The Ascendant Stars (53 page)

Anger burned in Talavera’s eyes. ‘Robert, take no notice of this prattling echo of nothing. You can come with me and leave all your pain and your guilt behind – for ever. Freed from burdens you never deserved to carry, you can move towards perfection and a supremacy unimaginable at this level of existence.’

Robert listened, swallowed, considered this offer which shook his self-belief to its foundations. There it was, liberation from the endless remorse, from the corrosive loss, from the shadow of mourning that followed him always. All he had to do was deny the ties that bind, the memories that coloured his inner world … deny that Rosa had ever existed.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t pretend. I cannot give up even the memories of her … ’

Talavera glared at the flattened ovoid drone.

‘So this
thing
is yours after all, a
puppet
which cannot see or choose! I will not be diverted from my plans! There will be an end to you … ’

At this Talavera let out a deafening shriek that shattered the auditorium windows while she held out fire-wreathed hands towards Robert. A boiling wall of flame flew towards him. He staggered back, arm raised to shield his face in desperation, tripped on something and fell backwards …

And opened his eyes with a startled jerk, provoking a stab of pain from somewhere in his body. He was lying back at an angle and his vision seemed a little bleary – he could see some kind of tiled ceiling but it was indistinct, opaque. And his limbs were restrained, held down with cuffs, but he soon discovered that any attempt to struggle stirred up spikes of pain that twisted in his legs and burned in his torso from spine to innards. He gasped and moaned.

‘I’m sorry about the lack of painkillers – types suitable for Human biology are hard to come by.’

Robert tried to speak but there was something in his mouth.

‘Sorry, that’s just a feeding tube … ’

Something shifted overhead, a translucent canopy, he realised, and a nozzle was manipulated, tugged from the corner of his mouth. He felt a vague writhing in his gullet as the slender tube was retracted.

‘What’s hap … ’ His voice gave out, dry and hoarse. A straw was slipped into his mouth and he sucked down cold refreshing fluid.

‘What’s happened to me?’ he said at last.

‘When you crossed through the periphery portal, a vermax closed in after you, crashed into your craft and nearly destroyed both it and you. The vermax died when the portal switched to abeyance mode, and your craft’s emergency systems kept you alive long enough for me to gather enough remotes to cut you free and bring you to a place of safety.’

Robert tilted his head left and right and saw enough to figure out that he was lying on a light blue couch with rough grey walls on either side. He swallowed more fluid.

‘How bad is it?’

‘Your spine is broken in three places, both legs have compound fractures and your left shoulder was also broken. In order to carry out repairs I used a neural cutout and interfaced your conscious mind with the outer margins of the Godhead’s thoughtflow. Your instincts for exploration, however, guided you straight towards the theatre of his desires and motivations.’

‘That informal hearing,’ Robert said. ‘It didn’t end on a … positive note.’
And neither did my arrival
.

‘You certainly did well to resist his flattery and bribes, and to see through him. It gave me time to stabilise your condition and move you here.’

‘I’ve met enough narcissistic thugs to know one when I see one,’ Robert said. ‘But all that doesn’t tell me much about who and what you are. And would you
please
raise my head so that I can see!’

‘Of course.’

A motor hummed beneath the couch and his head inched up, permitting a better view of the room. It looked like a box made of unsurfaced plascrete, walls, floor and a ceiling that were compacted grey extrude flattened and left unfaced. There were two long shuttered windows in the wall in front of him while several medical machines flanked him, monitoring, beeping faintly as they delivered nutrients and medication. The devices were all worn and scratched, not unlike a dark green and brown machine that hovered to his left, the direction where the voice had come from. It had the shape of a small disc sitting atop a larger one. From an open slot in the lower disc glassy sensors regarded him.

‘Greetings to you, Robert Horst. I am speaking to you via this remote because I am the Godhead’s eternal companion, of which he will never be free. I am his conscience, his empathy, that part of him which even after all this time remains connected to the workings of reality, especially to the consequences of his actions.’

Robert stared, thoughts whirling. ‘Empathic conscience … manifesting as a distinct personality?’

‘The Godhead is very old. He has experienced several waves of exponential change and growth. He has subjected the very fabric of his core awareness to a process of enhancement and reshaping which, in retrospect, I realised was his way of excising parts that he found disturbing. But he cannot escape me and cannot erase me. It is pain in the end that drives him but he is unable to understand it, unable to come to terms with it. All he can do is try to escape from it.’

Robert’s eyes widened. ‘He wasn’t joking about this transcendence, was he? About ascending to another … plane?’

‘No, he is utterly serious and totally committed to his plan, a grotesque strategy that depends on the mass murder of nearly a trillion living sentient creatures.’

Robert listened in growing horror as the empathic entity told him about an intricate plan to acquire anti-dark matter from hidden labs on Darien, to capture a team of genetically enhanced scientists from the colony, to load 500 missiles with the anti-dark
matter which would then be used to create 500 synchronised supernovae …

His initial incredulity made him want to laugh but the twinges in his chest dissuaded him.

‘The whole thing sounds completely demented,’ he said. ‘But is it possible?’

‘The Godhead has pursued this obsession for millennia,’ the empathic entity said. ‘He has studied the mystical creeds of a million worlds, some of which I too have observed. He is convinced that this vile act will bring him transcendence, that it will wipe away the memory of the mass suicide of the Tanenth, and that he will escape the pain and me for ever, the fool. But that is incidental to the slaughter that he would commit in the attempt.’

‘Can this be stopped?’ said Robert, wondering who could stop a god.

‘Perhaps – but all the parts of his plan are now coming together. It really all began with the discovery of Darien. The Godhead saw how he could very easily prod the various powers into focusing on the ancient Forerunner device with the aim of drawing all available military forces away from those areas where the crucial elements of his scheme are now ongoing. He was even prepared to allow the warpwell to be unlocked so that the Legion of Avatars could escape, which is what has happened. So while battles and destruction swirl around Darien, the Godhead has already ascended a considerable distance up the tiers of hyperspace to confront one of his most dangerous adversaries. Look.’

The shutters lifted on the two windows. Beyond was a strange grey expanse, at first glance looking like the surface of an airless moon. But then Robert saw that the surface was in continual movement, slow ripples and heaves of regular forms, geometric shapes mixed with odd curved or bulbous things which he realised were bodily extremities, noses, fingers, ears, or at least what looked very like them. They reshaped and reformed, and often faces emerged wearing all manner of expressions and emotions only to be smoothed away by the next tide of undulations. He saw swelling hills that narrowed into wavering columns, or
cubes that turned into buildings that toppled/melted into transient fissures, or orbs and pyramids that broke free of the oceanic amorphouscape to float through the air until snatched back down by tentacles with mouths.

‘This is the physical aspect of the Godhead, at least his outer husk,’ said the empathic entity. ‘It’s like a great ragged continent more than a thousand miles across. We are located on one of a few hundred immutable landmarks, a kind of tower once used as a platform for defences. Now, however, we rely on others for protection.’

Above the restless surface, the ships of the Vor and the Shyntanil flew in layered echelons, black organic outlines of the former, the big diamond carriers of the latter, all moving in one great formation through the pale blue emptiness of some hyperspace tier …

Then he saw the sparkle and flash of ship-to-ship weaponsfire and in the distance an unmistakable conical, stepped edifice. The Construct’s headquarters, the Garden of the Machines, now undoubtedly being defended by the AI-craft of the Aggression.

‘So the Godhead is going after the Construct,’ he said.

‘As I said, Darien is the arena, the crucible where several fleets are now engaged in a titanic struggle, therefore the Construct presents the only serious obstacle to the Godhead’s purpose.’

Robert stared out at the distant warfare, feeling infuriated at his own incapacity.

‘You said that perhaps there was a way to stop the Godhead’s insane plan,’ he said. ‘How would we do that?’

‘It involves you and me,’ the empathic entity said. ‘Your memories of the Tanenth machine’s simulation of its creators, and my memory of the Godhead’s guilt over their suicide. And it will probably lead to our deaths.’

Robert smiled sardonically. ‘Well, personally I don’t believe that it’s over until it’s over. But let’s hear it.’

The siege of the Garden of the Machines was not going well. The battlefront between the Construct’s Aggression ships and the vessels of the Vor and the Shyntanil was constantly shifting back and forth according to the rhythm of attacks and feints, surprise jumps, decoy manoeuvres, and the unseen war of datanet sabotage. In the overall aggregate could be seen the incontrovertible truth of the enemy’s gradual and inexorable advance.

The Construct was monitoring the tactics of the defence, monitoring the decision-making of the strategic cognitives and the transrational solutions of the conjecturator subminds. At the same time it was overseeing the loading of the contingency craft, the means by which a new Garden of the Machines would be established in a secluded tier far away. It was also giving instructions to the military Rosas, the commanders of the last-ditch defences. Both they and the Roberts had turned out to be exemplars of adaptability and creativity. This, the first Garden of the Machines, might fall but the patterns of their mind-states would live on.

And simultaneously with all the foregoing, the Construct was conducting a conversation with one unexpected visitor while a second waited in storage, frozen, inert.

‘I am certain that he presents no risk,’ said Reski Emantes, a copy of the drone AI that had remained back on Earth. ‘I’ve scanned his code for sleeper scripts and cyst routines and came up empty. You conducted his original excision so I am sure you’ll see that I’ve missed nothing.’

‘That may be so,’ the Construct said. ‘And we may return to this matter later. First, explain why you came here.’

The copy of Reski Emantes was running in a surplus tutorial drone, a small boxy unit with about a dozen spidery articulata. The Construct was temporarily inhabiting a spindle-framed biped unit, and together they faced each other in a windowless inner chamber lit by a full-wall holoconsole. One of its screens was showing code scans and a virtuality sim of the stored AI known simply as Harry.

‘I am here,’ Reski Emantes said, ‘to gain your help in rescuing the fractalised sentience of Julia Bryce.’

‘The leader of the Enhanced research team,’ the Construct said. ‘Ever since they were abducted by the Talavera woman we have been unable to track them. If Bryce is now a fractalised data sentience, does that mean that her physical form is deceased?’

‘It’s somewhat complicated,’ the drone said as it sent the Construct a databurst summary.

The Construct went over it, tracing Talavera’s involvement in obtaining the anti-dark matter and abducting the Enhanced team. It noted Julia’s partnership with the ex-Hegemony AI Harry and their collaboration with the Glow-savvy Nicodemus in their bravura political exploits. Now, it seemed, Talavera, the anti-dark matter missiles and the Enhanced team had gone to the Great Hub, accompanied by a pair of Vor warships. The Julia sentience had been sent by Nicodemus to an automated Hegemony supply ship near the Great Hub via a data-access flow, along with a mid-cognitive AI as a guide. However, shortly after the down-port all tiernet connections suddenly ceased. But the supply ship’s ident was still registering on independent battle surveys carried out by military tracker guilds, hobbyist netcommunes who regularly sent disposable flyby probes into war zones.

‘And you want me to travel to the Great Hub, find this supply vessel and rescue the Julia sentience,’ the Construct said. ‘Why?’

‘Because Talavera is keeping her body alive, using its neural pathgrids in conjunction with the other Enhanced to run the missile launch and in-flight navigationals. If we can get her back into
her own body, into her own head, perhaps she can shut the whole thing down. If not, five hundred stars and their planets and inhabitants could be obliterated.’

The Construct saw how all the disparate pieces fitted together – the Godhead’s subtle aid to the forces of the Spiral Prophecy, their invasion of Darien guaranteeing aggressive responses from the Hegemony and the Imisil, the arrival of the remnants of the Legion of Avatars whose insensate savagery could annihilate all in its path; the revitalisation of the Vor and the Shyntanil; the attack on the Construct’s power base; the ascent of the Godhead itself and its anticipated emergence into an area of objective space where its presence would be mostly unopposed. And 500 stars that were targeted for destruction because …