The Ascendant Stars_Book Three of Humanity's Fire Read online

  The charges blew, a sharp explosion that made the cabinets jolt at my back and hurled a shock wave of heat and debris down the room. Smoke and dust filled the air and I coughed as I stood and went to examine my handiwork, torch in hand. Weak flames had taken hold on the far wall, burning the fabric covering, and the surrounding console was buckled and smoking. The coupling conduit had been reduced to glowing, melted stubs, and when I paused to listen I realised that all the faint sounds of machinery had ceased.

  I repacked the equipment bags, climbed into the ventilation duct, and pulled them up after me. It took me another twenty minutes or so before I was finally sitting up on the hyperdrive housing, being warmed by sunlight. I rested for a few minutes before descending to the ground and hurrying forward to the main bays. There I found a wounded Olssen standing over the bodies of McAllister, Kokorin and Moseyev – and several others I saw were cyborged crew members, now lifeless.

  ‘I succeeded,’ I told Olssen. ‘It’s dead.’

  Olssen nodded wearily and proceeded to explain how they had walked into a trap, triggering explosives which brought a deck and bulkheads down on them. They had kept fighting while trying to free their trapped companions but it was nearly impossible. McAllister and Moseyev had been killed outright, while Kokorin was clubbed and hacked to death. The desperate holding action had ended when my thermite charges severed the generator core from the rest of the ship and the Command AI. Cut off from that diabolical intelligence, the cyborged crew had stopped fighting, dropping whatever weapons they had, and had started groaning or screaming.

  Even as I stood outside listening to the captain I could hear sharp cries and animal-like shrieks of agony coming from inside the ship. Olssen said that the AI’s cyborgisation process must have included some method of stimulating endorphin production to suppress or numb the pains of those freakish surgical adaptations. It was that pain, raw and unfiltered, which was now tormenting them. A couple had already died, cardiac arrests brought on by shock and seizures.

  Yet that was not the worst of it. The isolation of the generator core had initiated a shipwide lockdown of all pressure doors, at least those not damaged by the landing or the ambush explosion. This has resulted in large areas of the ship being sealed off, and made inaccessible since all manual overrides have been destroyed. It also meant that a number of the cyborged crew members are trapped in the sealed-off areas – when I went into the Hyperion with McBain to stretcher out one of the incapacitated ones, I could hear muffled screams and howls from the locked-down decks.

  The rest of that day and the next was devoted to burying the dead and taking the wounded back to the cave. The following morning Strogalev went with me back to the vent shaft and down to the power coupling to retrieve poor Ferguson’s body and those of the AI’s victims. Tying them up in plastic sheeting, we dragged them through the ducts and back outside, adding them to the row of the dead.

  And now I am back here in the cave, making my notes. There were great cheers when we returned. Is this victory? It scarcely feels like it. Perhaps Olssen could see that in my face on the way back here. He told me to stay and rest while he took a party back to the ship to salvage what they could and to see if there were any ways into the sealed-off decks.

  Some have been talking about moving back into the Hyperion and setting up living quarters. For myself, I could not contemplate doing such a thing, yet I feel that I will be spending quite some time there in the days ahead.

  >>>>>>

  <<<<<<

  Commentary II – As we know, from Surov’s diaries and other accounts, it took them nearly eight years to break through to the upper forward decks, from where the rest of the Hyperion was easily accessible. But they found that intermediary doors had been strengthened or blocked off entirely. The forward repair shop and an auxiliary medical station had been stripped of their most useful contents. There were also booby traps which claimed one life. The resulting disappointment caused a split – in eight years the survivors had certainly learned what plants, animals and sea creatures were safe to eat but the effort devoted to the ship had held back development on several fronts.

  By the spring of Year Nine there were no more than a handful still at work in the ship, including Vasili Surov. At the end of Year Ten they gained access to the main sickbay, just in time for the birth of the colony’s fourth baby. They also finally gained access to the cryo-stored embryos. Sacrifice and resolve showed that a better future was possible. – S.H.

  >>>>>>

  <<<<<<

  1

  GREG

  Three long grey days after Catriona merged with the Zyradin, which took her from him, Greg saw her again.

  He had been sitting on a mat-cushioned, sunlit perch overlooking Berrybow, a mid-level harvester town, studying a small Uvovo statuette, when he glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye. Looking up, he saw a hooded figure walking along a higher branch some thirty-odd yards distant. He had frowned and stared as the figure headed towards a shadowy curtain of dark leaves, hand reaching out to part the foliage. Just before disappearing from view, the hooded head had turned and a half-obscured face had glanced back down at him.

  It was Catriona. Greg saw her for only a second but the sight burned into his mind.

  Heart pounding, he struggled to his feet and yelled her name repeatedly until the Uvovo Listeners and elders from Berrybow came and persuaded him to calm himself. Again and again he told them what he saw and the answer was always the same – Segrana sends visions to remind the living to live.

  Bowing his head in weary sorrow, he stowed the statuette away in his pack, slung it over one shoulder and left, heading downwards through the dense foliage of the great forest. For all that he’d learned about Segrana and its strange, far-flung awareness he found it hard to believe that such a vast sentience would create a mirage just for him.

  And what about the Zyradin? he thought. It was created by the Forerunners too, and its powers are almost beyond comprehension …

  But that led him to wonder if it was the Zyradin rather than Segrana which had decided to torment him with the ghost of what had been taken from him. It was an awful conjecture which he tried to put aside as he concentrated on his footing on the bough’s damp, mossy steps.

  An hour or more later Greg reached a small seeder village nestled in the crook of a huge branch that sprouted from the side of an immense pillar tree. Lamps glimmered softly in the eternal twilight as one of the female elders, her facial fur streaked with silver, wordlessly showed him to a vacant hut. Once he was alone, he curled up on a Uvovo-sized cot, scarcely feeling the interwoven bark slats as he slipped quickly into uneasy sleep.

  He woke to the sound of rain on the hut roof and rose with creaks in his joints and an aching neck. Despite the mild humidity he shivered as he went out onto the branch and sat on a large projecting knot, just letting the fine droplets speckle his face. Greg felt rested and more relaxed than of late, but the sum total of all that had happened up to his arrival on Nivyesta still hovered over his thoughts. He glanced at his watch: he had slept for nearly seven hours, and for the colony down on Darien it was 5.20 in the afternoon.

  For a few moments he was overcome by introspection, recycling events, the betrayal by Vashutkin, enslaved by Kuros’s nanodust, then his translocation first to the warpwell chamber within Giant’s Shoulder then up to the moon Nivyesta. And the maddening worry over what had happened since, what Vashutkin was up to, whether Rory and Chel were still alive, and how he could deal with the responsibility he felt for having agreed to bring the Zyradin here, and for what happened to Catriona …

  He sighed, shook his head then ran one hand over his face, smearing the raindrops, tasting them on his tongue, fresh and clean. Some light was filtering down from above, the faded tails of sunbeams that lent a glow to the mists ghosting slowly over the forest floor.

  That was when he heard the laughter, high and girlish, muffled laughter coming through the trees, Human female laughter …
/>   He got to his feet, suddenly tense, turning his head this way and that, trying to pinpoint where it was coming from.

  Below. It was coming from down on the forest floor.

  Swiftly Greg retrieved his backpack from the hut and by way of rope ladders and worn bark steps, he descended.

  For several hours he stumbled through the hazy gloom, slipping in decomposing leaf mould or tripping over concealed rocks. The poor light down here made it hard to make out details but his hearing seemed to grow sensitive in the deadening hush. He was certain he could hear a voice, Cat’s voice, muttering broken sentences. One moment it was clear enough for him to make out a few words but the next moment it was faded and indistinct and coming from another direction. As time passed he began to think that he was hearing more than one voice, blurred medleys of sibilant echoes emanating from all sides. Tension gave way to a kind of distraught despair. The echoing whispers became interspersed with sighs, gasps, hummed snatches of song, and, heartbreakingly, stifled sobs.

  At first Greg pursued the sounds as they came to him, lurching off through clinging wet undergrowth, his own voice growing hoarse from crying out Cat’s name. Taking leave of his senses was how he would regard this experience in later, calmer hours, dislocated from reason by a paroxysm of grief and anger. Anger at the zealots of the Order of the Spiral Prophecy and their callous leaders, and at the Hegemony and an Earth that would not protect an innocent and defenceless Human colony. Anger at the warpwell, the Zyradin – which he thought would help in the struggle – and the Forerunners who made them, and anger at Segrana. He swore and cursed the forest, ripped down curtains of creeper, broke off branches and tore up bushes and saplings by the roots. By now the fragments of Catriona’s voice had melted away into the everlasting twilight, as if that was all there had ever been, just wisps and shadows.

  Weary from hours of pursuit, confusion and anger, he staggered on through the dripping dark. Occasionally he passed a mass of stone with outlines too regular to be a natural feature but the old burning curiosity had waned to a mere flicker and he kept on going. Exhaustion finally overtook him as he was struggling up a bushy slope, alongside a huge fallen tree – a wave of dizziness struck and he sank down, scraping against the trunk. He rested there for a short while then realised that he would have to find somewhere to sleep up off the sodden ground, and hauled himself back upright.

  Further upslope he clambered onto what seemed to be another fallen trunk, but as he walked along it he realised that it was a branch of a much larger tree. A towering shape emerged from the half-light as he mounted the sloping branch, which had cracked away from the main trunk but remained attached by a section of bark and underlying wood. At the main trunk he found some old steps hacked into the bark and followed them up to a stump-supported platform. There he made camp, wrapped himself in a blanket and drifted off into a dream where ships fell out of the skies over Nivyesta, crashing down onto the forest of Segrana …

  Greg woke to still grey mists. It was the fifth day since losing Catriona. His face felt cold and clammy but he didn’t have the shivery weakness of a fever. By his watch it was 9.48 a.m., Darien time, while on Nivyesta it also seemed brighter. Getting to his feet, he yawned and stretched, wincing at his growing collection of aches, then tried to recall just what had happened last night.

  Perhaps I did lose my mind, he thought. Aye, a fitting nadir to my career as a freedom fighter …

  But was Catriona really dead? That was the question that bedevilled his every waking moment. The Zyradin’s main mode of attack appeared to be a kind of controlled disintegration, as Greg discovered in the two days following its transformation of Catriona. Desperate to get away, he had searched out several downed Spiral craft, even the couple that had been captured, but found that every one had been reduced to heaps of parts and components. Even hazardous materials like fuel cores and coolants had been rendered inert. It looked like he wouldn’t be leaving Nivyesta any time soon.

  But there’s still the other scientists, he thought. Folk that Cat was working with – they had some communication equipment before they went into hiding. Maybe they’ve still got it, and maybe it’s still working …

  It might be a forlorn hope, but at least it was a motivating one.

  With his fine Uvovo blanket once more stored away, he pulled the pack’s straps over his shoulders and paused to consider his route back to the heights. The rain had stopped and although ragged curtains of mossy creeper obscured the view in most directions he could just see a rope bridge curving up from some way along a higher branch. A sequence of hand- and footholds in the gnarled bark of the immense tree led him up there, where he found that the branch’s upper surface had been inlaid with a line of flat stones. Moments later he reached the bridge and started across, using the damp, braided rope rail for support.

  He was breathing hard by the time he reached the next tree and a circular platform from which another two bridges extended. Greg chose the steeper one and continued his ascent through heavy mist. A large forked branch with a railed platform emerged from the haze ahead and above. A pale figure was standing there, motionless, facing away. By the time he reached the midpoint he was sure that the stranger was Human, bundled up in one of those padded forest jackets with a hood that most of the researchers wore. The person’s physique seemed quite slender, the stature shorter than average. Then the upper torso turned and there was Catriona gazing down at him, face framed by the hood.

  Greg stopped, hands grasping the rough rope on either side. For a moment they stared at each other in total silence, then she smiled one of her teasing half-smiles and beckoned to him. This way …

  She moved out of sight, obviously heading for the next curve of bridge. Greg broke out of his frozen reverie and hurried after her, climbed the last steep stretch to the platform and found himself standing there alone. For a second he thought that this was a repeat of last night until he saw a solitary figure quite a distance along the next bridge, receding into misty grey. Greg followed.

  For the next hour and a half she led him on a winding, wordless, strangely unhurried chase up through the branchways of the forest. Sometimes he would call out to her, usually when he lost track of her, and she would step into view, finger raised to her lips, then point the way. Or she would somehow move from one level of walkways to a higher one, and wave at him, indicating the stairs or ladders he would have to take.

  The higher he went, the cooler and fresher the air became, as the light steadily brightened. He also noticed that her route bypassed any Uvovo settlements they came near, which implied secrecy or reluctance or both. But he persisted in his pursuit despite aches, bumps, bruises, splinters, and a cut in his forehead from a thorny creeper.

  The zenith was a sturdy wooden platform vine-lashed to the crook of three leaf-heavy branches, the uppermost limbs of one of the forest’s mightiest giants. Catriona was waiting for him when he finished his climb, and having at last got this close he could see that she was a ghost. Her eyes regarded him calmly yet he could see through her shimmering form.

  ‘So you’re … well, a spirit?’ he said, masking his sorrow. ‘A spectre, maybe?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not dead! – this is just the best that Segrana and the Zyradin can manage just now. There’s a lot of repair work going on, and not just in the places damaged by the fighting … and me. Every root and branch is being made ready for war.’

  ‘War,’ Greg echoed. ‘You mean when the Brolts send in their reinforcements?’

  ‘The Brolturans?’ She shook her head. ‘No, no, I’m talking about the Legion of Avatars, remember? Did ye not know that their agent finally got to Giant’s Shoulder? Powered up the warpwell, reversed its flow, and basically turned it into one big escape hatch to let the Legion of Avatars out of their hyperspace prison.’

  Greg was appalled. ‘My God – so it’s happened. The Sentinel once told me that there could be over a million of those things still down there … ’

  ‘Aye
, and maybe the rest. Don’t think they’ll be in a good mood when they get out. Which brings us to you.’ She paused to glance up at the sky where Darien hung, a shining blue-white orb. ‘When they arrive, the first hammerblows will fall here. After realising that Darien presents no threat, they’ll look further afield and find this moon and Segrana and the Zyradin and come straight for us.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘Which is why you’ve got to leave. Won’t be long before it’s too dangerous for ye here.’

  He was taken aback but still smiled at her.

  ‘I can see that there might be a bit of a stramash, but if you think I’m gonnae scarper and leave you here … ’

  ‘Greg, ye don’t understand! – it’s not going to be as civilised as a battle in space. This moon will be a target – the forest and Segrana could burn.’ She sighed and started to reach out to him, then stopped. ‘Ye canna stay here, my love. There’s too much for you to do … no, please don’t ask, I can’t explain what I’ve seen but you have to trust me, Greg. Please, I’m begging you.’

  Greg breathed in deep, trying to steady himself, then let it out.

  ‘Is this some kind o’ second-sight, seeing-the-future thing?’

  ‘I don’t even know how to answer … ’

  ‘Okay, but how can I get off Nivyesta?’ he said. ‘Every craft of every kind is lying about the forest in a million pieces.’

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ Catriona said, glancing over her shoulder. ‘Your lift’ll be here pretty soon … ’

  He followed her gaze and saw a dark speck descending steeply from the sky then flattening out into a curved trajectory that came round about ten miles away and headed straight for them.