The Ascendant Stars (21 page)

It was a short walk and a two-deck ascent via lift to the bridge, where two deck guards met him and escorted him within. Autodoors parted to admit them. The bridge had a rough figure-eight layout with banks of monitors and interfaced code-techs in the aft loop while the operations dais occupied the forward section. The ambassador sim was seated by one of the screens and holoplanes that encircled the dais – he raised a hand in greeting. The captain, standing a quarter-turn away, glanced over and nodded then went back to frowning at something unseen and muttering over his lip-bead mike.

Robert sat down in the seat next to the sim and leaned forward slightly.

‘Saw some interesting repair duty rosters pinned to walls on my way here,’ he said quietly. ‘And overheard a couple of revealing conversations on the state of this vessel. Just how badly was it damaged by the missile, and why did it survive when the Brolturan battleship didn’t? And how ever did it get through my rescue in one piece?’

The ambassador sim’s affable demeanour never wavered.

‘You know about the Spiral crusade?’ he said.

‘Got a summary from the terminal in your room,’ Robert said.

‘Well, after the missile attack and the subsequent Spiral gunship assaults the
Heracles
was a near-wreck, going by the logs. A third of the generators were junk and another third were offline, as were the battle systems. Velazquez’s emergency jump was an act of pure desperation which damaged his hyperdrive and plunged them down into hyperspace. By the time I found them nearly half the ship had been surrendered to vacuum due to hull breaches and failed environment systems. Luckily, the Construct provided me
with a holdful of energy and shield modules and a few combat drones which I modified to maintain shield strength at the weak points. When we arrived to collect you from the cryptship, the double- and in some places triple-layer shields made
Heracles
almost invulnerable. For a limited period, that is.’

‘How are the repairs going?’

‘Let us say that it’s a work in progress.’

Robert glanced over at the captain. ‘Velazquez looks a little vexed.’

‘We are deep in the tiers of the Abyss,’ the sim said. ‘From my ship I sent a spy-probe on ahead to our target destination and it has just returned. The data gathered presents a daunting picture.’

‘Your ship?’

The sim nodded. ‘The Construct provided a fast scout for my journey. It is berthed in the
Heracles
’ main hold and may soon play a crucial role in what lies ahead.’

‘Okay, I’m curious,’ Robert said with a smile. ‘What did the probe discover?’

‘Lifeforms, gigantic lifeforms,’ the sim said. ‘Some kind of multilevel signal block prevented the probe from engaging the full range of its sensors, but it did get something before it was forced to pull out.’

The ambassador sim fingered a few bead controls on the holoplane between them and a dark image sprang into being. It was so dark that for a moment Robert thought he was looking at nothing. Then the sim adjusted the enhancement and an uneven, curved surface emerged from the gloom and as his sight acclimatised he saw that it was a planet, barren and airless. More details became apparent, great pits in the planet’s surface, terrible cracks and gouges, then the edge of one fissure kept on widening until it took up a huge area. Larger than a canyon, larger than a lake, an immense shadowy crater torn out of the planet’s face.

The sim altered the image a little more and suddenly Robert saw it – the planet was hollow and the immense crater was actually a huge gap in its crustlike shell. The cracks and hole he had noticed earlier were just visible from the inside.

And beyond it were the faint outlines of other rough, pitted and holed globes.

‘Dead worlds,’ he murmured. ‘Were they once inhabited?’

‘That is doubtful. These are smaller bodies, more like satellites or planetoids with masses insufficient to retain an atmosphere. Before the probe could carry out detailed scans it detected several huge objects moving straight towards it … ’

In the holoplane the image suddenly swung round to encompass what looked like uniform darkness – until Robert saw immense black and shapeless silhouettes drifting across the shadowy distance. Then the holoplane went blank.

‘Those were the source of lifesigns, according to the sensors, but the probe was unable to scan for more. After that it returned,’ the sim said. ‘From the sensor data we know that there are roughly fifty planetoids like the one you saw, and that there is some kind of gravitational anomaly inside one of them, at the coordinates you got from the Tanenth machine. The lifeforms, unfortunately, number well over a hundred, which is the cause of the good captain’s worries.’

‘The solution seems clear,’ said Robert. ‘Put me in your scout, have the
Heracles
decoy the beasts away from the anomaly, allowing me to sweep in, disembark and enter the mind of the Godhead.’

‘I agree,’ said Captain Velazquez as he came round to join them. ‘The question hangs over how much stress will be generated by decoy manoeuvres and how much the chassis plates can stand. Ambassador, you said that these combat drones are the Construct’s most advanced models – do they have need of inertial dampeners?’

‘Ah, I see – you would rather use them aboard
Heracles
than deploy them against the mystery leviathans?’ The sim nodded. ‘Yes, their inertial u-fields can be merged with the ship’s, as I understand it.’

‘Good,’ said Velazquez, turning to Robert. ‘Mr Bauer, we’ve not had much opportunity to get acquainted but going by the ambassador’s tales you have already put yourself in harm’s way
on more than one occasion on behalf of Darien and Earthsphere.’ A smile creased the man’s craggy features. ‘And I must say, I wish it were me heading for this gateway, but I am sure that the Construct was wise in choosing you for this mission. Good luck to you, sir – may God come between you and danger in all the dark places you must walk.’

There were brief, firm handshakes which Robert chose to see as brotherly rather than valedictory. Ten minutes later he was down in the
Heracles
’ high, narrow hold, climbing into the belly of the Construct scout tiership. Locked into a cradle berth, the craft’s thruster sponsons and prow-mounted, fan-shaped sensor emitter made it look like a pale blue turtle with big back legs. From his adventures aboard the
Plausible Response
, however, he knew that the hull configuration could be altered as and when required.

The ambassador sim’s face was watching him from a secondary monitor as he clambered into the pilot recess and eased back in the couch.

‘Wish I was going with you,’ the sim said. ‘Well, in the flesh at least.’

Robert smiled. It had taken some determined getting used to but seeing the aged appearance of his earlier self no longer sent chilly fingers up his spine.

‘How long?’ he said.

The sim glanced sideways at another display for a second. ‘Ninety-eight seconds till we jump,’ it said. ‘You’ll see that most systems are on standby, and the ident has been disabled – on arrival you’ll be berth-launched with engines dead.
Heracles
, on the other hand, will be making plenty of wideband noise to draw off the creatures. The scout’s passive sensors will be monitoring the diversion and when your vicinity is clear the systems will be brought online and the thrusters will go for a fast burn to get you to the anomaly quickly.’ The sim gave a somewhat mischievous smile. ‘That is all. Safe journey – and see you soon.’

The screen went blank. Robert shook his head, wondering what the sim was planning. As the seconds ticked away he could feel a tense fear building in his chest, fear and a dull dread.
Perversely, he laughed and shook his head.
After all the tight spots and life-or-death situations, you’d think I’d be used to it
…

The hyperspace jump caught him by surprise, the usual twist of vertigo and a ripple of indeterminate sensations. Before him, the main holoplane shrank to a standby bar while part of the cockpit quivered into transparency, showing him the hold of the
Heracles
. And the Construct craft was being tilted forward to point at the deck as it began to open, heavy pressure doors sliding to either side. Robert could see the drag of evacuating air making net-lashed crates shift on the wall racks.

There was a deep grinding sound, a harsh whine, and the scout shot forward, straight out of the hold. Robert, already strapped in, was shoved back into the couch by the force of the launch. The frontal pressure eased after a moment or two, followed by an odd, muffling silence. Interior lights were muted to some console glows and a few button symbols. One status display on the secondary screen showed that the ship was spinning slowly around its axis as it flew forward at a laggard 43 metres per second.

In the hush, thoughts pestered him. Thus far, the Construct had made two sim versions of Rosa and two of himself, so far as he knew. In Earth culture, despite several decades of embedded AI use, the creation, use and abuse of intelligent software entities was hedged around with questions of morality, both religious and secular. Robert had grown up with his AI companion, Harry, until it was expunged by the Sentinel of the warpwell on Darien. Was he really in any position to decry the Construct for creating multiple copies of data models of Human personas, even when the copies were of himself?

Or was it about the guilt? Rosa’s death had planted a seed of guilt in him and its fruit was bitter. The Construct, for all its sophistication and millennia of accumulated knowledge, seemed to express no guilt or remorse over the destruction of its servants. The Godhead, however, had certainly been affected by the mass suicide of its creatures, the Tanenth – did that make it morally superior to the Construct?

The minimised bar of the holoplane began to pulse then
expanded back to full. From an angled frame within it, the smiling face of the ambassador sim gazed out at him – a closer look revealed that this was a rendered image, rather than a realtime feed. Robert laughed.

‘So you copied yourself into the ship, then,’ he said.

‘Curiosity is part of my persona profile,’ the sim said. ‘I wanted to get a closer perspective on those planetoids … and I have now stabilised our attitude and ignited the thrusters. We should reach the anomaly in ten minutes.’

The undifferentiated darkness outside the viewport began to change as enhancement layers went to work. The barren, eroded, hollowed-out planetoids slowly came into view, complete with his route, a dotted line winding through them.

‘I am receiving an interesting burst of data from the
Heracles
,’ the shipboard sim said. ‘Visuals of the mega-creatures that are chasing them.’

Another frame expanded to take up most of the secondary screen. It showed a succession of shots from the
Heracles
’ hull cams, shots that zoomed in on the immense creatures, panned from one to another, and cut to other views. Robert stared in fascinated horror, recognising their long shapes, their undulant motion.

‘Vermax!’

He had encountered them on his first journey into the depths of hyperspace, in the lithosphere of Abfagul then later while riding in a sentient machine called Conveyance 289. Only they were arm-length horrors while these things were … gargantuan, serpentine monsters so black their forms seemed to blur into each other.

‘Indeed, yes. We know that the small ones are sent by the Godhead and its servants – I doubt that the same applies to those leviathans. At this depth they may even be the remnants of some ancestral species. Their presence here, however, offers a clue about those planetoids … ’

The ship sim paused, its screen image frozen for an instant before reanimating.

‘It appears that not all of the megavermax dashed off in pursuit
of the
Heracles
. We have managed to attract the attention of one and it is heading for us.’

On the viewport’s data-layer a second line of dashes stabbed in from the side to intersect with their own route.

‘Increase speed?’ said Robert.

‘We are already approaching this vessel’s nominal maximum but our pursuer is easily matching it.’

‘So what does it want with us?’ Robert said with growing irritation.

‘Vermax are technivores,’ said the sim. ‘Anything composed of refined materials and laced with energy sources would be a tasty meal. And in a denuded tier like this we are like a sandwich to a starving man.’

The planetoids were coming up fast but the megavermax was gaining by the second. Hull cams got it in shot and enhancement revealed its colossal size, bearing down on the Construct ship like the grandfather of all whales chasing a minnow.

‘Do something, anything!’ Robert said in a strangled whisper. ‘It’s only seconds away!’

‘When forced to take drastic action,’ said the sim, ‘the trick is to make it work for you.’

The view through the viewport swung round wildly. Robert held on to the arms of the couch, even though he was safely strapped in.

‘We cannot outrun it in a straight race, but undertaking a spiral dodge around its body – turn one – forces it to abandon that considerable forward momentum in favour of twisting and turning in its pursuit of us. After the second loop we can use our superior acceleration to reach the anomaly with enough time to send you on your way … and that is turn two.’

Ahead a group of eroded planetoids swam into view while the rear sensors showed a writhing mass of blackness starting to recede.