The Orphaned Worlds (38 page)
‘Once you’ve seen the evidence you’ll understand how vital your task is. You’ll need more than a handful of followers … which is why I’ve included data on the current whereabouts of your troops, the ones that have stayed loyal, anyway …’ Grimacing, he gasped. ‘No more, no more. I will not be unmanned before you so let me say that it has been a privilege to be your friend, Captain Gideon. Serve with honour.’
Theo could see muscles work in Gideon’s cheek and neck as he straightened.
‘Go with honour, Preceptor Rawlins.’
The picture vanished. A terrible silence reigned for only a few seconds before a soundless burst of light signalled the destruction of the Bund ship. After a moment Gideon spoke.
‘Sergeant, did we receive the Preceptor’s datapack safely?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s being decoiled right now.’
‘Good. Lieutenant Berg, set a five-light-year jump to interstellar space, any direction. Just get us away from here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Theo glanced at Gideon. The Tygran’s face was a stony mask out of which harsh eyes gazed at nothing.
‘My condolences, Captain,’ he said quietly.
Gideon nodded. ‘He reached the last battlefield.’
‘Captain, why did he say that his binary device was reactivated? How is that possible?’
‘I have no answer for you, Major. Such a thing should be impossible …’
‘Course set, Captain,’ said Berg at the helm. ‘Hyperdrive on standby.’
‘Execute jump.’
The main viewport went black as the ship jumped into hyper-space. Theo felt the expected ripples of vertigo and nausea, grinding his teeth together against the urge to puke.
‘What’s the status on the datapack?’ Gideon said. ‘Do we know what’s in it yet?’
‘Almost finished, Captain,’ said Malachi. ‘It consists of three main cells; first contains a lengthy visual recording, second has a data resource sequence configured as an interactive overlay to the visual record, and the third holds several text files.’
‘Can you screen the videofile shipwide and if so how soon?’
‘That’s it ready now, sir.’
‘Good – I’ll announce it first.’ Gideon leaned forward and fingered a control on his console. ‘This is the captain – I regret to inform that the Preceptor of Veterans, Captain Rawlins, has lost his life in the course of honourable struggle. He died to bring us crucial information which I am about to share with you.’
The image of Rawlins appeared on the bridge screen. He was standing at the edge of a grassy clearing bathed in bright sunshine, next to an antigrav low-loader on which a bulky but indistinct device sat. He pressed a control pad and the image zoomed in on his face.
‘I am Captain Rawlins. It is 11.19 on the fourteenth of Metagia, and I have come to a wooded area on the outskirts of Zyasla. Any Tygran viewing this will know the importance of that place, which is why I have brought along a pair of airborne cams, as well as some other equipment …’
As he watched, Theo quickly reviewed what little he had learned of the Zshahil Wars from Malachi back on Nivyesta. According to his account, the Tygrans had encountered the natives not long after their arrival in the Forrestal 150 years ago. The Zshahil were a race of reptiloid bipeds, intelligent but backward, socially organised into tribes frequently at odds with one another. Friction soon developed between them and the Humans over resources, skirmishes and clashes growing into something more serious. Nearly forty years after the arrival, it had become a war which reached its bloody crescendo near a Zshahil fishing village called Zyasla. Afterwards, the Zshahil chiefs signed a peace treaty, the Cold Truce, which required them to abandon their lands and travel across the eastern sea to a landmass later designated Ostland. The Zshahil were forbidden to leave Ostland and all Humans were likewise prohibited from visiting it.
On screen, Rawlins went over these same details while steering the low-loader across the clearing. Twice he paused to take readings from a pole-mounted sensory device which he spiked into the ground, after which he planted a stalklike object at the centre of the clearing. The recording then cut to a second clearing where Rawlins gave the time and continued the scanning procedure. This was repeated another three times, with the shadows lengthening, before Rawlins halted and faced the cam.
‘The last battle was savage and brutal, much of it hand-to-hand, and involved roughly six hundred Tygrans and a thousand Zshahil. We crushed the Zshahil and showed no mercy.’ He indicated the open ground nearby. ‘The skeletal remains of Zshahil lie buried here in twenty-one mass graves. For the five clearings the burial pits total 107; sensors estimate that there are about 1,400 dead per pit, giving an approximate total of 150,000.’
Next to the screen, subtitled images of cold blue ground scans scrolled by, compacted masses of bones and skulls. Theo was appalled and disgusted, but when he glanced at Gideon he saw an expression of transfixed horror.
‘There are another half-dozen similar clearings in the woods across the river,’ Rawlins continued. ‘Brief scans this morning revealed more pits, more remains. Yet the history books say that all the Zshahil tribes, right down to the last of them, embarked in their ships and sailed for Ostland. How many ships would have been needed for such an evacuation? Certainly, Zyasla was a fishing village, but many Zshahil tribes lived inland. And here’s another question – why has no one verifiably seen or spoken to a Zshahil since the Cold Truce?’
Rawlins kept on, revelations hitting like hammerblows, relentlessly driving home the terrible, undeniable truth wrapped up in a single word – genocide. The videofile lasted nearly an hour, its final haunting, defining image that of Rawlins’s digger drone excavating one of the pits, hauling up earth-caked clumps of bones.
At some point, the
Starfire
had emerged from hyperspace, reached its destination and stopped dead in space. The bridge, the whole ship even, felt becalmed, inanimate, as Rawlins’s testimony came to an end. ‘Finally the rumours are dead, leaving only this black truth,’ he said. ‘So will this truth set us free, or will it damn us?’
Yet it was an end delayed. As the Preceptor’s face faded away to black, it suddenly cut to an image familiar from earlier, that of an ill and exhausted man sitting at the controls of the Bund launch.
‘Gideon,’ he said. ‘If you’re seeing this then I am no more. Do not grieve, my friend – go out and fight! Use this record and the data to pry the commanderies out of Becker’s grip but first free your men – 148 of them are being held by Nathaniel Horne at Base Wolf. You’ll find the current access codes in one of the document files. Farewell, Gideon. Our redemption is in your hands.’
When it was finished, Gideon sat immobile in his couch, just staring, and Theo wondered if he was well. Then the Tygran leaned forward and spoke into the shipwide comm.
‘This is the captain – we shall shortly be leaving for Base Wolf. Any crew member who feels unable to continue under my command may see me before we arrive. Otherwise, thank you for your loyalty.’ He then turned to Theo. ‘My apologies, Major. I had intended to return you to Darien, but I am now compelled into a race against time – I must get to Base Wolf before my men are moved, and hopefully before any of them suffer at the hands of the base commander.’
Theo sighed. ‘I understand your position, Captain – were I in your place I’d be doing the same, especially in the light of Rawlins’s sacrifice. And for what it’s worth, you can count on whatever help I can offer.’
‘Thank you, Major. I may take you up on that.’ Gideon faced front. ‘Mr Berg, plot in a course for Base Wolf.’
‘Course already processed and loaded, sir.’
‘Good man. Execute jump.’
Less than an hour before the mysterious ship came down in Segrana’s northern uplands, Cat had been inspecting the repairs to a filter-root cluster near a high-canopy leaftown called Raintiderill when an eager young Uvovo came swinging and scrambling down from above.
‘Pathmistress! Listener Okass told me to fetch you up to see – there are new stars in the sky!’
By the time she reached the high open platform where Okass awaited her, several other senior Uvovo had arrived to peer up into the night sky’s faint veils and hazy swirls. Some were regarding a particular quarter of the firmament, then they broke off to bow as Catriona joined them.
‘In the region of the Ineka constellation, Pathmistress,’ said Okass, pointing.
Cat took her binoculars from a waist pouch and turned them to that particular direction. Brighter stars shone through the faraway streams and clouds of interstellar dust while others made diffuse glows, like specks of embers. But between those distant lamps and Darien, hanging in space, were formations of silver pinpoints unlike any stellar arrangement she had ever seen.
She lowered the glasses. Those had to be ships, so was this an invasion? Or was it Earthsphere? Or an intervention by the Imisil Mergence? And what was happening down on Darien? Not for the first time she inwardly cursed not having access to long-range communication. She turned to Listener Okass.
‘I will need a trictra and a rider,’ she said. ‘I have to travel down to the Stone Temple to speak with the Sentinel of the Ancients.’
Okass nodded. ‘I shall have one brought for you immediately, Pathmistress.’
Some minutes later she was strapped to the back of one of the furry pseudo-arachnoids and descending into the perpetual twilight of Segrana’s depths, following the mazy paths of branchways and strengthened vine-web ladders. And she was nearly halfway to the forest floor when she
felt
the ship crashing into Segrana.
Cat could sense the shattering of ancient trees, the tearing of vine curtains, the splintering of branches, then the long furrow gouged into the forest floor as the vessel’s momentum carried it through the undergrowth. The not-quite-pain, courtesy of Segrana’s weave of being, forced her to tell the trictra herder to stop. For a moment she sat there, physically assailed by a pulse of ache that ran straight through her. As it gradually diminished she began to get a more accurate idea of where this was happening, north and slightly east of Raintiderill, almost three thousand miles away. And that gash in the forest floor was more than half a mile long. Segrana’s presence was already moving to that area, trying to assess the damage and begin the healings. Cat realised that she would have to put off talking with the Sentinel and told the trictra herder to take her back up to Raintiderill. By the time she arrived, some of the Listeners had received sketchy accounts that the ship had many passengers on board and that there were many survivors. Other messages reported that two large flyers had taken off from the Brolturan base and were heading north to the crash site.
Without delay she had sought out one of the town’s vudron chambers and seated herself within its woody darkness. With her Enhanced abilities she swiftly calmed her thoughts, then drew about herself the lucid trance state that provided that vital link with Segrana’s weave of being. It was like setting off to swim down a widening river, moving with its great flow of strength as it poured into a great ocean of senses and images and interconnections, echoes and hints of ancient memories, and the voices of being and nonbeing, all tied to the vast presence of Segrana.
Unspoken worry swirled about her, unease and discomfort, and there was an odd rushing, falling feeling. Without warning brightness and interwoven shapes burst upon her. She was disorientated for a moment or two, until she adjusted to a distorted view and odd perspective, of the crash site seen from a high branch.
It was a creature’s eyes through which she observed figures moving in the harsh light of powered lamps. In the half-light the ship was a long, indistinct shape except for the prow which was crushed and split open from its collision with an outcrop of boulders. She couldn’t tell how many were gathered about the wreck, scores certainly, but before she could attempt a quick head count her vision suddenly quivered and wrenched away to another viewpoint, another pair of eyes.
Lower down this time, peering through branches towards the ship, but from the other side of those big boulders. In the glare of the lamps she saw several different forms, some two-legged, some four-legged, a few tall and vaguely birdlike or reptilian. On this side of the wreck there were fewer light sources, just a handful of maintenance spots spaced along the hull. Yet illumination reflected off the ship’s flank revealed a curious area of ripped-up bushes and trees, shattered stumps and charred foliage. And a small blast crater around which a dozen small forms lay still. Dread suspicion grew into horrified certainty the longer she looked. And a sorrowful voice spoke in her thoughts.
They saw the ship come down so they hurried to offer assistance
…
and they were killed without mercy. My poor children
…
Segrana. Catriona could feel an unsettling threnody of grief welling up from deep places, bringing with it anger.
More renders and despoilers will come and repeat this slaughter. I need your help, Catriona. Help me save my children, my world, my existence
…
Abruptly her vision was back at the crash site, seen from above, a perspective that wheeled and soared, then snapped round as two large shapes swooped down towards the grounded ship. It was the military flyers from the Brolturan base, bulky hawklike vehicles with curved wings bearing weapon pods … then she was looking through the eyes of a high-branch insectivore, watching a large pack of crash survivors grouped around a number of cases and packs near the tree line, watching as they unleashed a volley of small-arms fire … while a long-tailed forest creature saw ricochets spark and clank off the Brolturan vehicles’ armour as they decelerated towards the ground, right over the downed transport, their deployment hatches opening …
The explosion was gigantic and shattering, a red and black fireball that burst out of the crashed ship and upwards, engulfing both the flyers. Catriona’s viewpoint jumped quickly from creature to creature, all of which were startled and fearfully diving for cover, until the fifth which held steady, gazing across the treetops at the mass of rising fire. One of the flyers pulled out of it in a steep climb, trailing smoke and flames, arced over in a curve that turned into a nosedive, plunging to its destruction some distance away. The other, likewise ablaze, executed a tight turn into a flat trajectory heading north for a few seconds before blowing apart in midair.
