This is a fan translation of Dark Skies (Тёмныенебеса) by Mikhail Akhmanov, currently only available in Russian and, because of the author's passing in 2019, unlikely to ever be published in English. This is the fourth book in a six-book series called Arrivals from the Dark (Пришедшие из мрака), which also has a six-book spin-off series called Trevelyan's Mission (Миссия Тревельяна).
I claim no rights to the contents herein.
Chapter 16
The Strange Dromi
"Amazing," Alferov said, "amazing!"
His eyes kept alternating between the Dromi, who was sitting behind a transparent barrier, and the hologram of Ho, which had been copied from the alien crystal. It was difficult to say what had caused him to say these words: the sight of the greenskin or the detailed layout of the enemy base. The Western Limit HQ was in a state of astonishment. Kirk Tsendin, squinting his narrow eyes and rubbing his forehead, kept studying the spatial diagram of Ho and would, occasionally, pause the playback to jot down notes in his wrist computer. Maria Quintana was examining the Dromi intently; apparently, she had never seen them up close. Mark noted that there was neither revulsion nor hate in her mental spectrum; she was looking at the prisoner with pity.
They were in an empty storage area of the production tier, which was located below the living spaces. The storage area had been partitioned in two, the half meant for the Dromi had been pumped with extra oxygen, and the entire compartment had been hooked up to heaters. The conditions appeared to be suitable, as the prisoner looked calm and did not project anxiety. The Dromi seemed to be sleeping to Mark, his head drooped and his massive bulk leaning against the wall.
"I've never heard of communications with the Dromi," Alferov spoke. "As far as I know, they haven't even talked to us during peacetime, and now when we're at war…" He waved his hand.
"My father told me that there are settlements of peaceful Dromi on Danwait," Mark noted. "They've been living next to our towns for over two centuries."
"Really?" Maria blinked in surprise. "Where did they come from?"
"It's a long story, elder. When the Lo'ona Aeo had rejected their services as Defenders and started hiring humans, some of the Dromi asked for asylum on Danwait and other border worlds. Their request was granted on the condition that the Dromi avoid any conflict with the new Defenders. There aren't many of them, and they regulate their numbers. As Father told me, that was the point of the experiment: the Lo'ona Aeo wanted to make sure that the Dromi were capable of holding back their rate of reproduction." Throwing a thoughtful glance at the prisoner, Mark added, "Maybe the Lonchaks were already certain of it themselves and just wanted to show the other galactic races that they could live alongside the Dromi."
"This implies that it would be excessively and unjustifiably cruel to wipe them out completely. Not to destroy but to direct them on the true path, meaning one that is more acceptable to us and the other galactic neighbors," Nikolay Ilyich spoke. "But, when speaking of the lack of communication with the Dromi, I did not mean the ones on Danwait. Those are civilized beings, who have accepted the norms of… hmm… let's say community. And these…"
"…savages," Tsendin suggested.
"No, that's not right, Kirk. Can sentient creatures who travel among the stars and settle virgin worlds be called savages? I don't think so. They," Alferov nodded towards the partition, "simply did not wish to change after going into space. But any such act inevitably leads to changes! Contacts with other races stimulates development, gives rise to new ideas… not just ideas but also certain limitations. You don't bother me, and I won't bother you, or else conflicts are inevitable. Which is what we have in this case," Alferov finished with a sigh. Then he turned to Mark, "Can you talk to him, Lieutenant?"
"Weeell… in a way."
"What about the ones living on Danwait, they do communicate with them somehow?" Maria asked.
"Yes, in the language of the Lo'ona Aeo, elder. Their speech is accessible to humans, the Dromi, and the other races, but I don't know the language. And he doesn't seem to either." Mark glanced at the sleeping creature. "He spoke, but it sounded like croaking. What would you like to ask him?"
"Well, what he eats, for instance. What if he starves to death!?"
"He won't. The Dromi only require food once every two or three days and can starve for over a month without any consequences. At least, this is what I've been told."
"If we capture their base," Tsendin glanced at the holographic image hanging in mid-air, "he'll have plenty of food. The question is what we do with him then. He's helped us a lot, and that places certain obligations on us."
"We can discuss that later, and now let's get back to our plans," Alferov said. "We've received reinforcements from Northern. We've gathered pilots, drivers, and the veterans who know how to command robots. We have enough weapons, supplies, and transportation for deploying our forces. We can't wait, it's too difficult to hide all this equipment near Nickel. I figure we'll strike at night with three large groups and air support." He activated a laser pointer. "Here, here, and here… The force attacking from the south will take the spaceport, free the prisoners, and provide transportation to those who can't fight. We'll send more people and air transports with weapons with them. The two other groups will attack from the north and the east. Their primary task is to bring down emitter masts, then destroy hangars with military equipment, working in these directions." The laser beam pierced the hologram, leaving crimson strokes in its wake. "The second and third groups will need to be reinforced with robots and tanks. If we manage to vaporize at least some of the greenskin vehicles, it'll be easier to deal with their soldiers. The entire operation is estimated at ninety minutes, then we need to set up powerful laser batteries along the entire perimeter and prepare to repel an attack from orbit."
"Do you think it's inevitable?" Tsendin asked with a concerned expression.
"We don't know that and can't plan it out. If we manage to destroy the Patriarch… Then maybe their space forces won't attack at all. What do you think, Lieutenant?"
"Better safe than sorry. We should prepare to defend," Mark said.
"Exactly. This will be the responsibility of Ahn Shi-ah from the Eastern Headquarters. He used to command marines, and he's at least as old as me. He can do it! As for the Patriarch…"
"I'll handle that." Mark activated his own laser pointer. "Here is his tower, at the very center… We could have approached in concealment from several directions, if not for the shields on the perimeter. In order to punch through the field and take down the emitter towers, we need Roaches and powerful pulse lasers. If we move in with vehicles and strike, we'll make lots of noise… I'm afraid, Nikolay Ilyich, a hidden approach is out of the question. Either from the air or from the ground."
"We have mining robots and drilling machines," Alferov reminded him. "If we dig a tunnel… let's say from those hills…"
On his command, the holoprojector showed the ground site near Western Port, a plain with low hills. Kirk Tsensin suddenly livened, pressed something on his wrist computer, and muttered, "Hold on, I'll query the information at the mine's control center. There used to be a project, a funny one… a century and a half ago… the data should still be available… an interesting venture… does the name Cyrus Etterby mean anything to you?.. Cyrus Etterby, geologist… the author of the copper vein hypothesis… Here, of course! There is data, nothing has been lost!"
"Well, what is it?" Alferov asked.
"During the laying of the foundation of Cuba and Western Port, they found copper. Etterby believed that the layer or the vein stretched for a hundred and twenty kilometers between the cities, and, in that case, that would have been the richest deposit ever. Besides, if it was mined underground, then it would result in a transportation tunnel, connecting both cities. They used to build such structures on Earth… it was called… called…"
"A subway," Nikolay Ilyich suggested. "Are you trying to say that this tunnel exists?"
"Partially. They cut eight kilometers from Western Port and three from Cuba, but the output turned out to be miniscule. There's no vein there, just small local deposits. Etterby was very disappointed, and–"
"Forget Etterby!" Alferov turned red from the excitement. "Where does the tunnel lead? And how do we get inside it?"
The engineer called up the diagram on his computer, and translucent outlines of elevations, valleys, and buildings of the no longer existent outskirts of Western Port appeared above his wrist. A dark line stretched from the city to the hills, and four red lights were blinking over it.
"Ventilation shafts, located every two kilometers along the track," Tsendin explained. "The last one exits into the woods beyond this hill ridge. It's probably overgrown with shrubbery, but shouldn't be difficult to find; there should be a stone ring, a grating, and a vertical well ninety-four meters deep. It comes out into the last section of the tunnel, into a dead end. The dead end is towards Cuba, but the other direction… let's see…" He overlaid the image of Ho on his own diagram and chuckled. "Before, the entrance was near the city limits, but now this place is in the enemy camp, beyond the emitter line. There is an inclined shaft with an antechamber. The tunnel that led to the surface was buried to avoid attracting little boys… But it's not deep! A couple of robots can do the job in a few minutes."
"It the tunnel wide enough for the UCRs to pass?" Mark asked.
"A tank can pass and even a cargo crawler," the engineer informed him, peering into the lines and tables running above the hologram. "The groove was cut with the use of an ordinary mining machine, which means that the width and the height of the tunnel are six and a quarter meters. They were thoroughly reinforced, so there shouldn't be any cave-ins… It's an entrance into the enemy fortress!"
"I'll send scouts into the hills," Alferov spoke. "Have them find this ring with the grating, come down, and check everything."
Mark nodded, "That's sensible, elder. But they'll need to bring a UCR with them; they won't be able to get into a deep well without one. I'll grab a few robots as well, five or six dozen. As for people…" He paused to think for a moment. "I think fifteen will be enough. Better give me someone who used to serve in the Fleet and worked with UCRs."
"All right." Alferov pulled up his sleeve and glanced at the timer strip. "Let's meet at noon, people, and finalize the details of the operation. Here are the current tasks: Kirk and I, as well as Shi-ah from the Eastern HQ, will work on organizing the combat teams. Mark will pick his people and robots, and Maria will handle the supplies and equipment. Let's scatter!"
The storage area emptied out, the hologram displaying Ho winked out. Left alone, Mark approached the transparent partition, put his palms against the cold plastic, pressed his cheek against it. The prisoner on the other side of the barrier was motionless; he was sitting on the floor, his legs folded under him and his eyes closed. The aura of serenity and detachment was coming off him; there were also rhythmic pulses, the slow beating of thought, as if the Dromi was not sleeping but deep in reflection. Mark suddenly recalled what his instructors had said of the greenskin social hierarchy and method of reproduction, of their ships, weapons, and food, of their tactics and psychological makeup, the location of their nerve clusters and other vulnerable spots, of their anatomy and many other things, but none of them had explained how the Dromi rested. What did they do when they were not working, sleeping, or eating? Talked to their friends? Melded with an invented reality, with that which humans called art? Maybe they basked in warm salt water, from where their ancient amphibian ancestors had crawled out? Lay in huge baths and scratched off dry scales… Or did each caste have its own form of entertainment? The elders could order the Names Ones around, skin them alive, tear them up with their claws, taste them… That could also be relaxing!
The prisoner had not bothered to answer these questions, or any other, for that matter. Standing next to the transparent wall, Mark tried to put himself in his shoes, but that was hopeless. To reject one's own race and leave with someone else, someone completely alien, creatures with a different physiology, different customs and historical experience, incomprehensible speech and motivations — that seemed and would always seem a mystery… He could not imagine the reasons that would force him to abandon his loved ones, his comrades-in-arms, all of humanity, and run away somewhere, to those same Dromi or the Lo'ona Aeo, for instance. Had his father or Cro Lightwater been near him, he would have asked them and, perhaps, heard an answer that people were different, and that what was sweet happiness to one was bitter poison to another. Maybe Valdez Sr. would have told him of the Lo'ona Aeo woman, who was a woman only in his eyes, and Mark, thinking of that story, would have realized that, sometimes, an alien became closer than one's own.
But neither Father nor Lightwater were in this dungeon or even in the stellar vicinity. Mark could not ask for advice, and so, shaking his head, he simply muttered., "Something bad must have happened to you, man! Something causing you to resort to this!"
Leaving the storage area, he headed for the lift.
Patta was slumbering, and the Hossi-moa's thoughts were reaching him as a vague, barely discernible echo. It seemed as if the human wanted to ask something, but the junior adviser could not grasp the heart of the matter, either because he was in a sleep trance or for another reason, related to the lack of the necessary concepts. His vocabulary lacked the terms "friend", "art", "rest", "entertainment", and it would be difficult to try to explain them to Patta. First of all, it had to do with art in all its forms and styles, a purely terrestrial, human invention, since other humanoids and some of the highly-developed non-humanoid races lacked the concepts of painting, music, theater, and literature. Not all, though; for example, the Kni'lina were excellent sculptors, chefs, and jewelers, while the Lo'ona Aeo had reached perfection in light painting, music, dance, and architecture. But the creation of works related to using writing symbols to portray nonexistent personas and situations, as well as showing this fiction in the form of living pictures, where actors represented not themselves but characters completely different from them, everything that humans called literature and theatrical art was incomprehensible, strange, and, at times, even shocking to the other races. In their opinion, the ability of a writer or an actor to imagine and play "another life" was a result of an unhealthy psyche, a sign of mental instability with a risk of schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder. Maybe the Lo'ona Aeo alone, being sybarites and hedonists, who always looked for new forms of entertainment, had figured out the reasoning behind human fantasies, recognized literature in all its forms as a valuable commodity suitable for trade. For the past century, they had been exporting books and films into their astroids, even including ancient westerns and corny Hollywood comedies.
But for Patta, art remained a mystery. His world, lacking carnal love or any of its other forms, was rational and did not recognize fantasies. There was reality: stars, planets, food, technology, Dromi, and their enemies; that was enough. Fantasies came down to forecasts, but even here the Patriarchs, the greatest of the minds, had trouble imagining what awaited their race in the future, the future when the galaxy would be under Dromi control. Tihava might have been the only one to envision the coming disaster and thought about how to avoid it.
But was he a Dromi?.. This thought, despite its absurdity, never left Patta, and, sensing the Hossi-moa's telepathic pulse, he regretted that their communication was so limited. If he could only tell him of Tihava, his mentor! Maybe together they could have figured out his secret, for each of them had his own race's unique experience and could have enriched the other with an idea that lay beyond the range of the familiar. But that required a language, a common language, Patta thought, words were still necessary, as a wordless thought did not allow him to convey the complex and tell of the strange. He would probably be able to learn such a language on the planets of the Secretive Ones, if he managed to get there…
He was reflecting on such things in his drowsing state, not noticing the passage of time. The wall he was pressing against was pleasantly warm, the air was also warm and humid, and that, along with the knowledge that his duty had been fulfilled, granted him serenity.
The elevator took Mark up to one of the upper tunnels. It was not one of the caves that held crawlers and flyers but one of the larger loading terminals, which received finished metal. All these exits had already been unsealed, and the landing pads for cargo shuttles had also been cleared of all the debris. The terminals and landing pads were connected by surface roads, which had also been cleared of rocks and gravel; this local transportation network by the mine could simultaneously receive two dozen small ships. Now the roads, pads, and upper tier shafts were filled with military equipment: columns of amphibious tanks, ranks of robots, and tight squares of aircraft stretched everywhere. It was nighttime, but the space around Nickel was lit up by floodlights, and rows of enormous transport disks hovered over the lit territory, hiding it from observation. Containers with supplies, weapons, and ammunition flowed out of them in a never-ending stream; the people and robots, who were working below, opened them, took armor and laser rifles, flat backpacks with rations, bandoliers with power packs, piles of protective helmets and jumpsuits, explosives, laser cutters, boxes with flasks, binoculars, communications equipment, and cyber-medkits into the shafts. They were working silently, quickly, and Mark did not notice any women or teenagers among the hundreds of figures. There were only middle-aged men here, who had once served in the Fleet, those whose sons and daughters were now fighting somewhere in the immeasurable distance or had been killed above T'har along with the Malta and her frigates. They knew how to handle weapons, even those that had spent a century and a half underground.
He descended and started walking down the roads from pad to pad, peering into the faces of the veterans, answering their greetings, looking for those he knew. All UCRs, like all robots, were the same, but people were not, and he wanted to pick out those fighters into his team he remembered from his childhood. In those happy days, they had been known as Uncle Bob, Uncle Dao, or Grandpa Fyodor, and the kids, following them with their eyes, had whispered of their feats, wounds, and awards, destroyed ships, and the special honor granted to colonists – Earth citizenship. However, all of them had returned to T'har, and all those who had survived the Dromi assault were here. Robert Bale and Dao Bo, gunners, Fyodor Timofeyev, marine, Hernando Bariega, a commander from the frigate Orion, Zurab Chania, also a commander, weapons chief on the cruiser Panama, Miguel Cortez, pilot… Mark was raising his hand in a salute, exchanged a few phrases with each, and the other person nodded and headed for the aircraft, the ranks of robots, or the ammo crates.
Two hours later, he was back at the terminal. A disk-shaped transport vessel was already hovering over the rocky ground, and Cortez was sitting in the cockpit, bent over the console, and entering the route data. The aperture of the lower hatch was open, the sixty combat robots had lined up under the ship, awaiting the loading command. A little farther away was a tall stack of long boxes containing missiles; some of the UCRs already carried them on their round bodies, while the others were slowly being equipped under the supervision of Chania and Timofeyev. Roy McCloskey was busy with two mining cybers next to the hatch, verifying the completeness of their equipment and the presence of spare batteries. Mark couldn't see the rest of the team and decided that they had to have left to get their weapons, armor, and rations.
Stepping back into the shade under the terminal's canopy, he sensed someone lurking nearby, recognized the familiar scent, and turned to embrace Maya. Her features were almost indiscernible in the darkness, but he could see her eyes clearly; they were reflecting the scattering of tiny lights from the floodlights below.
"Your eyes are like the sky over T'har," Mark whispered. "Have I told you that?"
"Maybe. I don't know, honey, I don't remember… Tell me that again…"
He found her lips and thought, while kissing them, More… more… more… enough to last until we meet again… may she be spared by fate or the Lords of Emptiness, God or the devil, anyone, only to ensure that meeting… may she be spared…
Maya touched his cheeks, throwing her head back.
"Xenia and I will go in the southern group, the one with youngsters and women. When we free our people, there's going to be a lot of work. Well, you know… help the weak, transport them to Nickel, and hand out weapons to the rest. Nikolay Ilyich warned us not to get into the fight."
"Are you trying to reassure me?" Mark asked.
"I want you to do what you need to do and not worry about me or your sister."
"That's impossible," Mark said. And repeated after a pause. "Impossible."
They fell silent. Two large grav-platforms floated out onto the pad before the terminal, and Commander Chania, formerly Uncle Zurab, the curator of the museum in Ibáñez, drove the robots to start unloading them. Combat suits appeared from inside the boxes; artificial muscles could be seen under their flexible cermet armor, helmet visors gleamed, dark sensors were attached to shoulder pads. Roy McCloskey finished examining the mining cybers, and the ship's manipulators pulled them inside. The sky over the eastern peaks faded; dawn was coming.
"Are you leaving soon?" Maya asked.
"No, not until tonight. Alferov sent scouts to Western Port, and until they come back… Anyway, we still have time. A whole day."
"Then we could…" Maya shrugged hesitantly. "We could take a look at our Dromi. What's he doing, Mark?"
"Sleeping, I think. If you want, we can come down and look." Mark glanced at the landing pad. "They'll be fine without me."
They headed for the lift. The storage area on the lower tier greeted them with darkness and silence; a quarter of a kilometer of rock, earth, and metallic structures separated this level from the surface. The spacious area was almost empty; a few chairs and a table with a holoprojector only underscored this solitude and emptiness.
"Light," Mark said, and balls of light flared to life under the ceiling of the room. The Dromi behind the transparent partition did not react in any way; he continued to sit as before, with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall. His skin was green, and the small oval spot on his belly seemed like a smear of purple paint.
"He's very big," Mark spoke. "A Zong-tii, who's approaching the age of Zong-ap-sidura."
"What does that mean?"
"By our count, he's at least thirty years old, maybe thirty-five. A mature individual. He knew what he was doing when he asked to come with us."
Squinting, Maya was examining the greenskin. The enemy Dromi seemed ugly, brutish, real monsters, but this one, helpless and motionless, was more amusing than scary. He was reminiscent of a giant frog, which some humorous painter had given anthropomorphic features: some sort of shoulders and neck, a vertical torso and face, which could no longer be called a bestial snout. But it was not a face either, Mark thought; more like a mask.
"What's going to happen to our Dromi?" Maya asked. "He'll become this… what did you say… Zong-ap-sidura… And then what?"
"He'll live for about fifteen to twenty years, no more. They don't live for very long." Mark also glanced at the prisoner. "Had he remained with his clan, he would've taken up an important position. There aren't that many Elders-under-Big. We were told that only one in five hundred or a thousand Sinn-ko survives to this age."
"So, we could say that he sacrificed a brilliant career," Maya spoke with a smile. "But why?"
"That I don't know, my T'haran."
"But you can ask him, can't you?"
"I'm afraid he won't understand the question, and I won't understand the answer. I only pick up on his emotions, intentions, motivations… occasionally, and very rarely, visual images. Not enough to convey abstract concepts." Mark rubbed his temples without taking his eyes off the big creature. "He came over to our side, which means he betrayed his own… But how do I ask about it? Do they even have a term for 'betrayal'? And does this word mean the same thing it does for us? No human expert knows that."
"Couldn't they ask the Dromi living on Danwait? The ones who live in peace with humans?"
"It's possible to ask them, but it must be done by specialists, and that's impossible; Father told me that the Lo'ona Aeo don't allow human scientists on their planets. Danwait, Tintakh, and all the other worlds are only meant for mercenaries, and all that we know of the peaceful Dromi came to us from secondary sources. Besides the fact that they lack a clan-based structure, they differ from their cousins, the ones we're fighting, in many ways. They're different now. Cro Lightwater called their society a splinter civilization, in the sense that they had split off from the Dromi empire and created something new. A new world, a new culture, new customs…"
The Dromi suddenly shifted and opened his eyes.
"He's looking…" Maya whispered, spellbound. "He's looking at us!"
"Well then," Mark spoke, not really surprised, "that's why he has eyes, to look. He must be done sleeping."
The Dromi's legs straightened, and he suddenly hopped to the partition. He was moving with the ease unexpected from such a large creature. Each of his lower limbs was as thick as a tree trunk, and the upper limbs weren't much thinner.
His mouth opened, a purple tongue thrashed about the sharp teeth. Was that a sign of threat or displeasure?.. Probably not, Mark decided, analyzing the prisoner's emotions; the Dromi seemed excited but did not bear hostility towards them. Actually, he was not even a prisoner. The fact that he was here now had been his conscious choice.
The Dromi scratched the partition with a claw, leaving a noticeable white trace on the tough plastic. The claws on his hands were sharp, half the length of a human finger.
"He's trying to get our attention. He wants to say or ask something," Maya spoke. "Could you?.."
"Yeah, I'll try." Nodding, Mark stepped away from the wall separating them, sat down in a chair, and closed his eyes. It wasn't necessary to close his eyes in order to enter a trance, but it helped him concentrate. His experience in telepathic communication was brief; he should not be neglecting any detail.
This time, he engaged the link without difficulty. It seemed as if the Dromi was trying to help him, and Mark decided that he wanted to tell him something important. It had nothing to do with the Patriarch, the coming fight with the clan that had occupied T'har, or anything else except the prisoner himself; without knowing how, Mark realized that they were communicating about this Dromi's personal fate. Their Dromi, as Maya had called him.
"He wants to discuss his future. I think he has some plans on this account. I'm not sure I'll be able to understand them, but one thing is clear: he has no intention of returning to our enemies."
"A Dromi must live with Dromi. We're not suitable companions to him," Maya said. She fell silent, thinking, but then Mark once again heard her voice after a few seconds, "The ones fighting us are not the only Dromi in the galaxy. You said it yourself. Has he heard of those other Dromi? Does he want to go to them, to the Lo'ona Aeo worlds? To Danwait or Tintakh?"
"I don't know how to tell him about that. I can't…" Mark said and broke off. He wanted to say that Danwait, Tintakh, any of the names for stars, planets, and galactic races used by humans were meaningless to the Dromi. But it seemed that was a hasty conclusion. The name bore an image, but not a figure or face of a Lo'ona Aeo and not the landscapes of their planet, which he had seen in holographic recordings, but something more complex, multifaceted, which described an object in such detail that it would require hundreds or thousands of words to do the same in written or spoken form. Without realizing it, Mark had just touched the distant future, the precursor to the universal meta-language, where one concept, one single thought could replace long complicated conversations. This method of communication was not yet present among the galactic races, but, like every phenomenon, called to life by the progress of sentient communities and interactions between them, would appear inevitably; in a thousand, or in ten thousand years, or, maybe, in an extremely distant future.
The ability to create such images had been Mark's first shock, the second was that the Dromi understood him. Maybe their mental fields were currently in that state of resonance that happened when thoughts of partners were close, resulting in complete and clear understanding; perhaps, with each mind link, Mark's experience and skill grew or the Dromi's echo became clearer; either way, his answer was unambiguous. The agreement thought was accompanied by an emotion of contentment or something akin to happiness, although Mark would, probably, not risk vouching for such an impression. Had the Dromi been human, he could have thought that they were talking about a lifelong dream, of something he wished with a desperate and hopeless passion, of the idea that had gripped him for many years. But the Dromi was not human, not even a humanoid, so it was not a good idea to ascribe such feelings to him.
Mark opened his eyes and said, "I think he has accepted the thought of Danwait with enthusiasm. Now, my dove, all we have to do is kick the Dromi out of the Far Worlds, wait for ships from Earth, and send our friend to the Embassy Domes [Embassy Domes are the location of the alien diplomatic missions. They were built on Luna between the Second and Third Void Wars (2182-2185) and have the shape of cylinders, buried into the lunar soil and covered by transparent domes (hence the name). The First Dome is taken up by the Servs of the Lo'ona Aeo, who represent their masters.]. And then the Servs will take him where he needs to go. It would also be nice for us to avoid being vaporized in the coming fight; after all, who's going to understand him without translators?"
"Without you," Maya clarified with a smile. "What can I do by myself?"
"What can I do?" Turning to the Dromi, Mark made a farewell gesture and, holding the girl by the shoulders, headed for the exit. "My, my dear T'haran, for the next hundred years, you're going to inspire and direct me. You and only you! And heal me too, by the way. These psychic exercises devour my nerve energy, and there is only one way to replenish my strength." He kissed Maya on the lips. "A very good, time-tested way. I mean that, after each session…"
Maya didn't let him finish, covered his mouth with her hand, and burst into quiet laughter. Without another word, they went up to the habitation level, found their wedding palace, and spent the rest of the time until sunrise there. With the first rays of the sun, they were on the surface.
Looking over the landing pads and roads, packed with hundreds of vehicles, groups of armed people in combat suits, and transport disks, hovering over the mountains, the girl sighed and drew closer to Mark. He knew what she was thinking, and he himself was thinking of the same thing: the day would pass, the night would pass, there would be another morning, but would they see that sunrise? There were so few T'harans, thousands against tens of thousands, and Earth, humanity's great home, seemed so hopelessly distant…
"You're wondering if we can do it?" Maya whispered. "If we can kick them out? Survive?"
Mark gently stroked her hair.
"We have a chance, my T'haran. A small one, but it's a chance. If we kill the Patriarch."
