Jaydium by Deborah J. Ross Page A

he’d had no chance to appreciate it. He and Hank were in the team Weiram had dispatched behind the far moon, holding them in reserve against the impending stalemate. It was a sensible tactical move that took everything into account, everything except the desperation of the Alliance raiders. Eril had seethed with frustration at being ordered away from the center of the action.
    Battle-fever scoring his nerves, he’d watched on the scanners as the fight turned in favor of the Federation. Behind him, in the co-pilot’s seat, Hank wondered aloud how soon the surrender would come. Then, without a shred of warning, a blanket of electromagnetic noise paralyzed the stinger’s scanners. The static deafened his ears for a terrifying moment.
    As soon as he could move his hands on the controls, Eril sent his ship darting out from the moon’s protective shadow. The struggle was all but over, so what had happened? Where was the battle? Where were the Federation ships, poised for the kill?
    A snowstorm of tiny fragments glittered momentarily in the holocaust that had once been a planet. Eril slowed, unable to believe his eyes. Numbly he thought, That mote of fire was once the flagship, that one a stinger, that one a medic unit, that one a living human...
    Then he could see nothing at all.
    When Eril’s light-seared vision cleared, the sparkling cloud was gone. The fireball had already begun to dim. As he and Hank drifted and waited, their communications equipment damaged past repair, he heard someone weeping — dry, heart-shredding sobs.
    Now, three years later, leaning against a tenth-rate scrubjet on an unknown planet, Eril shied away from the memory.
    It must have been Hank sobbing in the darkness. It must have been. He was fine, just fine. The medics had cleared him of any radiation damage. He’d made it out of the war alive and with a bucket of medals, hadn’t he?
    In the middle of the field, Kithri jerked upright, and the movement caught his eye. The flowers in her arms had darkened, wilting. She brushed them from her, letting them drop as she got to her feet. The broken flowers lay in a little heap.
    As she came toward him, Eril saw she still held the one he’d given her. Its inky petals drooped like the tentacles of an octopus. When she reached the scrubjet, he could smell its rankness. She paused, her eyes flickering to the mangled blossom, and dropped it.
    Eril took a deep breath and wished he hadn’t. The whole field reeked with decay. Even his saliva tasted bitter. Silently he climbed into the co-pilot’s seat and slid his hands over the controls. They felt familiar and solid.
    Kithri scrubbed her face with the back of her hand, slipped in front of him, and pulled the door shut. “So much for flower fields,” she said in a voice tight with secrets. “Let’s see what else this place has to offer.”
    Neither of them said anything about going back.

Chapter 7
    As they continued across the massive forest, shipbrain sketched details of a variety of animals — insects, amphibians in the rivers and ponds, and reptiles, some of them the size of wolves. There seemed to be no recognizable primates or felines. Shipbrain continued to report nothing on the radio frequencies except natural background noise.
    So much for my woodmen.
    Without checking the scrubjet’s chronometer, Eril couldn’t be sure how long they’d been flying, watching and scanning. It felt like forever, suspended between forest below and equally endless sky above. Kithri said nothing about the flower field and very little about anything else.
    The novelty of the planet quickly wore thin on Eril. He found himself itching for something — anything — to happen. This couldn’t be all there was — a few tantalizing mysteries and then nothing but hours on end of unremitting pastoral peacefulness.
    He signalled shipbrain to pipe the radio scans to his headset. Maybe there was