The Ascendant Stars_Book Three of Humanity's Fire

by Michael Cobley

  No response.

  ‘How about a pipe? Do you have a pipe and some tobacco? Or even a cigarette would do.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Well, do you have some pen and paper? – I said, do you have any

  Strogalev’s head snapped round, fury in his face.

  ‘I heard you! And no, there is no pipes or cigarettes or pen or paper so shut your mouth!’

  ‘Shame, that. I really want to make up my last will … ’

  ‘Okay, okay, now I’m going to shut you up!’ Strogalev gestured at the other man, who was holding the gun in both hands. ‘Do it now – shoot him dead.’

  The other man, who was wearing only a shirt and trousers, stumbled forward, waxy face slack, the eyes full of confusion, outstretched hands holding the gun. The mouth worked, muttering, ‘Kill him, shoot him, pull the trigger, just pull it, fire the gun, shoot him.’ Then he slowed, the arms lowering, the mouth gaping in a soundless cry, eyes spilling tears as he began shaking his head. Strogalev uttered an angry curse, wrenched the gun out of the strange man’s fingers and from about ten feet raised and aimed it at Theo’s head. Theo stared back at him.

  Strogalev spat on the ground. ‘Couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could … ’

  Theo was on the point of desperately throwing himself sideways when a shot rang out, blood sprayed from Strogalev’s right temple and he spun and sprawled on the grassy slope. Theo stared at the corpse for a frozen second before looking across the stream, searching the undergrowth for signs of the shooter. For a moment he thought he saw a form ducking behind curtains of greenery, then he heard movement from nearby. Looking back, he saw the other man sitting next to Strogalev with the gun in his hand once more.

  There were footsteps behind him, rustle of grass, a hand on his shoulder. He glanced and was amazed to see his sister, Solvjeg, crouching down next to him. She forestalled his first words with a finger raised to her lips then pointed. Theo looked round and saw a man in dark hunter greens approaching with a rifle aimed at the man sitting by Strogalev’s body. Still muttering to himself, the man suddenly put the gun down. Solvjeg meanwhile had severed the bonds at Theo’s wrists and gave him a short knife with which he freed his ankles. The man with the rifle drew nearer, still holding it on the mumbling man. He wore a black woollen cap and had several days of stubble but Theo suddenly recognised him – it was Ian Cameron, his nephew and Greg’s older brother.

  ‘Nice to see you again, Ian,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, likewise, Uncle … ’

  Then the man picked up the gun again. Holding it two-handed with the barrel dipping, his intense, panicky gaze switched back and forth between Theo and Ian.

  ‘Put down the gun,’ said Ian. ‘Put it down and move away.’

  ‘Easy, it’s easy, shoot him, pull it, easy … not easy, not good, not right, don’t pull the trigger, don’t shoot … ’ The gun was being lowered shakily to the grassy ground. ‘ … it is easy, it is good, the right thing, pull the trigger, good and easy, shoot him, kill him … ’ Fingers tightened and the gun came back up again.

  ‘If you don’t put it down,’ said Ian levelly, ‘I will shoot and kill you.’

  The man looked up at him, suddenly cold and focused.

  ‘You may not. Only I am permitted.’

  Before anyone could react, the man jammed the barrel under his chin and pulled the trigger. The report was loud and a sickening gout of gore sprayed the undergrowth behind him. The bullet’s impact knocked him onto his back. Ian lowered his weapon, walked over and crouched between the two bodies. To Theo’s surprise, Solvjeg went to join him and displayed no signs of squeamishness.

  Well, now, sister, what’s happened to you in the last few weeks?

  Moving to peer over their shoulders, Theo saw that Ian was ignoring Strogalev and instead examining the suicider’s corpse, prodding the skin around the neck and shoulders, then chest and back. After a few minutes of this Ian straightened, frowning.

  ‘No sign of any implant,’ he said.

  ‘But the behaviour is the same,’ said Solvjeg. ‘There was control, and he was fighting it throughout.’

  Ian shrugged. ‘No implants or grafts as far as I can see without an autopsy. If he was under control then it was something different.’

  ‘Would anyone care to explain this to me?’ Theo said.

  Solvjeg stood and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Of course, Theo, I’m sorry.’

  He smiled at her. ‘You look too grim, sister, which means that the meaning of this is grim enough to suit the times, eh?’

  ‘That is putting it mildly,’ she said.

  ‘Back in the Eastern Towns,’ Ian said, ‘we had discovered a few spies working for the Brolts, unscrupulous backwoodsmen usually. Then we cornered one who died in a shootout and when he was autopsied the surgeon found webs of fine wiring running from subdermal implants to the brain stem and the optic centres. We had never seen anything like this before, and we guessed that the Brolts had wired them up as intelligence gatherers.’

  ‘A couple of days ago,’ Solvjeg said, ‘we heard that a bomb went off at a boatyard in Byelygavan, killing four people and almost destroying the yard. They found a body in the wreckage, which turned to have several implants in its chest and arms. It made me think of the AI War waged by the founders … ’

  ‘But that’s not what we’re dealing with here, is it?’ said Theo, who then went on to tell them about the deadly enslaving dust that Kuros had used on Greg and which, he now suspected, had been used on Vashutkin too. ‘My guess is that Vashutkin, or the thing controlling him, transferred some of that dust from his bloodstream to that of this unfortunate.’

  ‘If Vashutkin is using this stuff to create a web of spies,’ Ian said, ‘where did our implanted spies and bombers come from?’

  Theo frowned. ‘That drittsekk Kuros is apparently holed up in a base north of Trond – perhaps he’s responsible.’ He looked down at the two bodies. ‘Strogalev didn’t seem like the other one – have you looked him over?’

  Ian shook his head, checked the Strogalev corpse, head, neck, chest and arms like before, then shrugged. ‘Nothing. Looks like he was a voluntary minion. Is Vashutkin up at Tusk Mountain the now?’

  ‘No, he’s going along on the raid,’ Theo said. ‘The plan was to reach the northern farms by late afternoon so they’ll be away by now.’

  ‘Theo, it’s late afternoon now,’ his sister said. ‘What time did you think it was?’

  Theo was startled at this, then alarmed as he fumbled for the watch he kept in an inside pocket. And there it was – 5.23 p.m.

  ‘My God, they’ll be passing the Glensturluson daughter-forest by now. I should have been with them to keep my eyes on Vashutkin!’ He buttoned his jacket. ‘We have to get back to Tusk Mountain – I need to know that nothing has gone wrong, and we need to tell the others about these spies. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

  There was a grimness in Ian’s face, while Solvjeg seemed burdened and pale. ‘That is part of the reason,’ she said. ‘We’re also here to explore a possible pact with a splinter group of the Spiralists. But mainly we’re here to see Greg, if he’s … ’

  ‘That’s another reason for us to hurry back,’ Theo said, summarising what he had learned about how Greg ended up carrying the Zyradin to Nivyesta. Solvjeg relaxed a little on hearing that her son was due back on Darien soon. ‘I know that he’ll be very happy to find you waiting for him, although it must be important for you both to leave the safety of the Hrothgars … ’

  Solvjeg exchanged an anguished look with Ian and Theo knew.

  ‘It’s Ned,’ Ian said. ‘He was one of the ones who died at the boatyard.’

  Theo sighed – Ned, the youngest of the three Cameron boys, Ned the doctor, who was also Ned the poker player and Ned the cartoon-drawer. And Ned the home help for seniors, a side of himself he’d shared only with his uncle. Now gone, effaced, erased.

  I’ll remember you, boy. I’ll fight to keep the memory of yo
u.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ he said.

  Solvjeg made a soft, sad shrugging motion. ‘He’s still in my heart. He’ll always be with me, Theo, so let’s leave this place. It’s getting cold.’

  Wordlessly, he nodded and led them up and out of the darkening valley.

  11

  CHEL

  Robed and hooded, he walked along the valley side, and it was the walk of one whose every movement threatened to unleash pain. The memory of pain was in him, so fresh, so near, so clear that his terror of it made him want to fall down and curl up, but Chel knew how severe his punishment would be so he kept walking. He couldn’t escape the pain or its memory (pain like razor claws hot from the fire, tearing through his throat, his neck, his bowels), yet he had to and the only avenue that offered the slightest chance of it was to obey the commands of the Knight of the Legion of Avatars, perfectly, without hesitation, down to the last detail.

  Rory was walking behind him. Chel was glad that he couldn’t see the Human’s face, glad that he wouldn’t be reminded of his failure, his capitulation, his guilt. Just after they were captured, just a few days ago (Was it five days or six? Seven? Longer?), when they were imprisoned within the autofactory, the spectral Pathmaster had appeared and urged him to embrace the machine-nature in order to defeat it. And at first he had thought it possible that he could conceal his intentions from the Legion Knight but the relentless cycles of drugs and pain conditioning made such plans and intentions meaningless. The implants that tapped into his feeling-paths could create agonising pain anywhere in his body. Under their impact, his conscious sense of self fractured and sank beneath the desperate need to avoid that colossal, mind-wrecking pain.

  The Human Rory was even less able to resist the crushing torment than Chel and had surrendered to the demand for obedience. Back at the start, Chel had been able to sense Rory’s state of mind with his Seer talents, but before long the implants began punishing any use of them with terrible jolts of pain up and down his spine. At some point, during a period of semi-aware delirium, they sealed shut his Seer eyes with some kind of sticky strip but he managed to quickly put it out of mind.

  On they walked, along a path half-overgrown by bushes and long grass still wet from a recent shower. The light was fading into evening greyness and an odd hush hung in the air. The baggy dun robes they wore were dark with dampness from the knees down. Ahead the narrow valley widened and steepened and the undergrowth grew thicker, merging further on with the outlying bushes and trees of a dense forest. More trees dotted the valley sides, jutting from tangled, creeper-wound foliage. The cold, clean sharpness of the air was refreshing after days confined within the metal walls of the autofactory. Chel caught odours of leaf and twig, of rain-speckled blooms and damp earth, all mingling into a song that his senses remembered, a song of life and renewal, the long sweet song of Segrana …

  He stumbled slightly – and was abruptly, frighteningly aware of where he was. The great mass of trees and intertwined growth up ahead was Glensturluson, one of Darien’s seven daughter-forests, havens of the green spirit of Segrana, seed nurseries for the near-countless plant varieties brought from the moon, Nivyesta, repositories of ancient memories and their echoes. Chel could almost hear them calling …

  A hand grasped his shoulder and pushed.

  ‘Keep moving.’

  Without realising it he had stopped dead in his tracks. Fearful, he started walking again.

  ‘I’m watching you,’ said Rory. ‘I was told to watch you in between watching my host, and to watch for weakness. So remember, I’m watching.’

  It was Rory’s voice yet not Rory. After the Human’s sense of self was dismantled by the Legion Knight’s machinery of pain, a twisted lie was smashed into his thoughts. Desperate fear of punitive agony made him cling to that lie, which said that he too was a Knight of the Legion of Avatars whose intellect had been transferred to a Human in order to carry out a vital mission. The implants fed him a stream of background conversations, as if he were overhearing exchanges between other units of the Legion, and messages from Knights and Hunters who were supposedly old friends and battle comrades. The lie was gross, but it offered freedom from torment.

  As they trudged along the path, Chel could feel the weight of the beam pistol swinging in one of the robe’s inside pockets. They knew their targets. Chel was to kill Vashutkin, and Rory was to kill someone called Gideon. That would be the signal for the combats mechs to spring the ambush, surging in from either side of the valley. He was ready to do it and knew he would have to do it or risk an agonising onslaught worse than any memory.

  Often he had dreamed about taking his own life, but the implants were sophisticated enough to detect certain movements and stress signs and to administer discouraging spikes of pain. And there was always the possibility that the Legion Knight himself was monitoring their performance.

  They were just drawing level with the daughter-forest’s lower tree line when Chel heard rustling sounds behind them. Half-turning, he saw two Humans in camouflage rise up from the undergrowth, even as a third appeared in front of them. All were pointing long weapons at them.

  ‘Identify yourselves,’ said the man in front, a nervous youth.

  ‘Just a second,’ said one of the others, who went over to Rory and pushed back his hood. ‘Ja, I thought so – you are Rory McGrain, aren’t you? I saw you back at Tusk Mountain before you went missing.’ He looked over at Chel. ‘And you’ll be the Uvovo Seer, Chel – I saw you once before with that headband over those eyes.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chel, ‘that is who we are.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Rory. ‘We were caught by … the Brolts, but we escaped.’

  ‘You’d best be coming with me,’ said the older scout. ‘I’ll take you both to meet Mr V and the captain. Paul, Gennady, you spread out and carry on down the valley.’

  The sky above the line of ridges and peaks to the west was a clear if fading blue, but a hazy dusk was already settling into the valley when they reached a steep southward ravine a little later. Here at the head of the valley, the daughter-forest loomed tall and dense, and only twenty paces from the path, a place of mist and shadows but also where soft glows and glimmerings were visible through the branches. Chel could feel its presence and hear that echo of Segrana’s song insinuating its way into his senses. Fear gave him the strength to shut it out.

  The darkness of the ravine was relieved only by the few ineka beetles crawling along low branches and the occasional cluster of ulby roots wedged into a dripping notch in the ravine wall. A line of tall Human figures came towards them, towering over Chel, one or two holding lamps angled downwards, others wearing strange goggles with tiny bright dots on their sides. Moments later they were brought before a knot of long-coated Humans. By the light of rod-shaped torches Chel recognised the bearded features of Vashutkin, the Rus politician, his target. He fingered the solid shape of the beam pistol hanging in the inside pocket.

  ‘Rory!’ said Vashutkin in surprise. ‘Good to see you again, my friend. It has not been so happy without you, and the Seer Cheluvahar.’

  Another man stepped into the light, not as tall as Vashutkin but wearing some kind of body armour beneath the waterproof.

  ‘I am Captain Gideon,’ he said in oddly accented Noranglic. ‘I command the Tygran volunteers—’

  ‘For which we are eternally grateful,’ Vashutkin said with irony.

  ‘—and I am concerned about what awaits us east of the valley mouth.’ The Tygran’s gaze swung between them. ‘What can you tell us?’

  For a second Chel expected Rory to come out with a bland denial of all knowledge, but Rory was fixed on Gideon with an unwavering stare. Chel broke the lengthening silence.

  ‘After escaping from the mechs, we reached the valley by gullies and mountain paths. We never went down to the coastal plain.’

  ‘I’m curious,’ Vashutkin said suddenly. ‘Just how did you escape?’

  Chel met the Human’s gaze across the torchlit
space and saw a cold intensity that had not been there before.

  He knows, Chel thought with an abrupt certainty as fear made his chest feel hollow and nauseous. He knows what we are. But fear was not the only sensation coursing through him for beneath it he felt and heard the song of Segrana, calling from the forest.

  ‘The machines kept us in an enclosure of invisible powers,’ Chel said, still holding Vashutkin’s gaze. ‘But last night, during a heavy raindown, one of their devices failed. The machines were frozen, the enclosure was gone so we ran … ’

  Or does he really know? I have to kill this man and Rory has to kill the one called Gideon but … but there is something important about him …

  ‘Luck,’ Vashutkin said. ‘Always useful to have … ’

  But now Rory had the gun in his hand, although still enfolded beneath the baggy robes. Chel moved to his side.

  ‘Rory, friend, you’re looking weary … ’

  And without realising it he reached into his mind and opened the Seer talents while raising a hand to grasp Rory’s upper arm. The Human glanced round at him in fury and was about to speak when the talent flowered. Rory’s eyes unfocused and he staggered. Simultaneously a spike of pain drove down into the right side of his head, a hot needle cutting through his eye socket and the cheek and jaw, then lancing down his neck and into his chest. It blinded him for a moment and reduced all voices to muffled, anxious babble. But the song of Segrana sounded sweet, surging strong and pure. Another spear of agony burst in his chest yet it was dulled, blunted and faded.

  Chel was on hands and knees and Rory was half-prone, half-struggling to disentangle the gun from his robe while suffering jolts of punitive pain. Chel could see how the torment of it made the muscles twist in the Human’s face. Suddenly there were shouts and sounds of weapons fire, then nearby flashes, streams of bright spikes. A broad shape flew out of the upper darkness and landed with a thud and a chorus of metallic whispers. The Humans recoiled, the mech charged, and Chel thought he saw Vashutkin fall back with blood on his face.