Of Fire and Night

The book opens on good news, which is how you know it won’t last. An EDF heavy transport sets down on the Whisper Palace plaza, and King Peter and Queen Estarra walk a purple carpet to welcome thirty survivors of Osquivel long given up for dead. Behind them, lifters lower the captured hydrogue derelict for the crowd, and the engineer Lars Swendsen can hardly wait to take it apart. The Queen’s pregnancy, which Basil ordered ended and which the couple leaked instead, has been unofficially announced. Peter, for once, enjoys himself:

“I so rarely get to announce good news that isn’t an outright lie.”

On Ildira the warglobes Osira’h led home fill the sky. The girl, Jora’h’s half-human daughter by the green priest Nira, bred on Dobro for exactly this, relays the hydrogues’ terms: the Ildirans must help them destroy the humans, or none will survive. Jora’h orders Adar Zan’nh’s ships to hold their fire. Then the emissary drifts into the palace inside its chamber of swirling mist, a quicksilver man in a mockery of an embroidered jumpsuit, and its words come out of Osira’h’s mouth: “We have come. Do you wish to be destroyed?” It has no interest in peace. Its war was with the verdani, and now with the turncoat faeros; long ago, it adds, the hydrogues helped the Klikiss robots wipe out their own makers.

Jess Tamblyn, racing away from the wreck of the Roamer base at Jonah 12, watches Cesca Peroni, Speaker of the Roamers, dying aboard Nikko Chan Tylar’s Aquarius. The wentals inside him mean he cannot even hold her hand. He begs them anyway:

“Make us two of a kind.”

They warn him that a changed human can become a tainted wental, then tell him to bring her to their primary sea, the storm-swept ocean world of Charybdis where he first set them free. There they show him what tainted means: in the ancient war, a corrupted wental fused with a Klikiss breedex and was dragged into a sun at last by six faeros. Cesca goes into the leaden sea anyway.

Under the ice of Plumas, Rlinda Kett and BeBob, prisoners in the Tamblyn water mines, face Jess’s mother Karla, years dead and walking again, her milky-white skin sparkling with frost; she has already killed Jess’s uncle Andrew, and the two traders stand at his Roamer funeral beneath the ice. On Dobro, Designate Udru’h and his idealistic protégé Daro’h keep the traitor Thor’h in a shiing coma so he cannot rejoin the thism, and Udru’h, who has lost Nira again, fears that Jora’h will have him executed for it.

Then the trap the Klikiss robots built into every Soldier compy springs. Admiral Lev Stromo, “Stay-at-Home Stromo”, is two days into a fruitless search at Qronha 3 for the missing rammers when the compies on his own Manta rise: one seizes him, Sergeant Anwar Zizu batters it with a bridge chair, and the green priest Clydia sends the alarm by telink. The revolt runs across the Spiral Arm. On Earth the compies boil out of the Palace District factory, and Peter, warned by the court green priest Nahton, far oversteps his authority: he orders the factory shut down and the defences alerted, and shudders to think how Basil will answer. Tasia Tamblyn, captured by her own robot crews in the last book, learns that none of the other human commanders was taken hostage, and cannot work out why the robots spared her.

The warglobes leave Ildira, but their threat stays. Jora’h, who sees no other way to keep his people alive, secretly agrees to help the hydrogues destroy the humans, and does not accept the treachery easily. He sends Osira’h back to Dobro, where she asks for her mother and is told she is not there, and summons Zan’nh, his scientists and engineers, his strategists, even the Rememberer Vao’sh.

On Earth the revolt comes swiftly and the EDF scrambles too late; royal guards hustle the King and Queen to safety, and an officer tells Peter his quick decision may have saved them all. Silver berets under Sergeant Paxton keep the rebel compies penned in the barricaded factory with a constant barrage until Swendsen and the Soldier-compy specialist Dr Kiro Yamane silence it with a virus. Patrick Fitzpatrick III, who now admits that his destruction of a Roamer ship started this whole mess, confronts General Lanyan about the order; Lanyan has no recollection. Lanyan, a soldier who would rather be doing something than sitting in a stuffed shirt, suits up a class of recruits and goes after a stolen battle group, betting on secrets about EDF ships the compies don’t know. His first armoured trainees jet aboard the Juggernaut Goliath through its open launching bay and report it secure, and a recaptured ship comes back to life.

Elsewhere the fleet is simply lost. On Grid 5’s flagship Eldorado, Admiral Kostas Eolus fights the uprising on his own bridge, then resolves to destroy his Juggernaut rather than let the robots have it, and the limping green priest Rossia keeps reporting by telink until he dies with the ship. Stromo, still fighting on his Manta and still losing, watches the compies kill Zizu; the admiral does not survive the revolt.

On Charybdis the reluctant wentals save Cesca. She comes up out of their primordial ocean changed as Jess is: no longer quite human, deadly to touch, and at last able to touch him. Together they board his water-and-pearl ship. Under Plumas, Karla comes on riding a crest of self-forming ice, and Rlinda grabs BeBob’s hand and runs; later the dead woman’s giant worms swarm the mines, and Rlinda hacks her way up a lift.

On Ildira, Sullivan Gold’s skyminers, who saved Ildirans at Qronha 3, are kept out of sight in the Prism Palace. Their green priest Kolker, cut off from the worldforest since he lost his treeling, finds a teacher in old Tery’l, a lens kithman who explains the thism to him. Sullivan is not pleased to see a missionary. Kolker’s hunger wins: he dashes for the treeling in Jora’h’s contemplation chamber, and one of Yazra’h’s Isix cats takes him down.

Kotto Okiah, very pleased with himself for saving Theroc with his warglobe-opening doorbells (his compy notes that the wental comet helped), finds the Osquivel shipyards deserted and visits Denn Peroni’s Roamer bazaar at Yreka.

Chairman Basil finally gets a viewpoint chapter of his own, chapter 52. The Kellums are skymining at a new gas giant, Zhett still flushing with anger whenever she thinks of Patrick, and Patrick, home with his formidable grandmother, is hunting for any lead to her.

Tasia, passed from the robots to the hydrogues, finds Robb Brindle alive in a citysphere five years after she lost him. Then the Klikiss robots destroy her little compy EA in front of them both. Sirix, their leader, reviews from a stolen Juggernaut the revolt that, as he sees it, has freed the Soldier compies; with his makers gone, all his hatred is for humans. One-eyed Tal O’nh leads a mission of mercy to rebuild Hyrillka under its boy Designate, Ridek’h, with Yazra’h as the boy’s mentor and Anton Colicos and Vao’sh along. Orli Covitz steps through a Klikiss transportal to Llaro, an abandoned Klikiss world where Crenna refugees and Roamer prisoners of war now make a colony together.

On Dobro, Daro’h’s scouts find traces of the escaped Nira on a shore. She has been wandering the empty southern continent, and when she is confronted with her own grave she insists that Jora’h loved her. Osira’h, back home, remembers through her mother’s memories the cries from the breeding barracks, and knows what must be done. She finds Nira and leads her to meet the other four children halfway: Rod’h, Udru’h’s son; Gale’nh, Adar Kori’nh’s; Tamo’l and Muree’n. Then, after two centuries, the human captives revolt. Armed with farm tools they trap Udru’h, and Osira’h tells him she has lived her mother’s pain and humiliation. They drag him to the new Designate, Daro’h, and the girl tells him the camp has served its purpose. From then on Udru’h is the Former Designate, a prisoner, inviting Osira’h to call him Uncle.

Thor’h gets his one chapter, surfacing from a haze in which there was shiing, too much shiing, then bliss, then nothing. He does not live to see the end of the book.

On Earth, Peter and Estarra have not been allowed outside the Royal Wing since the revolt; now Basil confines them there for the foreseeable future, perhaps permanently, and wakes the comatose Prince Daniel, the spoiled replacement he keeps in reserve, as a different tactic; the bratty prince makes no secret that Peter and Estarra will soon “retire”. OX, the ancient Teacher compy, stays loyal, and after he plays them something he has recorded, one of them says what both now believe: Basil is going to kill them. Estarra appeals to her sister Sarein and gets an amused, slightly dismissive hearing.

On Llaro, Davlin Lotze, alive after faking his death, keeps his head down among the colonists, until fiery shapes cross the sky. They are faeros. At Hyrillka the faeros rescue the mercy mission, and an astonished Ridek’h asks Yazra’h whether they are protectors now. On Dobro a conflagration devours the old breeding camp and sweeps through the main settlement. Jora’h arrives to scars where everything has burned to the ground. He finds Nira, meets her children, and admits to Osira’h that he hid his real plan even from her, so the hydrogues could not sense it through her. The pact was not the whole of it.

Conrad Brindle, Robb’s father, flies a scout over a hydrogue gas giant hunting for survivors; Jess tells him he should have gone home, and learns from him that Tasia is a hydrogue captive. And after faeros and hydrogues clash inside Hyrillka’s sun, the very star Rusa’h flew into, it begins to die, and Tal O’nh and Ridek’h must evacuate the world they came to rebuild.

Cesca, transformed, insists she is still Speaker for the clans and has to bring them together. Then, as a cup is lifted to someone’s lips, Sarein shoots to her feet: “Don’t drink that!” She accuses the Chairman’s own expediter, Franz Pellidor, who protests indignantly that he never touched Basil’s coffee, until his fingers spasm and the cup shatters on the floor. Sarein can see that Basil knows exactly who the real culprit was. Later, Sarein comes to Estarra.

Jess brings his water-and-pearl ship to Theroc, where more than a hundred treeships stand sentry above the atmosphere. In the first war, the green priest Solimar tells Celli, wentals and verdani clashed; now they join. Wental water soaks into the worldtrees, a new armada of treeships surges up from the forest floor, and Beneto, the dead green priest the forest made into a wooden golem, seals himself into the trunk of a treeship to fly it to war.

On Ildira, Kolker sees a tiny new worldtree growing from a pot and touches the worldforest again, yet feels something missing; the dying Tery’l grips his hand and leaves him a prismatic medallion. Jora’h asks Sullivan and his sharp-featured engineering chief Tabitha Huck for complete truthfulness, and the skyminers help equip warliners to run on automated systems. Jess goes into a citysphere after Tasia and finds an army of replicas of his dead brother Ross, the shape the hydrogues copied from one of their first victims; he brings out Tasia, Robb and the other captives, with treeships and Conrad’s scout covering the escape as the citysphere grinds to a halt.

The Solar Navy sails for Earth under the pact. And when the hydrogues come for the Prism Palace, Osira’h, already a bridge into their minds, turns the channel around: linked with Nira, she lets the whole power of the worldforest flood through it.

An Ildiran warliner lands in front of the Whisper Palace: the Solar Navy has come as the pact requires, posing as Earth’s ally. Lanyan, his fleet gutted by the compy revolt, gathers what remains for a last stand and fights from the Goliath, while Admiral Sheila Willis flies a defensive ring from her rescued Manta. Many of Zan’nh’s warliners have been reworked to run on automated systems from his single flagship. After the treeships come, at the last moment, he turns his Ildiran ships against the hydrogues, and the Solar Navy pays for it: at one point his flagship sits in the eye of a deadly hurricane, its last surviving vessel at Earth. Tal Lorie’nh gives a brisk nod, “May we all meet there someday,” and three hundred and forty-three warliners pour down on the remaining warglobes like a meteor storm.

The treeships come too, and one of them has a captain. A voice calls Estarra sister; she cries her brother’s name and scrambles for the comm, and Beneto tells her he is the treeship now. All through the battle the treeships wrap warglobes in their thorny branches and crush them. In the chaos Peter and Estarra slip away from the Whisper Palace, helped by Sarein, Deputy Chairman Cain and Captain McCammon, while OX purges his precious memories to make room to fly them out in a small hydrogue derelict. The hydrogues are beaten, resoundingly, and driven back into the cores of their gas giants, and on Ildira Jora’h tells his commanders that the Empire will survive. Sirix, aboard his stolen Juggernaut, takes stock of what he has left.

Kolker, linked to the forest again, still feels it is not enough. Patrick takes his grandmother’s space yacht, without much asking, and goes in search of Zhett. Rlinda and BeBob, out of Plumas at last, drift for days in the damaged Voracious Curiosity, patching it as they go. On Theroc, within two days, a transition ceremony on a flower-strewn stage proclaims the escaped King and his pregnant Queen Father Peter and Mother Estarra of Theroc. On Earth, Basil and Lanyan learn that no green priest can be forced to send telink, and Lanyan fumes that by the time the EDF can enforce the Charter, it will all be sewn up.

On Dobro, fireballs fill the sky. Out of them comes Rusa’h, the mad Designate everyone believed had died in Hyrillka’s sun, now wrapped in living flame:

“I no longer see the Lightsource—I am the Lightsource.”

He confronts the prisoner Udru’h, who betrayed him, and incinerates him while Daro’h looks on. Nothing is left of the former Designate but a black mark on the ground, and Rusa’h’s footprints are glass.

The last chapter belongs to Orli. It is her turn to bring round the homemade food when Llaro’s transportal comes alive, and the Klikiss, the beetle-like makers of the black robots, a race everyone believed extinct, come pouring through. Hud Steinman clutches her arm; they are outnumbered a hundred to one; and Margaret Colicos is there. The hydrogue war is won, and the next war walks in on the last page.