THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 35: The Tower
“Life is only as precious as what we will die for.”
– Nnyth agreement (2,401 MA)
Three hours had passed since Duaal’s surprisingly smooth drop out of superluminal flight. Logan stood next to Maeve at one of the viewports in the mess. She stared out through the thick glassteel with an intent look on her beautiful face that made the hunter want to sweep her up into his arms. Logan settled for a small kiss on the soft skin of her neck. It was like silk against his lips.
“Hey, Logan,” Duaal’s said over the Blue Phoenix com. “Get up here. This place is even worse than I remember. I’m going to need a hand.”
Logan kissed Maeve again, then made his way in the direction of the cockpit. Anthem sat at the table, reading. He glanced up at Logan as the Prian passed, but said nothing. In fact, everyone else on the Blue Phoenix had left both Maeve and Logan largely alone. Anthem had been quiet and even stopped his incessant hovering. Logan wondered if the knight was avoiding him and decided that he didn’t really care. He had Maeve. Nothing else mattered.
Up in the cockpit, Duaal tightly gripped the control yoke with white knuckles. Logan looked at the main display. It was easy to see why Duaal wanted a hand, even a glass one. The Rynn system was like nothing Logan had ever seen before. It was small by Alliance standards and ancient, located far away from the hot, dense pack of younger stars in the galactic heart. Logan squinted. They weren’t far away, but he could barely make out the star at the system’s center. It was a pale, flickering blue-gray spot only barely visible against the deeper darkness of space: a neutron star, the core of a larger dead star that had collapsed violently under its own weight to the size of a single city.
There were two other stars in the Rynn system — a pair of tiny, dim brown dwarves too distant in their slow and wide orbit to make out with the naked eye. But there were no planets… not anymore. They would have been destroyed when the system primary blew off its outer layers of volatile gas and then the massive radiation burst of the star’s implosion. All that remained now were billions of tons of rock and ice, millions of asteroids twisted by the neutron star’s intense and unpredictable gravity to form several convoluted belts.
Logan slid into the copilot’s seat. Duaal didn’t dare look up.
“Can you fly through this?” the young captain asked.
“Yes.”
Duaal gratefully turned over control to the copilot’s station with the flip of a switch.
“Great,” he said. “I need to find the Tower. It’s been a while since we were here and it isn’t exactly stationary. It doesn’t even follow a real orbit.”
Logan tipped the Blue Phoenix up onto the relatively vertical axis to glide alongside a roiling cluster of small, rough black stones torn free by the collision of two larger asteroids. The debris glinted in the Blue Phoenix’s running lights as though faceted.
“Are the sensors working in this?” Logan asked. “There’s a lot of material out there.”
“They’re working fine,” Duaal said. “But the Tower is stone, just like the asteroids. The Nnyth chew up rock and then secrete it to build their hive. The Tower is made of the same stuff as the rest of this mess, so the sensors can’t differentiate.”
“What about size?”
“I’m showing several large bodies in the system. It could be any one of them. We’re going to have to get close enough to use our eyes.” Duaal shook his head and scanned the sensor readout again. “You know, I seem to recall the Tower being a lot bigger than any of the asteroids, this giant sort of ring-shaped thing. But I was just a kid the last time. Everything probably looked bigger… Maybe the Nnyth are smaller than I remember, too.”
“I’ve seen Tiberius’ original data. Not likely.”
“Great,” Duaal said sourly. “You’re a real beacon of light in dark times, Logan.”
Logan didn’t answer. A pair of huge, pyramidal chunks of stone tumbled slowly ahead. He pushed down on the controls and slid the Blue Phoenix beneath the obstacles while Duaal consulted his readouts and adjusted their course.
“We can try this one,” Duaal said, pointing to a large blotch on one screen.
Logan glanced at it. “The one in grid seven is closer.”
“Yeah,” Duaal agreed. “But look at how much other stuff is in that grid, Logan. That’s going to be some tough flying.”
“But odds are better that one of those massive signatures is the Tower,” Logan said.
“Shouldn’t we rule out the easy ones first?”
Logan gave Duaal a pointed look and the young mage grinned.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “Why stick to the easy stuff? We’re trying to save the whole damned galaxy!”
That wasn’t what Logan had suggested, but it was close enough and Duaal punched in their new course. Without slowing, the Blue Phoenix pivoted and changed direction. They looped up over the pair of pyramid-shaped stones and into a glittering patch of darkness that reminded Logan disconcertingly of the Devourers’ nanite swarms. The asteroids were too many and too close for the pale radiance of the neutron star to penetrate. The only light was that of other, brighter but far more distant stars flashing off tumbling and turning faces of the celestial stone.
The Blue Phoenix flew slowly through the asteroid field. Even with both Duaal watching the monitors closely and Logan making myriad minute corrections, a dozen or more skull-sized black asteroids smashed into the Blue Phoenix’s hull. Duaal winced visibly.
“You know, I’ve been working really hard on my flying,” he said. “A little more of this and no one is going to believe it.”
“I’m flying,” Logan pointed out.
“You’re Prian and I’ve seen your ships. They’re not exactly delicate machines.”
“And the Blue Phoenix is delicate…?”
Duaal laughed shortly. “Nope. But her captain sure can be.”
Logan arced the Blue Phoenix up over a huge, flat slab of stone almost twice the old freighter’s size. Logan glanced down at the asteroid.
“What’s the chemical breakdown of this system?” he asked.
“Not sure,” Duaal answered. “Nitrogen, carbon and nickel, I guess. All the usual stuff. Probably some iron and heavier elements from when that star blew.”
Logan pointed to a long, thin spar of dark stone.
“Those things don’t look like any asteroids in the Prian system,” he said. “These seem almost crystalline. They’re structured.”
“You’re right.” Duaal looked up from the computers at Logan. “I don’t remember any asteroids like this last time.”
Stone floated and tumbled slowly all around the Blue Phoenix, impacting the fibersteel hull with ringing thuds. What the hells was going on? Asteroid fields — even those surrounding unstable stars like Rynn — were usually thinly populated and rather staid areas, full of silently and smoothly gliding stone and metal that contently circled its parent star. This was too crowded and too chaotic to be normal in a stellar system so old.
“What is happening up here?” Maeve asked, suddenly standing in the cockpit’s door.
Duaal jumped.
“God, Maeve,” he gasped, but didn’t look up at the fairy. “Don’t do that!”
“Why are we hitting so many asteroids?” she asked.
“I don’t think they’re asteroids, dove,” Logan told her.
“Then what are–?”
Maeve fell silent as they reached the center of the astroid field, the large body that the Blue Phoenix’s sensors had picked up. Her gray eyes widened and one hand flew to her mouth.
They had finally reached the Tower. A hundred or more shattered pieces of the great star-hive floated crooked orbits around a single broken crescent of dark, faceted-looking stone. The ruins of the Nnyth’s home tumbled slowly through space.
“What in the hells?” Duaal asked, gasping. “What happened here?”
“The Tower’s gravity is pulling the debris back in,” Logan said. “We’re exposed out here. We need to move back.”
Duaal nodded. “Whatever did this could still be out there.”
“Wait!” Maeve said. “No, take us into what remains of the Tower. There are openings large enough to fly the Blue Phoenix inside.”
“What?” Duaal asked. “Why?”
“We need to find out what happened here. Perhaps some of the Nnyth yet live. We came to warn them…”
“It’s too late for that, dove,” Logan said. “You know who did this — Xartasia and her Devourers.”
Maeve stared at the Tower, dark and broken. “But we still need to discover why, enarri. Why was Xartasia here? And why did she attack the Tower?”
“I’m more worried about how she did it,” Duaal pointed out. “Maeve, she could still be here!”
“Is that not what we wanted?” the fairy asked. “To finally catch Xartasia? We have followed my cousin since this began! Now we have some slim chance to find out what she wanted here. Take us to the Tower. Please, Duaal.”
The Hyzaari captain looked at Logan, waiting for him to argue with Maeve. But Logan said nothing. Maeve was right. Duaal drew a deep, hissing breath.
“As you command, my queen,” he said.
Duaal toggled control back to his own station and flew toward the ruins of the Tower.
As the huge gray crescent eclipsed their vision, Maeve wormed her hand into Logan’s. He squeezed her fingers gently and wanted to reassure her, but had no idea what to say. What did she hope? That the Nnyth lived? Dead star wasps posed no danger to the Blue Phoenix or anyone else, but they couldn’t answer questions, either. And whatever Logan thought of the Nnyth and their secretive, defensive isolation, he didn’t particularly want the species wiped out.
Did Maeve hope to find Xartasia still haunting the ruins of the shattered Tower? Or that the White Queen was already gone, her terrible work here done? Logan didn’t hope either way. He simply sat, waiting.
Duaal carefully circled the shattered Tower. The Blue Phoenix glided along the outer edge of the crescent. Duaal swore once as a huge segment of gray and black stone suddenly shuddered and tore free from the ruined hive. Logan watched the massive thing spin slowly through the cold void. Smaller pieces — smaller, though each was still larger than his Raptor had been — fractured and then broke away. The loss of mass slightly changed the vast stone’s spin toward the Blue Phoenix. Logan leaned forward. There was something inside the rock…
“Do you see that?” he asked Maeve.
Logan pointed. The interior of the broken stone — easily larger and longer than a CWAAF starcruiser — wasn’t black or gray, but a pale pink like the inside of a seashell. As Logan and Maeve stared, a subtle blue shimmer rippled over the rose-colored surface. Logan knew that pale light. He had seen it back on his own homeworld, in the mountains above Pylos.
“A… Waygate?” Maeve asked.
“A piece of one,” Logan said.
The Blue Phoenix flew around the huge floating stone and the glowing pink inner surface vanished from view. Duaal wiped the back of his hand across his forehead.
“You keep telling us what great Waygate experts the Nnyth are,” Duaal said. “Makes sense that they would have one of their own.”
“But I have never seen one so huge,” Maeve said. She traced a circle in the air over Logan’s shoulder. “A ring. A great ring in the stars. The whole Tower is a Waygate!”
Logan looked up at her. “At least, it used to be.”
They were flying low and close along the faceted surface of the Tower. The ring’s shattered edge suddenly loomed up ahead, as sharp and dark as obsidian. Maeve and Duaal were silent. Logan felt the Arcadian queen’s breath against the back of his neck as she leaned close, staring through the viewport. Logan switched on the sensor panel to his right, but there was no sign of any other ships. Not that he could find, at any rate…
But even snapped in half, the Tower was beyond huge. There were vast pentagonal openings into the ring’s surface, wide tunnels into darkness more than large enough for a starship to land inside. Surrounded by the stone and metal of the Nnyth hive, what chance did the Blue Phoenix’s outdated sensor system have of picking them out…? Xartasia and her whole army could be anywhere out there, hiding among the destruction.
A dark, streamlined shape streaked through the flickering and inconstant starlight, right at the Blue Phoenix. Duaal shouted and jerked the controls, but not fast enough. The thing landed on the old freighter’s conical nose. A large, sleek silhouette crawled up the front of the Blue Phoenix until it was looking into the cockpit.
It was a Nnyth. The star wasp was the size of a small fighter. The weight of its own black and red-striped exoskeleton would have killed it on the surface of any planet, collapsing under the gravity. But out here in the void, it moved with a fluid, alien grace. Almost… One of the shiny black legs — longer than Logan was tall — ended abruptly at the first joint. Dark ichor leaked slowly from the wound and beaded into glistening spheres that froze and floated away into the darkness of space.
The Nnyth tilted its triangular head one way and then the other, peering into the Blue Phoenix. Colors swirled across the compound eyes, reminding Logan at once of an Ixthian. But while Xia’s eyes changed color, they only ever showed a single hue. The eyes staring at them now were a swirling mosaic of bright, sunny yellow, blue and orange and a deep violet so dark that it was nearly black but for the nearly ultraviolet glow.
But below those eyes were the Nnyth’s mandibles — blade-like black hooks longer than Logan’s arm and barbed all along the inner curve with spines that could tear fibersteel apart as easily a paper. The Nnyth’s mandibles worked open and shut as it studied the Blue Phoenix.
Finally, the colorful eyes fixed on Maeve. She gripped the back of Logan’s chair so tight that he could hear the plastihide creaking. The huge wasp lowered its head and slowly unfurled long, translucent wings. It spread them wide and then swept them back… Just like the Arcadians did to their queen. The Nnyth was bowing.
Both Duaal and Logan stared at Maeve. Her gray eyes were wide and she inclined her head in reply. There was no room to move her wings, but the Nnyth seemed to understand. It raised its own wings and caught the wild stellar winds, soaring out ahead of the Blue Phoenix and then turned back toward the ship again.
“I think we are supposed to follow,” Maeve said.
Duaal let out an explosive breath.
“The worst part is,” the mage told no one in particular, “this isn’t even the weirdest thing that’s happened to me in the last year.”
Duaal flew the Blue Phoenix after the injured Nnyth, following. The wasp led them over the Tower’s sharp, shattered end and along the crescent’s inside surface. Logan saw many more of the five-sided tunnels, but most were blocked by silvery stone rubble. Cracks ran down the length of the sundered ring’s curve, some so wide that a much larger ship than the Blue Phoenix could have landed easily inside.
And deep inside the broken Tower, pale light flickered fitfully. Not with the steady heartbeat throb of the Pylos Waygate, Logan thought, but lights on the verge of burning out.
Closer to the Tower now, there were more Nnyth. The striped star wasps crouched on the facets of the Tower’s surface, their long wings shining in the starlight. There were hundreds of them, but still fewer of them than Logan had expected. Shouldn’t there have been thousands, tens of thousands of Nnyth? Where were the rest?
Their guide led the Blue Phoenix to one of the openings in the Tower’s curved side. The tunnel had been huge to begin with, more than large enough for a ship, but now a jagged crack tore it wide and the stone yawed open like a monstrous mouth. The Nnyth vanished inside and Duaal looked to Maeve.
“This could be a trap,” the young captain said. “Xartasia and her whole army of fairies and Devourers could be in there, just waiting to tear us apart.”
“I know,” Maeve answered. She put her hand on Logan’s shoulder. He pressed his glass one over it. She drew a deep breath. “We have come all this way to find Xartasia. If this is her trap, then let us spring it.”
“That sounds brave and all, Maeve,” Duaal said, “but we don’t have a single weapon on this ship. If Xartasia is here, then what?”
“Then be ready to fly,” Maeve said.
Duaal gave her a lopsided smile. “Same as usual. Got it. Logan, keep an eye on the proximeters. I don’t want to run into anything down there.”
“I will,” Logan answered.
Duaal nodded and then flipped on the internal com. “Attention, everyone. The Nnyth appear to be inviting us into the Tower and Queen Maeve has kindly accepted. Keep your eyes open and your weapons close. We have no idea what’s waiting for us in there.”
He released the com button and pressed the control yoke gently forward. The Blue Phoenix glided down into the Tower.
