She smiled at him and held out one small hand.
‘Goodbye, Greg,’ he heard her say, though her lips never moved.
He lifted his hand towards hers but was too late. One moment she was standing there before him, the next her form disinte-grated into a slow-swirling mass of radiant roseate specks, undulating and stretching like a vast flock of birds surging this way and that. Then the expansion accelerated and the motes in their millions flew outwards in every direction, a wave of enigma racing out to every corner of Segrana.
The Brolturan gunship, still soaring over the treetops of Segrana, hunting the Spiral zealots through the dense forests, was on the trail of a heavily armed group moving east along the banks of a broad river. Its captain never noticed the roseate radiance that was rising from the canopy beneath in a wave, until it engulfed the craft fully, from prow to stern. The fleeing zealots below, who had for hours been desperately dodging missiles and explosive rounds, suddenly found themselves ducking and hiding from a deluge of parts and components, armoured hull sections, uncased ammunition, interior fittings, couches and deckplates, all the elements of the former gunship which were scattered over a wide area.
Similar treatment was meted out to the Spiral interceptors and fighters. Their swooping trajectories turned into a terrifying ride for their pilots as the craft disassembled and came apart around them. Any Brolturan ship that ventured out across Segrana’s green ocean received the same treatment.
Those on the forest floor holding flechette rifles, pistols, beam carbines, flamers, shoulder launchers and grenades one by one saw their weapons fall apart into useless piles of junk. Faced with the abrupt loss of the means of attack and defence, both the Brolturans and the Spirals armed themselves with cudgels improvised from branches and gathered together in larger numbers for mutual protection. Some headed for higher ground or the coastal regions, while others set up camps to wait out the night.
Later, the new unity of Zyradin and Segrana used specialised midlevel plants to produce a gaseous soporific that drifted down through the foliage onto the unsuspecting intruders. After that teams of Uvovo transported the narcotised antagonists to places where they could not cause harm to Segrana, the Brolturans to their battered base off Pilipoint, and the Spiral zealots to an isolated island several miles off Segrana’s west coast.
In the Uvovo temple, after Catriona’s transformation and transcendent disintegration, Greg had stood there under the circular roof opening, staring up at the smoke-veiled, branch-interwoven heights, watching the bright shafts and gleams of sunshine shift and fade, studying the night’s progress through the layers of foliage. The faint radiance of ineka beetles and ulby roots began to appear, and before the last shreds of daylight faded some Uvovo scholars entered and quietly lit several lamps. The realisation that she was not coming back finally became bleakly real in his thoughts, and slowly Greg sat down. After a time, he began to weep.
LEGION
Flanked by two bodyguards, the Henkayan general Hurnegur followed the Spiral Prophet up the hillside track leading to the immense promontory. Sunup was less than an hour away but the feathery greyness of pre-dawn was lightening the horizon. The darkness atop Giant’s Shoulder remained unbroken. As they approached it from the ridge, the only light came from the torches and lamps carried by their guards and attendants. This place was, according to the Prophet, the sacred repository of the tomb of Agiserri, one of the founding Father-Sages, but the Brolturan fortifications that came into view lessened the impact somehow.
Behind him, Jeshkra, the Gomedran general, cleared his throat.
‘Still reading no lifeforms, Exalted One.’
‘Good,’ said the Prophet as he limped along. ‘You see, Hurnegur? Our enemies disperse, by virtue of our divine purpose and the guarding presence of Arigessi, praise the light of his words.’
‘Praise their everlasting light,’ Hurnegur and Jeshkra said in unison, but Hurnegur couldn’t shake off an imperceptible thread-like sensation of menace. The Brolturan units guarding the passes had been broken by his fervent battalions and, as the Prophet had promised, the Hegemonic enemy had abandoned their citadel. Such desirable outcomes caused the believer in him to give hearts-praise to the spirits of the Father-Sages, but the tactician in him could not stop being cautious and wary.
By torchlight they came out onto a wide expanse of rocky ground which became an area of rough concrete. It was flat and empty, overseen by squat towers and broken up by sections of low wall angled to force a ground attack into a bottleneck, a gap opening onto the next crossfire arena. Probing cones of light revealed signs of battles, charred lumps of metal which, on closer examination, proved to be the remains of battle mechs. This only served to provoke stronger feelings of unease in Hurnegur as they proceeded onwards to a large, multi-levelled bastion. When he voiced these fears, the Spiral Prophet was dismissive.
‘Trust to the Father-Sages, General. Gaze upon these impregnable yet vacated fortifications and see how that vaunted power has been rendered impotent by unseen hands and invisible intent. Ahead lies an abomination, built over that sacred resting place – picture it torn aside to allow that divine presence to rise to the celestial spaces, to its rightful and illustrious station. Come, walk with me, you too, Jeshkra.’
With Hurnegur in the middle, the three of them continued with their guards following.
Now they were crossing a well-surfaced plascrete landing pad. Two more wrecked droids came into view, some distance apart, and Hurnegur began to wonder if some horrific ambush or booby trap awaited them within the darkened structure. The Prophet indicated the main entrance, a pair of doors made from some opaque material and adorned with a stylised interlocking-gears symbol. They were just a few paces away when a deep synthetic voice boomed out across the promontory.
‘Wily and dauntless Hereditants, be welcome in this place of my triumph!’
Suddenly combat-alert, and angry at not having paid more attention to his instincts, Hurnegur drew his hand projector and scanned the surroundings. Then he realised that the Prophet and Jeshkra showed no sign of alarm or agitation. Instead, they had stopped to smile at each other.
‘He is here,’ said the Prophet.
‘He is indeed formidable,’ replied Jeshkra.
Hurnegur stared at them in fearful incomprehension. ‘Revered One,’ he said to the Prophet. ‘Who is it that is here? Is it … Arigessi? … Jeshkra, old friend, what is this all about?’
But neither responded. The Gomedran and the crippled Henkayan turned to gaze up at some point in the dark and shadowy upper air.
‘We greet you, Illustrious Progenitor, and stand humbled in the light of your mastery. How may we serve you?’
‘Cast off your disguising shells, my Scions. The final phase awaits us.’
With a trembling hand, Hurnegur brought up the projector and aimed it at the Gomedran.
‘Jeshkra, my friend, if you do not tell me what is happening, I will shoot you dead, I promise.’
Jeshkra and the Prophet glanced sideways at him but said nothing, just smiled. Hurnegur uttered a prayer for forgiveness, and blew Jeshkra’s leg off at the knee.
The Gomedran went down, making no sound even as blood gouted from the ragged stump. Then Hurnegur swore as Jeshkra forced himself up onto his knees, smile fixed, unvarying. This time he aimed at the head, but before he could fire Jeshkra jerked as if struck in the back and his head lolled forward. There was a grinding sound, then a wet tearing. The Prophet too had fallen to his knees but his head was leaning further and further to one side until there was a terrible crack, a ripping noise, something spattering on the ground. And the Prophet flopped forward like a boneless husk, revealing the thing that had been inside him, a metallic object like a tapered cylinder less than a metre long. Streaked with blood, it rose to hover in midair while Jeshkra’s tormented body split apart in a dark spray to expose a similar monstrous passenger.
In all his years of combat, Hurnegur had encountered many examples of vil
eness and base depravity but this superseded them all. Awash with incredulity and seized by an unanswerable terror, he flung out his beam projector and emptied its charge. Bloodstains were crisped and charred to ash but otherwise the two metal things were unaffected. He threw away the weapon, turned and ran.
He heard other weapons firing behind him, and only got as far as the edge of the landing pad when he felt something needle-sharp stab into his neck. He staggered a couple of paces before a spreading numbness reached his legs and he slumped to his knees. The next thing he knew he was being lifted into the air.
His senses swam. He tried to bellow his fear but even his throat had rebelled. Then whatever it was that had him in its grip turned him to face it, and a grotesque shape swung into view. With a flattened hull, it seemed to be a craft fashioned to resemble certain sea creatures he knew of – it even had several tentacular limbs protruding from the forward section. The hull was adorned with a hooked pattern, dark reds and greens with silver details. There were no obvious weapon ports but it was hovering, which meant that it had to have suspensors on board …
His vision blurred a little, followed by a wave of dizziness which he fought against. Then he realised through the fear that a few of the tentacles were no more than stumps but before he could complete the thought everything blurred and just fell away from him.
The Knight regarded the unconscious Henkayan, held aloft in one of its lesser tentacles.
>The Henkayan is greatly respected by the followers of the Spiral Prophecy sect. Through him the movement can be manipulated to your advantage<
>Only and for all time and beyond, honoured Progenitor<
The Knight considered the captive and recalled the other two experimental subjects, the Human and the Uvovo.
The Scions moved away from the organic guises that had been sloughed off, a symbolism that the Knight chose to ponder with approval. The Brolturan building was entered with ease and the Knight began to receive datafeeds from his Scions as they descended to the warpwell chamber, the very heart of their ancient enemy. Before long he was receiving images of the chamber and the broad circle of the warpwell, which was strewn with odd stone blocks, many of them fitted together.
And as far as could be made out, the Sentinel was not present.
>Illustrious One, it appears that the Sentinel of the well has been destroyed<
A stream of data came through, directly from the crude devices employed by the Hegemony scientists. Crude or no, they had successfully provided Ambassador Kuros and his advisers with detailed information about certain warpwell functions. The Knight could see where their investigations were leading before their inexplicable halt. Together with his own knowledge, gleaned from the ruins of other Forerunner warpwells down the millennia, the data offered the key to warpwell operation. And, of course, it was knowledge that his Scions also possessed.
>Illustrious Progenitor, once the well is activated we propose that one of us enters it and makes the descent with the aim of contacting the Legion’s survivors and guiding them to the well if necessary. Soon after the first has gone, the second shall follow with the logic bomb, intending to detonate it within the warpwell pattern access field. There is an 8.3 per cent chance that the first of us will survive the journey into the abyss. The second of us has an 11.1 per cent chance of surviving the warpwell’s inversion, although the chance of a successful detonation is 92.6 per cent<
<92.6 per cent?>
>Unforeseen factors, Illustrious One. In the event that the inversion attempt fails, it is our recommendation that you dispatch another Scion to carry out the task>
The Knight watched as his Scions used the well’s patterns to bring it up to full activation. The various stone blocks and pieces of equipment abruptly vanished into the dazzling, churning maw. Even here, floating on his suspensors above ground, he could feel that dragging force, that insensate hunger. Yet even as fearful as it was now, when controlled by the full bioentity of a Forerunner citadel world it could reach out into space almost a light year away and drag any enemy down its throat.
Then one of the Scions floated out over the burning bright portal and plunged in. The Knight was receiving a video feed which lasted less than two seconds before cutting out. A minute and thirty seconds later the second Scion followed. The Knight’s attention was split between the stream of data coming from the warpwell chamber, and the view from Giant’s Shoulder as the sun edged up over the horizon. Then the datastream suddenly spiked with state-change information … and the Knight felt it, felt the warpwell’s alteration ripple outwards from Giant’s Shoulder. He was sure that even if he had been miles away just then, he would still have felt the alteration. As for how long the inversion wave would take to reach the bottom of the Abyss, that was indeterminate, three or four days, perhaps, then the same for any survivors to make the ascent.
But one thing was utterly certain – a hundred millennia after that ignominious defeat, the Legion was returning from the Abyss.
EPILOGUE
CHEL
Cold and tireless, the pulse of machinery regulated all functions within the autofactory. The extraction of base material from the forest floor, the preparation, the conversion, the schedule of power allocations, the finely coordinated production process, the internal repair and monitoring systems, the external service racks. And the special project section, a chamber provided with environment control and arrays of surgical equipment that hung over a scoured metal plinth flanked by recesses. In two of them, still forms lay, lifesigns readouts blinking nearby. One was Human, his open yet blank eyes darting to and fro after invisible things while his lips moved but made no sound. The other, a Uvovo, lay still with his eyes, all six of them, closed, his face calm and expressionless while his chest rose and fell unhurriedly. Both bore evidence of surgery and at their necks, shoulders and upper limbs the skin had been replaced by panels of some grey, flexible material.
Behind those closed eyes, Chel hung in a kind of delirium, his semi-aware self swaying between despair, pain and the temptation to surrender to the malign machine fragments now invading his body. He could feel how they were meant to merge with his flesh, with the feeling-paths and the thought-paths, and he had so far resisted. This had resulted in a persistent fever and a steady weakening of his forces. Chel had nothing left except the willpower to resist, and even that might not shield him from any use of drugs. He just regretted not being able to help Rory escape.
Thinking to take one more look at the Human, he forced his awareness to focus on the physical so that he could at least open an eye or two. Pain flooded in from the nine separate implant wounds but he endured it as he opened his ordinary eyes.
The compartment was essentially a large metal box harshly lit from a single source. Except that just now it was blinking erratically, more than enough to reveal the opaque, fold-draped and cowled form of the Pathmaster floating next to the surgical table.
‘Great Elder, I … am I imagining this?’
‘Your birth eyes are open, Cheluvahar, and your senses are seeing and hearing me.’
‘Am I dying, Great Elder?’
‘There is no death, but it may be that the universe will offer you a new path. Many dark and terrible possibilities are emerging from the seething no-time of the future into the dim periphery of becoming-time. The turn of events has benefited our adversaries and laid a still-greater burden of necessity on your shoulders.’
‘But Great Elder, I am their captive and …’
‘Hear this! – a Knight of the Legion of Avatars, the same one that you were tracking, has taken possession of the Waonwir and activated the warpwell, reversing its flow. It will take at least three days for the change to reach that dark, deep prison in the Abyss and as
long for any Legion survivors to travel up its full length. It may be that only you and this Human will be able to prevent it.’
Chel was stunned, and irritated that somehow stopping this terrifying event was his responsibility while his mind and body were being eaten away piece by piece.
‘Please, Great One, can you help us escape? If I can just get free of the mechanisms and the implants …’
‘But Cheluvahar, you must not fight but accept. You must embrace the machine in order to defeat it!’
This time he felt a wave of anger.
‘How can this be? I am to become one of that monster’s mechanical slaves in order to …’
‘I see that you are yet to be convinced. Seer – attend!’
Chel’s sight flared suddenly, then cleared to reveal a dark, over-cast scene, an expanse of skeletal trees set in a blackened landscape, a charred Darien. But as his vantage point began to drift across this gloomy forest he saw that they were trees of metal, and that tunnels sloped down into the roots. Human and Uvovo came and went from below but their faces were blank and their bodies were patchworks of sickly skin and artificial grey. Chel saw immediately that the metal forest was a depraved parody of Segrana, a cruel copy stripped of natural life. Meanwhile, the vision still glided onwards until he reached the hills and ridges east of the Kentigerns. Further on was the coastal plain, a scarred and poisoned desolation, and when he turned to look at Giant’s Shoulder there was nothing there. The upper section of the promontory was gone, leaving the chamber of the warpwell open to the skies. Clouds darkened, rain fell, thunder rumbled …
Abruptly he was back in the recess, in the metal compartment, a prisoner and experimental subject, yet not alone.
‘Hard as it is to believe,’ said the Pathmaster, ‘there are other far grimmer futures gathering, ones where implacable tyrannies wage pitiless wars that consume the stars.’
The Orphaned Worlds Page 47