Free Eternity's Mind by Kevin J. Anderson Page B

stayed behind to fight, fusing themselves with the great trees via the catalyst of wental water to become verdani battleships … lifeships that carried millions of escaping Onthos, who burrowed into the trees like parasites. Some of those lifeships were destroyed by the Shana Rei before they could get away.
    A very few Gardeners had escaped, though, along with their rare spore mothers, but their race withered and declined, because they had no worldforest, and the last refugees spent thousands of years fleeing and wandering, trying to establish new colonies, doing anything to survive. Along the way, they were also hunted down and nearly eradicated by the Klikiss race.
    And all along the Onthos had carried a blight hidden within their DNA, which they had now unwittingly brought to Theroc. They planned to thrive again, to become part of an ever-larger worldforest, which the blight was killing. The infestation would destroy the Wild; then it would snuff out the whole verdani mind.
    Kennebar and the voidpriests intended to assist in that doom. They were entirely composed of dark matter now, a manifestation of the shadows.
    Now only Collin knew the truth, and he and Arita were trapped here. Sarein must have discovered some part of the secret herself and been killed for it.
    Through his probing, Collin had nudged the worldforest mind, awakened part of it here. And now he knew he needed to emerge, return to his body and to Arita. The two of them had to fight and survive. It was more important than ever.
    I am a green priest! He came back to himself and although only a moment had passed, he saw the voidpriests closing in like slow ink-black soldiers. Collin and Arita stood together, ready to fight. “I am a green priest,” he said aloud, his voice strong and clear.
    He heard a rustling sound and realized that the fronds overhead were filled with Gardeners—not just the few who had come to watch before, but dozens of them crowded shoulder-to-shoulder, all identical and staring down with clinical fascination. As if anticipating death and blood.
    Collin drew a deep breath. The first enemies he and Arita had to fight were the voidpriests.

 
    CHAPTER
    11
    ROD’H
    The void around him was a lifeless purgatory that preserved his existence so the shadows and their malicious robots could toy with him, study him, excavate his mind.
    Because Rod’h was a halfbreed, he could resist them to a certain extent, but he was no longer truly alive. The Shana Rei held him in an entropy bubble, a vague chamber apart from the real universe. He drifted in the blackness with no sensory input, except for pain. And the robots were extremely good at inflicting pain—almost as good as Rod’h was at preserving his secrets. The Shana Rei were growing frustrated with him.
    During the battle at the Onthos home system, black robots had captured his scout ship, taking him as an experimental subject. Months earlier, the shadows had also seized his brother Gale’nh when they engulfed the Kolpraxa, but they let Gale’nh go—weakened and damaged—when they could not derive the answers they needed.
    They took Rod’h instead, and he knew they would not make the mistake of releasing him.
    Even in his bizarre isolation, though, he remained connected with Gale’nh and their three half-sisters, Osira’h, Muree’n, and Tamo’l. As he drifted, an unknown time after the attack on Kuivahr—because time had no meaning here—he reached out to make a connection with his siblings. He was surprised to sense Tamo’l more clearly than the others. She had devoted her life to tending the misbreeds in the sanctuary domes on Kuivahr, and she had escaped just before the shadows engulfed that planet. Now, he could sense that Tamo’l was vulnerable, susceptible … contaminated in a way. Somehow, the creatures of darkness must have touched her before she escaped Kuivahr.
    Rod’h feared that the