The Ascendant Stars_Book Three of Humanity's Fire Read online

‘To say I’m disappointed, well … ’

  Talavera was suddenly standing a few feet away, attired in a red lacy bodice, green skin-tight leggings and her trademark heavy boots. As she stood there, black snakelike creatures emerged from the sand and wound up her legs. They had no features and were tapered at either end, so apart from their direction of movement there was no way to tell head from tail.

  ‘I explained what our work’s for, how important it is,’ Talavera went on.

  ‘And I don’t believe you,’ Julia said. ‘Don’t believe you, don’t trust you, don’t even … know what you are. What are those things? – why make up things like that?’

  ‘Hmm, sounds like pride to me. Yeah, the hubris of the oh-so-superior mind.’ Talavera leaned forward and hate glittered in her eyes. ‘But hang on a second – I’m the one who’s foiled your plans and dragged you back three times in a row so I guess that makes me your nemesis, maybe even arch-nemesis.’ She laughed. ‘And I didn’t make up my little snaky friends here – they’re messengers from someone called … ’ She paused, as if deciding what to say. ‘ … called the Godhead. He helped me escape when I was marooned and surrounded by death. You’ve no idea how powerful he is, or how powerful he is going to make me. Do you have someone like that, someone who’ll reach down and protect you and save you? I think we both know what the answer is.’

  Julia kept her face expressionless and looked out across the placid waters, not knowing who this Godhead was, feeling empty.

  ‘What happens now?’ she said.

  ‘There’s still work to be done,’ said Talavera. ‘So we need that magnificent brain of yours in order to finish the project on time. But we can’t risk any more meddling or plotting on your part. In short, it’s time for a Julia-ectomy!’

  Darkness slammed in from all sides. Her field of vision suddenly shrank to just her right eye and she couldn’t feel her body, no hands, legs, no mouth, nose, no feeling, no senses apart from one eye and a section of blue sky.

  ‘That Hegemony nanodust … really, it is such versatile stuff,’ came Talavera’s voice, close and rich with an unreal intensity. ‘I’ve got it shutting down pathways around your personality centres, mainly those to do with motivation and mood. Should keep you nicely torpid, and when you wake up after it’s all over, it’ll be a very different galaxy. Who knows, you might like it!’

  Silence closed in. The blue sky turned grey-silver and an array of square silvery recesses emerged, a lattice of them, lines converging towards the distance. She was herself sinking into one of the recesses, drifting down into its shadows. There was brief flash of anger but it soon faded. The need to oppose Talavera frayed away and defiance dissolved into passivity. Becalmed, Julia’s awareness was simply content now to stare up out of her square niche. Even when the light above shaded away into unbroken darkness, there was nothing in her that felt like responding.

  … initialising contingency state … initialising contingency state …

  The odd phrase appeared on the niche wall, pale blue glowing letters that pulsed over and over.

  … initialising contingency state …

  It seemed familiar, one of the autofeatures she’d coded into the polymotes at the start.

  … initialised … nano-intrusion has been mapped … reroute partitioned cortical nodes? y/n …

  A small glowing star sat above the y/n options and she found that she could will it to move in any direction. When she placed it over the y, other words appeared.

  … stepped reconnection initiated … pov focus translocation initiated …

  Suddenly she was in motion, a headlong blurring rush that made a bewildering number of abrupt changes in direction. All while a sharpness of mood crept back into her thoughts, bringing understanding in its wake. This reprieve had been effected by one of the polymote copies following its imperatives – subvert enemy systems, enhance and expand Julia’s scope for action. By now the dizzying, angular journey had slowed and it seemed that she hovered next to a dazzling, quivering, thrumming geyser of light passing horizontally through a sequence of crystalline rings. It was the dataflow of the virtuality chamber, the inflows and outflows, currents specific to each of the five metacosms that Talavera was running.

  Time is limited, said the polymote. Do you wish to send a message via this vessel’s tiernet connection?

  Hearing the polymote as a disembodied voice in her mind was unsettling. I have no mouth, she wanted to say. How can I …

  You may do so by speaking the words in your mind.

  ‘I see. How much time is left?’

  The nano-intrusion was easily fooled. However, cortical imbalances will exceed their capture tolerances in less than an objective minute and trigger alerts. Subjectively you have a longer period.

  ‘I want to observe the other Enhanced. I want to see what she’s done.’

  Without warning her point of view plunged straight into the searing brightness of the dataflow.

  She saw Konstantin’s laboratory, vast and intricate as a city, its districts cluttered with complex arrays of glassware, or stacks of analytical devices, or towers of monitors and servers. Yet a dark hush hung over it and many areas were shadowy or swathed in inky darkness. Toward the city centre there were still lights and flickering glows, signs of activity.

  Irenya’s metacosm was a garden with a fountain and a stream and a wooden bridge and a bird table and willow trees. Only the garden was overgrown, the willows were half-strangled by masses of thorns, the fountain was dried up and cracked and the stream stank of decay. It was raining and from behind the tangled bushes came the sound of crying.

  Thorold had not succumbed, not completely. Under an icy grey sky he was hauling a cart of stones up a bare mountain track.

  The last was Arkady’s. Talavera had already infected him with the Hegemony nanodust so Julia didn’t know what to expect when she saw a vast foggy plain and the outlines of a solitary mountain. As she drew nearer the fog thinned and she saw that an immense seated figure had been formed from the mountainside. It was headless.

  ‘I’ve seen enough.’

  Again the dataflow, its torrid brightness, its furious density. She considered the ship’s tiernet connection, a cluster of data channels whose multiplexity made perfect security a near-impossibility. Which is why Talavera wanted the Enhanced; their wetware was harder to infiltrate via the tiernet, and they were easier to coerce than an AI. Easy victims, weak, friendless. Talavera’s words came back to her:

  ‘Do you have someone like that, someone who’ll reach down and save you and protect you? … we both know what the answer is … ’

  ‘Can you make a copy of my mindstate?’ she said. ‘Then open a channel to the tiernet and upstream it?’

  A close, fractal-based approximation can be created … the virtuality monitors have discovered the anomalous imbalance in your brain. There is no time to create the copy then upstream it, but there is time to fractalise and upstream it in continual realtime transfer.

  She hesitated, but only for a moment.

  ‘That will suffice.’

  The fractalisation process may cause irreparable neural damage – it will certainly mean the end of your self-aware existence.

  ‘If I am cogent and aware when the nanodust shifts into its second phase I will experience suffering and self-death anyway. I have seen what it does. Please proceed with the scan.’

  It is commencing. You will soon experience a scaleback in the visual and auditory senses. Also, old memories may appear for a short time.

  The furious brightness of the dataflow grew pale then blurred into haze, and she imagined that she could hear a sound like the roar of a waterfall fading away. As it quietened it turned into something else, a crackling sound interspersed with pops and clicks. She saw a blob of light, a wavering yellowness which resolved out of the blur to become a bonfire on a beach by night. Ash specks and gleaming motes flew up on the swirling heat. Branches glowed red at the heart of the flames, bark curled and crisped a
nd smoke flowed off the outer kindling in pale, rising rivulets.

  Then it was as if the fire was within her. A wave of strange sensations surged, some memories, ideas, words, her name even, burst forth then melted away. Somehow she felt unburdened as her last thoughts rose up out of her like an ascending cascade of singing stars.

  Flanked by two Kiskashin techs, Corazon Talavera gazed down at the unresponsive but still breathing form of Julia Bryce. As she stood there comparing the data on her analyser pad with the tank’s readouts, a creature like a snake made of dense black smoke coiled and slithered from thigh to torso to upper arm and back. The Kiskashin were both terrified of it but strove to show no fear, not in Talavera’s presence anyway.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Talavera said at last. ‘Use the dust again. Make a fine, new instrument for me.’

  7

  KUROS

  Brolturan troops saluted as he passed, mounting steps recently cut into the side of the rocky ridge. The morning sky was grey and a cold sea breeze made his golden robes flap. He experienced an involuntary shiver and the skin of his exposed lower arms prickled, a reaction to the lower temperature. It was a flaw of the flesh that he was prepared to suffer in anticipation of the rewards that came with victory. He continued his climb to the observation station.

  Utavess Kuros, eldest offspring of Efeskin Kuros, once High Monitor, once Ambassador of the Sendrukan Hegemony to this dust-mote of a world, once rejoicing in the appellation ‘exalted’, was now a prisoner within his own head. There were no physical feelings, no bodily sensations apart from vision. He was a mute witness to all that the interloper was seeing and hearing, all of it so clear that he had come to believe that it was deliberate.

  For that first day, after the AI Gratach took possession, Kuros had felt the moorings of his sanity give way. Darkness had gaped, a cavernous maw now eager to swallow and grind him down. But he held on to the flow of images from outside, a lifeline he grasped in desperation, using it as a focus for conscious attention. He had survived, learning to maintain the essence of his being while the usurper, his own mindbrother the general Gratach, strode around in his body, spoke with his mouth and gave orders to his troops.

  After the evacuation from Giant’s Shoulder, the transports had flown to the high valley encampment north of Trond. From his cage of dark numbness Kuros could only watch as Gratach and the Clarified Teshak, the engineer of his imprisonment, reorganised the encampment with the aim of keeping them safe. There were still a number of flyers and aircars capable of mounting an effective strike against the rogue droids which had occupied Giant’s Shoulder and the warpwell, despite the defence batteries still in place there. But Teshak, in his gloating declaration back on Giant’s Shoulder, had made it clear that abandonment of the facility was integral to his plans. The failure of the Hegemon’s Darien strategy would allow the Clarified and their traditionalist allies to see off the current administration and take control of the Hegemony.

  However, in the last few days more details had come to Kuros’s attention. Gratach and the Clarified Teshak seemed to communicate via the neural implants, apart from when either or both were accompanied by their Brolturan subordinates. It was from those verbal exchanges that Kuros deduced hints and other fragments of knowledge, including references to ‘the Knight’, who seemed to be the one directing the droids currently occupying Giant’s Shoulder. This entity had also successfully fended off a couple of attacks by the Human resistance.

  At the head of the stone steps an uneven path led along a rocky ridge bearing only sparse patches of hardy grass and the occasional low bush. On such an open prominence the breeze was stronger, its cold bite sharper. The path steepened till it reached a level stretch where a Brolturan trooper in outdoor dress saluted as he approached. Further along a small building stood against a sheer cliff of dark stone. He was halfway towards it when a one-man flyer rose into view from the seaward side and alighted gracefully next to the observer station.

  Apart from strengthening the defences, their other high-priority task was to make contact with the nearest Hegemony or Brolturan outpost. Multiband scans revealed that no relay satellites had survived the destruction of the Purifier and the subsequent Spiralist invasion in which tens of thousands of half-starving religious pilgrims of various species spilled out of ramshackle transports and began looting the villages and farms of the coastal plain. Under great pressure, a group of Brolturan techs worked around the clock for three days, cannibalising flyer systems, testing modules salvaged from crashed craft, till they managed to assemble a subspace commset.

  It only permitted monochrome visuals and low-quality audio, but if it worked it would suffice. Contact was established with a Hegemony listening post at the edge of Brolturan space. Kuros listened as Gratach used his own codes to identify himself as the ambassador then proceeded to spin a wild, exaggerated tale. Gratach told them that after the loss of the Purifier (which they already knew about), and the Spiral armada’s ground invasion, it had been discovered that the zealots had brought dozens of backpack nuclear devices which were now hidden in strategic places throughout the colony. At the first sign of a planetary assault they would be detonated. He then claimed that his forces had captured three Imisil spies who, after questioning, revealed that an Imisil invasion force was already on its way to the Darien system. Kuros listened to all this with barely restrained fury. Clearly, Gratach had thrown in his lot with the Clarified Teshak and the Clarified conspiracy.

  The reply came two hours later. Relayed from Iseri, the Sendrukan homeworld, it came from none other than the Second Tri-Advocate. The Brolturans, it seemed, had been on the point of dispatching a relief force but when informed of the severity of the situation decided to formally request military assistance from the Hegemony. The relief force had been stood down and a Hegemony carrier battle group was on its way at maximum speed. The staunch resolve demonstrated by Ambassador Kuros and the Clarified Teshak was already being hailed on news announcements all across the Hegemony, and their valour would most surely not go unrewarded. They were instructed to expect the arrival of the Solemnitor and her attendant warcraft in approximately forty-eight hours. A much larger fleet was also being gathered and elements of that could possibly reach the periphery of the Darien system in fifty-five hours.

  Once the communication ended, Gratach and Teshak grinned at each other. Kuros heard neither speak but knew that they were conversing via the implants. It was frustrating in the extreme but Kuros allowed himself no luxuries of rage, instead kept his attention on all details within the scope of his perception. Fragments of information could usually be gleaned, and over the last few days, during Gratach’s briefings with the Brolturan officers, Kuros had learned several strange facts.

  Like the mysterious deaths of two of the Spiralist leaders, which took place on the same day that Kuros was entombed in his own brain and Giant’s Shoulder was abandoned. The Prophet-Sage himself and his generals, Jeshkra and Hurnegur, had reportedly been attacked by bomb-throwing Humans while observing an assault on the promontory. Only Hurnegur survived, and now the Spiralist hordes were scouring the coastal settlements, rounding up the remaining Humans and confining them in camps. Teshak was keeping his Brolturan troops close to home, but still there had been a few skirmishes between aircar patrols and Spiralist gangs on the ground.

  As a consequence, most of the Human colonists were trying to get out of the coastal region, some moving south to the Eastern Towns while others went north to the stockaded villages around Trond. For the first three or four days the Spiralist fanatics spread out in mobs and gangs, unopposed and unhindered. Then yesterday one of the comm technicians brought Gratach-in-Kuros a report compiled from shortwave chatter, the substance of which was that a sizeable force of Humans had infiltrated the capital, Hammergard, by night and routed the Spiralists from the city. Apparently crude airships had been used to deliver attack squads to rooftops then later to rain incendiaries on the fleeing zealots. Hearing this, Kuros felt a stab of admir
ation for the colonists and their willingness to hit back at the invaders. Then there were the probing attacks carried out by the Human resistance against the rogue mechs occupying Giant’s Shoulder. Kuros knew that light irregular troops could not prevail against armoured combat droids.

  The Clarified Teshak was waiting at the door to the observation station. A large silver-blue transport case hovered next to him on suspensors. Once inside, Teshak activated the case and it unfolded into the improvised subspace comm device. As the connect system began scanning for specific encrypted channels, Gratach stared out of the window at the heaving sea.

  One glimmer of personal satisfaction persisted throughout Kuros’s imprisonment, this torment of nothingness, and it went by the name Alexandr Vashutkin. Not long after he and his followers took up residence in the Utgard cliff caves, Kuros had sent in shock troops equipped with genetic trackers. Once the insurgents had been stampeded to the various exits and Vashutkin had been captured, the Rus was infused with the nanodust. It only took minutes for the dust to master him, after which he was released.

  Vashutkin’s orders had been to capture Greg Cameron for interrogation, or to eliminate him. But Kuros, disconnected, disembodied, had no way to know if Cameron was definitely dead. None of the Brolturan reports spoke of him, although there was mention of Vashutkin being spotted at temporary camps in the Kentigern foothills and leading one of the attacks on Giant’s Shoulder. Was this proof positive that Cameron was in fact dead? Yet the controlled Vashutkin had not sought Kuros out, which implied that he was still alive.

  Unknowns and imponderables – Kuros’s attenuated existence consisted of little else.

  Now, however, it seemed likely that he would soon discover some authentic facts, perhaps even an explanation that would reveal something useful about the Clarified plan. It was the morning of the fifth day since Kuros’s entrapment and Gratach had left the Brolturan compound and, alone, climbed newly cut steps to the crest of a ridge overlooking the sea and the southern approaches. Now he was inside a dilapidated stone building with the Clarified Teshak, waiting for a subspace comm device to find a specific signal. As before, no words were spoken. An implicit silence held sway.