The Ascendant Stars (12 page)

But Talavera somehow deduced that she was not aboard any of the evac capsules and nearly thirty minutes later the aft hatch’s locking clamps were activated. Then the hatch itself opened and she was dragged into the airlock, where a pair of Henkayans bound and gagged her.

Back in the virtuality chamber they tipped her into the tank, reattached the waste and nutrient tubes and refastened the neural cutout around her head. By now she had abandoned all pretence at composure and was yelling wordlessly behind the heavy tape covering her mouth. Then the cutout was activated and her body grew heavy and numb and misty and distant as her awareness was pulled back into Talavera’s virtual prison.

Julia opened her eyes and saw blue sky. She sat up and found she was back on the beach. Wavelets lapped at the shore, darkening the sand, but there was no beach house, no dog, no Catriona.

‘To say I’m disappointed, well … ’

Talavera was suddenly standing a few feet away, attired in a red lacy bodice, green skin-tight leggings and her trademark heavy boots. As she stood there, black snakelike creatures emerged from the sand and wound up her legs. They had no features and were tapered at either end, so apart from their direction of movement there was no way to tell head from tail.

‘I explained what our work’s for, how important it is,’ Talavera went on.

‘And I don’t believe you,’ Julia said. ‘Don’t believe you, don’t trust you, don’t even … know what you are. What are those things? – why make up things like that?’

‘Hmm, sounds like pride to me. Yeah, the hubris of the oh-so-superior mind.’ Talavera leaned forward and hate glittered in her eyes. ‘But hang on a second – I’m the one who’s foiled your plans and dragged you back three times in a row so I guess that makes me your nemesis, maybe even arch-nemesis.’ She laughed. ‘And I didn’t make up my little snaky friends here – they’re messengers from someone called … ’ She paused, as if deciding what to say. ‘ … called the Godhead. He helped me escape when I was marooned and surrounded by death. You’ve no idea how powerful he is, or how powerful he is going to make me. Do you have someone like that, someone who’ll reach down and protect you and save you? I think we both know what the answer is.’

Julia kept her face expressionless and looked out across the placid waters, not knowing who this Godhead was, feeling empty.

‘What happens now?’ she said.

‘There’s still work to be done,’ said Talavera. ‘So we need that magnificent brain of yours in order to finish the project on time. But we can’t risk any more meddling or plotting on your part. In short, it’s time for a Julia-ectomy!’

Darkness slammed in from all sides. Her field of vision suddenly shrank to just her right eye and she couldn’t feel her body, no hands, legs, no mouth, nose, no feeling, no senses apart from one eye and a section of blue sky.

‘That Hegemony nanodust … really, it is such versatile stuff,’ came Talavera’s voice, close and rich with an unreal intensity. ‘I’ve got it shutting down pathways around your personality centres, mainly those to do with motivation and mood. Should keep you nicely torpid, and when you wake up after it’s all over, it’ll be a very different galaxy. Who knows, you might like it!’

Silence closed in. The blue sky turned grey-silver and an array of square silvery recesses emerged, a lattice of them, lines converging towards the distance. She was herself sinking into one of the recesses, drifting down into its shadows. There was brief flash of anger but it soon faded. The need to oppose Talavera frayed away and defiance dissolved into passivity. Becalmed, Julia’s awareness was simply content now to stare up out of her square niche. Even when the light above shaded away into unbroken darkness, there was nothing in her that felt like responding.

…
initialising contingency state
…
initialising contingency state
…

The odd phrase appeared on the niche wall, pale blue glowing letters that pulsed over and over.

…
initialising contingency state
…

It seemed familiar, one of the autofeatures she’d coded into the polymotes at the start.

…
initialised
…
nano-intrusion has been mapped
…
reroute partitioned cortical nodes? y/n
…

A small glowing star sat above the
y/n
options and she found that she could will it to move in any direction. When she placed it over the
y
, other words appeared.

…
stepped reconnection initiated
…
pov focus translocation initiated
…

Suddenly she was in motion, a headlong blurring rush that made a bewildering number of abrupt changes in direction. All while a sharpness of mood crept back into her thoughts, bringing understanding in its wake. This reprieve had been effected by one of the polymote copies following its imperatives – subvert enemy systems, enhance and expand Julia’s scope for action. By now the dizzying, angular journey had slowed and it seemed that she
hovered next to a dazzling, quivering, thrumming geyser of light passing horizontally through a sequence of crystalline rings. It was the dataflow of the virtuality chamber, the inflows and outflows, currents specific to each of the five metacosms that Talavera was running.

Time is limited
, said the polymote.
Do you wish to send a message via this vessel’s tiernet connection?

Hearing the polymote as a disembodied voice in her mind was unsettling. I have no mouth, she wanted to say. How can I …

You may do so by speaking the words in your mind
.

‘I see. How much time is left?’

The nano-intrusion was easily fooled. However, cortical imbalances will exceed their capture tolerances in less than an objective minute and trigger alerts. Subjectively you have a longer period
.

‘I want to observe the other Enhanced. I want to see what she’s done.’

Without warning her point of view plunged straight into the searing brightness of the dataflow.

She saw Konstantin’s laboratory, vast and intricate as a city, its districts cluttered with complex arrays of glassware, or stacks of analytical devices, or towers of monitors and servers. Yet a dark hush hung over it and many areas were shadowy or swathed in inky darkness. Toward the city centre there were still lights and flickering glows, signs of activity.

Irenya’s metacosm was a garden with a fountain and a stream and a wooden bridge and a bird table and willow trees. Only the garden was overgrown, the willows were half-strangled by masses of thorns, the fountain was dried up and cracked and the stream stank of decay. It was raining and from behind the tangled bushes came the sound of crying.

Thorold had not succumbed, not completely. Under an icy grey sky he was hauling a cart of stones up a bare mountain track.

The last was Arkady’s. Talavera had already infected him with the Hegemony nanodust so Julia didn’t know what to expect when she saw a vast foggy plain and the outlines of a solitary mountain. As she drew nearer the fog thinned and she saw that an
immense seated figure had been formed from the mountainside. It was headless.

‘I’ve seen enough.’

Again the dataflow, its torrid brightness, its furious density. She considered the ship’s tiernet connection, a cluster of data channels whose multiplexity made perfect security a near-impossibility. Which is why Talavera wanted the Enhanced; their wetware was harder to infiltrate via the tiernet, and they were easier to coerce than an AI. Easy victims, weak, friendless. Talavera’s words came back to her:

‘
Do you have someone like that, someone who’ll reach down and save you and protect you? … we both know what the answer is
… ’

‘Can you make a copy of my mindstate?’ she said. ‘Then open a channel to the tiernet and upstream it?’

A close, fractal-based approximation can be created … the virtuality monitors have discovered the anomalous imbalance in your brain. There is no time to create the copy then upstream it, but there is time to fractalise and upstream it in continual realtime transfer
.

She hesitated, but only for a moment.

‘That will suffice.’

The fractalisation process may cause irreparable neural damage – it will certainly mean the end of your self-aware existence
.

‘If I am cogent and aware when the nanodust shifts into its second phase I will experience suffering and self-death anyway. I have seen what it does. Please proceed with the scan.’

It is commencing. You will soon experience a scaleback in the visual and auditory senses. Also, old memories may appear for a short time
.

The furious brightness of the dataflow grew pale then blurred into haze, and she imagined that she could hear a sound like the roar of a waterfall fading away. As it quietened it turned into something else, a crackling sound interspersed with pops and clicks. She saw a blob of light, a wavering yellowness which
resolved out of the blur to become a bonfire on a beach by night. Ash specks and gleaming motes flew up on the swirling heat. Branches glowed red at the heart of the flames, bark curled and crisped and smoke flowed off the outer kindling in pale, rising rivulets.

Then it was as if the fire was within her. A wave of strange sensations surged, some memories, ideas, words, her name even, burst forth then melted away. Somehow she felt unburdened as her last thoughts rose up out of her like an ascending cascade of singing stars.

Flanked by two Kiskashin techs, Corazon Talavera gazed down at the unresponsive but still breathing form of Julia Bryce. As she stood there comparing the data on her analyser pad with the tank’s readouts, a creature like a snake made of dense black smoke coiled and slithered from thigh to torso to upper arm and back. The Kiskashin were both terrified of it but strove to show no fear, not in Talavera’s presence anyway.

‘She’s gone,’ Talavera said at last. ‘Use the dust again. Make a fine, new instrument for me.’

Brolturan troops saluted as he passed, mounting steps recently cut into the side of the rocky ridge. The morning sky was grey and a cold sea breeze made his golden robes flap. He experienced an involuntary shiver and the skin of his exposed lower arms prickled, a reaction to the lower temperature. It was a flaw of the flesh that he was prepared to suffer in anticipation of the rewards that came with victory. He continued his climb to the observation station
.

Utavess Kuros, eldest offspring of Efeskin Kuros, once High Monitor, once Ambassador of the Sendrukan Hegemony to this dust-mote of a world, once rejoicing in the appellation ‘exalted’, was now a prisoner within his own head. There were no physical feelings, no bodily sensations apart from vision. He was a mute witness to all that the interloper was seeing and hearing, all of it so clear that he had come to believe that it was deliberate.

For that first day, after the AI Gratach took possession, Kuros had felt the moorings of his sanity give way. Darkness had gaped, a cavernous maw now eager to swallow and grind him down. But he held on to the flow of images from outside, a lifeline he grasped in desperation, using it as a focus for conscious attention. He had survived, learning to maintain the essence of his being while the usurper, his own mindbrother the general Gratach, strode around in
his
body, spoke with
his
mouth and gave orders to
his
troops.

After the evacuation from Giant’s Shoulder, the transports had flown to the high valley encampment north of Trond. From his
cage of dark numbness Kuros could only watch as Gratach and the Clarified Teshak, the engineer of his imprisonment, reorganised the encampment with the aim of keeping them safe. There were still a number of flyers and aircars capable of mounting an effective strike against the rogue droids which had occupied Giant’s Shoulder and the warpwell, despite the defence batteries still in place there. But Teshak, in his gloating declaration back on Giant’s Shoulder, had made it clear that abandonment of the facility was integral to his plans. The failure of the Hegemon’s Darien strategy would allow the Clarified and their traditionalist allies to see off the current administration and take control of the Hegemony.

However, in the last few days more details had come to Kuros’s attention. Gratach and the Clarified Teshak seemed to communicate via the neural implants, apart from when either or both were accompanied by their Brolturan subordinates. It was from those verbal exchanges that Kuros deduced hints and other fragments of knowledge, including references to ‘the Knight’, who seemed to be the one directing the droids currently occupying Giant’s Shoulder. This entity had also successfully fended off a couple of attacks by the Human resistance.

At the head of the stone steps an uneven path led along a rocky ridge bearing only sparse patches of hardy grass and the occasional low bush. On such an open prominence the breeze was stronger, its cold bite sharper. The path steepened till it reached a level stretch where a Brolturan trooper in outdoor dress saluted as he approached. Further along a small building stood against a sheer cliff of dark stone. He was halfway towards it when a one-man flyer rose into view from the seaward side and alighted gracefully next to the observer station
.

Apart from strengthening the defences, their other high-priority task was to make contact with the nearest Hegemony or Brolturan outpost. Multiband scans revealed that no relay satellites had survived the destruction of the
Purifier
and the subsequent Spiralist invasion in which tens of thousands of half-starving religious pilgrims of various species spilled out of ramshackle
transports and began looting the villages and farms of the coastal plain. Under great pressure, a group of Brolturan techs worked around the clock for three days, cannibalising flyer systems, testing modules salvaged from crashed craft, till they managed to assemble a subspace commset.