Ryer Ord Star crouched next to him in the doorway, her gaze directed back toward Walker, helpless and beseeching. Walker gave her a calm, untroubled look, one meant to comfort and allay her fears. His attempt failed. Perhaps she saw the truth. Perhaps she was beyond seeing anything but what she feared most. She screamed, and the sound could be heard even over the howl of the alarms.
In response, Walker flattened the palm of his hand against one of the extraction ports and sent the Druid fire hurtling inward.
Antrax was caught by surprise. Walker's magic pumped into the intake lines like floodwaters down a dry riverbed. The shock was enormous, so much so that a backlash ripped through Walker, as well. He stiffened against the pressure and pain and thrust the magic forward again, deep into the lines, feeling it build anew. Antrax was throwing up defenses in a wild effort to contain him, but it was too little, too late. He was all the way inside the feeding system, breaking from the main lines into all the little channels, all the little tributaries, everything that kept Antrax running. He could feel conductors fusing, melting, and falling away.
Fire threads ripped into the room from behind, burning into him like heated metal. He contained his screams, and blocked what he could of the counterattack without lessening his own assault. Ryer screamed anew, but he could not look to see what she was doing. Every part of him was directed toward continuing the assault. Antrax was racing down its central lines, patching what it could, closing off what it could not. Its internal systems were imploding, one after the other. Walker chased it through its central nervous system, through its bloodstream, into its heart and mind. Everything he touched he savaged with the Druid fire, carrying himself with it, feeling himself burning up, as well. He couldn't help it. He couldn't stop it. He couldn't separate himself from what was happening sufficiently to stay whole. Bits and pieces of his own body were collapsing, as well.
Then abruptly, he felt Antrax convulse. The fire threads that raked him lurched wildly, spraying out of control. Creepers, disoriented and mindless, twisted like bits of paper caught in a wind. He felt Ryer clutch at him, still screaming, pulling at him, trying to wrench him free of the ports to which his hand was fused. Ahren Elessedil was beside him, his face a mask of horror. Walker had only a moment to register their presence, and then a backlash of magic burst through the extraction port through his hand and arm and into his body and blew him across the room.
The attack on its internal systems was so sudden and powerful that Antrax was burned halfway through before it could manage to respond. It blocked the intruder's advance, turned his own power back on him, and counterattacked with its lasers. It began closing down damaged areas and calling for repairs. But in spite of its efforts, the intruder's fire raged all through it, and for every section of itself it managed to salvage, it lost two more. All of its central lines were invaded and contaminated, riddled with power so destructive that it was eating through the circuits and conductors. Antrax felt pieces of itself cease to function as feeding lines deteriorated and collapsed. It could not maintain its various functions, its complex operations. It lost control over its mobile defenses first, its probes and lasers. Its maintenance systems stalled. It kept intact the defenses surrounding the power source, but the protection devices at Castledown's surface ceased to operate. It threw everything it had left into fulfilling its prime directive-to protect the knowledge it warded in its memory banks.
Nothing worked. Everything was failing. Bit by bit, it felt itself slowing down, losing control, and slipping away. It retreated to its stronger positions to gather strength, to reconnect. But the fire tracked it as if it were a living thing and burned away its faltering defenses. Antrax was forced all the way back through its collapsing lines to the chambers that housed its power source.
There it found itself cornered, unable to move outside the twin capacitors that had fed it all these centuries. The capacitors were all it had left, and their power was leaking away through a thousand ruptures. Its charge from the creators was no longer possible to fulfill. Already it could feel the central memory banks dying.
Then Antrax could no longer move.
It began to have trouble thinking.
Time slowed, then became barely noticeable to it in its new-found state of immobility and dysfunction.
Its last conscious thought was that it was unable to remember what it was.
TWENTY-NINE