HAMMERFALL

Caroline J. Cherryh

the first book of the gene wars sequence

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EOS
An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
East 53rd Street New York, New York 10022

Copyright © 2001 by C.J. Cherryh
Interior design by Kellan Peck
ISBN: 0-06-105260-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cherryh, C. J. Hammerfall / C.J. Cherryh.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-105260-4 I. Title.
PS3553.H358 H35 2001
813.54-dc21
00-047621

First Eos hardcover printing: July 2001

Eos Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries,

Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A. HarperCollins® is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Printed in the U. S. A.

FIRST EDITION

CONTENTS

^

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter One

^ »

Imagine first a web of stars. Imagine it spread wide and wider. Ships shuttle across it. Information flows.

A star lies at the heart of this web, its center, heart, and mind. This is the Commonwealth.

Imagine then a single strand of stars in a vast darkness, a beckoning pathway away from the web, a path down which ships can travel.

Beyond lies a treasure, a small lake of G5 suns, a near circle of perfect stars all in reach of one another.

This way, that strand says. After so hard a voyage, reward. Wealth. Resources.

But a whisper comes back down that thread of stars, a ghost of a whisper, an illusion of a whisper.

The web of stars has heard the like before. Others are out there, very far, very faint, irrelevant to our affairs.

Should we have listened?

—The Book of the Landing.

Distance deceived the eye in the lakht, that wide, red land of the First Descended, where legend said the ships had come down.

At high noon, with the sun reflecting off the plateau, the chimera of a city floated in the haze, appearing as a line of light just below the red, saw-toothed ridge of the Qarain, that upthrust that divided the Lakht from the Anlakht, the true land of death.

The city was both mirage and truth; it appeared always a day before its true self. Marak knew it, walking, walking endlessly beside the beshti, the beasts on which their guards rode.

The long-legged beasts were not deceived. They moved no faster. The guards likewise made no haste.

“The holy city,” some of the damned shouted, some in relief, some in fear, knowing it was both the end of their torment and the end of their lives. “Oburan and the Ila’s court!”