The following is an excerpt from the novel Dragon Sun, the sequel to last year’s Centauri Dawn. In chapter one of the book, Chairman Yang, hidden in underground bases across the sea, wrestles with a growing rebellion among his own people. Chapter two joins Lady Deirdre in the human settlements.

This book is set seventy years after the events of Centauri Dawn.

Chapter Two

In the Gaian territories across the sea, Lady Deirdre awakened from a long nightmare to find herself in her bed, her silk sheets damp with sweat. She stared for a moment at the high ceiling arching overhead, trying to calm her racing heart, feeling the dull throb of a hangover. The bank of tall windows on the other side of the room was set on maximum tint, allowing none of the light of Chiron’s suns into her rooms.
She reached up a hand and massaged her temples, then turned over. Next to her slept a man, young and blonde and with limbs as slender as a woman’s. His mouth hung open in his sleep, she couldn’t remember his name, and he couldn’t be more than twenty-four years old.
I’m 140  years his senior.
Of course it wasn’t quite that bad. Counting the forty-year cryosleep on the journey from Earth, and the genetic treatments from Zakharov’s labs that kept her young, she was technically 160 years old or so. But really, physically, she was much younger.
And mentally? Emotionally? I’m old enough to know better.
She slipped quietly out of bed and walked across her vast new chambers to the tall windows. Images of the Bacchanalian festivities the night before teased at her consciousness, but she quickly pushed them away. She hoped the young man wouldn’t awaken until she was gone.
No such luck. She heard a stirring in the bed behind her, and glanced over her shoulder to see him rubbing his face. After a moment he looked at her with a cocky, lopsided grin.
“Good morning,” she said, wanting to preempt any coy remarks.
“Oh, indeed.” He let out a self-satisfied sigh. He got out of bed, naked as she was, and walked across the room toward her. She quickly crossed to a closet and wrapped herself in a pale yellow robe.
When she turned back to him he had stopped, frowning. She gave him a tight smile. “You’ll have to take your breakfast in the common rooms. I’m sorry.”
His frown remained for a moment, until he finally nodded. “Done with me, then? All right.” He looked around her chambers, with their high arched ceilings and immaculate fixtures. “So this is living in true harmony with the world.”
She reached out and punched a touchswitch on the wall, turning off the tint on the windows and allowing the blazing light of Centauri A and B to flood the room. The young man made a choked sound and put his hand over his face. “Please leave now,” she said.
He turned away from the windows, his hand still over his face, and then began picking up his clothes from their scattered piles around the floor. He headed for the door, still naked, and she saw with dismay that he was going to walk out past her guard that way. Before he left he turned back to her.
“You weren’t so cold last night, Lady. I hope you can still remember that.” He shot her one last arrogant grin and walked out the door. She shook her head.
He’ll be a glass cutter for life, that’s for sure.
But his words stung. The visions of the night before encroached on her. It was as if some kind of desperate madness had overtaken her. She could feel the frantic sweat on her skin again, as she reached inside herself for a passion she once had felt, and instead only found more frantic thrashing. She touched her forehead again, and her hand trembled.
What’s wrong with me?
She walked to a full-length mirror and slipped out of the robe again. Her body was still firm, with small but shapely breasts and strong legs, and she felt a moment of wistful vanity. But she knew the signs of age encroaching yet again, in the wrinkles that touched the periphery of her oval face and the pains she felt in her joints. Each time she had to return to the genetic treatments sooner and sooner, and each time she wondered how many more years she could steal from the grave. And each time the life force, the energy that made her feel alive, seemed farther away.
Until last night, in the throes of passion, she had felt something dark and cold squeeze her heart.
She looked out the window at Chiron, at its rolling red hills and the crimson tangle of xenofields that touched the periphery of her High Garden base. And she knew she would never see the end of this world’s story.

“Well, it wasn’t a heart attack,” said her personal physician, Bayliss, as he loosened the medical probe from around her arm. “Not quite, anyway.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He leaned forward and shined a light into her eyes, then she felt his hands pushing into the skin around her throat. “It means that no one else has a body quite like you do, Lady. Your heart has thumped out more than its fair share of beats, and it’s just…” He shrugged helplessly. “You’re 165 years old. I don’t think the genetic treatments are working very well anymore.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“You need another treatment, much sooner than I expected. I don’t see any other way.”
She felt her heart sink. “I thought as much.”
“It’s been almost eight years. I’m sorry.” He made a note on his portable touchpanel. “We’ll have to contact Zakharov for more.”
She looked at him, startled. “Don’t we have any treatments in storage?”
“No. Zakharov recalled the outstanding treatments about six months ago. He said he has some improvements he wants to make to the technology. All we have left is a half treatment for your advisor, Goldman, who’s due pretty soon. Weren’t you notified?”
“No.” She felt her heart start to race, and she cursed the loose and disorganized Gaian bureaucracy.
“Well, like I said, we didn’t expect you to need them this soon.” He came and sat down next to her, on the examination table, and he reached out to touch her hand. “Lady, I also need to tell you. At some point I think these treatments will stop working. You should think about that, and prepare yourself accordingly. Don’t be fooled by what you see in the mirror.”
She swallowed and climbed off of the examination table. “OK, then. Contact Zakharov and get the treatments. There’s a critical vote at the Planetary Council meeting in three weeks, and I won’t take the treatments until after that meeting, anyway.”
He nodded and snapped his touchpanel closed. “Fine, but I want you to come in every week until then, so we can monitor things.” He walked to the door and looked back at her. He looked as if he would say something more, but then he turned and left.
The door closed behind him, and Deirdre started to slip out of her white patient’s gown. As she did her hand brushed by her hair, and she paused to feel it. It was still thick and dark, but felt much more brittle than the softness she remembered after her last series of treatments. 
She had a sudden vision of Zakharov, the settlement’s master scientist, and his calculating blue eyes set in a craggy but ageless face. It dawned on her that he now held the key to her longevity, and yet she couldn’t remember the last time she had really spoken to him.

She left the medlabs and walked the clean hallways of the base to clear her head. Gaia’s High Garden, the largest of her five bases, had started as a collection of bubble tents huddled around a series of mammoth eighty-meter-tall rock formations. The location was perfect, with rolling red hills in every direction and a vast tangled field of the crimson xenofungus nearby.
In the early days after planetfall, that field had served as her laboratory. While the other settlement leaders had feared the xenofungus and the mindworms, Deirdre had encouraged her people to embrace these native life forms and study them. While the other human bases fought off deadly mindworm attacks, Deirdre had been the first to discover that the mindworms could be controlled and directed, giving her a massive head start in xenobiology research which the other leaders now envied.
Later, when expansion had been necessary, the Gaians had built their facilities into the sides of the rock formations, which actually weren’t rock at all but some kind of hardened, long-dead xenofungal mass. The care she used during this expansion had served them well; her base was beautiful, with glass and synthmetal tiers clinging to the high towers and pristine red hills all around them.
The medlabs were on the second highest tier of the central tower, and she found herself approaching one of the huge observation windows. She stared out over the pristine land, and then a poster on the window caught her eye. Printed on a thin sheet of translucent material, the poster said, “A mindworm is a terrible thing to waste.” An accompanying image showed young, fresh-faced Gaian men and women playing near the xenofields.
She smiled. Had she ever been that naive? Now the young people went into the xenofields at night to experience the psychotropic effects of the xenofungus itself, using it like a drug. Well, let them. It will take their minds off of the need for luxuries, and bigger quarters and stylish clothes. She didn’t want them to crave those things, and as time rolled on she realized she was the only living Gaian who remembered the devastation of Earth.
Ironically, that devastation was what she wanted most to forget.
Her quicklink beeped. It was Goldman, her top advisor.

She walked to a nearby dining area and sat at a small, sunlit table to wait for Goldman. He bustled up a few minutes later, his face looking haggard but still strong, his hair long and silver-white. Right behind him came Simper, her other top advisor, taller and much thinner than Goldman and wearing a stylish wrap that made him look somewhat foppish.
Goldman smiled. “Lady Skye, hello.” She nodded and took Goldman’s hand, touching the tanned, creased flesh. His hand felt warm to the touch.
“Greetings, Lady Skye,” said Simper, pressing in close to her. “I hear that you’ve been to your physician. Are you well?”
“Of course.” Where did this man get his information? “If not, I’m sure I would have told you already.” Simper bobbed his head, and she took the slender hand he extended to her and gave it a quick squeeze. Simper Pol was a forced experiment in democracy, elected to her council of advisors under pressure from a vocal minority of her citizens, who wanted to make sure her desire for harmony with nature didn’t mean sleeping in the dirt and eating mindworm omelets for breakfast.
“Thanks for meeting me here,” she said to them.
“We know you’d rather meet away from the command center,” said Goldman. “I find it stifling as well.”
“Stifling,” agreed Simper. “Are we prepared for the meeting of the Planetary Council?”
“Almost,” said Deirdre. “I want the surveyors to recheck those territory borders.”
“Already done,” said Goldman. “They’ve verified again that the forested hills to the east are not officially recognized as part of Gaian territory. We’ve asked for a one-hundred-kilometer extension of our territories, which encompasses the forests plus a little more, just in case.”
“I think we’ll need that extra to bargain with,” said Simper. “Morgan is not going to let us have that land without something in return. Why should he?”
“And why shouldn’t he?” asked Goldman. “We seeded those hills and grew the forests. Lady Skye created the hybrids that flourished better than we could have hoped.”
Simper dismissed the argument with a flip of his hand. “Morgan doesn’t care about the trees. He wants the minerals underneath, and there are no better deposits available to him for hundreds of kilometers.”
“We were there first,” said Deirdre. 
“He’ll want something,” said Simper stubbornly. “He’s a businessman. We should have something ready to put on the table. We could open trade with him, or allow him to pipe more of his MorganLink video channels here. These are simple requests…”
Goldman shook his head. “Simple with someone like you as trade liaison, right?”
Simper touched a clasp on the throat of his wrap. “We need to acknowledge what our citizens want. They want what Morgan has. They want his luxuries.”
“Some of them do,” said Deirdre. “But they’ll have to wait. Director Morgan has already turned his own territory into a field of boreholes, and uses more metal in one of his bases than we use in six. We’ll let the Council decide this one.” She looked at Simper, who’s eyes darted back and forth between her and Goldman. Was this the future of Chiron? She suddenly felt nauseated.
“We’ll meet again before the Council. You can raise any further concerns in your weekly reports.”
“Very well,” said Goldman, nodding. Simper got up from the table, shaking his head.

One advantage of having a loyal advisor who had held your trust for a long time was that you could carry on an internal dialogue with him even when he wasn’t there. As Deirdre left the meeting, she dialogued with Goldman in her head, filling in what he would say.
I don’t like Simper, said the internal Goldman. But he has a point. He knows the Morganite mind better than anyone.
That’s why we don’t like him, she answered herself.
Yes! But we should be prepared. Our lifestyle has left us weak. Morgan is far ahead in technology, in weapons, and even in Council influence.
But my forests! They are stunning…Earth forests on Chiron, a complete ecosystem, grown from nothing!
Yes. But they’re only trees, at least to the others. We must be prepared. I just don’t want that little wimp to have the satisfaction of knowing he scared me.
He scared me too. But we’ve been scared before.
The xenofields had scared them, and Deirdre had shown her citizens how beautiful they truly were. The mindworms had scared them, and now she had citizens directing the mindworms as if they were Beethoven conducting a symphony. And now Morgan scared her.
But Morgan was human. And humans scared her more than anything.

Later that day
Deirdre touched her hair and considered the research report in front of her. It was part of an ongoing test series that had caught her eye, and for some reason, with the talk of new threats from Morgan, this report seemed more important than ever.
It was dry and technical, as these reports tended to be, but it detailed the progress of one of her pet projects, an experiment to allow humans to “read” the energy fluctuations swirling through Chiron’s native life forms. It used a device that had been labeled the empath chair.
A jotted note from her head researcher, Sylvie, had caught her eye. The research had progressed to the testing stages, but then had stalled.
She thought about the busy, cramped command center, and Goldman and Simper tossing their barbs at each other. Then she thought of the biolabs, where an introverted soul could feel at peace among the Gaian “seeds and beakers.”
She linked to Sylvie and requested a meeting in the labs. It had been a long time.

At the base of High Gardens’ central tower was a carefully preserved piece of Chiron’s ecosystem surrounded by unobtrusive laboratory modules. In this area Deirdre’s hand-picked scientists were free to experiment at will, seeking to unlock ever deeper mysteries of Chiron.
Deirdre entered these biolabs from a secure elevator, and reflected how she barely recognized the labs since the last expansion. There were new white walls, and doors that hissed open instead of using a simple handle, and lean, nervous guards at regular intervals. She tried to remember what kept her away from research, her first love, but the last months and years seemed a blur of politics and policies. 
At least she recognized the thin young woman with the homely face coming down the hall toward her. 
“Hello, Sylvie,” Deirdre said. 
The woman returned a nervous smile. “Are you ready to see our progress, Lady Skye?”
“Of course.” Sylvie lead her down a curving glass hallway. Through the glass Deirdre could see the “laboratory gardens,” a broad patch of red earth mingled with tongues of xenofungus extending from the nearby fields. Groups of scientists in pressure masks stood in small clusters, conferring over experiments.
In the center of the field stood a tall woman with long black hair, facing away from Deirdre. She wore a flowing robe and lifted her hands to the sky with the grace of a dancer.
“Who’s that?”
“Lady Skye, that’s Lindly Downs. She’s our best brood trainer.”
“Of course. I didn’t recognize her from this distance.” 
Deirdre stopped to watch the woman work. Lindly turned toward a tongue of xenofungus, and now Deirdre could see her in profile…a study of beauty and youth, her eyes lost in the deep focus of calling the mindworms.
 “How old is she again?”
“She’s twenty-two. A prodigy.” Deirdre could hear the tinge of awe in Sylvie’s voice. “No one has been able to control the mindworms like she can.”
Deirdre didn’t answer. As she watched, Lindly lifted both of her hands in one smooth motion, and suddenly, in the tongue of xenofungus, a hundred thousand writhing creatures appeared, tiny wormlike shapes. A hissing rattle rose in Deirdre’s mind, pressing in on her consciousness.
“The worms should behave under Lindly’s influence,” she heard Sylvie’s voice say, but it seemed muffled, as if coming from a distance. “You may sense their psych attacks, but it shouldn’t really affect us. If it gets to be too much, signal me and we’ll leave.”
“I ran the original experiments on worm control,” said Deirdre. “I won’t need any help.”
In the field, Lindly moved her hands to the side, and the worms spread out, rolling from the xenofungus and onto the red earth to her sides. Then she stepped back and kneeled, folding her body into a tight knot, and the worms also contracted into a tiny pool that quivered with motion. Deirdre heard the sounds shrink to a concentrated hiss in her mind, and she felt her knees start to tremble. She looked at Sylvie, but Sylvie just stood in rapture, staring at Lindly and the mindworms.
Embrace them.
Deirdre shook her head. The worms gnawed at her consciousness, seeking to tear her brain apart from the inside, but her intuition had just told her to let them in.
She saw Lindly stand up and the worms suddenly flowed toward her and then up into a column, a living pillar nearly forty meters high. Lindly stretched her body up, powerful and taut, and at that moment Deirdre closed her eyes and reached out to the worms, embracing their jarring cries. She felt a stab of pain for a moment, and then suddenly she felt her spirit lift, as the worm voices merged into a hum that expanded to fill her mind, calm and immense.
Lindly spread her arms apart, directing the worms to divide and pool again, but Deirdre felt the voice of the worms at that moment, and knew they wanted to reach still higher, toward the bright sky.
Do it,  she thought, and smiled as the hum rose in pitch. 
For one brief moment she saw Lindly’s body twist into an attitude of concern, as the worm pillar soared into a slender column that arced into the bright sky, a hundred meters or more. Deirdre saw them soar and felt her own spirit lift for a moment, as Lindly stood helpless, and then suddenly the wormsong crashed into static and the tall pillar collapsed to the ground, becoming Lindly’s toy again.
Deirdre gasped and reached out to touch the glass, her mind spinning. Sylvie made a sound of choked awe.
“That’s the highest I’ve ever seen them go, Lady Skye!”
Deirdre felt the cool glass under her hands, trying to collect herself. Lindly did a few more maneuvers, but seemed shaken. The sound of that mindworm song still tugged at Deirdre, and she grabbed Sylvie’s sleeve.
“I want to use this new technology you reported, that lets the human mind read the native life,” she said.
Sylvie looked at her. “You, Lady Skye? It’s unproven technology, and we’ve gotten no positive responses…”
“It doesn’t matter,’ said Deirdre. She shook her head and swallowed. “I’m returning to my quarters now, to rest. But get ready, because tomorrow I want to use this empath chair for myself.”

Simper sat hunched at his touchpanel in the Gaian command center, contacting his web of allies, informants and spies until his eyes and shoulders ached. Behind him the work of the command center went on, with tense Gaians hurrying from console to console in the cramped room, buried deep in the base of the central tower. Cramped space and lots of people--it explained why Lady Skye was never there.
A few plants sat around the room in pots, sad specimens that took their nourishment from the bank of artificial lighting overhead. Only in Gaia would a potted plant be allowed near delicate equipment. He smiled at that and went back into the links.
“Here, Councilman.” A woman named Jean Fox, according to her ID tag, set a mug of hot tea next to him and touched his shoulder. “You’ve been at work all day. Both suns will be down within the hour, so hurry if you want to catch a double down.” A double sundown, both suns slipping below the horizon at the same time, a rare and much treasured sight for any self-respecting Gaian.
“Thanks,” he said quickly, and made a vague motion at her with his fingers. If she was flirting with him, now was not the time. Although…
He turned to her. “Do you really believe sunsets and potted plants are enough to support a fulfilling life on this world?”
She stared at him, then shrugged. “They’re nice things, I suppose, and Lady Skye says…”
“But Lady Skye enjoys double sundowns from her rooms on the tower tops. In Director Morgan’s territory, demand for lush quarters is met by supply.” And a little less fungus hugging is all I’m asking for, as a popular Morganite sentiment went.
A message flagged with a Priority One symbol appeared on to his screen, and he reluctantly turned away. “You’ll have to excuse me.”
“OK.” She turned and walked away. She was pretty, but didn’t have the nice fragrance and elegant clothes of some of the Morganite women that had greeted him in his outreach tours. Gaians had a kind of “less is more” philosophy for attracting each other…less clothing, less inhibition was more their speed.
He read the message, and then read it again. “I’ll be damned,” he finally said, and looked around the command center. Goldman wasn’t there, and Deirdre wasn’t there. He tapped the edge of the touchpanel, considering.
Something big was happening in the Morgan labs, and Deirdre should know. After a moment more of deliberation, he got on his quicklink and contacted her.

Lady Deirdre watched Simper face’s on the small window of her quicklink. “How confident are you about this information?” she asked.
“I trust the source, Lady Deirdre. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Director Morgan even wanted us to know about it, considering our current negotiations.”
“Perhaps he’s trying to trick us.”
Simper shrugged noncommittally. “We’ll find out if we ever try to use more mindworms against him. You’ll remember that I advised you against relying on the native life as our primary means of defense. You know, eggs in one basket…”
“Thank you.” Deirdre shut off the link, already lost in thought. She stroked her hair as she considered this new information.
Trance Rovers. A new Morgan technology. She knew that Director Morgan was working on anti-mindworm technologies, but she thought all his experimentation had failed. Was this some kind of breakthrough? And if so, would it threaten her brood trainers, and the mindworms they summoned?
She started thinking of Simper hunched in the command center, and stern-faced Morgan scientists plotting against her, and craggy Zakharov fiddling with his gene treatments.
She shook off the negative thoughts. It’s been a long day. I’ll read the reports in the morning.
She poured a glass of fungal wine and stepped to her windows. The wine tasted bitter, but with each sip feelings of lethargy and lazy pleasure washed through her. She felt the buzz of a semitrance descend over her, disconnecting her from her body, just as  she wanted. The lighting in her chambers was beautiful, soft and subdued, and outside she could watch the expanse of Chiron slip into twilight as Centauri A and B touched the horizon together.
Double down.
She looked east, where in the distance she knew her thriving forests covered the hillsides. She looked south, where the rolling crimson xenofields seemed to pulse in the twilight. And as she watched the xenofields, she could see points of light drifting to them and away from them, as Gaian patrols and curiosity-seekers visited Planet’s deepest mystery.
Planet. It seemed a fitting term, more organic and personal than the U.N.-assigned Chiron. She would call this world Planet.
She thought of the young man she had woken up with today, and his cocksure attitude. She was sure that he would have no problem accepting Director Morgan’s new gaming channels in exchange for longer and harder hours on the cutting crew.
Another sip of the xenowine dispersed any thoughts of him. 
She sat on her windowsill and watched nature’s grand display, thinking of that moment today when she had touched the essence of the mindworms, and she looked again to the xenofields.
Things were changing. She could see it in Simper’s darting eyes, and in the arrogant faces of some of the fourth generation Planet-born, and in Morgan’s newfound daring. The world was changing, and people were forgetting the things about Earth she wanted them to remember. So if her body did give out, tomorrow or next week, would that be so bad?
A sudden sadness washed over her as she drank and watched the fields alone. She had lived more years than anyone, had risen to the top of her field, had survived the destruction of Earth and the fragmenting of the Unity mission, but the more she accomplished the further she seemed from happiness. Her success, her maturity, had cost her…what?
She looked over the xenofields again, thinking of that brief touch of the mindworms today, as if they had called her. She tried to remember the last time she had visited those fields, the last time she had felt the dirt in her gardens.
She set down her glass. It seemed a long time ago.

While Deirdre drifted to sleep under the half-light of that Centauri night, sleek metal machines pushed their way into the edges of another vast xenofield, in the no-man’s land to the east of Gaian territory. 
One machine extended a thick plastic barrel, and from metal tanks on its back great clouds of yellow fog rolled out. The great machine turned right and left on synthmetal treads, and the crimson tubules of the xenofields withered and burned, meters deep.
The machine crunched its way deeper into the fields, the helmeted, faceless pilot inside trying for maximum damage. And in time the fields to their right rippled, and then the high-pitched whine began in the mind of the pilot, and then the worms boiled from the xenofields toward the intruder.
“They’re here!” choked the pilot into his link, sweat pouring down his face under his helmet, as his arms and legs straining at the straps in his chair. He had been bound in for his own protection, but the veins in his neck stood out alarmingly.
From behind the fungtank came a rover, small and speedy, and covered with shiny armor plating. On the top of the rover a strange bluish metal disc rotated lazily as if touched by a wind, but there was no wind in these fields. As the rover approached the mindworms the disc swiveled in to orient on them.
“I think I’m…under…” The driver of the fungtank’s speech became gasps, and the gasps became less regular and more frantic.
From the top hatch of the rover three soldiers came in sleek gray and yellow uniforms with bands of blue metal around their heads. They moved slowly but calmly, and as the worms approached these three warriors pulled out spitters, weapons that shot a fine spray of corrosive acid onto the worms. 
Even before the warriors reached it the mindworm boil seemed to lose its coherence. Worms that bunched like great fists, ready to rise into the sky and crush the human intruders, collapsed back into pools of liquefying wormbodies. 
The warriors moved as if someone else directed their steps, and the worms had no fear to feed on. Once the flametank driver howled in terror, and at that moment several hundred worms snapped to life and bored into the foot and shin of one of the warriors, who fell to the ground without making a sound and thrashed there. But the other two warriors continued, trancelike, turning the worms into pools of smoking liquid. And the worms slowly dispersed back into the xenofungus as Planet tried to close its newest wound.

This has been an excerpt from the novel Dragon Sun from Pocket Books, written by Michael Ely. The full novel is available at your local bookstore or online (try www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com). (Note: in local bookstores the book may be found in the regular sci-fi section, or in the section where serialized gaming and Star Trek novels are kept).

© 2001 by Electronic Arts. For more information, see www.firaxis.com. You are free to distribute this document as long as no text, including this notice, is altered.