The Ascendant Stars (60 page)

Everywhere she looked the same scenario was playing out and she saw one of her selves wave to her through the trees before she was whisked away to apprehend another creature of the Legion.

This time she appeared near one of the huge Hegemony carrier vessels which had attracted a correspondingly more numerous Legion assault. It seemed a daunting task at first since there were thousands of armoured cyborgs crawling all over the entire length of the vessel. Then she glanced over her shoulder and saw the pale host that was sweeping in with her. It was a moment made for banners and battle cries, of which there were none, apart from the yelling she was doing in her own thoughts.

The tide of Catrionas descended upon the cyborgs in a wave that rolled down the carrier’s flank, and a similar wave of disappearances swept along in its wake. Some Legion cyborgs leaped away from the rest as the vanishing rushed towards them and it was one of these that Cat laid hands on, grabbing an overlapping plate of armour. The channelled and shaped ancient energies of Nivyesta seized them both in a flash of dislocation …

When she appeared this time Segrana was hazy with smoke and filled with terrible noises, the crash of falling trees and the screams of panicking animals. This time she delayed relaxing her hold on the cyborg, trying to peer through the hazy gloom – but then the Legion creature began to stir, jerking and wrenching, and just as she let it go the smoke thinned before her and she saw the flickering yellow-orange of a tree on fire …

The next time she returned the murk was thicker and orange glows could be seen all around her. On the spur of the moment she held on to the Legion monstrosity while pushing herself
downward. It was a descent into darkness since the layers of smoke were shutting out the sunlight and reflected Darienlight. Blackened tree trunks were all she saw, clouds of ash drifting on hot updraughts, but she had to release the cyborg before reaching the forest floor. Webs and whips of harsh white energy tore into it even as it fought back during its tumbling fall into funereal gloom …

With each succeeding return to Nivyesta, to Segrana, the fiery glows grew more numerous and the smoke denser. At the same time, with each new foray out into the running battles in near space there were fewer and fewer cyborg knights of the Legion of Avatars, to the point where Catriona and her host of sisters started to outnumber them.
Valkyries victorious
, she thought. When that stage was reached, the end came swiftly.

She could not recall the last cyborg she brought back for its execution. She didn’t remember her last sortie into the great debris fields now stretching across huge swathes of space, destined to be swept up by Darien’s gravity field. She had a hazy recollection of the immense Roug ship, the one shaped like a pouncing creature, but it was like a fragment from a dream left over when she found herself sitting on the leafy floor of the dream-palace. In the dimness she could only feel a monolithic exhaustion settling over everything as those ancient and terrifying powers slowed and sank, muted and fading. Then she sensed a familiar presence trying to communicate through a vast and grinding weariness, trying to speak but failing. Then even awareness dissolved into a timeless, bodiless river without end or beginning …

When she awoke she had aches in every limb as well as neck and back. She was lying on a pallet in a small hut, wrapped in a rough blanket that smelled faintly of herbs. She yawned, scratched an itch on her ear, thought about food … and sat bolt upright with a gasp. Tremblingly she examined her hands, her arms, legs, feet, realising with thrilling delight that she had a body again, and it was her own body!

Suddenly, vibrantly awake, she lay there for moment then
stood, tugged the blanket tight about her, and went over to look out of the solitary window.

The view was of a cove full of trees and dense foliage, and a few boats bobbing on the waters not far from the shore. A cool breeze came in off the sea but the air was still marred by the taint of ash.

‘Ah, nice to see you up and about. Managed to scrounge up some clothes for you.’

A tall, skinny woman in a tattered, patched blue jerkin and work trousers had entered with an armful of garments which she dropped onto a stool.

‘Where is this?’ Cat said. ‘How did I get here?’

‘Cradle-Veil is the Uvovo name for it, and this is our Watchtree. I’m Kirsten, by the way.’

They shook hands and Cat introduced herself. Kirsten’s eyes widened.

‘The Uvovo who brought you here last night never told us who you were,’ she said, her voice lowering. ‘Were you caught up in it? What was it like?’

‘What do you mean?’ Cat said, having a good idea of what she meant.

‘It’s better if I show you.’

Still wrapped in the blanket, she followed Kirsten out onto the platform surrounding the hut.

‘There’s an observation platform with a good southerly outlook over the ridge,’ Kirsten said. ‘Up here.’

A ramp led up to a roofed platform with a chest-high rail. From the moment Cat stepped onto it the sight of what lay to the south struck her like a blow, and as she approached the rail the view opened up.

Of the forest of Segrana, its fabulously intricate, interwoven matrix of flora and fauna, of biomass and organic life and all the towns and settlements of the Uvovo, there was nothing left. A seared, blackened desolation stretched as far as the eye could see, a wasteland of ash up from which the charred remnants of trees jutted like black spikes. It was the horror from her vision. A
deathly silence seemed to emanate from it, a silence that went deep.

Tears streaming down her face, Catriona had to lean on the railing to stay upright. Staring out at it, she could also see the twisted fragments of Legion cyborgs scattered everywhere, heat-buckled carapaces, half-melted tool arms, the strewn, torched dregs of mechanistic viscera. Chel and the Zyradin had mentioned a great sacrifice. But this was too much.

Too much to look upon. Weeping, she slid down and clasped her knees in close while Kirsten said uncertain consoling words.

It all had the unnerving semblance of improvisation. Harry told her the details of Reski Emantes’s diversion – a dozen decoy remotes emitting the energy profiles of Construct wardroids as they boarded the station via several spread-out airlocks – just a few moments before the dataform device began repatterning her for the transfer. At that moment Julia’s body was lying on a couch in one of the Great Hub’s subspace signal towers, her vacant mind’s neural pathways under the control of a task-dedicated AI, what the subservicers had called a cognition, residing in an implant embedded in her body’s brain. Once Julia’s fractalised sentience was repatterned she would be streamed into the implant, overwriting the cognition AI and taking control. She had crossed vast interplanetary distance via the tiernet, had entirely unexpected encounters, seen incredible sights and spectacles, and vied with deadly adversaries, just so she could complete the circle.

Well, it wasn’t entirely complete – there was too much neural damage to her cortex to risk an organic transferral. Overwriting the implant was safer.

She waited beneath the overarching, fabulously intricate data-form, a glowing software assembly whose bright stabbing needles were prescanning the structure of her fractalised sentience, preparatory to the full compressive transload operation. Harry gave her a sardonic wave as the last milliseconds trickled away, and she was sure that she saw a familiar look of mischief pass over his features.

Then everything smeared and slid sideways, distorting along a rainbow spiral that coiled and coiled into whiteness …

Then time sprang back into motion. There was the sense of being somewhere else but vision was a dark blur and she could hear nothing. It had to be the VR headset which all the captive Enhanced were wearing. The subservicer AIs had explained that the implant had a hardbuilt interfacing system, which would match her own motion and perception impulses. Right now she needed to see, so she thought of herself tilting her head to one side, turning it, brushing her temple against her shoulder, even jerking her head sharply sideways …

Success! The VR visor tilted sideways, giving her a partial view of the low, round corridor, some of the consoles, and the couch in front. As if this were a signal a circular emblem began to blink in the lower right of her field of vision and sound came through. She found that if she stared at the emblem for more than three seconds an opaque menu of options appeared. As she experimented, she listened in to the commotion going on along the corridor. She could hear Corazon Talavera shrieking at some unfortunate underlings, ordering them to ‘hunt down and obliterate the intruders’, which had to be Reski Emantes’s decoys.

Anything that upsets that prize bitch has to be a good thing
, she thought.

Mastering the implant’s op-system was straightforward and she quickly came up with a list of the high-level connections that were open to her, or rather to the AI she had supplanted.

Power Usage Aggregate Monitor

Communications Net

Security Overwatch

Biophysical Aggregate Monitor

Chemo-Cortico Aggregate Monitor

Target and Guidance

Arm and Launch

The last two also offered additional options –
Codeline Interface
or
Immersion Interface
. For the last on the list she chose option 2.

Julia’s vision swam for a moment and the word ‘recalibrating’ pulsed below her POV centre a few times before the colours and shapes of a gloomy landscape appeared all around her. A memory came to her from those frantic moments before she gave up her body to escape Talavera, and she realised that this was Irenya’s personal metacosm. Dark bruised clouds loomed low overhead. Julia stood next to a dried-out stone fountain in a parched garden, several yards from a large and imposing mansion. A massive stairway flanked by stone wolves led up to a pair of iron-studded doors burdened with chains and padlocks. She considered the exterior, noting the narrow windows covered by outer shutters, the pale patches of lichen, the spreading webs of leafless, desiccated ivy. And a slender circular tower at one corner. It seemed atypical, out of keeping with the mansion’s stern, square-built aesthetic. When she reached it she discovered an open door and inside a spiral staircase which she began to climb. From outside came a rumble of thunder.

By the time Julia reached a landing halfway up a steady rain was falling – from an open, glassless window she could see water pooling in the fountain’s bowl and spreading in puddles across the ground. Ascending further, she came to the joisted underside of a floor – the staircase curved up to a door which opened easily and quietly. Inside, the tower room was bare, just floorboards and blank walls, and an open window, its double shutters swung outwards. The rain was heavier now, gusts sending sprays of it in to speckle the dusty floor around the slight figure that sat hunched there. It was Irenya.

Julia crouched beside her, one tentative hand on her shoulder, whispering her name. After a moment Irenya opened her eyes and sighed.

‘Did everything, you know? Did it all, just as they asked.’

Irenya was thin, her face gaunt, her blonde hair lank and tangled. Anguished eyes came round.

‘Yulia? Is that you?’

‘Yes – mostly.’

‘I can feel … I felt it when Thorold gave up. I could feel him slipping away.’ Grief made the lines deepen in her face. ‘Letting go … ’

Julia felt a sharp shadow of loss touch her, yet it seemed more of a dismal stoicism than genuine sorrow.

‘Irenya,’ she said. ‘I need to ask you about the arming and launch sequences … ’

‘ … just letting it go and slipping away … letting it go and … ’

‘Please Irenya, you have to help me … ’

Irenya shook her head dolefully then looked at her hands. ‘Took me off it, Yulia. Said I was losing my focus. That’s why I’m here in the tower, to keep me away from … ’ She pointed out of the window.

Julia got to her feet and went over to the casement, ignoring the rain as she peered out. Behind the frontage of the mansion was a broad flat roof covered in an array of identical statues laid out in twenty rows of twenty-five each. In the downpour it was difficult to make out the form of the statues; they seemed to resemble some kind of bulky creature holding up a cluster of rods, angled at the sky.

‘Quite a sight, eh? – nice symbology, I thought.’

At the sound of that familiar, despised voice Julia began to turn back into the room. But Talavera was already charging at her, hands outflung. The impact shoved her backwards off her feet and out of the window …

Suddenly she was back on the couch in the Great Hub, dumped out of the metacosm by her implant’s hazard-detection cutout. The VR visor still sat asquint on her face and she whipped her head to the side a couple of times before it finally flew off.

‘Okay, so now you’ve got a better view,’ came Talavera’s voice from somewhere behind her. ‘Good – there’s something I want you to see.’

The Chaurixa leader came and stood next to Julia’s couch, looked down and shook her head. ‘Clever gambit,’ she said.
‘Those decoys had my boys running around and going crazy trying to find non-existent Construct combat droids. Meanwhile one of these neat probes fed you in via some subsystem and you crept back to your old carcass. Only now you’re a fractalised sentience occupying an implant in your own brain! Goodness, the irony is practically industrial-strength – especially now that I have isolated your implant from extraneous connections.’