The Ascendant Stars (50 page)

Theo scrabbled around, desperately searching for his gun, relying on touch in the brazier-lit gloom. But he couldn’t find it – and Horne was bringing up that energy pistol …

Fingers touched cold metal under the flaps of a hide, found a wooden handle and dragged it out. Dull ember yellow gleamed on the polished blades of a double-bitted axe that must belong to one of the drinkers from before …

There was no time – he leaped to his feet and hurled it.

The axe flew true and smashed into the back of Horne’s head. The force of it slammed him forward to trip over Gideon, who was trying to rise. Horne plunged through the open door and measured his length on the puddled stone outside. Breathing heavily, Theo followed, retrieving his pistol from where the Tygran had flung it aside, then helped Gideon to his feet.

‘My fault,’ Gideon said, wincing. ‘Not in full armour … should have been … ’ His grip on Theo’s shoulder tightened as he looked at the fallen Horne and pointed. ‘How is that possible … ’

In the mud and the rain, Nathaniel Horne was stirring. Theo shivered, felt the hairs prickle on his arms, then growled and stepped out into the downpour, leaving Gideon propped against the door frame with the revolver in his hand.

Horne was reaching up one hand behind his neck, fumbling for the axe haft. Theo gritted his teeth, bent down and tore the axe free. And paused a second, staring. Horne made no sound, there was no blood on the blade, and in the gaping head wound something silver squirmed …

A kind of terror crawled in the pit of Theo’s stomach, giving him a new energy. He nimbly stepped to one side, turned and brought the axe down on the bared neck. Horne’s body spasmed, and it took another two blows to completely sever the head. Gasping, he kicked it off to the side, a sodden thing swathed in matted hair.

‘Was he telling the truth?’ Theo said, glancing at Gideon. ‘Will Becker be here too?’

Gideon was treating his own wounds with a field kit and there was a flush to his features and an alacrity in his movements that Theo guessed had a chemical origin. Battlefield stimulants, he thought. Well, even we had those kineshi leaves to chew.

‘Becker is here,’ Gideon said. ‘I saw him rappel in with a squad of Brolts on the other side of the crater. He has to be working with Kuros, which raises the question – where is the Hegemony ambassador and all of those flyers and gunships the Brolts supposedly had at their northern base?’

As if in reply, they heard a rumble of explosions in the distance, like far-off thunder.

‘Giant’s Shoulder,’ Theo said.

Gideon nodded. ‘It doesn’t change our overall objective, just makes it that much more complicated … ’

‘My God,’ Theo said, slapping a hand against his forehead. ‘Rory! – I have to find him, make sure he’s okay … ’

‘What would he do, Theo?’ Gideon said. ‘If he was cut off by this chaos, would he try to find a safe place to hide or go get the bomb then head towards … ’

‘The second,’ Theo said with a grim shake of the head. ‘
Ja
, he would try to complete his mission.’

Gideon bent and picked up Horne’s beam pistol from the ground, wiped away beads of rain and checked the charge indicator. Then he handed back Theo’s revolver and gave a cold smile. ‘Right, Theo – you should climb up to the base and go after him, keep him safe. I on the other hand will gather together my men and go and hunt down that piece of filth, Becker.’

‘Wish I could go with you. Best of Darien luck, eh?’

‘You too, my friend. Good hunting and see you on the other side.’

Theo raised his eyebrows. ‘And which side is that?’

‘The side where we’ve fought and won, and sit back drinking beer in front of a roaring fire, and tell huge lies about our bravery!’

‘Ah, yes,’ Theo said. ‘I’ll be there, all right. Just be sure to keep me a seat!’

The last he saw of the Tygran captain was a wave through the drenching rain before he headed over to the rope ladder, wiped the water from his face and started to climb.

Gunships circled and swooped through the night sky, pounding Giant’s Shoulder with pulse rounds, missiles and bomblets. The promontory had become a field of fire yet the combat mechs were still holding out, replying with a variety of ranged weapons, while the defence battery gave back as good as it was getting. Some five hundred metres above the action, veiled by the pouring rain, another gunship maintained a holding pattern: from inside the main passenger compartment, Utavess Kuros stared down with exhilarated fascination and a sense of approaching triumph. How the game had shifted! Just hours ago he was nought but a mind trapped in his own head, imprisoned and humiliated by a pair of traitorous machine intelligences. Now he was leading the assault to regain possession of the ancient Forerunner artefact while in near space an immense Hegemony armada was poised to crush a pitiful, Imisil-led alliance of rebel scum who had thought to defy the greatest civilisation in half the galaxy!

Below, the Brolturan troops had established a beachhead on a rocky outcrop on the promontory’s northern edge while a heavy-weapons section had set up an elevated fire point on the ridge just to the west. Together they were creating a murderous crossfire that hammered and ripped up any mechs straying out of cover. The main facility’s primary tracking sensors had already been put out of commission by three aerial jump teams, two of them fighting off combat mechs while the third set charges around the armoured sensor cluster. All of the five-man teams had died, shot
or clawed to pieces, but not before the sensors were wrecked. Which forced the battery systems to rely on secondary short-range detectors that were more easily fooled by Brolturan countermeasures.

As well as the naked eye, Kuros was observing the ongoing assault on a wide holoplane hanging down over the strategic overview table. An infrared subframe showed the hotspots of engaged units, with tags distinguishing between body heat and mech cooling manifolds. Another subframe was a more symbolic representation, revealing weapon types, rates of fire, hit accuracy percentages, and casualties. Yet another was an enhanced composite, showing the whole of the top of Giant’s Shoulder in pale blue-grey with the glare of the defence floods filtered out. The rain was like a succession of ghostly sheets trailing and swirling across.

An auxiliary holopanel provided updates and occasional vidreports from the other ambushes taking place. Becker’s strike against Tusk Mountain had successfully sabotaged the insurgents’ preparations so there would be no interference from that direction. Vashutkin’s operation to prevent bands of Spiralists from reaching the northern ridges had not been as successful – one of his three flyers had been shot down by a shoulder-launched missile, forcing him to land on the northern ridge and set up defensive positions.

The only thing missing was any confirmation of the presence of the mechs’ controlling intelligence, this entity known as the Legion Knight. But detailed scans had turned up no evidence to corroborate it – whoever was directing the combat mechs had to be holed up in the fortified building.

Once we’ve cut off the legs and the hands, then we’ll deal with the poisonous head
.

Even before he completed the thought, a hot bright explosion split the night as a missile or an energy bolt finally reached the battery’s innards. That first eruption was followed by two larger ones as the ammunition detonated. Chunks of burning wreckage flew in all directions, some pieces falling over the edge of the promontory in fiery groundward arcs. Kuros allowed himself a
wide and satisfied grin before telling the attendant flight officer, ‘Down – have the pilot take us closer, within safety margins.’

Moments later the gunship dropped to 200 metres above the war-torn promontory. At that height the craft began to attract some enemy fire but it seemed half-hearted and uncoordinated. A mixture of explosive, frag and EMP missiles were falling among the mechs with greater accuracy now and the infrared view was showing that their numbers were down to less than a score.

Sensing victory, Kuros ordered his officers to prepare for a final push. Ground units moved up to forward positions on the promontory, now plunged into gloom, while the other gunships and flyers circled lower in the unceasing rain. Jump teams landed on the fortification unimpeded and from the balconies opened fire on the last defending mechs. Kuros smiled and ordered his gunship closer to the fortified facility, to hover above it. He could already envisage the moment when he stepped down onto the paved area before the entrance.

Alerts blinked on the enhanced overview – the combat mechs were on the move. In unison they were leaping out from behind armoured shelters and shielding to charge straight towards the rear of the promontory. The troops dug in there opened fire, pouring a stream of energy bolts and HE rounds into the oncoming machines, aided by airborne units and the heavy-weapon crews on the ridge. Almost half of the mechs were brought down or destroyed outright by the time the survivors reached the Brolturan positions … which they either leaped over or swerved around, their metal carapaces gleaming in galloping precision, their taloned limbs pounding the ground, ignoring the troops as they dashed up the rocky slope, heading north.

Kuros watched the frantic retreat with an amused contempt. Either some consensus or collective self-preservation had been triggered or their master had ordered them to flee, confident that the facility fortifications would foil any assault. Later, once the Hegemony had fully tightened its grip on this world, he would have them all hunted down …

More alerts appeared, sidebar sensor displays tracking a
spectrum of other variables. They indicated energy spikes at a number of locations inside Giant’s Shoulder, running in a line from the tapered sea-facing point westwards towards the ridge at the rear.

Suddenly more spikes appeared, this time from either flank of the promontory, and he heard a sequence of thunderous cracks. An awful suspicion formed in his mind and he was about to order the gunship to gain height when the sensors picked up another big energy spike from the rear, close to the ridge … and on the holopanel he saw the ground there explode upwards, followed by another explosion and another, immense eruptions of rock and dirt, as if the rocky massif was being hammered from beneath by something trying to escape. The force of the multiple blasts was sending stone debris flying high. Kuros felt the acceleration as the pilot banked the gunship away with the jets opened to full thrust, but it was too late. Massive chunks and splinters of rock rose out of the growing clouds and smashed into the gunship.

Most of the right-side suspensors were crushed immediately. The thrusters shrieked as they chewed themselves into wreckage. The gunship wheeled away, plunging towards the hilly woods and fields below, and the last thing Kuros saw on the holopanel was Giant’s Shoulder collapsing amid billows of dust.

From the shadows of a high, sheltered crag on one of the northern ridges, the Legion Knight watched the demolition of Giant’s Shoulder. Via the lenses and sensors of his last few remaining probes and aerial flyers he was able to observe the sequential detonations and the rising wave of rubble that engulfed and pulverised the craft containing Kuros. And felt a warm satisfaction which complemented the delicious irony of it all.

From the tracking of Spiralist and Human groups over the last day or more, the Legion Knight had deduced that a joint attack on Giant’s Shoulder before dawn was likely. The promontory was already rigged with augmented burrower charges designed to open the warpwell up to the air. Thus he had been preparing to lure the Humans and their allies by retreat onto Giant’s Shoulder, thereby destroying them with one grand act of demolition. But then the Brolturans, led by that self-important fool Kuros, had launched a pre-emptive strike against the Humans at their mountain base while he placed himself between the jaws of death.

Fighting was still going on at Tusk Mountain so both main adversaries had been thwarted. On the other hand, his own onboard detectors were picking up faint signs of activity from another quarter, a certain energy pattern signifying ancient dangers.

the Forerunner web that once tapped into the primal energies of this planet. Linkages are made and the archaic forces respond but the linkages are few and only a meagre trickle of that raw, titanic flood creeps forth. Even on the forest moon, that conglomeration of ecosphere and biosentience seems torpid and weak before the unleashed violence of space-born conflict, proof of indecision or delusion, or some other degenerate form of paralysis. Who or what remains which can stand in the way of the Legion of Avatars?>

On the visual feed the destruction of Giant’s Shoulder ground on. The ancient Uvovo workings had caved in on themselves, their smashed ruins buried in the toppling chaos. Underpinning layers and supportive masses were blasted apart, while the sheer weight of the upper section aided in the shattering of those beneath. At the same time, the explosions along the flanks created paths for the tons of collapsing debris that soon built up in heaps around the promontory’s base.

At last the cascade of rubble slowed and petered out. Giant’s Shoulder had become a truncated stump of its former self and from the jumbled mass of cracked and tumbled rock a strong silver-blue glow emanated. As the rain gradually cleared the dust from the air, soaking the mounds of boulders and shards, more details resolved out of the murk. The warpwell was visible, a bright, uncluttered circle – any pieces of rock, large or small, that landed on it were ejected with considerable force.