the same thing.

  Encix seemed strangely reticent. “We stopped the pressure buildup in this planet, but with that demonstration, we shouted out our existence to the entire universe, a declaration that we are close to achieving ala’ru.” She hesitated, her facial membrane thrumming. “But the last time our race was this close to our destiny, Xaya was nearly destroyed.”

  65

  As the shadow-Xayan seed colonists gathered with him at Saporo Harbor, Adolphus felt hopeful, yet uneasy. If Tryn’s claims were correct, they could use their combined mental powers to send a powerful burst along the iperion path, enough to scuttle Riomini’s attack fleets. He had seen Devon and Antonia demonstrate the telemancy maneuvers on Hellhole, so he knew how effective they could be.

  Nevertheless, as a military strategist, he preferred to rely on his own prowess, conventional ships and armaments, things he could understand. In this case, however, he had no option that would likely be effective against what the Constellation would throw at them. He had to depend on the eerie powers of the shadow-Xayans—and he relished the surprise. This, more than anything else, would show Diadem Michella that she didn’t know what she was up against.

  Moving with sinuous ripples, Tryn led the group of converts, acting as a catalyst for their telemancy. Her humanoid torso was erect, her retractable antennae twitching, and her soft, jointless fingers splayed as she and the shadow-Xayans gathered on the shore, some whispering, most silent. The capital city’s buildings floated in the middle of the harbor, surrounded by steep jungled hillsides. Even though this was not yet the monsoon season, Candela’s skies were cloudy, pregnant with rain.

  High overhead were terminus rings to the DZ and Sonjeera stringline networks, as well as Tanja Hu’s own new hub. The end of the line from Sonjeera was the vulnerable spot. That, the General knew, was how the Army of the Constellation would approach Candela. Tanja’s six warships, along with the fifteen new ships he had brought from Hellhole, would put up a good fight against whatever the Constellation sent here, but the other five unidentified DZ targets wouldn’t even have a warning.

  Unless telemancy could stop the enemy at home.

  Tanja Hu stood next to him, watching the shadow-Xayans. Her expression was angry and pinched. “I love my planet, General. I don’t want to see those bastards wipe it out.”

  Tryn raised herself up on her caterpillar body. “We will not allow that to happen. We promised to help you when we came here. We can draw strength from the others on far-off Xaya, and stop the ships of the enemy faction before they depart.”

  “Then you need to act quickly,” Tanja said. “They could already be on their way.”

  “We will do it now,” Clovis said.

  “If you save the Deep Zone, I will do everything possible to help you achieve your ascension,” Adolphus said. “First, let’s show the Constellation that we have defenses far beyond anything they imagine.”

  At a signal from the Original alien, the converts gathered closer around Tryn, shoulder to shoulder on the shore, while the General and Tanja moved a safe distance away. Tryn positioned herself and raised her hands into the air. The group fell silent, connecting their minds, then began to emanate a whisper-hum.

  Water from the harbor grew choppy with a brisk breeze, and sprinkles of rain began spitting down. The tall floating buildings rocked and swayed in the harbor.

  “We are not all telemancers, but we all have Xayan minds and memories,” said the Original, her facial membrane vibrating. “Every one of us is connected as a race.”

  Next to her, Clovis lifted his face and closed his eyes. A louder humming sound came from his throat, and the other shadow-Xayans joined in, an eerie unison that built into a crescendo.

  Adolphus felt static electricity prickling his skin. Goose bumps rose on his forearms. The wind circulated, stirring the harbor waters, agitating them so that the Saporo buildings swayed even more.

  Overhead, the clouds parted, and the ascending blast of rising telemancy tore away the rainstorm. The General’s hair stood on end. The vegetation along the shore writhed and twitched as if stirred by a large invisible hand.

  “We are linked with our comrades on Xaya!” Tryn’s words sliced through the silent storm. “This is how we pull together in a single, grand mind to create a psychic weapon. Wait…” She faltered. “They have already been drawing on their telemancy, releasing Xaya’s pain, tapping into the planet’s wound. They are weak, drained—”

  “We need the power here!” Clovis insisted. “Send it into the stringline.”

  “It is coming!” Tryn said. “They are responding, building our combined psychic energy. This will take more than I anticipated.”

  As the brooding static electricity built upon itself, the General’s vision grew blurry. The objects around him were surrounded by shimmering halos, as if he could suddenly discern auras. He saw a transparent ripple in the air as the shadow-Xayans seized all the power they could grasp and sent a mental blast of energy to the overhead terminus ring, which then ricocheted outward and hurtled along the iperion line toward Sonjeera.

  * * *

  After witnessing the execution of Governor Goler—which Lord Selik Riomini found to be a satisfying but somewhat anticlimactic act—he took a command shuttle up to the main stringline hub, where his six battle groups prepared for launch to the Deep Zone. Even if General Adolphus managed to sever one or two of the DZ stringlines in time, he couldn’t possibly cut all of them. Riomini’s battle groups would fall on the rebel planets like ravenous wolves. He looked forward to it.

  Aboard the same flagship he had taken to Theser, Riomini settled into the command chair, fidgeting against its hard surface. Command chairs were not meant to be comfortable, yet the Black Lord adapted himself without much effort. While his security chief Lora Heston arranged her own attack force that would strike Komun, and his skilled operations officer Lucinda Ekova helmed the group headed for Ridgetop, the other three battle groups aligned themselves for departure to the DZ worlds of Atab Abas, Darenthia, and Ueter. As far as Riomini was concerned, those other worlds were mere names on a list, nothing remarkable whatsoever. He would take care of Candela personally.

  Before the recent Theser action, he hadn’t commanded a task force operation in a very long time, not since an early battle in the General’s rebellion some sixteen years ago. As that war intensified, he’d relinquished operational command to Percival Hallholme—a risky choice considering the black marks on the man’s early military record, but in retrospect it was the most fortuitous decision Riomini had ever made. He had sensed that Hallholme possessed the right sort of backbone and necessary ingenuity to make him formidable, and enough loyalty to toe the line when necessary.

  Even now, the Commodore’s unexpected military strike via Buktu might well put an end to the current DZ rebellion, if he did manage to pick his way along the decaying iperion path. Meanwhile, Riomini would make a more showy expedition, possibly even taking care of the matter before the old Commodore arrived.

  This time, after his operation crushed six frontier worlds without mercy, even the most slow-witted or intractable Deezees would come crawling back to beg the Diadem’s forgiveness. And everyone in the Constellation would know that Lord Selik Riomini had cemented the victory. Given the swell of popularity, he might just se
ize the Star Throne without further delay.

  His attack ships hung at the Sonjeera hub, six different clusters ready to depart along six different stringlines. Lora Heston checked in from her own battle group. Speaking in her rough, damaged voice, she said over the codecall, “All battle groups are ready to depart, Lord Riomini.”

  The sleek, efficient woman reminded him of Gail Carrington in her prime. But since Escobar Hallholme had obviously failed in his mission and lost a hundred ships, then Riomini decided that Carrington must have failed him as well. He expected better from Heston.

  “We’ve already had our fanfare,” Riomini answered on the open channel. “Now let’s go do a day’s work.” The six framework haulers at the Sonjeera hub interfered with the normal flow of space traffic, and he decided to demonstrate his leadership abilities by showing how efficiently he could bring normalcy back to the Constellation.

  Riomini’s stringline hauler was the first to disengage from the Sonjeera hub, gathering speed along the line to Candela. The other five haulers eased away, fanning out on separate iperion paths. Riomini heard inspiring military music over the fleet-wide intercom.

  Suddenly, with the force of a bottled hurricane, a rippling distortion hurtled toward them. Riomini sensed it only a fraction of a second before the surge slammed into the hauler, derailing the heavily loaded framework ship and rocketing past—directly into the Sonjeera hub.

  Sparks flew from the control panels aboard the flagship. Screens exploded from the overload. Screaming, bridge officers tumbled from their chairs. Riomini lurched to his feet, but as the deck tilted and the flagship broke from its docking clamp inside the hauler, he fell to his knees. “What the hell was—”

  The screens flickered with static; two had gone dead. One showed a low-resolution, grainy image of the hauler’s exterior. Riomini was shocked to see that most of his battleships had been shaken loose from their clamps and were drifting in space like debris.

  “It was like a flash fire along the iperion line, sir!” the exec officer said. “The stringline is damaged, maybe destroyed.”

  “But what caused it? How could this possibly—” He caught himself, knowing it had to be the General’s doing.

  The comm-officer had torn the top panel from her unit and reconnected the circuits, routing paths until finally she made contact with the nearby Sonjeera hub. Short-range radio transmissions were sufficient.

  From all around, alarms began to sound. Dozens of reports poured in from the drifting ships. Regaining his dignity, Riomini climbed back into the command chair. “Comm-officer, give me an assessment.”

  “The Sonjeera hub is in chaos, sir. That shock wave slammed past us and blew out half the nodes on the main hub. It’s a disaster!”

  They began to receive reports from the other five attack groups. The power surge hurtling along the stringline had not only torn apart their attack group and damaged the Sonjeera hub, the pulse had then ricocheted along the outgoing iperion paths. All five attack groups were torn from the stringlines. The pulse raced throughout the entire Crown Jewel network, spreading like shatter lines in a pane of glass and damaging some of the other routes.

  “My God, what has Adolphus done now?” Riomini said.

  66

  Discouraged that his work in the museum vault seemed futile, Cristoph nonetheless continued to search and document the artifacts with the archaeology team. Encix and the remaining converts had all traveled out to the main impact crater to quell the seismic pressure, and Lodo had willfully destroyed the one Xayan item that might have helped protect Hellhole, and now Cristoph didn’t know if he could trust the Original alien. Did Lodo really intend to help? What was his priority?

  And how could the asteroid impact not have been an accident?

  The Original gave no explanation, and even Keana could not pry information from her mental companion Uroa. As if grateful for a distraction, Lodo remained intrigued by the strange black artifact.

  Cristoph watched as the alien levitated the obsidian object with his telemancy, tilting the oblong artifact this way and that, spinning it, turning it over, examining it from various angles. He tried to penetrate it with his mind, as if it were a complex puzzle box. Squiggles and sparks of illumination danced in the air around him, glinting off the nested, inverted curves.

  Cristoph remained uneasy about what the Xayans knew but refused to reveal. He asked Keana, “Has he made any progress?”

  “Lodo knows nothing more than when he started,” she said. “It remains impenetrable.”

  Lodo looked up. “Encix is guiding the shadow-Xayans at the crater … and they have lanced the planet’s wound.” His head swayed from side to side. “And on Candela, Tryn is also … ah, she and her companions are drawing telemancy from all of us, using it to—” His feelers quested.

  “They are sending a strike down the iperion path to Sonjeera,” Keana said. “A telemancy blast.”

  “Too much telemancy,” Lodo said, his voice a low moan. “Too much at once!”

  Around them the walls of the vault trembled again, a shiver rather than the sharper crack of a quake. Keana looked up at the ceiling with a distant expression in her shimmering eyes. “It brings ala’ru closer.”

  “And worse,” Lodo said, but Cristoph didn’t know what the alien meant.

  The shivering in the air intensified, and even he could feel it thrumming through his thoughts. Lodo fumbled with the suspended black artifact. Keana seemed troubled. “The pulse keeps growing … there is something else.”

  Lodo said, “This is very dangerous!” The alien cried out, an eerie, warbling wail, followed by a piercing scream. Keana buckled and fell to her knees, struggling with the inner Uroa presence. The black artifact rose up, seemingly borne on its own telemancy, and began to thrum.

  “What’s happening?” Cristoph shouted. The shadow-Xayan workers in the vault clutched the sides of their heads, dropped to the cave floor. The black artifact screeched out a signal that warbled high up out of the range of his hearing.

  All around him, Cristoph saw numerous other artifacts in the vault begin to glow, the carved patterns in the stone walls, the crystalline figures, the spheres of enclosed jewel-tone liquid.…

  As suddenly as it had begun, the mysterious black artifact fell silent and tumbled to the stone floor, as if drained of power. Lodo struggled to right his caterpillar body; he stared, his large black eyes spiraling like whirlpool galaxies. His facial membrane emitted murmuring sounds.

  “What was that?” Cristoph gripped Keana’s hand, pulled her back to her feet. “Are you all right? Lodo, are you hurt?”

  Keana didn’t seem to understand him. “Uroa…,” she muttered, then focused on him. “His presence swelled up inside of me, but now it’s like an opaque net. He is silent.”

  Cristoph picked up the black artifact from where it had fallen to the floor. It was silent and cold, as if it had expended all its energy. Sending some sort of signal? Triggering an alarm?

  Lodo stood motionless, as if in shock. “Our combined telemancy is stronger than I had hoped … but not strong enough. Not yet. And we have more problems than you realize.”

  67

  After the telemancy blast down the stringline to Sonjeera, Tryn and the shadow-Xayans stood reeling and drained on the harbor shore, as if stunned by what they had done. Thunder rippled across the sky, and the air smelled of ozone.

  Adolphus looked at all the alien converts, searching for a sign that the effort had worked.

  Tel Clovis finally found words. “We succeeded, General! Our surge traveled down the iperion path like a telepathic tsunami. We knocked out the Sonjeera hub, overloaded the endpoints, disrupted the stringlines, and damaged some of the other Crown Jewel routes.” He was breathing hard. “From what I could tell, sir, we seriously damaged the Diadem’s transport capabilities.”

  Tanja Hu threw her head back and let out a throaty laugh. “That means Candela and the rest of the Deep Zone are safe!” Though she was grinning, her anger
remained palpable. “The old bitch got what she damn well deserved.”

  Adolphus felt relieved to the point of exhilaration that the bold gambit had worked after so many things had gone wrong. Even without stringline travel, the twenty core planets were close enough to remain connected with normal FTL ships, but the Deep Zone worlds were much farther away and virtually inaccessible without long voyages. “We should be safe for months now, maybe even years. Plenty of time to get our defenses in order.”

  The clouds had regathered over the harbor. “A downpour will begin soon,” Tanja said, turning her face to the sky.

  Adolphus wasn’t worried. “At least rainstorms are just rainstorms on Candela, rather than horrific static storms.” He felt hopeful again, and he wished Sophie were there.

  Tryn and the gathered converts remained linked on the harbor shore, and together they attempted to sever the psychic connection with the others on Xaya. The Original’s voice was heavy, her energy level low, exhausted from the effort. On each side of her the hybrids continued to hold hands, communing in their paranormal link … struggling. Adolphus sensed no exuberance in the group at all, and he began to realize that something was wrong.

  Tanja kept talking, as if she had forgotten the recent bloody darkness. “After that blast, the Constellation will be terrified of us from now on. It’s time to go on the offensive, General. Fight this war the way it should be fought, and finish it! While they’re weak and reeling, we could take over Sonjeera.”

  Adolphus drew his eyebrows together. “I don’t want to conquer the Constellation. I just want them to leave us alone.”

  A sudden loud boom sounded in the fabric of the air, and a flash of light shot down from what must have been the terminus above. A beam of energy slammed into the telemancers and illuminated them. They let out an eerie, combined scream.