The Orphaned Worlds (82 page)

<92.6 per cent?>

>Unforeseen factors, Illustrious One. In the event that the inversion attempt fails, it is our recommendation that you dispatch another Scion to carry out the task>

The Knight watched as his Scions used the well’s patterns to bring it up to full activation. The various stone blocks and pieces of equipment abruptly vanished into the dazzling, churning maw. Even here, floating on his suspensors above ground, he could feel that dragging force, that insensate hunger. Yet even as fearful as it was now, when controlled by the full bioentity of a Forerunner citadel world it could reach out into space almost a light year away and drag any enemy down its throat.

Then one of the Scions floated out over the burning bright portal and plunged in. The Knight was receiving a video feed which lasted less than two seconds before cutting out. A minute and thirty seconds later the second Scion followed. The Knight’s attention was split between the stream of data coming from the warpwell chamber, and the view from Giant’s Shoulder as the sun edged up over the horizon. Then the datastream suddenly spiked with state-change information … and the Knight
felt
it, felt the warpwell’s alteration ripple outwards from Giant’s Shoulder. He was sure that even if he had been miles away just then, he would still have felt the alteration. As for how long the inversion wave would take to reach the bottom of the Abyss, that was indeterminate, three or four days, perhaps, then the same for any survivors to make the ascent.

But one thing was utterly certain – a hundred millennia after that ignominious defeat, the Legion was returning from the Abyss.

EPILOGUE

CHEL

Cold and tireless, the pulse of machinery regulated all functions within the autofactory. The extraction of base material from the forest floor, the preparation, the conversion, the schedule of power allocations, the finely coordinated production process, the internal repair and monitoring systems, the external service racks. And the special project section, a chamber provided with environment control and arrays of surgical equipment that hung over a scoured metal plinth flanked by recesses. In two of them, still forms lay, lifesigns readouts blinking nearby. One was Human, his open yet blank eyes darting to and fro after invisible things while his lips moved but made no sound. The other, a Uvovo, lay still with his eyes, all six of them, closed, his face calm and expressionless while his chest rose and fell unhurriedly. Both bore evidence of surgery and at their necks, shoulders and upper limbs the skin had been replaced by panels of some grey, flexible material.

Behind those closed eyes, Chel hung in a kind of delirium, his semi-aware self swaying between despair, pain and the temptation to surrender to the malign machine fragments now invading his body. He could feel how they were meant to merge with his flesh, with the feeling-paths and the thought-paths, and he had so far resisted. This had resulted in a persistent fever and a steady weakening of his forces. Chel had nothing left except the willpower to resist, and even that might not shield him from any use of drugs. He just regretted not being able to help Rory escape.

Thinking to take one more look at the Human, he forced his awareness to focus on the physical so that he could at least open an eye or two. Pain flooded in from the nine separate implant wounds but he endured it as he opened his ordinary eyes.

The compartment was essentially a large metal box harshly lit from a single source. Except that just now it was blinking erratically, more than enough to reveal the opaque, fold-draped and cowled form of the Pathmaster floating next to the surgical table.

‘Great Elder, I … am I imagining this?’

‘Your birth eyes are open, Cheluvahar, and your senses are seeing and hearing me.’

‘Am I dying, Great Elder?’

‘There is no death, but it may be that the universe will offer you a new path. Many dark and terrible possibilities are emerging from the seething no-time of the future into the dim periphery of becoming-time. The turn of events has benefited our adversaries and laid a still-greater burden of necessity on your shoulders.’

‘But Great Elder, I am their captive and …’

‘Hear this! – a Knight of the Legion of Avatars, the same one that you were tracking, has taken possession of the Waonwir and activated the warpwell, reversing its flow. It will take at least three days for the change to reach that dark, deep prison in the Abyss and as long for any Legion survivors to travel up its full length. It may be that only you and this Human will be able to prevent it.’

Chel was stunned, and irritated that somehow stopping this terrifying event was his responsibility while his mind and body were being eaten away piece by piece.

‘Please, Great One, can you help us escape? If I can just get free of the mechanisms and the implants …’

‘But Cheluvahar, you must not fight but accept. You must embrace the machine in order to defeat it!’

This time he felt a wave of anger.

‘How can this be? I am to become one of that monster’s mechanical slaves in order to …’

‘I see that you are yet to be convinced. Seer – attend!’

Chel’s sight flared suddenly, then cleared to reveal a dark, over-cast scene, an expanse of skeletal trees set in a blackened landscape, a charred Darien. But as his vantage point began to drift across this gloomy forest he saw that they were trees of metal, and that tunnels sloped down into the roots. Human and Uvovo came and went from below but their faces were blank and their bodies were patchworks of sickly skin and artificial grey. Chel saw immediately that the metal forest was a depraved parody of Segrana, a cruel copy stripped of natural life. Meanwhile, the vision still glided onwards until he reached the hills and ridges east of the Kentigerns. Further on was the coastal plain, a scarred and poisoned desolation, and when he turned to look at Giant’s Shoulder there was nothing there. The upper section of the promontory was gone, leaving the chamber of the warpwell open to the skies. Clouds darkened, rain fell, thunder rumbled …

Abruptly he was back in the recess, in the metal compartment, a prisoner and experimental subject, yet not alone.

‘Hard as it is to believe,’ said the Pathmaster, ‘there are other far grimmer futures gathering, ones where implacable tyrannies wage pitiless wars that consume the stars.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ Chel said brokenly.

‘Use the talents Segrana gave you,’ the Pathmaster said. ‘And use them with cunning and guile. Accept the machine implants but use the eyes of the Seer to see and change. Observation alters what is observed.’

Pain gnawed at Chel’s neck, arms and chest, as he looked across at poor Rory, his darting eyes and restless head.

For Rory I will do this, he thought.

‘Many, many others will be spared lives-like-death if you succeed.’

‘But new potential is then created,’ Chel suddenly realised. ‘Potential for good and evil.’

‘Which those yet to be shall have to face, Cheluvahar. You can only face today’s challenges.’

And like mist melting away, the Pathmaster was gone. Chel regarded Rory, locked into machine-made delusions, then opened his Seer’s eyes and directed their unveiling gaze inwards.

JULIA

Cool, blank emptiness stretching out, silent and indivisible, was all she could see.

She remembered being carried to the virtuality chamber, limp from the sedation patches, almost laughing as they put her in the tank and hooked her up to the bioreg web. Then they’d activated the cortical interface field, and the laughing and the tank and Talavera’s face and sensation all went away.

And then there was this, only now that she thought about it, the cool blank emptiness wasn’t quite blank and not entirely empty. An indistinct dividing line passed across it, gradually taking on definition and contrast, as well as perspective. It was a horizon, with dark grey above and something textured below, a sea, she realised, at the same time as she felt a sense of presence.

So this is their virtuality
, she thought.
Is it responsive or adaptive? I wonder if I can consciously modify the context
.

She dug through her memories for childhood moments, like the summer holiday to an Enhanced residence by the sea, along the coast from Hammergard. The place had its own fenced-off stretch of beach, complete with sand and rock pools. She remembered warm sand between her toes, the cold and slippery feel of pebbles underfoot while paddling in the shallows, the acrid smell of washed-up tube-kelp. And when she opened her eyes (which suddenly she had) there it was, the shallows of a wide, placid sea and yes, she was paddling along, barefoot but otherwise wearing a blue checked shirt and yellow slacks rolled up to the knees.

A figure was strolling along the beach towards her. The beach was a sloping expanse of even, pale sand scattered with small stones and fragments of driftwood. As the newcomer drew near, she saw that it was Corazon Talavera, attired in red and carrying a parasol.

‘Very pretty,’ she said. ‘Although I kinda imagined that your metacosm would be, hmm, a bit more practical, like Konstantin’s laboratory.’ She uttered a low whistle. ‘Thing is like a city, it’s huge.’

By now the sky had brightened to an even summer blue. There was no actual sun but there was a soothing ambient glow that Julia quickly found irritating. That aside, she said nothing, just splashed her toes gently in the shallows (now dressed with rocks and pebbles), stirring up little billows of sand particles.

‘I liked your last escape attempt, by the way.’ Talavera chuckled. ‘Reassigning your room as storage and a storage closet as your confinement. I suppose the next stage involved the movement of large cargo cases from here to there and ending in one of the shuttles.’

Julia gave a cold smile. ‘I expect you found my polymote.’

‘Uh huh, and the one on timed deactivation. See? – I know how you wily Enhanced types think.’ She shrugged. ‘But all that is behind us now. Despite all your plots and sabotage, you are here in my virtuality to work for me.’

There were a number of clouds near the horizon. Talavera made a gentle beckoning gesture and the clouds rushed towards the shore, growing huge and dark. They all merged into one immense, sprawling bruised continent of cloud, looming and ominous. Then the ground fell away as Julia and Talavera rose into the air, passing through veils of intricate vapour to a point overseeing the great cloudscape. Only now, up close, she could see that the cloud was composed of numbers and symbols and fragments of symbols and hanks of fine tendrils linking them all together, with myriad glittery flecks strewn all through it. Out of curiosity Julia reached out to touch a nearby shining speck … and a burst of condensed data sprang into her mind, the gravity gradation effects of one planet on another in a five-planet system, full statistics laid out in tabular and graphic depictions …

Then it was gone.

‘Five hundred worlds,’ Talavera said with a theatrical sweep of the arm that encompassed the vast cloud. ‘Fully detailed information on their astrogational coordinates on a specific future date, complete with true-path trajectories and velocities, in-system gravity matrix, and plenty of etcetera!’ She glanced at Julia with one of her twinkly, malicious smiles. ‘That’s only a hundred worlds each, and all you have to do is use that admirable brain to produce course data similar to your recent success.’

Julia stared at her. ‘Course data for more missiles?’

‘I’ve got five hundred of them and they ain’t gonna get to their target by themselves.’

Struck by the enormity of Talavera’s suggestion, she fell silent.

‘Look, it’s not what you think,’ Talavera went on. ‘This isn’t meant to be some high-profile mass slaughter – it’s all precision attacks on specific pro-Hegemony actors, monoclan nobles, military industrialists, cultural influencers, pro-war politicians, interrogators, and plenty of other unsavoury types. And you may be interested to know that most of your associates are already hard at work, without any need for a dose of the magic nano-dust. Apart from Thorold – he needed a little persuading.’

At some unseen signal, Julia descended through the dark data cloud, returning to the shore, to the shallows of an electric sea.

‘You do have a choice, I suppose,’ said Talavera. ‘But there’s not much to it since you’ll end up doing the work anyway.’

Now Talavera was dressed in black while a couple of strange snakelike things wound and writhed about her feet. They seemed to have no faces or sense organs and the closer Julia looked the more it seemed as if they were made of dense, dark smoke.

‘Think it over,’ Talavera said. ‘You’ve got an hour – well, subjectively anyway!’

And with a laugh, she and her black snakes were gone.

Some choice
, Julia thought.
Which is no choice at all
.

And all that stuff about targeting pro-Hegemony types just sounded like a calculated lie that, coupled with the remark about Thorold, was supposed to weaken her resolve. Yet she felt like smiling, or even skipping along the shore and kicking up the water.

Because it now looked very certain that they hadn’t found the very last polymote, which she had hidden in her hair before they came for her.

Soon it will reactivate, she thought. Then we’ll see who really has a choice!

THEO

He was on the bridge of the Starfire when it entered Darien orbit. Sensors were completing their sweeps of the planet’s extra-orbital sphere, but many shocking details had been apparent from the moment they’d dropped out of hyperspace at the edge of the system. The huge Brolturan battleship, the Purifier, had been destroyed by a thermonuclear weapon – some of the twisted wreckage was still circling the planet, hurled along widely differing orbits by the force of the explosion. There were also signs of a second similar attack, but the attributable debris did not indicate a similar obliteration.

Theo knew that this debris had to be from the Earthsphere ship, the
Heracles
. Any strategy to move against Darien would logically involve neutralising such warships, but it did raise the question of the
Heracles
’ whereabouts. Had it retreated to somewhere else in the system, or did it somehow escape into hyperspace? Or had a failing orbit sent it plunging down into the atmosphere, burning up as it did so? He shuddered at the thought.