He chuckled. "Shareen-and Howard, of course-belong at Fireheart Station!" He grinned into the sudden silence, waiting for the reaction.

Patrick ventured, "That's where Kotto Okiah is working. There could be worse places. Unless she wants to go back to the private school on Earth?"

"No!" Shareen said quickly.

Del continued in a rush, not wanting anyone to steal his thunder. "I made arrangements. I'm going to escort Shareen, and Howard-if his parents agree-to Fireheart Station, make sure they arrive safely." He turned to Zhett. "Meanwhile, my sweet, you and Marius Denva can handle the distillery operations." He hooked his thumbs in his waistband and waited for someone to hand him a dish of food. "In fact, I may just stay at Fireheart for a while."

Zhett remained skeptical. "You're just handing your distillery over to us, Dad?"

Del sniffed. "You're my daughter, and you lost your gainful employment when the Golgen skymine was destroyed. You can handle these operations better than I can."

Patrick was too quick to agree. "Sounds like a good deal to me." He intercepted Rex from throwing food on the deck.

"Good," Del said. "It's decided then."

Shareen straightened in her chair. "Wait, nobody bothered to ask me."

Her grandfather just rolled his eyes. "Oh? Are you telling me you don't want to go to Fireheart Station?"

Shareen looked away, but not before she glimpsed the excitement on Howard's face. "What I want is to be consulted beforehand."

Del said, "All right, then I'm consulting you. You want to go to Fireheart Station?"

Shareen grinned as she imagined the giant glowing nebula, the processing stations, the huge experimental superconducting ring that Kotto Okiah was building, all the special films bathed in stellar radiation to be used in power blocks ... and a thousand other innovative scientific projects that she hadn't even heard of yet.

"Absolutely," she said.

"Then you two better pack up. I'm ready to take you right away."

CHAPTER.

135.

EXXOS.

Sealed inside the entropy bubble after the Shana Rei retreat from Theroc, Exxos and his black robots assessed their losses. Though each of them had synchronized their memory cores to a stable parallel with Exxos, the rate of attrition was highly disturbing. So many ships had been destroyed.

A thousand Klikiss robots had hidden in the ice moon of Dhula to wait for the return of their comrades, but that had not happened. They had suffered setback after setback in what should have been a glorious victory. The universe itself seemed to want to destroy them. Since their reemergence, Exxos had lost three quarters of his robots. As far as he knew, these were the last Klikiss robots in existence.

Accidentally encountering the Shana Rei might be their greatest opportunity, or their ultimate devastation. Now the black robots were trapped among them, allies or prisoners ... depending on how well Exxos could convince the creatures of darkness. The Shana Rei were insane.

Now, as the shadow creatures retreated into the folds of the universe, Exxos could sense the fury and accompanying agony of the Shana Rei, and he knew that he was about to lose more of his comrades. No doubt about it. He hoped at least some of them would survive. And himself, at all costs.

Exxos had forged a dangerous alliance with the Shana Rei-it had seemed the only way to survive-and now the robots could not escape. At Theroc, the Shana Rei had insisted on killing the planet with their nightshade, while they remained at a safe distance from the still-formidable worldforest. That was much too time-consuming! Exxos and his robots were ready to attack any vestige of humans anywhere, and would have preferred a more direct and active role in destroying the world and the trees. But the Shana Rei had not been willing to engage in outright battle against the verdani. The worldforest was too powerful.

With the eclipse darkening and the landscape and sentient trees beginning to weaken and wither, the robots had satisfied themselves with destroying numerous human vessels: battleships, small fighters, larger cruisers. Exxos was able to test new modifications that the Shana Rei had implemented when they manifested the new robot ships.

Theroc should have died in the dark, thereby extinguishing part of the shrill agony the Shana Rei experienced from the verdani. The robots would have moved ahead with their own extermination agenda.

Exxos had never expected such a crushing defeat.

The Confederation military had caused no serious harm to the Shana Rei, and even the verdani battleships were not strong enough to tear apart the nightshade, but the faeros and the Ildiran sun bombs tore apart the Shana Rei's plans and forced a full retreat. The creatures of darkness abandoned the matter they had ripped into existence, and their gigantic hex ships were heavily damaged.

The agony of the Shana Rei was now like jabbering madness, and Exxos could barely stand it. They lashed out, making indescribable sounds. And they needed something to blame.

"Your failure!" the nearest inkblot said. "You robots are not as powerful as you promised. The tree mind fought back, and now our pain is greater."

Three black robots drifting in the emptiness of the entropy bubble were whisked upward, twirled about, and slowly ripped apart, dismantled piece by piece until they were nothing more than atoms.

The thunderous shadow voice continued. "And now the faeros have been awakened and turned against us-the fire that defeated us before!"

More black robots were separated from the group and surrounded by entropy bubbles. Exxos could still view his hapless comrades, but all transmission and communication cut off as soon as their bubbles sealed. The Shana Rei collapsed the entropy bubbles, and the robots winked out of existence.

They intended to erase all of the robots, one by one. "We are your allies!" Exxos insisted. "Without us, the Shana Rei would fight alone." But he knew his bluff had failed.

"You created great pain," said the pulsing black blot. "Additional pain."

"The humans created great pain. The Ildirans create pain. The verdani and the faeros create pain. We robots are your only allies. Only we understand what is at stake."

"You say you understand," the Shana Rei said, and the central eye glowed brighter. "But you do not feel our pain. If you fail, we will make your robots feel our agony-a hundredfold!"

More robots were torn apart in front of Exxos, and he was helpless to prevent it.

He knew that the Shana Rei were afraid of the tremendous enemy that was awakening in the universe, the mysterious but powerful force that had driven them out of the dark corners of the cosmos.

Despite his fear, Exxos began to make contingency plans. Perhaps the black robots would have to find this other mysterious enemy, switch sides, and help destroy the Shana Rei.

If any robots survived at all ...

CHAPTER.

136.

ZOE ALAKIS.

Though Tom Rom was so sick he could barely move, he made his way to the quarantine-only airlock at ORS 12. All alone, he cycled through the airlock into the quarantine chamber, while Zoe rushed her handpicked team up to the orbiting laboratory.

The researchers arrived in full decontamination suits and crowded into the spherical station, twice as many scientists as on Dr. Hannig's team. Zoe took no chances, wanting her most talented researchers there. All scientists who weren't assigned to ORS 12 would work on the problem from their own labs. Nothing was a higher priority at Pergamus.

On the edge of consciousness, using his last strength, Tom Rom gave them a verbal summary of his current physical status. During the trip in the stolen courier ship from Vuoral, he had taken meticulous notes of his symptoms, temperature, blood pressure, and pulse in hopes the data would give them something to work with.

To buy time, the medical team placed him in an induced coma, used precision robotic arms to take samples, sealed his body into the quarantine module's coldchamber, and dropped the temperature to bare survival levels. But still the disease progressed....

Trapped in her sterilized dome on the planetary surface, Zoe felt very alone. She watched the screens, read updates, and insisted that one or more cameras in the ORS be focused on Tom Rom at all times, so she could keep looking at his face.

He was gaunt, his mahogany skin discolored by hemorrhagic bruises, but since his eyes were closed she tried to believe that he looked peaceful. With every second that passed, she knew he was one step closer to dying.

She hated the disease. Hated all diseases. Wanted to destroy them. Pergamus was supposed to be her invincible fortress, her arsenal. Now, all the data and samples she had collected, all the sophisticated researchers were being put to the test.

She had never doubted the dedication of her researchers; she studied each person's background before offering them employment at Pergamus. But Tom Rom's illness made her so desperate that she needed to give them additional incentive. She wanted no excuses, only a cure.

At first, she considered infecting the researchers so they would all live, or all die. Incentive. The advantage would be that they could then discard their cumbersome decontamination suits, which would facilitate easier work. But the progress of the disease was swift, and they would quickly deteriorate. She needed them at their best.

Instead, she told them that if they failed to find a cure for Tom Rom, she would consider the disease too dangerous even for her most extreme precautions, and she would be forced to destroy ORS 12 with the entire team aboard. She ordered her well-armed sentry ships to stand guard in orbit just in case one of the scientists found a way to escape the lab sphere.

The researchers were not overly cheered by her ultimatum, but they continued to work, regardless. Zoe couldn't tell if they worked with greater intensity once they knew how much was at stake, but she felt better knowing she had done everything possible to encourage them.

During the interminable wait, Zoe felt as if she herself were dying. Giving in to uncharacteristic nostalgia, she unlocked the old and secret recordings of her journals as a young woman at the watchtower station on Vaconda. She saw images of a younger, but somehow unchanged, Tom Rom working with the specimen-collection teams, helping to repair high windows that had cracked after a furious pelting storm, returning from offworld supply runs, repairing a weather satellite in orbit.

She found one image of Tom Rom deftly applying ointments and bandages to the numerous small bites she had received when the hummers broke into their tower station and swarmed into the chambers. Her father had been badly injured, but Tom Rom tenderly took care of her first.

"If it weren't for you, Tom Rom, I would have died long ago," she murmured to herself, then sighed. "Probably a hundred times over."

There were images of Adam Alakis, too, and she smiled to see her father when he'd been healthy, his eyes alert, his conversation brisk. The pain of losing him to Heidegger's Syndrome was long healed, the scars faded. Could she ever endure such pain again?

But Tom Rom was still alive-for now.

She checked hourly with the team aboard ORS 12, demanding to know what progress they had made. Then she made successive inquiries among the groundside domes where researchers worked on the problem independently, asking for their ideas, their insights. Teams scoured the entire Pergamus database, looking at every disease on record from any planet, trying to match the symptoms and possible effective drugs, but they could do only so much. This plague had originated in the Klikiss race, then mutated to kill Onthos, then humans; very little was comparable in the library of known diseases.

Even when they suggested long-shot drugs, the potential side effects were severe, and the various possibilities appeared to be fatally contradictory. If one treatment failed, they couldn't try another. Tom Rom would be dead.

Zoe was unable to sleep and didn't want to eat. She pestered the ORS 12 research team so mercilessly that finally the lead scientist scolded her, "You are distracting us, Ms. Alakis. We're under enough pressure, thanks to your threat, and you could cause us to make mistakes. We will inform you the moment anything changes." He switched off the comm.

Zoe felt so offended that she wanted to scream, then forced calm upon herself as she realized he was right. She sat sobbing by herself inside the sterile dome....

In the end, her scientists did not let her down.

Pulling the possible cures and treatments of every recorded malady, deconstructing the genome of the alien virus and following the pathways of infection, one of her independent teams working in a groundside dome made the proper connection by suggesting that a cure might be obtained from a distillate of the Klikiss royal jelly Tom Rom had harvested from Eljiid. Her researchers showed that something about Klikiss physiology rendered them immune to the virus. Therefore the royal Jelly might hold a key.

With racing pulse, Zoe listened to the research team's reports, watched the glacial progress, felt the work as a frantic race against her friend's degeneration, even as he lay in an enforced coma. The time it took to produce the royal-jelly distillate was maddening; after it was administered, the delay was more maddening still.

Zoe's eyes were bloodshot and scratchy. She felt haggard, weak, and feverish, as if she had somehow become infected by her very obsession with the disease. It was eleven hours before the team on ORS 12 was able to report with confidence that the patient had turned a corner and his condition was ever-so-slightly improved.

Fortunately, on his acquisition trip to Eljiid, Tom Rom had collected enough of the royal jelly to produce effective vaccinations for every member of the research team in the orbiting sphere. As Tom Rom slept and slowly regained his strength, Zoe commanded the research team members to remove their decontamination outfits, expose themselves to the disease, and inoculate themselves.

"We have to be certain," she said. "I want to see you stand by your own cure."

Some of the scientists took offense at being treated as guinea pigs, but they eventually acceded. After being exposed and vaccinated, they monitored themselves for three days and finally concluded that the treatment worked and that they themselves were not infected by the plague.

Then they revived Tom Rom from his induced coma.

Zoe, who had wrestled with the decision throughout the ordeal, at last found the courage and strength-to change her life.

She gave herself the inoculation, then called a small one-person ship to dock against her sterile central dome. Drawing a deep breath, digging deep to find long-buried reservoirs of courage, she exited through five layers of protective decontamination zones, boarded the one-person ship, and flew up to ORS 12.

Tom Rom was awake and aware when she cycled through the airlock and entered the spherical lab. The researchers gaped at Zoe in amazement. None of them had ever seen her in person before-very few people had.

The smells of the processed air were strange to her, the proximity of other human beings was intimidating. Zoe fought back her nervousness, though, and came forward.

Tom Rom stared at her, as if trying to convince himself this was not a hallucination. "You can't take this risk."

"I can, and I did. You're too weak to leave the lab yet. I could see you needed strength. Let me give it to you."

At his bedside, she touched his skin, felt the warm reassurance there that was so foreign to her. It had been at least fifteen years since she had touched another human being-even Tom Rom.

But now she slid her fingers down his forearm, took his hand in hers, and squeezed. "I'm here," she said.

CHAPTER.

137.

NIRA.

After the autopsy-chamber disaster, the remaining Ildiran bodies were spread out in the expansive arena normally used for the mirror ballet. Mage-Imperator Jora'h could not dispose of them quickly enough.

No audience was allowed to gather, but Nira remained with him. They had both seen the horrific eruption of darkness in the sealed chamber, but thanks to the protective systems every vestige of the contaminated corpses, the autopsy specialists, and the rising shadow had been incinerated in the tremendous discharge of intense solar light.

Jora'h would take no chances with the remaining cadavers. One hundred and two of them. The shadow stain must still be pooled inside the bodies, so they would all have to be disintegrated, flash-cremated. Lens kithmen insisted that the light of the seven suns was blessed. Maybe that light would be potent enough to erase the stain and achieve one small victory, to push the Shana Rei back.

Under general supervision, workers had laid out the dead participants of the massacre mob-a variety of Ildiran kiths and body types-stripped away their garments and incinerated the clothing in solar furnaces. Cremation workers moved from one cadaver to the next, carrying containers of a gray metallic paste-a photothermic cream used for funeral purposes-which they slathered over the skin, like a potter working clay. Jora'h had commanded the cremation workers to work as swiftly as possible.

Nira and Jora'h were alone in the primary observation box. This was no celebration, no spectacle of lights and colors. For a long time, neither spoke, although they shared their silent thoughts and feelings. Nira noted the troubled look in his eyes, how his long braid twitched with anxiety.

Finally, he turned to her. "I feel greater dread with each second. If the shadow should escape here and flood out into Mijistra..."

"But you know the shadow is already here." She thought of how easily it could infiltrate the Ildirans through the thism-as it had before. She remembered feeling uneasiness among the crowds that had come out for her birthday procession, when perfectly normal Ildirans had suddenly turned into wild killers.

Now the stadium was utterly still except for the quiet movements of the cremation workers. Outside, a full contingent of guard kithmen kept the curious away from the entrances.

Word had spread through the city of the horrors committed in the human enclave, how Ildirans had slaughtered all those people. They knew about the assassination attempts on Nira's birthday and the attacks in the Vault of Failures. Even though no one could understand the true cause of the violence, Ildirans whispered about the Shana Rei-and Jora'h could offer them no comfort.