The Ascendant Stars (56 page)

They don’t deserve this horror
, she thought.
I have to get them out somehow
.

And finally, last in line was herself, motionless in the couch. Pointing at her own body, she turned to the subservicers.

‘I wish to be transferred into the organic cortex of this sentient,’ she said. ‘Can it be done?’

‘Context of regret and honesty,’ said the hourglass AI. ‘Our analysis of this individual reveals significant neural damage … ’

‘Our shadow system is more efficient than that of the intruders,’ said the sea horse. ‘Our diagnoses of their operation are more encompassing and more accurate. These five lifeforms are being used as networked bioprocessors to direct the launch and guidance of several hundred missiles. Regretfully, only two of them retain persona coherence … ’

‘Which ones are those?’ Julia said.

The sea horse rose up and used a blue beam to point at Irenya and Konstantin.

‘The others no longer exhibit such brain-activity signifiers, although their neural pathways are being used for high computation by task-dedicated cognitions.’

Harry was suddenly more alert and focused. ‘Are these cognitions running from cortical implants?’

‘Yes,’ said the sea horse. ‘One possible method would be for the Eminential to be transferred directly into the implant on the indicated individual, overwriting the cognition currently installed.’

Smiling widely, Harry nodded. ‘But that scale of intervention would trip their alerts – so we need a diversion and we need to make it look as if it came from outside the Great Hub!’

‘This would be difficult,’ the sea horse said. ‘We have no access to any resources out in the External.’

‘But we do – can you tap into the subspace dataflow and send a message on a particular channel?’

‘Yes, but who will be receiving?’

‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘Who?’

Harry grinned. ‘A certain drone AI currently leading the Vor a merry chase!’

Despair weighed heavily upon him, as if his bones had turned to stone. When the dreaded moment, long-awaited and long-feared, had arrived, those on the side of life had been foiled by chance and an endemic weakness, by unwise choices and unforeseen treacheries. And now the calamity had blossomed forth, and an ancient viciousness had been set loose. The fighting had begun in earnest, and the destruction would be terrible beyond description.

Now cyborg knights of the Legion of Avatars flew through the skies over Umara, circling above the warpwell. Seated in the underground gloom of the roothouse, Cheluvahar, Uvovo Seer of Segrana, could sense their presence, and felt like weeping.

The root network that linked together the nineteen burrows he had extended to connect with the daughter-forests, all seven of them. The planetary energies of Umara now trickled steadily through the entire rootweb while he sat at its centre, holding it all in perfect balance. His Seer talents and senses were multiplied and focused now, allowing him to see the possible futures, to sift them for the likely ones, to see them in all their aspects of triumph and loss, to know what he could and could not do with the powers he controlled. The uncaging of the Legion had drastically diminished the range of future possibilities, and that was why he wept.

In one future, the Legion of Avatars to the last escaped from its hyperspace prison, its millions of cyborgs driven insane by the aeons spent entombed in a frozen pit at the very bottom of the Abyss. After utterly defeating the combined forces of Hegemony,
Earthsphere and Imisil ships, it swept outwards, encountering the star systems of the Brolturan Compact. Entire worlds were laid waste and billions died in agony or were enslaved, a scenario that was repeated over and over across the Hegemony, tens of thousands of times for nearly a century until the rampage was finally stopped by a grand alliance of Earthsphere, the Indroma and the Milybi.

In another future the Legion swept in another direction, straight into the domains of the Milybi, whose cultural ethos of adaptation led them to take on aspects of their attackers. After fifty years the Milybi civilisation had turned into an exemplar of the Legion creed of convergence, such that the Legion of Avatars was eventually absorbed into the Milybi Exodomain. A decade of rebuilding later, the Milybi launched a campaign of conquest and in time the borders of the Exodomain swallowed the Indroma, Earthsphere and the Hegemony.

In yet another future the Legion of Avatars, having destroyed all opposition in or near the Darien system, then argued among themselves about forward strategy, resulting in a bitter and savage internecine struggle that tore the millions of cyborgs into several warring camps. The Hegemony were struggling to cope with the tragedy of hundreds of supernovae, but Earthsphere and the Erenate, backed by the Aranja Tesh and the Pothiwa alliances, led a new attack on the Legion cyborgs which forced many of them to flee into the Huvuun Deepzone. It also served to push several factions of the Legion into the arms of the Hegemony, with catastrophic consequences decades later …

Chel could see and feel those futures looming like unsteady mountains ready to topple and fall. It wasn’t entirely accurate to say that they all hung on the decisions of one person or several people since the inexplicable consequences of the unexpected had led certain individuals down paths of near-unbearable predicament. Chel could see the places where Theo and Rory, and Greg and Catriona had been, and the places they were soon to reach. Each had decisions to make and the ability to attempt resolutions, just like Chel.

He wept small tears into the fur on his face, but only from the eyes he was born with. His four Seer eyes stared unblinkingly into the futures arrayed before him, making starkly clear the consequences that
had
to happen and the preceding decisions that
had
to be taken. His decisions – about who should live and who should die.

Guilt assailed him, guilt for what he would soon do. It was a burning task that seared him down to the essence. He tried to shut it out, rise above it … and for one shimmering instant he
was
free of it and able to see further, clearer and more truthfully than ever before. One vibrant, vivid instant when the stonework of the roothouse and the ground above moved aside, when the sky parted, when a shining corridor opened for him and let his vision soar at first between the stars then into the underdomains, what Humans call hyperspace. Onward his vision flew, past incredible sights and spectacles before it approached what seemed to be a vast and monstrous island, hanging in midair, ragged at the edges and underneath. And he felt another mind looking straight at him, a mind of two minds, readying itself for battle. It spoke before he could:

‘
Guilt cannot be outrun
.’

A jolt of surprise and a sudden intake of breath … and he was back in the roothouse.

Sad, sombre and resolved, he bowed his head. He knew what had to be done.

With a bloody nose and a twisted ankle, he staggered through the dying ship, desperately searching for a still functioning escape pod. The one he had been on the point of departing in had come under bludgeoning attack from a Legion cyborg trying to gain access to the ship. He remembered hearing the shriek of tortured metal as the thing ripped and cut its way through the ejection hatch then started on the hull of the pod itself. Ash and the others were already gone and he was on his own with only his instinct to guide him.

So he had scrambled back out of the pod, closed it up then resealed the heavy access hatch out in the gallery. Then he had hit the manual launch, sending the last pod in the port aft gallery away on its travels. He knew that the starboard aft pods had been wrecked by repeated missile strikes and that the starboard midsection ones had all been taken by the Tygran crew. That left the port midsection pod gallery. There was another cluster of them up in the bows but beam attacks had cut through the hull, turning the connecting corridors into mazes of razor-sharp debris blown open to hard vacuum.

So here he was, limping along with a knackered ankle and a bloody nose, earned when part of the deck grav fluctuated wildly earlier. In one hand he had a small foam extinguisher and in the other was a heavy beam pistol, while praying that he’d never have cause to use either. The corridors were smoky from onboard fires, concealed or otherwise, which the automatics were struggling to
get under control. Yet worse than that were the never-ending sounds of activity out on the
Silverlance
’s hull – thuds, clanks, hammering, the squeal of rotary blades. In some respects the Legion cyborgs were incredibly low-tech but their weapons and implements were very effective at close quarters. Luckily, thus far they had confined their activities to the ship’s hull but he knew that this couldn’t last – he had seen what a dense flock of them could do to a vessel, similar to watching a seethe of midden-beetles strip the meat off a dead baro.

‘Warning, Acting Commander Cameron, low orbit continues to deteriorate.’

Greg grinned and patted the comm in his jacket’s chest pocket.

‘Good tae hear yer voice,
Silverlance
. Thought maybe you’d packed in.’

‘This intelligence continues to maintain overall integrity despite localised difficulties. Note that atmospheric entry will commence in nineteen point three minutes, and that vessel
Silverlance
will cease to be habitable in twenty-one point eight minutes. Disembarkation via escape pod is urgently advised.’

‘Right, aye, I’m working on it. What’s the latest on our guests outside?’

‘External sensors continue to degrade. So far, two large cyborg units confirmed, bulbous carapaces with heavy-duty edged, serrated and pincer extremities; also confirmed, at least nine lesser units, which appear at least semi-autonomous. One or two of them examined the outer personnel lock near the bridge deck – this lock sustained no damage from earlier attacks and the lesser units did not return to it. Housing and hull assembly scavenging continues … wait … signal … reroute … ’

The comm went dead. Greg shook his head and hastened onwards. Up ahead was a sliding section hatch leading to a junction of companionways, one of which led down to a lateral passage that ran straight to the port-side escape pods. But as he drew near he could see that the hatch was slightly canted to one side, and when he thumbed the open switch there was a whine, a tiny jerk of movement, then nothing.

He cursed and retraced his steps, hurrying now. He would have to go up a deck, pass through another section hatch then head down to the junction that way …

Well, I’ll not be stuck for tales to tell the grandkids when they ask what I did in the Battle of Darien – ‘Aye, well, boys and girls, it was like this – there I was, the last crewman aboard the brave ship
Silverlance
on its final doomed plunge into the planet’s atmosphere
…
and, eh, I kinda got lost on my way to the lifeboat …
’

He smiled, then realised that relating the Legion’s arrival would be the real crowd-pleaser – the details of that and the ensuing chaos were something that he would never forget.

First there had been the blue glow, lighting up the racks of dense cloud from beneath. And Greg had known that it was the Darien colony below and that the light had to be coming from Giant’s Shoulder, from the warpwell. The
Silverlance
and a handful of other ships, including the Imisil command vessel, had been about to launch a two-pronged attack on the huge Hegemony flagship, which was in stationary orbit around Nivyesta, the forest moon. The multi-channel shriek of interference and the sudden appearance of the glow had interrupted a few chases and skirmishes, but most of the ongoing pursuit and destruction of Darien’s dwindling groups of defenders continued.

The
Silverlance
and three Earthsphere warships were to provide the diversion of a frontal assault while the two remaining Imisil ships came in under stealth shields and attacked the flagship’s drives at the stern. They had begun the final approach, circling round Nivyesta, almost brushing the upper atmosphere, and the weapon-heavy Hegemony flagship was coming into view when …

When the holopanel with the view of Darien showed a stream of small black objects ascending from the glow in the clouds, which had turned into a strange swirling vortex. The Hegemony flagship was breaking orbit and ramping up its main thrust drives as it brought its nose round in the direction of the planet.

Orders from the Imisil commander had been to pursue with the
aim of completing the planned assault. Ash had frowned but agreed.

Yet the long-range visual was showing that the stream of black objects had widened and become more densely packed. Greg had tried to recall what he had learned from the Zyradin and Chel – the ancient enemy of the Forerunners were known as the Legion of Avatars, not so much a race as a regimented civilisation zealously committed to a kind of union of flesh and machine, a cyborgisation of organic life, a deliberate blurring of the lines between organism and mechanism. The Forerunners had used the warpwells to defeat them and imprison them in the abyss of hyperspace. Released from that prison, they would wreak unimaginable chaos.

And still the rising stream grew, spreading out into milling formless clusters – until a Hegemony warship rushed in at them, weapons blazing. Heedless of the particle beams scything through their numbers, destroying dozens with every sweep, or of the missiles that vaporised scores as they detonated, the mass of them surged towards the attacking vessel, engulfing it so completely that no part of it was visible. Minutes later, the conglomeration of Legion cyborgs broke away like black webs unfurling, dissolving, reforming, and left behind a gutted shell drifting amid a haze of detritus. Then the Supreme Overcommander’s flagship came within firing range, along with a squadron of Hegemony cruisers, after which everything went to hell.