The Ascendant Stars (58 page)

At first Theo had felt stirrings of hope that the warpwell had been destroyed, perhaps by a weapon fired from orbit, and that
the bomb Rory was carrying was no longer necessary. Dense clouds had been thrown up, soon to be washed from the air by the continuing downpour. And there had been a pale glow at the heart of the murk which seemed to brighten by the minute. Then a breeze had picked up and torn aside the hazy veil, by which time Theo recognised the icy harshness of the light that now shone forth. He had seen it before, weeks ago when the ancient guardian of the warpwell had seized Robert Horst, the Earthsphere ambassador, and spirited him away. With the dust clouds blown away it was now like a bright column of cold blue radiance aimed straight at the sky.

It was not long after that the armoured cyborg creatures began emerging, black insectile objects that rose up in a trickle that grew to a dense stream of them, flying up through the clouds. There were a few that broke away from the gleaming black torrent but they were visible only for as long as they swooped around the warpwell’s glow.

And now here they were, clambering over mounds of shattered rock, heading for that icy radiance with the Scot called McRae acting as pathfinder. They had come over the ridge that had previously led onto the wide hummocky rise at the rear of the promontory’s summit, only to be confronted with a jagged brink and a thirty-foot drop. Moving south some way, they found some sloping ground which merged into the rubble field into which they ventured.

And always, overhead, that continuous upward cataract of pitiless enemies and the deep hollow rushing moan that it made. How many had poured forth by now? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

Great God or Father Odin or whoever’s in charge, please just let us get there, set the bomb and get out alive
.

‘Yer looking awfy grim, there, chief,’ said Rory. ‘That you run outta baccy?’

‘Worse than that, my lad – I’ve just been thinking of all the good Blackeagle Ale that’s going undrunk at the moment!’

That raised a few laughs.

‘Aye,’ Rory said. ‘And the Greydale whisky going unsipped.’

‘The girls going unkissed!’

One of the Hakon-Haer Norj grinned and waved a pointed finger.

‘The songs going unsung!’

‘
Ja
, and the heads going unpunched and the chairs going unbroken!’

In the ensuing round of belly laughs, Theo almost failed to hear the clicking of metal on stone. Frowning, he turned and spotted a grey insectoid machine the size of a dog leaping from boulder to rock shard and heading straight for McRae. The big Scot saw the warning in the others’ faces before they could shout and he’d unlimbered his cleaver in time to swing it as the Legion mech reached him.

Even as that happened, Theo spotted a second machine and a third, and was hastily bringing the Brolt rifle to bear. Dritt! – they were less than a hundred yards from the warpwell. They couldn’t fail this close!

One of the Stonecutter boys was jumped by yet another two of the machines and he went down with his throat slashed open. The Scots and the Norj were armed with hammers, cleavers, nailguns and shotguns and a group of them set about the ambushers with a will. Theo stayed near Rory and managed to pick off one mech as it dodged and swerved through the rocks. Grinning and laughing manically, he heard the warning shouts too late before something struck him across the shoulders. Knocked off balance, he would have fallen into a dark gap between a boulder and a tilted slab had he not jammed the big rifle between them.

‘Let me down, ye rust heap o’ junk! – if I get ma hands on yir main neural junction and gie it a good yank ye’ll know what hit ye!’

It was a full-sized Legion cyborg, about twenty feet long with various tool arms and tentacles protruding from its oddly starfish-shaped carapace. Rory was struggling in the grip of two smaller arms whose stubby graspers had laid hold of knots of his clothing. He was dragged from the rock shard he had clung to and was
being lifted into the air. Out of nowhere, McRae came running, made a mighty jump and caught hold of the edge of the cyborg’s carapace. The cyborg rose unsteadily, trying to dislodge its unwanted rider with sudden jerks or by fumbling around with one of its tentacle pincers. But McRae dragged himself fully on top of it, holding on grimly for a moment or two before spread-eagling himself across the upper carapace. At this point the cyborg was already moving towards the warpwell and its vertical cascade of invaders.

Regaining his feet, Theo looked around for the others and saw them scattered in twos and threes as they fought on against the Legion mechs. He cursed and began hurrying after the cyborg, trying to move through and across the field of broken rock without being rash. Moments later there was a shout and his eyes snapped up in time to see Rory falling from the cyborg while McRae was struggling in the coils of the machine-creature’s tentacles.

‘Rory!’ Theo bellowed, clambering over the smashed shards and split boulders. ‘Where are you? Tell me you’re alive, boy … ’

‘ … Here … I’m here … ’

Moments later Theo found him, lying at the bottom of a slanted slab of stone about ten yards from the warpwell. His face was pale and one of his arms looked broken but the worst of it was the sharp sliver of rock that had impaled his right leg.

‘ … no’ so good, chief … dinna think I can finish it … ’

‘Lie still and rest,’ Theo said, fumbling for the painkillers in his waist pouch. ‘Here, take these then give me the bomb – I’ll be happy to throw it in for you!’

Rory gave him a strange look as he swallowed the pills then unfastened the small satchel that was strapped to his chest. Theo had not yet seen the spacefold device. It turned out to be three metallic spheres joined by an odd coiling framework that looked and felt like wood. At the centre was an oval indentation into which his thumb might easily fit. Apart from that there were no other visible buttons or controls.

‘So, there is no timer,’ Theo said.

‘S’got tae be set off inside the well,’ Rory said. ‘That’s what the Zyradin told me, and I know fine well what he was on about … and … with all these things still inside me … chief, I really was gonnae do it. I wanted tae do it! After what that bastard machine did … ’

Theo nodded, seeing the tears glistening on the man’s cheeks. ‘So you did remember it.’

‘Oh aye … I remember. All of it.’

Theo felt numb, and a little unbalanced, knowing what had to be done.

‘That’s all right, Rory, my boy. We’ll see this through. We’ll stop … this … ’

Ignoring the trembling in his hands, he unslung the Brolt rifle and laid it down next to Rory. Then he checked that the painkillers had taken effect before lifting Rory’s leg off the spike of rock, which still prompted a string of blistering swear words. Quickly he patched the wounds and bandaged them up, so easily and ably it was as if those old battlefield first-aid skills were resurfacing, making themselves available.

‘Right,’ he said, slipping the spacefold bomb into his own shoulder sack, then getting to his feet to survey the surroundings. The rest of the Stonecutter and Hakon-Haer boys were down to a handful and desperately fighting off another bulkier Legion cyborg that had joined the fight. Even as he stood there, he noticed a few more swooping lower from above, drawn in by the commotion.

‘Stay alive, Rory McGrain,’ he said. ‘And remember – no damned statues! But I wouldn’t mind having a good ale named after me … ’

Then he grinned and said:

‘
Ha det sa bra!
’

Rory raised a clenched fist. ‘
Vi ses
, chief! I’ll be seeing ye! … ’

With that Theo turned and started across the last few yards of smashed rock. The rushing roar was much louder now. As he clambered over rough boulders and yawning gaps he found himself thinking about Donny Barbour, the Ranger captain who had
destroyed two Brolturan interceptors with a hijacked Earthsphere shuttle before being shot down in the skies of Nivyesta. Donny had reminded Theo of himself at that age, cynical enough to be immune to the propaganda yet idealistic enough to get into the fight.

I wish I’d been wise enough to know which fights to stay out of
, he thought.
But if I hadn’t backed Ingram and the Winter Coup had failed, what would I have become? Would I have even ended up here?

That last thought rang through his mind, despite the fear that was rising in him. It would be a lie, he knew, to claim that he had no fear of death but he also knew that there were worse things.

Suddenly he was there, just a few feet from the edge of the warpwell, staring at its brightness from behind a vertical chunk of rock. It seemed wider than when he’d last seen it. The upward torrent of Legion cyborgs was a blurred, flickering wall from which he snatched glimpses of their biomechanical forms. The hurricane moan was deep and oppressive, a basso drone that made his ears buzz faintly.

For a second he squatted there, gazing into the uprushing tumult, mouth dry, heart hammering in his chest. Then he descended from the last jutting shelf of stone and strode over to the well’s edge. He was holding the spacefold bomb in one hand and an unsheathed cleaver in the other. Not pausing, not daring to, he went up to the brink, jumped forward and fell feet first into it.

In those last seconds he felt an unimaginable cold cutting into his legs and back and chest, and with his last breath he howled a furious defiance at the cruelty of the cosmos as his cleaver rose and fell. Then he pressed his thumb into the centre of the bomb.

Lying on the tilted shelf of rock, Rory had balanced the big Brolt rifle on the thigh of his good leg while holding on to the trigger grip with his good hand. He could hear the harsh sighing roar of that vertical river of invaders. Worse, he could actually feel their mass machine presence through the implants still lodged in his
body. It made him wish the stone spike had gone through his side or his arm, not his leg.

It shoulda been me! – no’ the major
…

Then he heard and felt the bomb detonate. The droning roar abruptly turned into a monstrous, senses-shattering screech of tortured metal. Rory flung his head round to see a strung-out tail of Legion cyborgs struggling to climb into the sky against some force that was dragging them back down. Below, the warpwell had become a deadly grinding trap in which scores of the cyborgs were being crammed and crushed together as they were drawn down and compacted, jointed arms hammering, flailing. At the same time a vibrating noise began coming up through the ground, a sound like an airfieldful of running engines blended with about fifty choirs, climbing to a deafening crescendo …

Which was like a vast bubble bursting but instead of the expected explosion it was the opposite, an utter cessation of sound, an expanding shell of tranquillity, an all-pervasive quietus as darkness rushed in.

There was no wind and the rain had stopped. There was no light from the warpwell and in the gloom Rory noticed that all the readouts on the Brolt rifle had died. When the surviving Stonecutter and Hakon-Haer boys found him about ten minutes later they told him that every cyborg and machine within a 500-yard radius had simply keeled over or fallen out of the sky.

When Rory told them about the major, a few went over to inspect the warpwell. Excited voices came back and a couple of them carried Rory over to see what they’d found. Torch beams wavered and revealed an astonishing sight. The huge mass of grinding, compacting cyborgs Rory saw near the end was still there, only they had all been turned into some kind of dark glittering stone.

‘But are they all dead?’ Rory said, then realised that he felt nothing, got no sense of the animated mechanisms they had been.

One of the Stonecutter boys produced a hammer and chisel (‘You brought a hammer and chisel to a fight with mad cyborg aliens?’ was Rory’s comment) and struck off an outstretched
pincer-tipped tentacle. Held up to the torchlight it was clearly stone all the way through.

‘Aye, clinches it, I reckon,’ he said. ‘Anything else?’

‘Oh, wait till ye see this, though,’ said one of the Stonecutters, showing Rory’s helpers the way round the massive, motionless tableau. At one point they stopped and torches were angled down to light up a lower section of the jumbled frozen imagery. When Rory saw what was there his jaw dropped open, then he began to laugh. For there, amongst the press of cyborg forms, caught from the waist up and wielding a stone cleaver was Major Theo Karlsson.

When his laughter, half sorrow and half humour, subsided he reached out and patted a cold grey shoulder.

‘Sorry, chief,’ he said. ‘Looks like yer getting that statue after all!’

The dream-palace was her sanctuary, a calm place of soaring blue pillars, walls sprouting fragrant flowers, drifting veils of mist and carpets of soft, undecaying leaves. A haven for the bodiless distillation of what had once been Catriona Macreadie.

What she had become defied her every attempt at understanding. Was she just an instrument fashioned for the needs and whims of these ancient powers? It seemed that way. The Zyradin’s experiment with that immense piece of ship debris was still fresh in her mind, prompting wild speculation – surely the Zyradin wasn’t planning to use her to seize Hegemony vessels and move them to Segrana. Even stranded on the moon’s surface, such a warship would prove lethal to the surrounding forest. No explanation had thus far been presented to her and now, after all that she’d been through, she just longed for peace and seclusion. The dream-palace, however, was no longer her insulated, isolated refuge – Segrana and the Zyradin were laying siege.