The Ascendant Stars (6 page)

‘But our principles are only as strong as the men and women who live by them. Marshal Becker was corrupted by the Hegemony and in turn he has corrupted the commanderies, the Bund and Tygran society … ’

The Bund was the semi-elected council governing Tygran society, and the commanderies were like regiments, each with its own history, tales, axioms and heroes.

‘Becker is unhesitating in his compliance with the Hegemony’s needs,’ Ash went on, ‘no matter how cruel and ignoble, even if it means Tygran troopers using the all-enclosing Ezgara armour when deployed in Human-centric environments. Captain Gideon and the Stormlions are implacably opposed to Becker’s poison, thus we have become outlaws, criminals to be hunted down. It was in the captain’s mind to head for the Earthsphere to find commercial security work, but then he met your uncle. He
convinced Captain Gideon and the rest of us that Darien was worth fighting for, especially after … ’

Ash fell silent, sentence incomplete, his face clouded by some underlying anger which Greg decided to avoid for the time being.

‘Darien is certainly worth fighting for,’ he said. ‘But it’s my people that are worth dying for.’

Ash gave him a look of faintly surprised approval, then pointed at an auxiliary console to the right of his own. ‘Mr Cameron, there’s a seat there which swings down … that’s it. Now, are you hungry? I can have some food and drink brought for you. It is only rations and recyc, however.’

‘That would be great,’ Greg said. ‘All I’ve had for the last four days has been berries and nuts … ’

‘Contact! – a vessel has just exited hyperspace 1850 kiloms off our stern,’ said one of the bridge officers. ‘It emerged on a highvee course and tracked us almost immediately. And now they’re ramping up their acceleration.’

‘Go to combat-ready,’ Ash said. ‘And ID it! – get me a config, anything.’

‘No ident signals,’ rapped out the other bridge officer. ‘Profile is of an Imisil heavy trader.’

Ash, staring at his holoplane, gave a derisive snort.

‘Not with that emission curve. Ready battle systems, generate target points, all crew on standby … ’

‘Wait, it’s gone,’ broke in the first officer. ‘Off the sensors, just vanished—’ Suddenly there was an insistent beeping and readouts bordering the main viewport flickered. The officer sat back, stunned. ‘And it’s back … ’

Less than a kilometre ahead a ship swung into view, course converging on the Tygran ship. Insets on the viewport showed magnified, enhanced images of a blunt-prowed vessel with no apparent insignia.

‘Bring up partial shields,’ said Ash. ‘What’s their weapon status?’

‘Two heavy beam projectors, three pulse cannons, a multi-missile battery, and a well-shielded launcher of some kind,’ the helm officer said.

‘Has to be an Imisil expedition of some sort,’ Ash muttered. ‘But with that firepower they must have been expecting a rougher reception … ’

Greg had observed the unfolding crisis with an odd steadiness of nerve. Part of him was wishing he was back on Nivyesta, safe in the shadows of Segrana, while another part was, perversely, enjoying the edgy adrenalin thrill of it. And a further thread of thought was privately glad that he wasn’t the one giving the orders. He also recalled a little about the Imisil, one of several civilisations at the far side of the Huvuun Deepzone, who had been on the receiving end of a Hegemony punitive campaign several decades ago, a remorseless attack which had left several worlds near-uninhabitable. Was it too much to imagine that they might come to see themselves on the same side as Darien?

‘Incoming communication, Commander,’ said the tactical officer. ‘Full vid.’

‘Screen it,’ Ash said. ‘One-way.’

A frame appeared on the viewport, as well as the holopanel Greg was sitting at. A strange, hairless humanoid in white and grey garments gazed out. Its face was adorned with clusters of spots that changed colour as it spoke.

‘I am Presignifier Remosca. You have intruded upon the exclusion zone of a world currently under interdict by the Imisil Mergence. Your vessel bears close resemblance to ones used by a certain mercenary cohort known to be contracted to the Sendrukan Hegemony. Identify yourselves.’

The picture vanished, revealing Darien, the hazy stars and the approaching ship. Ash snorted in irritation.

‘Hardly mercenaries.’ He frowned at the now vacant monitor. ‘If we try to convince them that we are actually the Ezgara and Human as well, they’ll assume that it’s part of some devious Hegemony plot – and if we then tell them that we’re from a planet called Tygra, that’ll make things worse … ’

The Tygran paused, eyes widening as he looked round at Greg. An odd smile came over him.

‘Mr Cameron, I have an idea.’

‘You do?’ Greg said with a sense of premonition.

‘Yes, although I’m not sure how you’ll feel about it.’ Ash grinned. ‘But I am sure that your uncle would approve!’

‘Hmm – does it involve life-endangering peril and heroic levels of deceit?’

‘I regret to say that it does.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’

The place they provided for her was a strange complex of interconnected, shadowy halls where blue glowing pillars rose up into darkness, where flowers sprouted from the walls while pale gossamer mist hung in the air like great veils. It was meant to be a sanctuary for her essence, this disembodied spectre that she had become, and she came to think of it as the Dream Palace. In some ways it was an attenuated version of the forest Segrana but it left her feeling ignored and redundant. Sometimes she felt like a child at the beck and call of titanic beings with scarcely comprehensible motives and purposes. Other times she would be raised up to carry out a straightforward task, like leading Greg to the pickup point. Yet her understanding and private speculations had made it a bitter experience, knowing that any attempt to warn him would result in her summary return to these empty halls.

Ever since the Zyradin had used her to spread itself throughout Segrana’s great weave of being, Catriona had been constantly aware that she was on the fringes of a vast, multilayered dialogue, picking up a few things from the outermost ripples. Not so much actual words, more like conceptual fragments, echoes of ideas, fractured images, snatches of conversation, and the occasional swirl of heat, a sign of disagreement.

All of which her Enhanced mind could not help but gather and sort and juxtapose, while her speculative instincts tested and discarded conjecture after conjecture. To her dismay the first which
made real consistent sense was about Greg. The closer she looked, the more she realised that between them the Zyradin and Segrana were trying to foresee events and planning how to influence them. For Greg this would mean plunging along a sequence of encounters and clashes that promised horrific obliteration if he failed at any point. When she was brought forth to lead Greg up through the forest she already knew that his journey back to Darien would be interrupted, that the next stage of his odyssey would lead to an epic conflict whose outcome was far from certain.

Nor was he the only actor on the stage. Segrana and the Zyradin were obsessing over several others, who at times seemed less like actors and more like threads in an immense shifting pattern. She had seen glimpses of the Chinese emissary, Kao Chih, who had helped rescue the Pyre colonists, and now they were all fleeing from warships of the Suneye Monoclan, that peculiarly successful interstellar commercial entity run by a Hegemony faction called the Clarified. They were Sendrukans whose minds had been erased, for medical or punitive reasons, leaving behind a host dominated by the implanted AI. Unsurprisingly, they provoked a certain unease in the Zyradin and Segrana.

Another strand included Theo Karlsson, Rory McGrain, the Uvovo Seer Chel, and the cyborg Legion Knight who had seized and unlocked the warpwell. But there too was the enigmatic Chaurixa terrorist Corazon Talavera who, like the Clarified, provoked dread and anxiety, except that she also seemed to imply something more pivotal and terrible.

Then there was Julia.

Back in the dark, distant and disturbing past, Julia Bryce and Catriona had been students at Zhilinsky House, a residential facility run by the New Children Programme. All the students were either orphans or signed over to the NCP’s guardianship, and all had undergone genetic engineering in the embryonic stage with the aim of creating people with superior minds and the ability to consciously direct the fullness of the intellect. By puberty, Catriona’s mind had failed to progress correctly while for Julia Bryce success followed success.

Only now Julia and several other Enhanced had been taken prisoner by the Chaurixa woman, Talavera. Coerced or otherwise, they had provided the advanced weapons that destroyed the Brolturan battleship
Purifier
, and forced the Earthsphere cruiser
Heracles
to withdraw.

Catriona, absorbed into Segrana’s great weave of being, drifting in the under-periphery of that enigmatic colloquy with the Zyradin, had recognised Julia’s image among the outer splinters and heard whispers as redolent of hope as they were of fear. She had tried piecing the fragments together with frail webs of conjecture, but it was only after she had returned from leading Greg offworld that she had gathered enough slivers to provide a halfway coherent picture.

And despite the lack of detail, the implications were staggering. Talavera held Julia’s life in the balance, yet there was some other terrible motivation binding them together. Julia was also linked to Earth, a connection that would determine the fate of both Greg and Darien. Julia’s own survival was uncertain but there was an end point, a barely discernible convergence of colossal forces, a focus shared between Segrana and somewhere else, out among the stars …

Catriona let the web of conjecture unravel and the premonition faded. So much was uncertain, so much of it consisted of gaps bridged by speculation of her own making. This was the classic researcher’s mistake, impressing one’s own expectations upon dataless voids. Indeed, it was possible that either Segrana or the Zyradin were committing the same sin, causing those hints of disagreement.

One thing was certain, however – in the space between Nivyesta and Darien, Greg was about to set out on a wild plunge into chaos and mortal danger.

And if I’d explained it to ye, I’m not sure ye wouldn’t still have got on that ship!

Webbed into his couch, Kao Chih was cushioned against the worst of the jolting descent into Pyre’s atmosphere. The roar of the Vox Humana vessel’s engines was muted by the close-fitting helmet that the squad commander had insisted he wear. While donning the body armour earlier he had noticed a faint residual odour from the last wearer, stale sweat oddly mingled with herbs, which made him wonder how the armour would smell to its next user. Now, sitting in the vibrating couch, he caught the occasional hint of it and found it strangely comforting. A hazardous task lay ahead, the wholesale evacuation of the remnants of the Human colony on Pyre, kinsfolk by distant relation but they were still his people. With backing from the Roug and the Vox Humana, he would forestall any possible reprisals that the Hegemony or its proxies might inflict on these defenceless colonists.

The Marauder vessel’s troop compartment had couches for thirty-two but only half were in use, eight facing eight – the rest had been removed to make way for comm consoles and an array of displays. Kao Chih’s couch was three along from the deployment hatch and all around him the Vox Humana troopers were muttering to each other on the squad net. His own helmet was isolated from the rest, with a link – currently silent – to the squad commander, Captain Kubaczyk. For now, Kao Chih spent the time glancing at the others, noting their expressions of dour reflection, or good humour, or relaxed disinterest. Then Kubaczyk’s voice spoke in his ear:

‘Envoy Kao Chih – can you hear me, sir?’

Automatically he looked at the captain, who was sitting next to the hatch.

‘Yes, I can hear you perfectly.’

‘Good. We shall be landing near the mountain in approximately five minutes so I need to brief you about the situation on the ground.’

‘You have my full attention, Captain.’

‘Okay. The initial sensor sweep revealed six small vessels parked at the foot of the mountain. When our spearhead Marauders drew near, three of them took off and attempted to engage us in combat. They were knocked out of the sky and the other three were disabled. Proximity scans are still picking up energy discharges from within the mountain, so it looks as if the fighting hasn’t dropped off.’

Kao Chih nodded. His hands, for some reason, had begun to tremble. He tightened his grip on the couch armrests.

‘Thank you, Captain. Has there been any reaction from Thaul, the city beyond the mountains?’

‘Nothing so far. It seems that our Roug allies’ stern warnings are being taken seriously. Now all we have to do is land near the mountain and get your ops centre up and running before we approach the access point.’

‘I hope that my friend Wu Song has survived,’ Kao Chih said. ‘If he has not, there may be difficulties.’
Especially if there’s a Roug corpse to explain
…

‘I was briefed on your rescue of the other Pyre refugee leaders,’ Kubaczyk said. ‘I am confident that we will find a way to get the colonists out safely.’