The Ascendant Stars (24 page)

Part of him wanted to wail and beg but he knew that it was pointless to look for compassion from such creatures. They stank of death and their entire ship was a tomb where corpses moved and marched and fought in a withered semblance of life.

Nothing was said as the attendants tipped him back and wheeled him out and along a rust-streaked corridor through sluggish retracting doors then down a sloping section to a bright-lit, low-ceilinged deck. Before him stretched a passageway lined with tall recesses, many of which were occupied by similarly restrained captives. Some looked alive, others had a deathly pallor. Kao Chih would have focused on these passing details but his thoughts started to drift as the unknown drips began to take effect.

To his narcotised eyes, the occupants of the lines of recesses were smiling at him as he passed by, nodding and winking.
Welcome to Di-Yu
, they were saying,
welcome to the Hell of the
Iron Web
. One said,
The god Ping-Deng-Wang is the judge here
. Another said,
Have you committed any of the Ten Unpardonable Sins? If you have, you’ll be stuck here for eternity
…

I haven’t, honestly, I give you my word! he desperately wanted to say as he opened his eyes, not realising that he had closed them …

He was shocked to find that he was now in a recess, gazing across at another unfortunate who hung limply amid his own web of restraints.
I must have passed out
, he reasoned but when he peered at the drug vials they looked almost full. A nameless, inescapable fear twisted in the pit of his stomach, which ached with hunger. Then, amid his anguish, he noticed that the captive opposite, a lanky humanoid with a blockish head, had opened one dark and gleaming eye and was staring straight at him.

But the drugs were muffling his senses again, numbing the complaints from his stomach, surging steadily up into a great warm heavy wave that just rolled over him, tumbling him into a glittering darkness …

Voices woke him the next time, along with the trundle of wheels and the rattle of implements. He listened with eyes closed.

‘ … why is this one kept from the caul? It’s ripe for it … ’

‘Orders from the Greatlords – Humans are now to be held for our Vor brothers, for their uses … ’

‘Pauch! – mindeater scum – not my brothers! No honour, bad fate … ’

‘Bad fate if Old Irontooth hears your whining … ’

Vials clinked and moments later a torpid tide poured through his veins, tingling then numbing and smothering …

In wounded dreams he wandered. It seemed that he could see through the daughter-forest’s dense foliage to the rough lands beyond, and through them to the furthest corners of the Human colony. In his vudron dream, all seven of the daughter-forests were visible and curiously close – a short walk could take him to Ibsenskog in the south or Tapiola in the north. The entire landscape of the colony was visible in vibrant colours rich with detail: the towns and cities as much as the tracks and woods of the coastal farmlands.

Yet the daughter-forests had a special quality to them, a faint aura of power and mystery, even poor, half-burned and abandoned Buchanskog east of Hammergard. The cold waves of the Korzybski Sea stretched eastwards, while to the west lay Giant’s Shoulder, then a maze of ridges and ravines and the foothills of the Kentigerns, their jagged peaks marching west and north. And scattered among the vales and gorges, south along the Savrenki range and north across the vast Forest of Arawn, were the glows of burrows, ancient Uvovo chambers built during the time of Segrana-that-was.

He had visited one many days ago, soon after the Seer husking, and recollection of its dusty interior came back with surprising clarity and force. The vudron dream was lucid yet easily swayed – between one moment and the next he went from the hazy, sunny paths of a daughter-forest to the dry, gritty gloom of that underground burrow. Scholar Trem, the Uvovo in charge then,
approached from one side, his plain brown robe streaked with dust.

‘Keeper,’ he said. ‘This is the seedpod of battle. You must bring the Eyes.’

‘I am not the Keeper,’ Chel said. ‘The Human Catriona is the Keeper of Segrana.’

‘The Keeper of Umara,’ Trem said, ‘must bring the Eyes to the seedpods of battle.’

Suddenly they were standing in the chamber of living roots beneath the roothouse. Scholar Trem raised a cupped hand over a thick root embedded in the wall, tipped it and let a stream of glowing blue motes fall onto the root. They sank into the moist green and black woody skin and soon a flickering blue tracery spread along to branching rootlets and to the other rootsworks until the chamber was full of pure blue light.

With a sudden intake of breath he awoke in the darkness of the vudron. It was utterly quiet and stiflingly warm. He could smell the wood of the vudron pod and the odour of his unwashed fur, yet with his Seer talents he could sense the daughter-forest outside, the brimming swirl of its denizens, and the sweet undercurrent of Segrana’s song.

And something else. He rose from the low bench, half-crouching, and felt something fall to the floor. He pushed open the oval door and green-tinged light poured in, revealing seven or eight lengths of pale grey plastic lying at his feet, trailing clusters of hair-fine fibres. Chel smiled with relief – the vudron dreams had helped his body reject the Legion Knight’s implants.

Outside, he found himself standing on a high, midlevel branch, veiled in curtains of leaves and vines. A young male of the Warrior Uvovo handed him a leaf bowl of cold, fragrant water. Grateful, he drained it in a single gulp then went in search of the faint dissonance that he had heard through the interweave of songs.

He found Rory’s vudron on a lower branch round the other side of the immense tree. A female Unburdener, cloaked and hooded, inclined her head as Chel approached. The woody shell of the chest-high vudron was dark and rough, its upper surface
bearing patches of moss, while the edges of the doorway were smooth with use.

Gingerly he put out a hand to the vudron, lightly brushing the wood with his fingertips –
fire, choking smoke, wheeling stars
– and quickly snatched them back. Rory seemed to be in the grip of a powerful and vivid dream of destruction. Reflecting upon his own vudron vision, Chel wondered if Rory was coping with the intensity and the resulting turbulence of thought.

Perhaps I can help him face it all
, he thought.
Perhaps even help his healing
.

He reached out to touch the vudron and again saw …

Fire was burning in a recess in the wall of a narrow corridor. Smoke hung in a hazy layer and a shaven-headed Human male coughed hoarsely as he rushed up to the fire with a small extinguisher and unleashed its contents. All sound, though, was muffled, even the man roaring in agony in a small chamber off to the right, where the floor was spattered with blood. Chel turned away, horrified and confused, and a cloud of smoke and steam engulfed him for a moment.

When it cleared he was standing on the upper section of a medium-sized, split-level room that narrowed towards a wide, curved window beyond which starry night swung and spun. There were several Humans there, among them Gregory Cameron, deep in discussion with another Human male, and down on the lower level was Rory, who seemed uninvolved in what was going on. Faces were smeared with ash and expressions were grim. Then Rory at last spotted Chel and ascended to join him.

‘Chel! – what are you doing in ma dream?’ Rory grinned. ‘Pretty amazing, eh? And they nyaffs back at the mountain think I’ve nae imagination!’ Then his voice lowered as he leaned closer. ‘Listen, did we … were we gonnae do a job for that big Legion cyborg bastard? – I mean, did we escape or did we … ye know, betray the others?’ He swallowed. ‘Are we dead?’

Chel shook his head. ‘We’re not dead, Rory, and we managed not to betray the other Humans, although the mechs still carried
out their ambush. We are under the protection of a Uvovo daughter-forest, and it is healing you while you sleep.’

Rory was visibly relieved. ‘God, I was thinking the worst, there. So why am I getting this weird dream? I mean, there’s Greg but I can wave and shout and jump up and down but he disnae bat an eyelid … mind you, they’re all like ghosts, cannae touch anybody … ’

‘That may be the answer,’ Chel said, glancing up at the Human. ‘This may not be a dream – it may be happening right now.’

Rory suddenly looked worried. ‘But that means he’s on a busted ship in the middle of a battle … ’

Without warning a hand grasped Chel’s shoulder and pulled him. It was Scholar Trem, standing next to that thick gleaming root running the length of a stone wall, while the stonework of the root chamber blurred into the structure of the ship’s bridge.

‘You must bring the Eyes to the seedpod of battle, Cheluvahar,’ Trem said, regarding him with a piercing gaze. ‘Bring them from beneath the mountain.’

Then abruptly he was back on the branchway, standing before the vudron in which Rory dreamed true visions.

‘When he awakes,’ Chel told the Unburdener sentry, ‘tell him that I know it was no dream.’

With that he left, heading down the main trunk’s spiral steps to a rope gantry that would take him back towards that southward ravine. To the south were the Kentigerns and Tusk Mountain within which lay the Hall of Discourse and the Sentinel. Instinct mingled with his Seer talents and said this is where you must go. Now.

It was well into the night when the first survivors of the mech ambush arrived back at Tusk Mountain. An exhausted handful of men carrying two seriously wounded, one of them a Tygran, both needing immediate attention. Solvjeg and her son Ian volunteered to help and Theo was happy to accept the offer, hoping that by keeping them busy their minds would not dwell so much on Greg’s absence.

When the three of them had returned from the stony, wooded vale where Theo’s unsuccessful assassin now lay dead, it was to a Tusk Mountain base rife with rumour and torn by argument. Earlier, the Tygran squad left behind by Gideon had picked up a brief signal from their ship, the
Starfire
, saying that Greg Cameron was unable to leave the ship due to enemy action. When the Tygrans also began to overhear fragmentary battle communications from near space, this provoked dark, wild speculation throughout the corridors.

Then a garbled message had been received from Gideon’s comm officer, who said they were under attack moments before he suddenly shrieked in agony and the signal went dead. This turned the prevalent uneasy speculation into a mood barely short of panic. Theo was quick to impose authority and calm, backed by his remaining Diehards. Everyone had to calm down, steady their nerves and their resolve – and to be ready for when the wounded started arriving. Despite some muttering, the personal tack seemed to work and the panic subsided.

As he watched his sister and his nephew help stretcher the injured along to the sickbay, he thought again about their tense, cheerless mood, reasoning that Ned’s death must have had a tragic element. Perhaps he should have been somewhere else when the boatyard went up, or some chance event had led him to the wrong place at the wrong time. Certainly he had witnessed enough incredible coincidences to half-believe that the machinery of the cosmos had a ‘black irony’ setting which inflicted random synchronicities on hapless thinking beings and left them to rise or fall by their consequences. Theo preferred that to the ethos of a watching, activist deity, be it Odin or the Christian God – any god that would deliberately inflict suffering didn’t deserve praise, in his view.

Less than an hour later Captain Gideon arrived with most of the raiding party survivors, of whom a third were walking wounded. But no Vashutkin.

‘I don’t know what happened to him,’ the Tygran said as they went with the injured to the sickbay. ‘He was there, quite close to me, while we were questioning the newcomers … ’

‘Newcomers?’

‘Yes, Major, your people recognised them. A Uvovo called Chel, and a colonist called McGrain, I think.’

Theo laughed. ‘Rory – so he’s still alive! Are they with you?’

‘I lost track of them after the mechs attacked,’ said Gideon. ‘But there was something not right about them. As I heard it, Cameron was almost captured aboard one of your balloon boats after being lured to a hilltop by radio contact with the one named McGrain. Well, after we fought off the ambush, and they were nowhere to be seen, they seemed likely candidates as assassins. However, Vashutkin is also missing, which arouses my suspicion.’

‘I find it hard to believe that Chel and Rory would let themselves be used as assassins,’ Theo said. ‘Vashutkin on the other hand has dark corners that make me uneasy.’ He described the reasons for his suspicions and fears that the Rus had been infected with the blue dust.

‘Are you saying that the Hegemony has been using Blue Chain here on Darien?’ Gideon said.

‘Greg told me it was a blue dust,’ Theo said. ‘I see that you know about this stuff.’

‘Oh yes, Major. As a soldier I can appreciate its intelligence-gathering uses, but as a Tygran citizen I find it repugnant.’ Gideon crossed his arms and looked gloweringly thoughtful. ‘What you say about Vashutkin makes me more inclined to suspect him of being a pawn of that Legion Knight creature. However, a rational appraisal would demand more convincing proof. To that end, we should convene in an hour with your sister and her son and hear their testimony on the matter. We’ll also assess what went wrong today. In the meantime, Major, you’ll excuse me while I tend to my men.’