Scattered Suns

The book opens on a raid. The Earth Defense Forces’ hunt for the Roamer clans, scattered since Rendezvous fell, is in its second week, and Admiral Lev Stromo, derisively called Stay-at-home Stromo, rides along in a prowling Manta to watch the newer officers cut their teeth. One raid falls on the Chan greenhouse asteroids. Young Nikko Chan Tylar has the wentals aboard, and he is told to get away before the Big Goose, the Roamers’ name for the Hansa, can lay hands on them. “Probably pour them down the drain,” his father snorts. Nikko runs. On Earth King Peter watches the newsnet hail the raids as triumphs, boxed in by Basil and friendless except for Queen Estarra and, possibly, the old Teacher compy OX.

On Dobro, little Osira’h, Jora’h’s half-breed daughter by the captive green priest Nira, trains with half-siblings who suspect nothing of her purpose. She suspects everything and trusts no one.

Adar Zan’nh brings a maniple of warliners to Hyrillka, where Jora’h’s brother Rusa’h has made himself Imperator. A shuttle flees toward the fleet carrying Thor’h, Jora’h’s disgraced eldest noble-born son, who says he has escaped the uncle who murdered Pery’h. Zan’nh lets him dock aboard Qul Fan’nh’s warliner, and within seconds Thor’h’s converted guards and Rusa’h’s pleasure mates are taking the ship. “Thor’h! I will — I will destroy your ship!” Zan’nh threatens; Thor’h chuckles, and the Adar cannot bring himself to order warliners to fire on Ildirans. The rebels force heavy doses of shiing on his subcommanders, the maniple’s warliners are taken, Qul Fan’nh is killed, and Zan’nh ends up a prisoner on Hyrillka. Rusa’h, carried in an imitation of the Mage-Imperator’s chrysalis chair, invites him to join: “It is inevitable.” Zan’nh’s bloodline should make his thism strong enough to resist.

Speaker Cesca Peroni brings old Jhy Okiah to Jonah 12, Kotto Okiah’s base on a planetoid of hydrogen-rich ice, run by Purcell Wan while Kotto studies the hydrogue derelict at Osquivel; two days after they arrive, Jhy’s health fails. Cesca’s father, Denn, sets out to find new markets, since the clans have cut off trade with the Hansa. Jess Tamblyn, so charged with wental energy that he can touch no one, rides his water-and-pearl ship down into the convulsing clouds of Golgen, where his brother Ross died, while wental strikes smash the hydrogues: a measure of revenge.

Tasia Tamblyn joined the EDF to fight hydrogues, and finds herself escorting captured Roamers through the transportal to the Klikiss world of Llaro, feeding edited diary memories to her partly wiped Listener compy, EA. Robb Brindle, whom she must believe dead, is a prisoner of the hydrogues inside a gas giant. On Corribus, Orli Covitz thinks herself the only survivor of the robots’ massacre until old Hud Steinman turns up. Peter and Estarra leave for Ildira with Basil, Estarra carrying a potted treeling. On Theroc the wooden golem of Celli’s dead brother Beneto stands under the rebuilt fungus-reef city. And on Jonah 12 Jhy Okiah sits up in her narrow bed with pepperflower tea, squeezes Cesca’s hand with surprising strength, and says she wants to see how all this ends. She does not live to.

On Maratha the long night has fallen, and sabotage has wrecked Maratha Prime’s generators and two of its three shuttles. The frightened skeleton crew blame the Shana Rei, creatures of darkness from the Ildiran Saga. “The Shana Rei are not here on Maratha,” the rememberer Vao’sh tells them. Designate Avi’h leads the survivors on foot through the dark toward Secda, the planet’s other domed city, sure the Klikiss robots there will help them; Anton Colicos, the human scholar of the Saga, is suspicious. Maratha has other dangers: carnivorous plated anemones kill the burly agricultural kithman Mhas’k and his mate, Syl’k.

Rlinda Kett and BeBob bring two shiploads of refugees from Crenna, whose sun died in a battle between hydrogues and faeros, to the nearby Relleker system, and its governor, Jane Pekar, says they cannot stay. Davlin Lotze, the spy who had hoped to retire on Crenna, commandeers a ship for Earth to force the issue. DD, the Colicoses’ Friendly compy and Sirix’s prisoner, is carried from enclave to enclave as Sirix wakes long-dormant groups of Klikiss robots and harvests compies from ships and raids.

On Ildira, where night never falls, Jora’h receives Peter and Estarra at the Prism Palace. Estarra gives him a potted treeling and asks whether he remembers the worldtrees of her world, and he thinks of Nira, whom he believes dead. Then Udru’h, the Dobro Designate, brings Osira’h to Mijistra at his brother’s command. She feels very small as he marches her before the Mage-Imperator; she carries Nira’s memories secondhand, and from them she believes this man betrayed her mother. Yazra’h, Jora’h’s warrior daughter and now his bodyguard, takes her little half-sister under her wing, three Isix cats prowling beside them.

Basil frets over the King’s intractability and the disappointing Prince Daniel, Peter’s potential replacement. At Osquivel the EDF captives in Del Kellum’s shipyards chafe, and Patrick Fitzpatrick III resists the idea that he is falling in love with Kellum’s daughter, Zhett. Alone aboard the derelict with his compies KR and GU, Kotto finds systems unlike anything human, Ildiran or even Klikiss. And on Jonah 12 the miners find something on the other side of the planetoid; Cesca wishes Kotto were back to figure it out.

Rusa’h, sure he has seen the true path to the Lightsource, takes Dzelluria, less than a day’s journey from Hyrillka: his warliners loom overhead, he wipes out its communication facility, and its Designate-in-waiting, Czir’h, joins him of his own will. Still a prisoner, Zan’nh hears that his own warliners have added Dzelluria to his uncle’s empire. Rusa’h next sends Thor’h with a warliner on a special mission to Dobro, carrying an offer or an ultimatum; the practical Udru’h, the reckoning goes, has no real options. On Dobro, Nira, free of her island, walks on through the wilds away from a ghost town, with no one to help her and no green priest to hear her.

On Theroc the Beneto golem tells his people they are all connected to the worldforest, and asks that worldtrees be taken from Theroc, so that the verdani live on whatever happens there. Sarein, sent by Basil to claim Theroc, cannot get its people to accept her as their next Mother. After a disturbing conversation with the golem of her brother, she turns instead to sending green priests and treelings to Hansa colonies.

The EDF readies its rammers, crewed by Soldier compies, to tackle the warglobes head-on, one for one. Peter suspects the Klikiss programming embedded in tens of thousands of those compies. Basil promised to verify that it holds nothing harmful, and he is, Peter sees, turning a blind eye. Jess goes back to his wandering wental comet to wait for his water bearers. On Llaro a Roamer detainee blames Tasia for Hurricane Depot and Rendezvous, and she denies it.

Then Jonah 12’s discovery wakes. More and more black robots come alive behind the Roamers; Cesca grabs a fire extinguisher while Purcell shuts down systems. On Maratha, Avi’h, who cannot stop talking about the Shana Rei, sees something in the dark and cries out that it is one of them.

BeBob’s Blind Faith races away from Corribus with Orli and Hud aboard, and BeBob, who deserted the EDF that had conscripted him, brings them to its Moon base anyway, where he is told he has a lot of nerve coming back. In guest quarters Orli tells the officers that a Juggernaut and five Mantas crewed by robots destroyed her colony; they tell her she must be mistaken. Later Stromo walks the burned colony, finds fresh soot on the rockfaces, and confirms her story. At BeBob’s board of inquiry Rlinda acts as his advocate, but since he does not dispute the charges, the board’s finding goes against him.

At Osquivel Patrick plans an escape for the good of the captives, and plays on Zhett’s feelings to make it work. On Hyrillka Zan’nh breaks free. At the start he could not stomach firing on his own people; now he remembers that Rusa’h murdered his brother Pery’h. Ildiran has already killed Ildiran, and the Adar turns warliners on the rebels.

On Jonah 12 the robots cover the base, and Cesca shouts at Purcell to get out. On Earth young Prince Daniel, lectured by Basil and sore from forced exercise, shoves OX into his closet and seals the Teacher compy inside. Denn and Caleb Tamblyn, one of Jess’s uncles, land the Dogged Persistence at the half-mothballed spaceport of a cut-off Hansa colony, and the colonists cluster around: the Roamers’ new markets. Nira will not be made a hostage, a bargaining chip against Jora’h: she does not want to be a pawn. And on Theroc the golem chooses Celli and the green priest Solimar to jump-start the burned forest’s recovery by treedancing on its branches. It was he who selected them, he tells Celli, not the worldforest.

At Qronha 3, the gas giant where Adar Kori’nh died, the Hansa’s cloud harvester, run by Sullivan Gold with the green priest Kolker and the engineer Tabitha Huck, skims ekti until Ildiran warliners arrive with a skyfactory of their own under Chief Miner Hroa’x. Then the alarms shriek: the hydrogues strike the Ildiran skyfactory, and Hroa’x sends a desperate signal. Sullivan goes in, sets a module down on the skyfactory’s broad landing deck and loads the panicked miners. Tasia, meanwhile, is given a group of rammers, and knows exactly what they are designed to do.

At the EDF base Orli meets Rlinda, and Lanyan, through with the girl and Hud Steinman, sends them on. Davlin breaks BeBob out and, by every appearance, dies drawing off the pursuit; Rlinda refuses to believe that any plan of Davlin’s would require his own death. At Secda, now swarming with the beetle-like machines, Vao’sh’s facial lobes flicker with uncertainty. Jess sends Nikko to look for Cesca.

Flying with Udru’h past the Durris trinary, Osira’h sees its yellow sun dying in the hydrogues’ war with the faeros. Udru’h tells her why she was bred: for several years the Klikiss robots have failed to keep the hydrogues away from Ildiran worlds, and Ildira needs a mind that can reach the hydrogues itself. Out on the dark, frozen surface of Jonah 12, Cesca hides from the robots with her suit heaters at maximum. Thor’h reaches Dobro, and Udru’h, who sees that the rebels could simply murder him if Designate-in-waiting Daro’h looked easier to break, plays along. Osira’h is sealed into a protective encounter chamber and lowered by warliners deep into Qronha 3.

Before Tasia’s rammers can arrive, Sullivan is already flying away with his crew and the rescued Ildirans. With the warglobes ahead, she gives her sixty rammers the order: “Rammers, full forward!” The Soldier compies do not respond. EA stares from Tasia to the compies; Tasia lunges for the evac pod, and two of the stocky compies stop her. The robots keep the rammers and their commander. Deep in the gas giant, inside her chamber, Osira’h feels “like a specimen in an exotic zoo.”

In the hydrogues’ prison the captives are brought Gomez’s body, and then something new arrives through the storm winds and crushing gravity. Denn and his Roamers are summoned into the skysphere to meet the Mage-Imperator. On Dobro, Udru’h, aware that even Thor’h’s one warliner could level his settlement and destroy the breeding camps, plays his own game and turns on the rebellion. Jora’h reaches through the thism for Thor’h and is blocked; the shiing-dulled rebels are a void where the thism should be, and he resolves to stop them, whatever it costs. DD learns the robots’ plan whole: the Soldier compies throughout the EDF carry deep Klikiss programming, and soon they will rise.

Cesca is hurt badly, perhaps dying, when Jess’s water-and-pearl ship comes down beside Nikko’s crashed craft on Jonah 12. “It’s Jess Tamblyn. He’s come for us,” Nikko says, and Cesca answers weakly, “I knew he would.” He cannot touch her.

At Osquivel the Soldier compies run amok through Del Kellum’s shipyards, one driving a grappler pod like a missile. “By damn, the compies have gone berserk!” An EDF Manta arrives, and Maureen Fitzpatrick, the former Chairman and Patrick’s grandmother, hails Kellum. Patrick brokers a cease-fire; the captives and the derelict go home to Earth, and the Roamers slip away.

Udru’h returns unexpectedly from Dobro and walks into the skysphere reception hall to tell Jora’h that Nira Khali is alive: he has kept her isolated on an island. A pilot quickly finds the island, but Nira has escaped and is nowhere to be found.

Then the civil war ends. Even without weapons, Thor’h’s warliner could plow into the hill where his father stands, and Udru’h shouts at Jora’h to have the Adar destroy it: “There is no saving Thor’h.” Jora’h picks himself up off the ground and shades his eyes. Thor’h is taken alive. Beaten, Rusa’h flies his ship directly into Hyrillka’s primary sun; near the corona the faeros fireballs surround it and vanish with it into the depths. Sarein, her green priests sent out to the colonies, returns to Earth thinner and harder than she left, and learns from the notices that her sister Estarra is pregnant: the news has leaked.

The hydrogues come to Theroc a second time, and Kotto is there with a device built from the derelict’s secrets. Facing the diamond spheres, afraid to blink, he quips, “Ding-dong! Anybody home?” The gadget sends a warglobe off in wild, uncontrolled flight, and Kotto’s face lights up. Celli and Solimar dance on, through the Mating Dance and the Butterfly Pursuit, as the warglobes come, and Celli is told to take shelter. Then the wentals arrive: Jess’s supercharged wental comet plunges toward Theroc, and its vaporized water falls as rain on the scorched forest. Last comes the verdani’s own answer: the verdani battleships, huge thorny treeships flown in from the beyond.

Elsewhere the threads close. Anton keeps Vao’sh sane in an isolation no Ildiran can bear with a human tale of a man who lives alone a long time until he meets a native, and the two escape Maratha, bringing the story of the robots to the Mage-Imperator. Patrick, back in the EDF, doubts Zhett will ever forgive him. Sullivan and his people are held on Ildira. Rlinda and BeBob, seized by Roamers, are held in the Plumas water mines, and through the glacial ice they can see Karla Tamblyn, Jess’s long-dead mother, her skin pale and waxen.

And Osira’h comes back up out of Qronha 3, released from the protective chamber that let her survive. She has done what Dobro bred her to do, and she has not come back alone: a huge armada of hydrogue warglobes hangs over the Prism Palace. Of Fire and Night takes up the scene in its third chapter.