The Ascendant Stars_Book Three of Humanity's Fire Page 5

  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!

  3

  KAO CHIH

  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.’

  The helmet went dead, leaving Kao Chih alone with his thoughts and memories of the retrieval of the Pyre refugees from the Tygran ship. That whole experience, from the dizzying pursuit through hyperspace to dodging combat while aboard a stolen Tygran shuttle, was still unnervingly fresh in his mind. The raw fear of lethal peril and the heady exhilaration of survival had seemed the very pinnacle of his life, yet even that would be dwarfed by what was about to happen. Less than a week ago, Mandator Reen of the High Index of the Roug had told the Vox Humana agent Silveira to return to the independent Vox Humana worlds and tell their leaders that their help was sorely needed. Also included was a message from Reen that threatened the disclosure of certain secrets which might have had deleterious consequences for Vox Humana politics, most especially for the ruling party. Senior figures in the ruling party suddenly found themselves keen to oblige.

  And now here he was, returning to Pyre with five heavy Marauders of the Vox Humana navy, three large passenger transports, and the Syroga, a heavily armed Roug Incursioner craft. A grave burden now rested on Kao Chih’s shoulders, that of persuading the Pyre colony’s leaders to assent to the wholesale evacuation of the populace. Pyre was a desolate dusty globe and the colonists were living under conditions of squalid oppression, but they were going to be asked to leave most of their possessions and flee aboard ships crewed by complete strangers. What’s more, Kao Chih was going to have to conduct negotiations via comm link. The Vox Humana commanders had decided that the mountain interior was a ‘high-risk environment’ and therefore too dangerous for Kao Chih. Hence the ops centre in the Marauder, from where he would have to coordinate the evac.

  Which was why he was praying that Qabakri, the shapeshifting Roug who stayed behind, was still alive.

  The deep voice of the Marauder’s engines climbed and he felt a shift of inertia as the compartment tipped back before smoothly levelling off. There was the faint thud and lurch as they touched down, followed by a gentle rocking as the craft settled on its landing gear. Then the hatch made a chunking sound and lifted open to reveal the grey sepia tones of a Pyre dusk, hazed by swirls of dust thrown up by the engines.

  ‘Our positioning is on target, Envoy Kao Chih,’ said Kubaczyk. ‘Tac Units Two and Three will now deploy and secure the area around the entrance.’

  The Vox Humana troopers were armed with compact beam carbines whose scope lenses were oddly similar to the impenetrably dark goggles they all wore. Ten of them exited the compartment, split into two teams, set up a perimeter and secured the approaches. By then, Kao Chih had emerged and saw that the Marauder had put down between the hillocks he remembered from his first visit. And there, just visible in the dimming light, was the rocky mountain track that led up to the entrance.

  ‘Envoy,’ said Kotev, the comm officer assigned to assist him. ‘Our systems are up and the comm nets are active. We are ready.’

  Kao Chih took one last look at Kubaczyk leading his men up the track then went back into the shadowy interior. The rear hatch thud-clunked shut as he sat before the main displays and fitted his mouth- and earpieces. He had practised with this setup several times during the journey and now it was time for the real event.

  The helmet of every Vox Humana trooper had an audio-vis attachment and the feeds from fourtee
n pickups were now spread out across the array of monitors. Kotev swiftly tiled them into just a couple of screens while Kao Chih focused on the view from Captain Kubaczyk’s helmet cam.

  At the top of the mountain track they were met by the tall, brawny figure of Qabakri himself, in his guise as the colonist Wu Song. Kubaczyk was carrying a datatablet that allowed Kao Chih and Qabakri to converse face to face.

  ‘Ah, so you did return, my friend, and with impressive companions.’

  ‘I would not be here without the help of the Vox Humana,’ Kao Chih said, grinning with relief. ‘Is there fighting going on inside?’

  ‘There is,’ Qabakri said. ‘Your arrival is most opportune – Shibei District is in the hands of the Va-Zla gangsters and their Henkayan thugs are trying to break through to Yaotai.’

  ‘If this is the first stage in erasing evidence,’ Kao Chih said, ‘then we got here just in time.’

  ‘Just so.’ Qabakri glanced up the mountain slope and down to the dusty plains. ‘We should continue this indoors, for the sake of caution.’

  Once inside, past a narrow tunnel and a heavy security door, Kubaczyk and Qabakri sat around a table with the datatablet propped beside them. The captain and Qabakri discussed the locations of the main groups of the Va-Zla while one of the Pyreans brought out maps of the colony districts. These were image-captured by Kao Chih’s displays then quickly passed through a graphicker system that created an amalgamated schematic suitable for field use. By now, more troopers had arrived by Marauder and Kubaczyk decided that he had sufficient strength to move against the gangsters.

  The Suneye Monoclan might be the supreme industrial power on Pyre yet they were happy to allow a criminal faction like the Va-Zla to move in and run various kinds of vile activity. On his last visit, Kao Chih had heard of their ruthless cruelties and brutish greed. Now however, faced with well-armed and trained soldiers, they put up a poor fight. There was still a hard core, the Kiskashin leaders, who barricaded themselves into a warehouse then ranted and raved over a comm link about the vengeance that the Vox Humana would bring down upon themselves.

  ‘I warn you,’ the Va-Zla leader had said. ‘The Suneye Monoclan will not stand idly by while you defile their domain. Wherever you go or how far, their relentless and righteous anger will hunt you to the edge of the galaxy and beyond. The Lords of Suneye never abandon their property!’

  After which they suddenly burst out of the warehouse, guns blazing, only to go down under the weapons of the Vox H troopers, bloodily slain to the last.

  After that, the evacuation proceeded with remarkable smoothness, some hitches, a minimum of argument and controversy (although there were a few minor aggravations when officials in Tangxia thought they were being passed over for supposedly better quarters aboard the Nestinar). Most of the time Kao Chih was in constant contact with Qabakri, helping direct aid to the old and the sick, as well as the hungry and the weak. Some of the images that crossed his screens deepened his anger towards the Suneye thieves.

  Population totals for the districts were vital when it came to reckoning boarding numbers for the transports. The reckoning for Yaotai was roughly 4,400, Tangxia about 9,100, and Shibei 10,158 (according to a wizened old census taker). The provisional estimate was 23,700, which all three transports were capable of sustaining with space to spare. The Nestinar was larger than the Marzanna but had wider boarding gantries, allowing for a smooth embarkation mostly free from complications and bottlenecks. And as fate would have it, throughout the whole operation three pregnant women went into labour while waiting in line and another did the same during the ascent to orbit.

  In the event, both the Marzanna and the Nestinar made two pickup runs, transferring some to the troopship Viteazul. This left the Viteazul more than two-thirds full with over 11,000 colonists and the other two loaded almost to capacity, with a grand total of 24,082. And from the arrival of Kubaczyk’s Marauder to the departure of the last colonists aboard the Nestinar, the entire evacuation took nearly fourteen hours. By the bleached light of a cold, hazy morning, Kao Chih stood leaning against the black hull of a Marauder, watching the Nestinar’s gantries retracting and its ports sealing as the suspensors came online. The antigrav helices drew in air and dust and grit with a sharp rushing sound. Then the ship rose, jet thrusters manoeuvring, sending it on its ascending trajectory. Minutes later it was a dot dwindling in the high distance.

  Kao Chih then looked about him at the rounded barren hills, the mountain’s stony slopes, and the gaping entrance to the colony’s now vacant tunnels. Belongings of every kind lay scattered on the ground, clothing, toys, curtains, pots and pans, even pieces of furniture, all the things that the colonists were repeatedly told would not be allowed on board. Nearby, an open book lay with its pages flapping lazily in the faint breeze, illustrations of trees by pools, birds on branches, solitary travellers walking in the shade of towering peaks. More of this jetsam could be seen down at the landing zone, fragments of people’s lives, cherished heirlooms that had to be abandoned.

  He sighed, went to the Marauder’s open hatch and climbed in alongside the last squad of Vox Humana troops.

  ‘That’s it,’ he told the waiting sergeant. ‘Time we were leaving.’

  The Roug Qabakri had already left in one of the Marauders, bound for the Roug ship, the Syroga. Kao Chih, however, was being taken to the Viteazul, where Admiral Zhylinsky was awaiting his report.

  The ascent from the planet’s gravity well was as swift as the descent and marginally less comfortable. Enclosed in the Marauder’s stuffy compartment, without any exterior feeds, Kao Chih sat back in his couch’s embrace and tried to wind down, closing his eyes just to relax. The next thing he knew he was being awoken prior to docking with the Viteazul.

  Unlike the Marzanna and the Nestinar, the Viteazul was a purpose-built military transport vessel with an 18,000-body capacity as well as several capacious dropship bays and cargo holds. Once through the scan and decon chambers, Kao Chih was escorted by a female lieutenant to an elevator which deposited them at a small lobby in an upper admin level. She took him past two checkpoints to a metallic door decorated with the Vox Humana symbol, a string of worlds in a figure of eight. The lieutenant opened the door with her palm print and they entered.

  The bridge was a long room with two narrow archways separating it into three distinct areas. In the darkness the glows of occupied workstations lined the walls. The first two areas seemed to be dedicated to sensor and engineering systems, their holoplanes full of datastreams and glyph-algorithms. The last section had a circular lower level at its centre, almost a pit, where operators in visored headgear and interface gauntlets sat in a ring of back-tilted couches. Angled holoscreens were projected above them, opaque windows busy with images and symbol patterns, a blurring datadance. And on a raised dais by the edge of the virtual operators’ pit was a low-backed swivel chair flanked by more holoscreens. Its occupant turned as the lieutenant led Kao Chih over.

  ‘Welcome to Bridge Operations, Envoy,’ said Admiral Zhylinsky. He was a burly, grey-haired man with terrible searing on the left of his face and an ocular implant where his left eye had been. According to Kubaczyk, he lost it twenty years ago during one of the many system battles then fought against Earthsphere attempts to disrupt governance of the Vox Humana worlds.

  Kao Chih gave a short, polite bow of the head and Zhylinsky waved the lieutenant away with one hand. The other held a pointer device.

  ‘Captain Kubaczyk speaks highly of you,’ the admiral went on. ‘He says that your comm-link coordination was crucial to the smoothness of the evac, and that without your negotiation skills several misunderstandings could have turned ugly.’

  ‘The captain is too kind,’ Kao Chih said. ‘But there are others who easily put in as much effort as I who also deserve praise.’

  ‘I saw mention of other names,’ the admiral said. ‘But due recognition of their part will have to wait. Right now, we have a potential situation developing.’

 
; ‘A serious situation, sir?’

  ‘Our Roug allies seem to think so. Three ships are heading this way from well outside the system, moving in Tier 1 at high transit kinesis. Our sensors don’t have that kind of reach so we are relying on a feed from the Syroga.’

  Zhylinsky used his pointer to highlight a schematic on the main holoscreen before him, bringing it to the front. It showed the local star system, the sun and its four orbiting planets, one of which was tagged with four familiar ship names. The perspective then zoomed out and three new symbols came into view, closely clustered and moving steadily towards the Pyre system.

  ‘Mandator Reen for you, Admiral,’ said a silky, resonant voice.

  ‘Thank you, Ino. I’ll take it here.’

  The holoplane scarcely flickered as the layers of data were replaced by the head-and-shoulders image of a Roug. In common with all members of his species, Mandator Reen had a spindly physique, a narrow neck widening to a slightly conical head, and garments resembling tightly wound strips of dark, coppery-brown material that left no area uncovered apart from bulbous meshes covering the eyes and mouth. All an illusion, Kao Chih knew, a form secretly adapted by the shapeshifting Roug for their long-term purposes.

  ‘Admiral Zhylinsky,’ the Roug said in a rough, papery voice. ‘Are all your intercept craft berthed and secure?’

  ‘We are awaiting confirmation of that from the Viteazul, Mandator,’ said Zhylinsky as he studied a dataframe on one of his other holoplanes. ‘In fact … yes, that is the last Marauder clamped and sealed.’

  ‘Good. The navigational subsystems we installed are harmonised and course information has been encoded. You may commence departure jump to Tier 1 when ready, Admiral.’

  ‘With pleasure, Mandator,’ said Zhylinsky. ‘Ino, execute.’