87 - I Will Give You Water

In code, Prime and Kyrus loomed over their support.  On Hinnemon every one who had the strength to help sat or lay where they were. The Great Hive all along the canyon and up to the Milari mountains shaded people. The Nadu in their domes, the Hippifrei in the shadows of their saddles, guarded by the ribs of their bone horses.

Prime paused in his relentless lightning strikes, his fists glowing brighter than the white sun in the sky, knocked aside Kyrus’s mandering of a sun-spear and enclosed himself in a shield once more, cutting everyone on Xanadu off from Glass Mountain.  Everything run by the machines stopped.  Hospital equipment paused, went to back-ups that were no longer there, and stopped.

Pumps failed, filters shut. Lights went out. The vehicles rolled to a stop, the hover-carriages sank to the ground, while the horses reared and fought to pull the suddenly inert weight behind them.

“You… upstarts.  You aren’t Gregori and you aren’t Petra!  You aren’t Nadia or even her feckless husbands!” He raised his fists over his head, clearly visible inside his shield.  “I don’t have Station to drop the moon on you but that will not stop me!” The ground, world-wide, trembled as he drew on Glass Mountain’s full power.

Glass Mountain, tapped into the planetary core, linked to the mantle floating on that core, shrieked as Prime ripped the water out of the rocks and sand in the ocean basins.  Geysers of water blasted hundreds of feet into the air as he clenched his fists, squeezing the liquid out of the world.

It began to rain world-wide and the wind howled louder than Glass Mountain; the terra-forming programs struggled to compensate, struggled to keep the biological mats in place.  The Hippifrei drew the bones of the grass, the dust of it out of the sand and clamped it down on the plains.

The zon in Milar wove their mandery into the rocks struggling to hold the mountains in place as the tsingy cracked and avalanches threatened. The Nadu tumbled out of the domes in the shade of the cliff, on hands and knees, and threw up every trick of weather control that they’d researched for a thousand years, to blunt the teeth of the wind.

The mats ripped up, were pounded flat by the rain, were ripped again as the sand rippled. In the badlands hoodoos cracked and fell, shattering like a field of mushrooms flattened.

On Xanadu people lay where they’d fallen, or crawled away from houses or statues, things that rocked and fell.  Funnel clouds full of rain and terran plants, trees uprooted, pieces of oaks and elms and walnut smashing through the forests.

Lollipapera trees fell, Thunder Thorns shattered.  The driest ground began to crack and aquifers blew from deep out of the ground.

“I’ll give you water,” Perrin snarled and for the first time there was enough water that the ocean basins, from space, shone blue and white.

Kyrus’s gauntleted fists smashed into the outside of Perrin’s shield, his armoured fingers dug into it despite its sparking and he and his warbird wrenched the owner, and his throne, into the air.