The Orphaned Worlds_Book Two of Humanity's Fire

by Michael Cobley

  The shuttle alighted at one corner of the octagonal landing pad which had been laid down where scraps of ruins had once stood. Next to it was the research centre, a three-storey establisher building configured with enhanced fortifications. Thus far the autobuilder had erected two wings with standard defensive positions, but add-on template frames were already in place. The exterior was impact-resistant polymer armour patterned in blues and greens that appeared deep black beneath the four suspension floods, whose actinic light drenched the entire promontory.

  Leaving the shuttle, Kuros and his escort approached the secure lobby, which identified and admitted them. He was greeted by Chief Scientist Tabri, resplendent in his high-shouldered formal gown. Together they took an austerely appointed elevator down to the room that led into the warpwell chamber.

  ‘You have made progress,’ Kuros stated as the Chief Scientist led the way round to a platform overlooking the well itself.

  ‘Our experiments with the pseudostone have reached a crucial juncture,’ Tabri said. ‘We have already carried out preliminary tests and we are ready for a full demonstration.’

  From the platform, Kuros could see that pieces of some pale material had been positioned on the warpwell, each shaped to match a section outlined by the pattern beneath. Over each piece a probelike apparatus stood poised, like shining metal spears tipped with glittering crystal. Blue-tinged lamp arrays lit up the incised circular floor while tech workers in enclosing grey suits moved from probe to probe, taking readings, or consulted other equipment displays dotted around the low wall.

  ‘Please, proceed,’ said Kuros.

  ‘We have done so, Ambassador,’ said Tabri. ‘We are now evaluating the results.’

  ‘I saw nothing out of the ordinary take place, Chief Scientist.’

  Tabri offered a ghostly smile which Kuros found irritating.

  ‘Ah, but not all the dramas of science are visible to the naked eye … ah, thank you.’ He accepted a databoard from one of his underlings, tapped and stroked its screen, then presented it to Kuros.

  ‘Ambassador – the top diagram represents our pseudostone block, coloured pale blue, resting on the warpwell, coloured red. The diagram beneath illustrates the depth to which we took control of the energy pathways of the subpatterns.’

  The second diagram showed the pale blue extending down to a depth exceeding the thickness of the pseudostone block.

  ‘Of course,’ Tabri went on, ‘the ingrained patterns of the warpwell have begun to push back, to reassert its control …’

  ‘So your experiment has failed,’ Kuros said.

  ‘Oh no, honoured Ambassador! This is only the first probing attack – with more pseudostone elements emplaced across the surface we will be able to take control of the subpatterns and their functions, permanently!’

  Kuros was about to ask how much longer the process would take when his mind-brother suddenly appeared at his elbow.

  ‘One awaits,’ Gratach said, his gaze a thing of trapped fury. ‘Above he awaits and commands you to attend.’

  Then Gratach vanished, leaving Kuros struggling to maintain his composure. It was the Clarified Teshak, it could be no other.

  ‘You must excuse me, Chief Scientist,’ he said. ‘There is a pressing matter I must resolve without delay.’

  Ignoring the looks of surprise, he hurried back to the elevator and some moments later was striding across the landing pad to where a tall figure in gleaming black stood next to a military shuttle. The Clarified Teshak turned at his approach, head enclosed by a rigid, peaked headdress, mouth smiling, eyes cold.

  ‘I’m disappointed, Kuros,’ Teshak said. ‘Yet somehow it seemed inevitable.’ He glanced at the pair of Ezgara at his back. ‘In private.’

  With a murmur, Kuros sent the Ezgara off to wait at the edge of the landing pad. Looking back he saw that the flank of the military shuttle had hatched open to reveal a passenger compartment, and a wire and shackle-fitted couch that was clearly meant for prisoner transport. Kuros could feel his mouth going dry.

  ‘Due to your lack of foresight, and your negligent approach to the insurgents, we are faced with a crisis for which we are scarcely prepared.’

  The Clarified Teshak smiled unpleasantly as he walked unhurriedly around Kuros, as if studying or measuring him.

  ‘I am unaware of a crisis, your Clarity, but if there is such a situation I am ready to take all and any steps to rectify it.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Teshak said, speaking into Kuros’s ear with quiet menace. ‘Because you must move swiftly to negate the threat.’

  ‘What is the nature of the threat?’

  ‘Initially, the lack of investigation and a paucity of updated intelligence.’ Teshak considered the shuttle’s interior and the vacant couch. ‘Originally, the Uvovo were seen as primitives with no knowledge of the legacy of the Forerunners, some of which remains intact although buried throughout this region, deactivated and invisible to all our sensors. But now we find that the Uvovo are urgently seeking out these ancient nodes of power with the aim of reactivating them. If they are able to awaken those planetary defences then it will not just be the garrison and this facility that are at risk – any ship in orbit could be brought down too!’

  Part of Kuros was incredulous as he listened but the Clarified Teshak was so intense and unswerving in his account that Kuros was swayed, almost as if this were a vindication of his own earlier convictions.

  ‘What must we do to safeguard our mission, your Clarity?’

  ‘This is no time for half-hearted measures,’ Teshak said. ‘You must mobilise all Brolturan ground units and send them into the hinterlands, backed by all available air support as well as units from the Human militia, barring the bare minimum required to secure important locations and routes on the coast.’

  Kuros was alarmed but remained composed. ‘There are dangers in such a wholesale redeployment. Several townships will see it as a pullout and an excuse to revolt …’

  ‘What is that next to the possibility of seeing the Earthsphere vessel go down in flames, or even the Purifier?’ Teshak leaned in close. ‘If you won’t take the necessary action then go aboard my shuttle while I find someone among your staff who will!’

  The Clarified Teshak’s outstretched hand pointed unwaveringly at the prisoner couch. It took Kuros no time at all to come up with the correct response.

  ‘I fully understand the gravity of the crisis, your Clarity,’ he said. ‘Our forces shall go forth – the treacherous indigenes shall not escape punishment.’

  ‘Excellent decision, Kuros. You will be able to rely on reinforcements from the Purifier but they’ll take several hours to arrive – you need to give the mobilisation orders now.’

  Kuros nodded and beckoned to one of the Ezgara guards with the intention of using his communicator. As he did so, Teshak made a small gesture and the shuttle’s flank hatch closed up, whole and seamless.

  ‘Hegemony historians will look back at this moment and identify your actions as crucial to the success and glory of future generations,’ Teshak said. ‘Perhaps you will earn a noteworthy byname – Kuros of Darien, or the like, or something yet more impressive.’

  ‘That would be … most gratifying,’ Kuros said, emotions mixed as the Ezgara handed him a detachable suit communicator. ‘Yet such experiences are the true reward; after all, I live to serve, your Clarity.’

  Or am I serving in order to live?

  19

  LEGION

  ‘Technical station three – request that you restate orders for production schedule and target list.’

  ‘Fabricator 238 – your orders are clear. In the next thirty-hour period you will construct two type-D mechs, two type-E mechs, and four of the new type-R mechs. Send a D-mech and two Es against the Humans in the mountain fortress, two Ds to raid the rebel camps along the western valleys, and the four type-Rs to the northern marches of the Forest of Arawn to hunt down other rebel groups.’

  ‘Orders received
but do not satisfy tactical reasoning. Human fortress requires concentrated attack. Two type-Ds inadequate for subduing more than one or two armed camps since Human acquisition of Brolturan weaponry. Type-R failure rate in the field strongly indicates fundamental design flaws – recommend recall and upgrade. One recovered unit already undergoing reconditioning …’

  ‘Fabricator 238, you assume that you are in possession of all relevant battlefield data with respect to our deployments. You are not. The orders given to you are part of a wider strategy devised to secure the hinterland region; also, your concerns about the type-Rs have been noted.’

  ‘Acknowledged. Orders will be carried out.’

  As the link was cut, the Knight of the Legion felt relief mixed with irritation – clearly, the codification of the autofactory’s machine mind had included a bias towards nit-picking oversight.

  The audio-visual simulation of the Kasimir’s captain and crew had been straightforward in comparison, the important difference being that the simulation had been running on semi-autonomous scripts. It was ten days since his remotes, with painstaking stealth, took control of the autofactory’s transceiver systems, but such control was a two-edged sword. Not only was he pretending to be a Hegemony military technician giving the autofactory its orders, he also had to pretend to be the autofac-tory receiving orders from the technician when those channels were opened. Both dialogue streams demanded realtime responses that were authentic while serving the Knight’s own purpose.

  That purpose had seemed a forlorn hope soon after the plunge into the lake, cradled in the camouflaging barge, and the subsequent entrapment under the rockfall. It had tested him, provoking depths of panic and despair, yet he had regained his wits and set the remaining work drones to shoring up the barge hull with rocks pried from the nearby mud. With the threat of being crushed to death negated, he then had the drones cut him free of the wrecked barge, a timely escape since Brolturan units had started to arrive in the area.

  Erasing what evidence he could, he took the work drones and moved to a far-off and deep part of the lake. After dark he had swam up a river for several miles, turned off at a tributary and eventually surfaced in a steep-sided gully, in a remote northeastern corner of a large, dense forest. A dispassionate assessment of his cyborg status revealed that the repairs completed at the Bargalil moon facility had not been equal to a combat situation. It was a weakness of the materials available rather than the refurbishment methods. Although internal power and control systems were stable, some carapace and substructure repairs had failed. Also, the prosthetic extensions on two of his three remaining greater tentacles were showing serious wear.

  And he had realised, belatedly, that his two Scions had told the truth – the forces of the Hegemony occupiers were indeed formidable, at least for one aged, crippled Knight of the Legion of Avatars. Perhaps he would have to remain in the background after all, a spectator of the glorious unfolding strategy of his Scions. Naturally, a little of their triumphant radiance would reflect upon himself, as their Progenitor, but that would be a lesser accolade, the merest gleam of prestige, a bitter sip of splendour.

  Much later, in the middle of the night as the Knight rested under a low canopy stippled with the glow of light-emitting insects, a large dark silhouette had passed overhead with scarcely a murmur. Alerted, he set his refurbished sensor arrays to track it across the treetops, a low stealth approach that took it in a long southward curve that ended in a high, densely wooded valley. Swiftly, he dispatched one of his remotes to find out more, and a few hours later a stream of gathered visuals and intercepted transmissions reached him, revealing the truth – and the outlines of a strategy. By sending in their autofactory, the Hegemony had unwittingly provided the means by which he would seize control of the fortified promontory and thus the warpwell. With an army of heavy war mechs he could smash his way past any defences – the problem was getting the autofactory to build them with the minimum of argument.

  At least he had seen one of the type-Rs in a live field test against some Humans at the western end of the mountain a few days ago. Throughout this region his remotes had picked up echoes of old Forerunner places, buried deep yet still emanating faint trickles of that terrifying power. The Humans had gone to ground at the heart of one of those ancient nodes, one of that world-strangling weed’s anchors, a pillar tree, truncated but still alive, ten thousand years on, and protecting itself with layers of interwoven foliage. The mech had gone after the Humans with an appropriate degree of brutality and would have obliterated them had it not been neutralised by a Brolturan overpulse cannon, captured by some other Humans. The Knight was not overly dismayed since the live test had proved correct his suspicions about the upper-body armour fields.

  Now that dawn was pushing back the night-time shadows, it would not be long before the Hegemony technicians opened a channel for their regular status check dialogue. He already maintained a steady telemetry feed abstracted from the autofactory’s actual output but substantially modified. The curious thing was that he found it easier to imitate the sentience of Fabricator 238, with its finicky reiterations, than a Sendrukan technician.

  Several moments later his receptor picked up a new feed from the autofactory’s secluded valley, but rather than a satellite relay from the Sendrukan tech station, it was from the autofactory sentience again. Uneasy, he opened the channel:

  ‘Fabricator 238 – this is an unscheduled …’

  ‘Technical Station Three, this unit is unable to carry out your orders.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Extensive analysis of the schedules of production and deployment show that they have failed to suppress or curtail significant insurgent activity in any way. This level of incompetence would not normally be tolerated in the prosecution of such a vital mission yet you have been feeding deficient instructions to this unit for eight days without interruption. Conclusions are inevitable.’

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘Either your facility has been subverted by enemy elements or this unit’s communications equipment has. Regardless, this dialogue is at an end.’

  The channel went dead. The Legion Knight immediately switched to the encrypted channel linking him with the remotes and monitor points embedded in the autofactory’s hull. Live visuals came through, along with various datastreams to confirm that the autofactory, Fabricator 238, was recalling its picket sentry drones, retracting its extraction borers, and starting the seal and lockdown procedures in preparation for take-off. Which would be disastrous – the moment it cleared the treetops, the Brolturans’ orbital scanners would identify it and know that something was seriously wrong. And that would be the end of any plan to seize control of the warpwell.

  Options were limited – the type-R mechs, whose redesigned comm systems gave him complete control, were divided between guarding his own place of hiding and a staging point over a hundred miles to the east. He had no direct control over the Ds and Es, and his onsite remotes and spymechs were incapable of penetrating the autofactory … but there was a type-R inside, being repaired …

  The Legion Knight ordered the hull remotes to tap into the inner status logs, to find out the type-R’s location and what condition it was in. The response came seconds later – the mech was being held in workshop storage, its left leg assembly was twisted junk, and it was currently powered down on standby.

  Meanwhile, most of the sentry drones had returned and were hutched while the navigationals ran system checks on the suspensors and the atmospheric thrusters. There were only moments left.

  Based on the autofactory’s layout and functionalities, the Legion Knight compiled a task order for the mech, pointing out multiple paths to the objectives, knowing that he would have to rely on the machine’s semi-sentient judgement to get it done. He sent it to the hull remotes, who then flensed through the datashields and fed the task order to the type-R as a burst transmission. At once, data-breach systems came online, cutting off all exterior sensors. But the type-R was powe
ring up and providing the Legion Knight with patchy, unsteady visuals as it dragged itself out of a storage recess and descended into maintenance ducts beneath the main deck. That was the quickest route to the power junctions.

  And time was running out. From a nearby ground remote, he had seen the last sentry drone glide on board and was now watching the ramp withdrawing and the bow sections closing up. With its curved, blunt prow, wide midsection and tapered aft, an auto-factory was not a high-mobility unit and therefore its minimal propulsion systems left it slow and ungainly. But they would be sufficient to send it out from concealment and bring the Brolturans in numbers to this corner of the forest.

  Inside, the crippled mech had encountered a barricade comprising several deactivated auxiliary drones welded into a solid mass across the duct. The mech clearly reckoned that it would take too long to break through since it swiftly reversed course, headed back to an intersection, tore aside the grille-decking above and clambered up into a narrow passageway. The visual feed was jerky and almost in monochrome, showing metal walls that looked scored and battered in the light from the mech’s shoulder lamps.

  Suddenly there was motion along the passage. The visual gave the impression of something with a vertical row of jutting pintles rushing towards the mech. Then there was a burst of distortion and the link went dead. Aghast, the Legion Knight switched to the ground-POV remote and watched as the autofactory stirred from its landing position. Dust, leaves and fragments of bark and twig flew up. The air rippled as suspensor fields lifted the vessel slowly into the air and the stubby landing legs retracted. The high valley was hemmed in by steep mountainsides so the autofactory could either follow the valley to a river canyon that led east, or ascend straight through the canopy to the open air above, which seemed most likely.

  Resigned to this defeat, angry at himself for not having foreseen such an outcome, the Knight began preparing for his own egress. In keeping with the principles of stealth, he had already scouted out other fallback hiding places, the most useful being an underwater cave in a lake in the mountains north of Trond. The route was already mapped and he had stationed a type-R mech there, watching for intruders.