The Ascendant Stars (20 page)

‘Hah! – blew their own generators – they’re up to … Harriman, here they come … agggkk! … ’

Shouts mingled over the comm, with the sergeant bellowing orders, and Robert felt himself being pulled off to one side. Drifting in zero-gee, he spun slowly and saw that he was attached by a flexiline to the female marine, Chuang, who was being pushed towards the shattered windows by a plume of vapour jetting out of a hole in her faceplate. From her lack of movement Robert knew she was dead.

Then he saw the Shyntanil interceptors harrying the long blockish hull of the Earthsphere warship, sitting there, waiting. Realising there was death aplenty waiting out there, he tried to grab at the flexiline only to find that the propod didn’t have gauntlets for the hands, just smooth round stumps. He started yelling for help and was a moment from gliding neatly out of the cryptship when something unseen snagged him.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Bauer – got you … ’

It was Harriman and behind him another three marines. Under this escort he was guided along the null-gravity corridor, now a floating charnel house of Shyntanil bodies, frozen bloodspill and viscera. The pylon angled into the corridor through a mess of bent and burst plating. Robert was pushed into a hatch in the side of it, then hauled up its cramped interior to a large, dimly lit chamber. When the last marine was inside and the hatch was sealed, the sergeant said:

‘
Heracles-ops
, this is Retrieval Alpha – teams and objective safely aboard. Ready to up and out.’

‘Retrieval Alpha, this is
Heracles-ops
– acknowledged. Hold on to something – this could get rough.’

Listening, Robert had to conceal his excitement – he was aboard the
Heracles
, the same ship that had been on station near Darien! But what was it doing here, in the depths of hyperspace?

Everyone was tethering themselves to a stanchion or an anchor point, of which there were many around the ribbed metal walls. Before Robert could ask, Harriman pulled him round so he could see the pair of lines attaching him to the bulkhead.

There was a sudden jolt that Robert felt through the floor, then another.

‘Restraining bolts blown,’ said the sergeant over the comm. ‘Get ready for emergency manoeuvring.’

The inertia hit like a truckful of sandbags slamming him onto the chamber floor and pinning him there – for twenty or so hour-long seconds, relentlessly squeezing the air out of his lungs while his chest muscles laboured and the pressure seemed to be making his eyes bulge …

Until the weight abruptly eased off, leaving Robert and the others gasping for breath as they got to their feet in something resembling standard gravity. A moment later, Robert’s propod suit suddenly lost its shell-like rigidity and flopped down to hang in saggy folds. The head of it went limp, peeled apart and slipped down to his shoulders. Breathing the air, the first smells he noticed were stale sweat and, for some reason, coconut.

Then, without warning, Robert felt the ripple-quiver sensation that usually accompanied a hyperdrive jump. Some of the marines shook clenched fists and grinned and there was a palpable air of relief. A series of thuds then came from the rear bulkhead and an entire section swung inwards. The marine teams, laughing and joking, began to troop through.

‘What now?’ Robert asked the sergeant, now helmetless to reveal short-cropped silver hair.

‘You’re the VIP, Mr Bauer,’ he said. ‘You get to meet the captain and the ambassador so I’m sure a plan will come out of it, eh?’

‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry about Chuang … ’

‘We do our job, Mr Bauer, and Chuang died doing hers.’

The sergeant forestalled any further exchange by indicating the short passage with an ‘after you’ gesture. When Robert reached the T-junction at the other end the familiar stocky figure of Captain Velazquez stepped forward, hand outstretched.

‘Mr Bauer, welcome aboard the
Heracles
.’

Velazquez’s dark green uniform was as immaculate as ever, although there was noticeably more silver in his thick dark hair. Robert almost grinned at the irony of the situation as he shook the man’s hand, recalling his own physical frailty when he was last on board this ship. When it first arrived in orbit around Darien.

‘I am more than happy to be away from the Shyntanil and their death obsession,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help noticing the damage to your ship, however – what happened?’

A strained look came over Velazquez’s features.

‘We suffered a surprise attack while in orbit around the planet Darien. Lost over a seventh of our complement.’ His eyes were hard, flinty. ‘I ordered an emergency jump but halfway through the transition to Tier 2 the drive fields fell out of alignment and we ended up in a very strange … domain, or continuum, with the ship leaking in a thousand places and a half-wrecked hyperdrive. As well as dozens of dead, scores of injured. If it wasn’t for your grand-uncle, Ambassador Horst, and this new ally, the Construct, we’d still be there.’

Grand-uncle?
Robert thought.
How much more
Wahnsinn
can there be?

‘I believe I heard someone talking about me,’ came a voice from behind. Robert composed himself and turned … and yes, it was himself, dressed in a semi-formal suit, strolling unhurriedly towards them. Only it was himself pre-contact with the Construct. This Robert Horst was an unrejuvenated seventy-year-old, white-haired, thin-faced and wrinkled.

‘Grand-Uncle,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you what it means to see you again.’ But his thoughts were whirling, recalling how he had been framed for the assassination of the Brolturan ambassador. From what Robert had heard, third-hand, Velazquez must have
witnessed the immediate aftermath so how had he come to accept and trust this version? – which surely had to be one of the Construct’s sims.

The white-haired ambassador smiled and nodded in just the way he’d seen himself do so in playbacks. An odd shiver passed through him.

‘Rudy, my boy, someone had to pull your chestnuts out of the fire and since I was passing this way anyway … ’ A wider smile. ‘Besides, it seems that you have acquired a vital clue, according to the message probe your ship managed to launch before it self-destructed.’

‘I’m glad it got through, er, Grand-Uncle, really … ’

‘Ambassador,’ interrupted Captain Velazquez. ‘I must return to the bridge to deal with operational problems. Once you’ve debriefed Mr Bauer, I’ll make myself available for planning your next step.’

‘Very good, Captain,’ said the sim. ‘I should be in touch before very long, and again, my thanks.’

As the captain disappeared round the next corner, Robert turned to the Construct sim.

‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘The resemblance is very close.’

‘Not close, exact,’ the sim replied. ‘The Construct went to a lot of trouble building the physical-traits range, not to mention the vocal-spectrum match.’

‘And Velazquez? He was there when I vanished after being framed for the Brolt ambassador’s assassination – how did you get him on your side when you turned up down here?’

‘He never believed the accusation or the reports,’ the sim said. ‘Also, shortly before the Spiral armada attack, he received a recording of the assassination from an American reporter called Macrae, which proved that it was Kuros’s Ezgara commandos who were behind it. Of course, I still had to work on him a bit, especially when it came to explaining how I was spirited away by the Construct, which was keen to make an alliance with Earthsphere. He was impressed when I told him that my personal AI had been surgically removed – well, yours! In the end the most
persuasive card in my hand was the holdful of repair bots with which he was able to save his dying ship. Although it helps that there’s no way he can contact any Earthsphere bases up through the levels of hyperspace. Now, however, I would like to lead this conversation onto more pressing matters and in a less public venue.’

The ambassador sim’s room was on the officer quarters deck. On the way there, the sim informed Robert that he did in fact have a grand-nephew called Rudy Bauer, who was the grandson of his younger brother, Werther. Robert found himself struggling to recall Werther’s face. A niggling suspicion rose and would not subside.

The room was spacious and shadowy, broken by pools of subdued light from wall-niche downlights or small table lamps. After a vapour shower and a change of clothing into a casual grey-blue two-piece, Robert settled into a low-backed easy chair, sipping a glass of some brandy analogue as he gathered his thoughts. From across a nearby lamp-illuminated decorative table, the ambassador sim regarded him.

‘When you last saw the Construct,’ Robert said, ‘did you encounter my daughter, Rosa?’

‘There are several versions of Rosa working for the Construct in a range of capacities,’ the sim said. ‘I did speak with one or two.’

‘I’ve found myself wondering if she still reads her favourite book,
Butterfly Wave
.’

The older sim smiled. ‘I think you meant
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. Was that a test?’

‘The consequence of habitual caution,’ Robert said. ‘My apologies.’

‘I take no offence,’ said the sim. ‘I saw the report you gave to the Construct. Your account of the Tanenth virtual planet was fascinating.’

There was a pause. Robert smiled.

‘But you deduced that I wasn’t being entirely forthcoming.’ He shrugged. ‘I was uncertain about some of the things the Tanenth
machine told me … well, not so much uncertain as overwhelmed. I couldn’t help but see it all, that defiance of colossal power, that mass suicide, in the context of my daughter Rosa’s death.’

He downed the rest of the brandy in a single, pleasurably sharp gulp.

‘The Tanenth wanted to live,’ he went on. ‘I’m sure of it, but the Godhead was all of their world, alpha and omega, mother and father. And Rosa wanted to live, with all the life that was in her, but she knew that there were principles that she had to live up to. Risks that she had to take in the hope of forcing the Hegemony to alter or delay its war deployments. In both cases, the risks went against them.’

‘So the Tanenth machine told you something else before sending you on your way.’

‘Something incredible and bizarre,’ Robert said, cradling the empty glass in his hands. ‘The machine said that the Godhead has an immense physical presence yet its location has been hidden for millions of years, deep in the abyss levels of hyperspace, shielded by mazes of psi-traps and altered physical laws. Over great spans of time, the Godhead’s mind has developed meta-quantal abilities that now allow it to extend beyond the boundaries of its hyperspace lair. Its consciousness, and parts of its subconscious, now literally stretch across several neighbouring levels around which a number of entry points are scattered.’

‘Entry points?’ said the ambassador sim. ‘To the Godhead’s lair or to its mind?’

‘I didn’t have time to question the machine before my abrupt departure,’ Robert said. ‘But my guess is that they allow access to both its mind and its real-world physical presence. Orders have to reach its underlings and I’m sure that the Godhead’s conscious awareness would demand face-to-face manifestations of its authority.’

‘A plausible conjecture but still conjecture nevertheless,’ the sim said. ‘Did the Tanenth machine give you directions to any of them?’

‘Yes,’ said Robert, taking a pen and paper from a table niche.
The Tanenth machine had impressed upon his mind a sequence of symbols, along with the sound, the shape and the smell he had to recall to unlock them. After some moments he began to write, carefully reproducing the symbols as he saw them in his mind’s eye. This was the information that the cryptship’s torturer had mistakenly thought was passed to him by the Shyntanil renegades. Once they were all down, he passed the finished sequence to the sim.

The sim frowned and looked closer at the slip of paper. ‘A very ancient script,’ he said. ‘No, it is actually a later variant from the Gha’Voh era … ’

‘Does it give a location?’

‘Oh yes, right in the Abyss, Tier 275, possibly … ’

‘Possibly?’

‘Assuming that it has not been compacted into another tier. But we’ll get there, certainly – I just need to make some adjustments to the upgrades I fitted to the
Heracles
’ drive.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘Seven, eight hours.’ The sim of his younger, older self stood, folding the slip of paper away in a pocket. ‘Have you thought on your tactics?’

‘Not sure. Since I’ve no idea what I’ll be facing, is there any point in preparation at all? As I see it, all I could reasonably expect to achieve is to infiltrate as far as safely possible, gather any useful information then find a way back out.’

‘How do you escape from the mind of a god?’

Robert shrugged. ‘The way in might also be the way out, but that seems too rational for some internal psyche-terrain. I’ll just have to wait and see.’

The ambassador sim nodded. ‘Very well. I shall take the course data to the captain and translate it for him. In the meantime I recommend that you get some rest. Your low alertness levels suggest that you need it.’

Seven and a half hours of unbroken sleep later he was woken by a soft but insistent chiming. As he sat up the room apologised for disturbing him but said that Captain Velazquez was requesting his
presence on the bridge. After another brief dip into the shower, he was told where to find the food unit and a fresh set of clothing. He dressed then went over some notes he’d made from consulting the room’s info terminal. A short while later he emerged from the ambassadorial suite in armourless combats, a jacket and leggings in a heavy dark blue material.