A Forest of Stars

Five years after the hydrogues’ ultimatum, the Roamers still need the gas giants, and the gas giants still belong to the enemy. The clans’ answer is the blitzkrieg scoop: a skymine rebuilt around giant engines, funnel-shaped maws and detachable cargo tanks clustered like grapes, built to dive, gulp and run. Jess Tamblyn flies lookout over the coppery gas giant Welyr for the clan leader Del Kellum. The lightning on the sensor buoys looks normal until another lookout pilot, Trish Ng, notices that it repeats every twenty-one seconds: a recorded loop. Seven warglobes rise from the clouds. One scoop and a lookout ship are lost; the rest run with the ekti. Jess is a hero to the clans for hurling comets into Golgen, where his brother Ross died, and Kellum, whose intended bride died at Welyr, wants Welyr bombed next.

On Earth, Peter has been King for five years. At an emergency staff meeting, held on terms Peter insisted on, Chairman Basil Wenceslas reviews five years of war since the hydrogues killed King Frederick, and General Kurt Lanyan reports that Roamer ekti deliveries cannot meet the need. Dressing in his chambers, Peter tells OX, the ancient Teacher compy who tutors him, that Basil doesn’t want a leader. OX replies, “It is best for you to be both, King Peter.” When Peter defies the Chairman openly, Basil is blunter:

“Your job is to speak for the Hanseatic League, not to think.”

Basil’s lover Sarein is Theroc’s ambassador on Earth, and he presses her for more green priests, whose instant telink the war needs, and floats the idea of a royal marriage. On Theroc her younger sister Estarra sits on the very top of the worldforest canopy with Rossia, a solitary green priest who limps on a thigh cratered by the wyvern that once carried him off. Their brother Beneto tends the worldtree grove that the old priest Talbun planted on the farming colony Corvus Landing.

Jess’s sister Tasia is platform commander of the Thunderhead 7-5 in Admiral Sheila Willis’s battle group, which is besieging Yreka, a breakaway colony that has been hoarding ekti. Its Grand Governor, Padme Sarhi, refuses to give way. Patrick Fitzpatrick III, the spoiled grandson of a former Chairman, urges a fast strike, and Wing Commander Robb Brindle is Tasia’s friend and lover. Cesca Peroni is now Speaker of the clans, and her love for Jess is still unspoken in public, kept waiting by duty. Jess visits his family’s water mines on the frozen moon Plumas, then meets Cesca in secret, their two unmarked ships docked together in a comet’s tail.

On Dobro, Nira Khali has been a prisoner for five years in a breeding camp among the descendants of the Burton colonists. Jora’h believes she is dead. She has borne his daughter, Osira’h, and since then, by order, half-breed children by other Ildiran fathers, the Dobro Designate, Udru’h, and Adar Kori’nh among them; Osira’h is the one she cares for most.

Rlinda Kett, her merchant fleet requisitioned for the war, works her one remaining ship, the Voracious Curiosity, out of a dock on the Moon. On Crenna, an Ildiran colony abandoned after a plague and resettled by humans, Davlin Lotze, a Hansa exosociologist posing as a settler, listens to colonists who want to leave. Anton Colicos, son of the archaeologists lost on Rheindic Co, arrives on Ildira to study its great epic, the Saga of Seven Suns, with the rememberer Vao’sh. The Colicoses’ compy, DD, is a prisoner of the Klikiss robot Sirix and watches the robots take captured compies apart. Then Basil sends for Rlinda: fetch his spy Davlin from Crenna, and find out what happened on Rheindic Co.

Mage-Imperator Cyroc’h is dying, and only his heir may know it.

“Go to Hyrillka. No one can know my health is failing—not yet”

Jora’h’s errand is to bring home his eldest noble-born son, Thor’h, who will be Prime Designate when Jora’h ascends. Cyroc’h quietly blocks his son’s letters to Theroc, and Jora’h still believes the lie that Nira and Otema died in a fire. On Dobro, at dusk, Nira glimpses Osira’h in the Designate’s tower and counts it a start. Udru’h sees in the girl a mind that could bridge Ildirans and hydrogues.

Adar Kori’nh flies a skyparade over Hyrillka, the Empire’s pleasure planet, under orange skies lit by its secondary sun, and a warglobe arrives. The hydrogues bring down the Designate’s citadel palace, and Rusa’h, Cyroc’h’s soft and pleasure-loving son, is caught in its fall; Kori’nh’s warliners are routed but escape with Jora’h, Thor’h and the unconscious Rusa’h. Thor’h keeps vigil at his uncle’s bed, asking why he won’t wake, and is sent back to rebuild. In the crystal capital, Mijistra, Vao’sh tells Anton the tale of the star-crossed Kri’l and Tre’c, and teaches him that stories are best told in the dark.

On Earth, Peter questions the Klikiss robots and the scientists’ plan to reverse-engineer them. Jorax, the robot that killed a scientist who tried to dissect it years before, comes before the throne and volunteers to be dismantled. Soon Admiral Lev Stromo and the engineer Lars Swendsen present Soldier compies built with modifications borrowed from the robots, and Peter is suspicious. General Lanyan, on Fitzpatrick’s advice, takes a scout wing out, stops the lone Roamer cargo ship of Raven Kamarov, drains its ekti and destroys it, killing Raven. Rlinda collects Davlin on Crenna, where she also runs into her favourite ex-husband, BeBob, and flies him to Rheindic Co to search the Klikiss tunnels.

On Theroc, Father Idriss and Mother Alexa announce that they will retire and make their eldest son, Reynald, Father of Theroc. Basil and Sarein come to the coronation, where Idriss wears a tall crown adorned with insect wings and beetle shells, and propose that Estarra marry King Peter. Reynald agrees. He has already proposed a match of his own, to Cesca. She weighs it while inspecting Kellum’s comet-extraction teams at the edge of the Osquivel system; in a grappler pod among Kellum’s hidden ring shipyards, Jess urges her to choose happiness; and at Rendezvous, the Roamers’ asteroid cluster around a garnet-coloured dwarf star, after a talk with old Jhy Okiah, she accepts the political wisdom of marrying Reynald. Jess signs aboard one of Kellum’s nebula skimmers and flies off alone. Elsewhere the hydrogues lay waste to the forested colony of Boone’s Crossing.

In the Klikiss cliff city on Rheindic Co, Rlinda and Davlin find Louis Colicos’s body. Margaret and DD are gone. Davlin, a trained investigator, tests the blood: Louis was frightened, and he died slowly. At Boone’s Crossing, Tasia, now commanding a Manta cruiser, has her crew spray tactical armour foam onto the water, where it hardens into rafts, and thousands are saved. Willis credits her in front of Basil, who still calls the battle a disaster.

Basil announces Peter’s bride, and Peter has to ask who Estarra of Theroc is. Told she will marry the King, Estarra promises Rossia she will keep an open mind. Sarein persuades nineteen green priests, among them her uncle Yarrod and Rossia, to serve the EDF as telink relays. Estarra leaves Theroc by Manta with Sarein and the volunteers, and on Mars Lanyan receives the priests and their potted treelings. Peter formally hands the new Soldier compies over to Admiral Stromo on a parade ground.

On Dobro, Nira works the hills with the other prisoners, her emerald skin feeding on the sunlight; by order she is kept pregnant. Osira’h trains alone in a white isolation room, learning to fuse the green priests’ telink with the Ildiran thism.

Cesca prepares for her betrothal in a gown pieced from a swatch of every Roamer family’s cloth, but an emergency delays the trip. She visits Kotto Okiah, Jhy Okiah’s brash, brilliant youngest son, at the metals colony he has built on scorching Isperos, and when she does reach Theroc it is with twelve eccentric Roamer betrothal ships, which come down to Idriss’s bewilderment. Far out in the nebula, alone for months, Jess begins to sense that the water he is skimming is somehow alive.

On Rheindic Co, Rlinda and Davlin work out what the Klikiss transportal is, a trapezoidal stone wall of tiles marked with coordinates. Rlinda sees at once that instant travel could put her Voracious Curiosity out of business; Davlin sees a motive for murder. When he activates it he is snatched away to other Klikiss worlds, and Rlinda is left waiting. Davlin comes back, and they set out for Earth to report. On Ildira, Jora’h finds secret records in his sealed chambers, then hears from his father and from Udru’h about the work on Dobro. Udru’h puts it plainly: “Human folly reawakened the hydrogues, but we have always known they would return.” Anton and Vao’sh go to Maratha, a resort world of very long days and nights.

Robb Brindle tracks warglobes to the ringed gas giant Osquivel and goes down into the clouds to try to talk to the hydrogues. He does not come back, and he is presumed dead. His overture was a political nicety; the real plan is Lanyan’s full attack, led by Mantas crewed by the new Soldier compies, and it becomes a massacre of human ships. From their shipyards hidden in the rings the Roamers watch. “By the Guiding Star, there is no way I will ever attempt to skymine again,” Del Kellum tells his daughter, Zhett. The clan salvages the wrecks, and Zhett pulls a lifetube from the debris with a weak Patrick Fitzpatrick inside. She nurses him, and the clan ends up holding some thirty EDF survivors that it cannot free without giving away the yards. Peter stands on a Juggernaut’s bridge and recites the words written for him about the defeat.

Out in the nebula, Jess’s suspicion proves true. The water speaks in his mind: “We call ourselves wentals.” They are the last of an elemental race of water, and old enemies of the hydrogues. On Dobro, when alarms send the prisoners out to fight a brush fire in the hills, Nira tries to escape and is beaten and dragged back. Kotto’s Isperos colony begins to fail. And DD, still Sirix’s captive, is taken down into a gas giant, where the Klikiss robots are making an alliance with the hydrogues.

Peter and Estarra marry before the grandfatherly Archfather of Unison in the square of the Whisper Palace, and Estarra becomes Queen. Peter eats nothing, remembering that he was drugged at his coronation. Tasia, at the hospital colony of New Portugal after Osquivel, finds that her compy EA has not come back from a secret errand to Rendezvous. Jess releases wentals into a stormy, sterile, nameless ocean world. Admiral Stromo, mocked as Stay-at-Home Stromo, surveys Oncier, the gas giant the Hansa turned into a star, and sees a red-hot ovoid like a perfect geometric egg rise out of it, and then others: the faeros, fire beings that live in stars.

Then a hydrogue emissary sphere descends on Corvus Landing. Beneto sends his last messages through telink as the hydrogues destroy the colony and his grove. A running green priest brings the news to Reynald, and on Earth Estarra grieves her brother in private, away from the cheering crowds. Peter goes off alone to do something dangerous and, faced down by Basil’s expediter, Franz Pellidor, publicly asks whether he is not the King. Basil decides that Peter is out of bounds and has Pellidor quietly gather files on other candidates.

On Isperos, Kotto, red and blistered, leads his people overland out of the failing base; one woman freezes to death on the planet’s dark side. A Roamer rescue under Anna Pasternak gets them out, and what they meet in the star leaves Kotto awed; Anna calls it a pleasant surprise, aliens that for a change do not want to smash them.

On Dobro, Osira’h feels a cry for help in her mind. On Ildira, Cyroc’h tells Jora’h the Empire’s secrets: the ancient war in which the hydrogues and the faeros fought the wentals and the verdani, the mind of the worldforest, and the purpose of Dobro, where Osira’h is being bred as a bridge to the hydrogues. Then, behind a door sealed by his bodyguard Bron’n, he dies by poison, so that Jora’h must inherit the rest of his knowledge through the thism. Kori’nh feels the thism go empty.

Jess, racing back to Rendezvous in the hope of catching Cesca in time, with a vial of wental water in his pocket and a larger cylinder of it in the hold, is caught by hydrogues above the clouds of an ocean world. As they shoot his ship apart, the wental tells him to drink the vial. He does, and the wentals pour into his body and keep him alive. On Dobro, Udru’h hurries away to Ildira for the funeral.

With Udru’h away, Nira slips out of the breeding barracks, and Osira’h follows the call in her mind to her mother. Mind to mind, Nira gives her daughter the truth: memories of Jora’h, of the Prism Palace and of Otema’s murder. A guard hurries the girl back while Nira is beaten. Her last plea is that Osira’h remember.

Less than two weeks after Corvus Landing, the hydrogues find Theroc, and no one there is ready. Warglobes descend on the worldforest, and Reynald is last seen standing defiantly atop the canopy. Then the faeros come and fight the hydrogues over the trees.

“They had repelled the hydrogues, but they had left much of the worldforest in flames.”

Reynald is dead; Idriss, Alexa and their youngest daughter, Celli, survive. At Qronha 3, the gas giant where the Solar Navy was beaten before, Adar Kori’nh leads a cohort of warliners in a suicide charge, ramming the warglobes; the images that reach Ildira show nearly fifty of them destroyed.

“Let the enemy witness their own folly.”

Jora’h takes the chrysalis chair as Mage-Imperator, and the medical kithmen prepare the surgical rite that goes with it. Cesca learns that the hydrogues have again killed the man she was pledged to: first Ross, now Reynald. Davlin and Rlinda tell Basil about the transportal network, and Tasia is sent in a Manta to try to make contact with the faeros. In the last chapter Peter comforts Estarra, who has lost both her brothers in less than two weeks.