He could easily have rigged the fuel canisters to detonate. Perhaps the explosion would have been great enough to crack open one of the diamond globes … but most likely not. And there were five of the city-sized monstrosities. Though they had not yet opened fire, he knew he was doomed either way.

“Time to separate the habitation module,” Berndt said, his last desperate measure. “We’ll have to sacrifice the skymine and hope the aliens follow the larger factory and let us get away.”

Bolts and clamps blasted apart as their connectors were broken. The separable main deck rose away from the lumbering industrial facility, carrying most of the skymine’s crew members. Looking chagrined but defiant, young Junna climbed back onto the bridge deck. Before Berndt could shout at his daughter for not making good her escape, his wife climbed up beside him. “Oh, Marta!” His heart melted, and he shook his head, wanting to damn them for the foolish love that might now cost them their lives.

The alien warglobes ignored the scout ships that had flown away from the skymine. Even so, once the main facility was destroyed, those small craft would have no place to land, nowhere to refuel. The construction yards in the broken moons of Erphano had been abandoned after the skymine launch. Berndt prayed to the Guiding Star that some rescue would come before the escapees’ life-support systems ran out and the tiny crafts plunged one by one into the limitless atmosphere.

Even after Berndt had scuttled the skymine in the high clouds, the relentless crystal globes advanced on the separable bridge deck.

His wife and daughter stood beside Berndt at the command chair, and he reached out to clasp them, pulling his family close. He knew in his heart that whatever these creatures were, they didn’t want the ekti after all, didn’t want any part of the Roamer skymines.

They just wanted to destroy humans.

Blue lightning lashed out. Berndt clutched his wife and daughter. An instant of incinerating electricity vaporized metal and glass, too fast for him to draw a breath. Then he, his family, and the whole escape module became a soup of blasted atoms.

67: NIRA

67NIRA

It took Prime Designate Jora’h several days to arrange a formal presentation to the awesome Mage-Imperator himself. Carrying their potted treelings as gifts, Nira and Otema entered the fabulous skysphere reception hall.

The transparent, faceted Prism Palace surrounded them, and Nira thought she had stepped into the heart of a gigantic gem. The walls were made of interlocked blown-glass bubbles. Attached to the nucleus were seven smaller globes, chambers with towers connected to the upper skysphere. Elevator tubes ran like longitudinal veins within the main dome; smaller spheres housed the foundations of the Ildiran government, the ministries of economy, agriculture, colonization, military, urban affairs, medicine, and kith relations.