Eternity's Mind Read Free Page A

among the Roamers, leaving Elisa in charge. When Orli, Tasia, and Robb discover the highly secret operations, Elisa races out in her ship and blasts the Curiosity. Even Iswander’s other employees are horrified to see this over-the-top reaction. Tasia and Robb do some fancy flying to escape, though their ship is damaged. In empty space, they make repairs before limping back toward Newstation.
    Meanwhile, General Keah and Adar Zan’nh launch their expedition to the Onthos star system, carrying Nira’s halfbreed sons Rod’h and Tal Gale’nh. Their ships discover that the entire star system is sealed inside a vast black shell composed of hexagonal plates of dark matter. The expeditionary ships break through the shell and explore inside, finding dead planets and a snuffed-out sun. On the Onthos homeworld itself, they retrieve some blackened shards of long-dead worldtrees.
    Outside the black shell, their sensors detect a gigantic verdani treeship, dead and drifting. Rod’h takes a small solo craft out to investigate and learns that the dead treeship is full of dead Onthos bodies—it was an arkship trying to escape the Shana Rei. As Rod’h’s craft explores, a shadow cloud appears in the Onthos system: the Shana Rei and their black robot attack fleet. General Keah, Adar Zan’nh, and Tal Gale’nh unleash their arsenal of sun bombs against the enemy, but Rod’h is stranded. Sensing another one of Nira’s oddly resistant halfbreed offspring, the Shana Rei engulf Rod’h’s craft and take him prisoner. The devastating space battle continues, and the human and Ildiran ships have no choice but to retreat, leaving Rod’h behind.…
    Zoe Alakis and Tom Rom consider Prince Reyn’s disease, and knowing that Pergamus has been discovered, they decide to negotiate on their own terms. Encased in a protective suit, Zoe leaves her sterile dome for only the second time in years. Tom Rom takes her to Theroc, where she speaks to King Peter and Queen Estarra. In exchange for their data on the Onthos plague, as well as the King’s promise to destroy the vile biological black markets on Rakkem, Zoe gives them all the information she has on Reyn’s illness. She also extracts a promise that the Confederation will leave Pergamus alone. Since Reyn has gone to Kuivahr to be treated by Tamo’l, Tom Rom volunteers to fly there and deliver the records personally, because he also wants to get Tamo’l’s research data on the misbreeds for Zoe’s collection.
    Rod’h finds himself held inside an entropy bubble that isolates him deep within the shadow cloud, where he is interrogated horrifically by Exxos. The Shana Rei use the dark matter from the hex plates around the Onthos system to rebuild their own ships as well as many more robot battleships. Scheming against the Shana Rei, Exxos is using the linked processors of all his robots to run extremely complex calculations for an entropy-crystallization device that will destroy the creatures of darkness, but the calculations will take a very long time. Meanwhile, however, he is pleased to torture Rod’h to extract information. The Shana Rei demand to know why Nira’s halfbreeds can somehow resist them. Under constant torture Exxos gets Rod’h to reveal that his halfbreed sisters Tamo’l and Osira’h are on Kuivahr with the misbreeds—and so the shadow clouds decide to conquer that planet.
    On Theroc, after the Onthos settle in the Wild, Arita goes to visit her aunt Sarein, who lives alone there. She also finds her friend Collin, who lives among Kennebar’s isolationist green priests. Distressed, Collin takes Arita to see a large swath of worldtrees that are dying from a mysterious blight. In the forest, they also come upon the alien Gardeners, but far more of them than the original hundred refugees. After Arita departs, Sarein investigates the dying trees and discovers that the blighted areas