The Ascendant Stars

by Cobley, Michael

  But the drugs were muffling his senses again, numbing the complaints from his stomach, surging steadily up into a great warm heavy wave that just rolled over him, tumbling him into a glittering darkness …

  Voices woke him the next time, along with the trundle of wheels and the rattle of implements. He listened with eyes closed.

  ‘ … why is this one kept from the caul? It’s ripe for it … ’

  ‘Orders from the Greatlords – Humans are now to be held for our Vor brothers, for their uses … ’

  ‘Pauch! – mindeater scum – not my brothers! No honour, bad fate … ’

  ‘Bad fate if Old Irontooth hears your whining … ’

  Vials clinked and moments later a torpid tide poured through his veins, tingling then numbing and smothering …

  CHEL

  In wounded dreams he wandered. It seemed that he could see through the daughter-forest’s dense foliage to the rough lands beyond, and through them to the furthest corners of the Human colony. In his vudron dream, all seven of the daughter-forests were visible and curiously close – a short walk could take him to Ibsenskog in the south or Tapiola in the north. The entire landscape of the colony was visible in vibrant colours rich with detail: the towns and cities as much as the tracks and woods of the coastal farmlands.

  Yet the daughter-forests had a special quality to them, a faint aura of power and mystery, even poor, half-burned and abandoned Buchanskog east of Hammergard. The cold waves of the Korzybski Sea stretched eastwards, while to the west lay Giant’s Shoulder, then a maze of ridges and ravines and the foothills of the Kentigerns, their jagged peaks marching west and north. And scattered among the vales and gorges, south along the Savrenki range and north across the vast Forest of Arawn, were the glows of burrows, ancient Uvovo chambers built during the time of Segrana-that-was.

  He had visited one many days ago, soon after the Seer husking, and recollection of its dusty interior came back with surprising clarity and force. The vudron dream was lucid yet easily swayed – between one moment and the next he went from the hazy, sunny paths of a daughter-forest to the dry, gritty gloom of that underground burrow. Scholar Trem, the Uvovo in charge then, approached from one side, his plain brown robe streaked with dust.

  ‘Keeper,’ he said. ‘This is the seedpod of battle. You must bring the Eyes.’

  ‘I am not the Keeper,’ Chel said. ‘The Human Catriona is the Keeper of Segrana.’

  ‘The Keeper of Umara,’ Trem said, ‘must bring the Eyes to the seedpods of battle.’

  Suddenly they were standing in the chamber of living roots beneath the roothouse. Scholar Trem raised a cupped hand over a thick root embedded in the wall, tipped it and let a stream of glowing blue motes fall onto the root. They sank into the moist green and black woody skin and soon a flickering blue tracery spread along to branching rootlets and to the other rootsworks until the chamber was full of pure blue light.

  With a sudden intake of breath he awoke in the darkness of the vudron. It was utterly quiet and stiflingly warm. He could smell the wood of the vudron pod and the odour of his unwashed fur, yet with his Seer talents he could sense the daughter-forest outside, the brimming swirl of its denizens, and the sweet undercurrent of Segrana’s song.

  And something else. He rose from the low bench, half-crouching, and felt something fall to the floor. He pushed open the oval door and green-tinged light poured in, revealing seven or eight lengths of pale grey plastic lying at his feet, trailing clusters of hair-fine fibres. Chel smiled with relief – the vudron dreams had helped his body reject the Legion Knight’s implants.

  Outside, he found himself standing on a high, midlevel branch, veiled in curtains of leaves and vines. A young male of the Warrior Uvovo handed him a leaf bowl of cold, fragrant water. Grateful, he drained it in a single gulp then went in search of the faint dissonance that he had heard through the interweave of songs.

  He found Rory’s vudron on a lower branch round the other side of the immense tree. A female Unburdener, cloaked and hooded, inclined her head as Chel approached. The woody shell of the chest-high vudron was dark and rough, its upper surface bearing patches of moss, while the edges of the doorway were smooth with use.

  Gingerly he put out a hand to the vudron, lightly brushing the wood with his fingertips – fire, choking smoke, wheeling stars – and quickly snatched them back. Rory seemed to be in the grip of a powerful and vivid dream of destruction. Reflecting upon his own vudron vision, Chel wondered if Rory was coping with the intensity and the resulting turbulence of thought.

  Perhaps I can help him face it all, he thought. Perhaps even help his healing.

  He reached out to touch the vudron and again saw …

  Fire was burning in a recess in the wall of a narrow corridor. Smoke hung in a hazy layer and a shaven-headed Human male coughed hoarsely as he rushed up to the fire with a small extinguisher and unleashed its contents. All sound, though, was muffled, even the man roaring in agony in a small chamber off to the right, where the floor was spattered with blood. Chel turned away, horrified and confused, and a cloud of smoke and steam engulfed him for a moment.

  When it cleared he was standing on the upper section of a medium-sized, split-level room that narrowed towards a wide, curved window beyond which starry night swung and spun. There were several Humans there, among them Gregory Cameron, deep in discussion with another Human male, and down on the lower level was Rory, who seemed uninvolved in what was going on. Faces were smeared with ash and expressions were grim. Then Rory at last spotted Chel and ascended to join him.

  ‘Chel! – what are you doing in ma dream?’ Rory grinned. ‘Pretty amazing, eh? And they nyaffs back at the mountain think I’ve nae imagination!’ Then his voice lowered as he leaned closer. ‘Listen, did we … were we gonnae do a job for that big Legion cyborg bastard? – I mean, did we escape or did we … ye know, betray the others?’ He swallowed. ‘Are we dead?’

  Chel shook his head. ‘We’re not dead, Rory, and we managed not to betray the other Humans, although the mechs still carried out their ambush. We are under the protection of a Uvovo daughter-forest, and it is healing you while you sleep.’

  Rory was visibly relieved. ‘God, I was thinking the worst, there. So why am I getting this weird dream? I mean, there’s Greg but I can wave and shout and jump up and down but he disnae bat an eyelid … mind you, they’re all like ghosts, cannae touch anybody … ’

  ‘That may be the answer,’ Chel said, glancing up at the Human. ‘This may not be a dream – it may be happening right now.’

  Rory suddenly looked worried. ‘But that means he’s on a busted ship in the middle of a battle … ’

  Without warning a hand grasped Chel’s shoulder and pulled him. It was Scholar Trem, standing next to that thick gleaming root running the length of a stone wall, while the stonework of the root chamber blurred into the structure of the ship’s bridge.

  ‘You must bring the Eyes to the seedpod of battle, Cheluvahar,’ Trem said, regarding him with a piercing gaze. ‘Bring them from beneath the mountain.’

  Then abruptly he was back on the branchway, standing before the vudron in which Rory dreamed true visions.

  ‘When he awakes,’ Chel told the Unburdener sentry, ‘tell him that I know it was no dream.’

  With that he left, heading down the main trunk’s spiral steps to a rope gantry that would take him back towards that southward ravine. To the south were the Kentigerns and Tusk Mountain within which lay the Hall of Discourse and the Sentinel. Instinct mingled with his Seer talents and said this is where you must go. Now.

  THEO

  It was well into the night when the first survivors of the mech ambush arrived back at Tusk Mountain. An exhausted handful of men carrying two seriously wounded, one of them a Tygran, both needing immediate attention. Solvjeg and her son Ian volunteered to help and Theo was happy to accept the offer, hoping that by keeping them busy their minds would not dwell so much on Greg’s absence.

  When th
e three of them had returned from the stony, wooded vale where Theo’s unsuccessful assassin now lay dead, it was to a Tusk Mountain base rife with rumour and torn by argument. Earlier, the Tygran squad left behind by Gideon had picked up a brief signal from their ship, the Starfire, saying that Greg Cameron was unable to leave the ship due to enemy action. When the Tygrans also began to overhear fragmentary battle communications from near space, this provoked dark, wild speculation throughout the corridors.

  Then a garbled message had been received from Gideon’s comm officer, who said they were under attack moments before he suddenly shrieked in agony and the signal went dead. This turned the prevalent uneasy speculation into a mood barely short of panic. Theo was quick to impose authority and calm, backed by his remaining Diehards. Everyone had to calm down, steady their nerves and their resolve – and to be ready for when the wounded started arriving. Despite some muttering, the personal tack seemed to work and the panic subsided.

  As he watched his sister and his nephew help stretcher the injured along to the sickbay, he thought again about their tense, cheerless mood, reasoning that Ned’s death must have had a tragic element. Perhaps he should have been somewhere else when the boatyard went up, or some chance event had led him to the wrong place at the wrong time. Certainly he had witnessed enough incredible coincidences to half-believe that the machinery of the cosmos had a ‘black irony’ setting which inflicted random synchronicities on hapless thinking beings and left them to rise or fall by their consequences. Theo preferred that to the ethos of a watching, activist deity, be it Odin or the Christian God – any god that would deliberately inflict suffering didn’t deserve praise, in his view.

  Less than an hour later Captain Gideon arrived with most of the raiding party survivors, of whom a third were walking wounded. But no Vashutkin.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to him,’ the Tygran said as they went with the injured to the sickbay. ‘He was there, quite close to me, while we were questioning the newcomers … ’

  ‘Newcomers?’

  ‘Yes, Major, your people recognised them. A Uvovo called Chel, and a colonist called McGrain, I think.’

  Theo laughed. ‘Rory – so he’s still alive! Are they with you?’

  ‘I lost track of them after the mechs attacked,’ said Gideon. ‘But there was something not right about them. As I heard it, Cameron was almost captured aboard one of your balloon boats after being lured to a hilltop by radio contact with the one named McGrain. Well, after we fought off the ambush, and they were nowhere to be seen, they seemed likely candidates as assassins. However, Vashutkin is also missing, which arouses my suspicion.’

  ‘I find it hard to believe that Chel and Rory would let themselves be used as assassins,’ Theo said. ‘Vashutkin on the other hand has dark corners that make me uneasy.’ He described the reasons for his suspicions and fears that the Rus had been infected with the blue dust.

  ‘Are you saying that the Hegemony has been using Blue Chain here on Darien?’ Gideon said.

  ‘Greg told me it was a blue dust,’ Theo said. ‘I see that you know about this stuff.’

  ‘Oh yes, Major. As a soldier I can appreciate its intelligence-gathering uses, but as a Tygran citizen I find it repugnant.’ Gideon crossed his arms and looked gloweringly thoughtful. ‘What you say about Vashutkin makes me more inclined to suspect him of being a pawn of that Legion Knight creature. However, a rational appraisal would demand more convincing proof. To that end, we should convene in an hour with your sister and her son and hear their testimony on the matter. We’ll also assess what went wrong today. In the meantime, Major, you’ll excuse me while I tend to my men.’

  In the event it was several hours before Theo could get everyone round the same table. Stragglers from the ambush arrived in ones and twos and only after the last of them had been sedated, medicated or operated on was it possible to lead his sister Solvjeg away to quarters in the southern sublevel. A nearby chamber had been laid out for the meeting and some twenty minutes later Theo and Captain Gideon were sitting across from Solvjeg and Ian Cameron. Greg’s brother had had a shave and a change of clothing, which if anything emphasised his gauntness. A beaker of water poured from the table jug sat untouched before him.

  Also in attendance was Listener Weynl, looking weary yet alert. Seated on a raised chair, he was able to face everyone at eye level.

  Gideon began by addressing Solvjeg.

  ‘Frauwas Cameron, the major has made me aware of the death of your youngest son. Please accept my condolences for your loss.’

  ‘Thank you for your kind words, Captain,’ she said. ‘Has there been any further news about Gregory?’

  ‘My communications officer has been unable to re-establish contact with my ship,’ said the Tygran. ‘Unfortunately it appears that all offworld communications across this region are being jammed by the facility on Giant’s Shoulder. But according to the meagre sensor data we’ve been able to gather, it seems that there is a skirmish taking place in near-Darien space. Several vessels are involved and combat exchanges appear to have shifted further outward, beyond high orbit. We continue to monitor the situation as best we can but details are difficult to ascertain.’

  On hearing this, the lines in Solvjeg’s face deepened and she closed her eyes.

  Well done, Captain, Theo thought. Is that a Tygran attempt at being supportive and morale-boosting?

  ‘Sister,’ he said. ‘I told the captain here about the boatyard bombing, and what you said about infiltrators … ’

  ‘Yes, and I am now sure that they come from that nest of rogue droids,’ Solvjeg said angrily. ‘On Giant’s Shoulder, the same monsters which brought down destruction on your men, Captain, and which sent a spy into your midst. We saw the possessed host that accompanied my brother’s captor. The internal mind-struggle was plain as could be.’

  ‘The major tells me that the infiltrators you intercepted off in the Eastern Towns had visible implants, yet this host which suicided had none. Correct?’

  Solvjeg nodded.

  ‘Then it seems likely that our spy’s origin is different from those you encountered.’ Gideon sat back in his chair. ‘I have seen the effects of Blue Chain and the effects you describe correspond to the use of too little. The machine-molecule particulates take time to build, especially when they have to replicate themselves within a host, so what you saw were the results of a Blue Chain collective too few in number to effectively dominate their host, resulting in the indecision and mental instability.’

  ‘And this Blue Chain definitely would originate with the Hegemony?’ said Ian Cameron.

  ‘Without a doubt,’ said Gideon. ‘The Hegemony ambassador, this Kuros, who is currently residing in the Brolturan enclave north of Trond. Our planned strike against the Spiralist stockades would liberate nearby villages and Trond itself, making it easier to mount an attack on the Brolturans. Reports say that they have a hangar full of assault flyers and gunships, just what we need to take on Giant’s Shoulder.’ He frowned. ‘Of course, attacking that enclave would be very difficult, and if Brolturan reinforcements arrive then all our plans will be of no consequence.’

  ‘There may be an alternative,’ Ian Cameron said.

  Theo leaned forward. ‘You mentioned the possibility of an alliance with a splinter group of Spiralist zealots.’

  Ian nodded. ‘One of their leaders came to us and offered the help of his faction in any attack on Giant’s Shoulder. He told me that the prophet lied, and that an alien machine is now in control up there.’

  The Uvovo, Listener Weynl, cleared his throat. ‘This alien machine is actually a creature known as a Knight of the Legion of Avatars. It landed on Darien some days before the Spiral armada’s invasion. Our Seer Cheluvahar was following this vile creature through Greathome Forest – as you call the Forest of Arawn – for several days before he was captured by it. As Rory had been earlier.’

  Gideon glanced at Theo. ‘So when we met them on the way north, they could well have
been enslaved by this Knight of the Legion.’ He glared at the Uvovo. ‘My men claim to have heard rumours that this thing is an ancient enemy of the Uvovo – is this so? And what is the truth about the Forerunner installation within Giant’s Shoulder? – it has been described to me as a malfunctioning matter transporter but I cannot see the Hegemony or their Brolturan pets expending this amount of effort over something that does not work. In the meantime, this Knight of some Legion now seemingly controls it, supported by an army of combat mechs. A satisfactory explanation would be most helpful.’

  Theo and Listener Weynl exchanged a look, almost by chance. Theo decided to respond first.

  ‘Captain, you are correct – there is more to Giant’s Shoulder than what you have seen or heard. There is a Forerunner artefact inside it, a warpwell. The first time I saw that chamber and that well with the light pouring out of it … an amazing sight, I can tell you. But yes, as I recall it, the warpwell is really the front door of a prison, a prison in hyperspace, y’see, and … ’

  ‘If I may, Major Karlsson,’ said Listener Weynl. ‘Might I tell the tale from our side?’

  ‘Certainly, Weynl, go ahead.’

  ‘Captain Gideon,’ said the Uvovo. ‘The Legion of Avatars was the last great enemy faced by the ancient Forerunners. They swept across the star-rivers in vast numbers, hundreds of millions, laying waste to entire civilisations. To fight them, the Ancients caused warpwells to be built on a hundred worlds – Giant’s Shoulder, which we call the Waonwir, is the location of one such device. At the height of that last immense battle the warpwells snatched every enemy machine and creature and dragged them down uncountable, immeasurable distances, thrust them into the light-less, frozen chasms beneath the deepest underdomains … ’

  ‘They were imprisoned in the abyss of hyperspace,’ Theo explained. ‘All except one, a Legion Knight, a kind of armoured cyborg.’