The Ascendant Stars_Book Three of Humanity's Fire

by Michael Cobley

  ‘Is this how you conduct yourselves every time you meet strangers, Commander Wade?’ Greg said. ‘With insults and arrogance? I mean, isn’t that a wee bit risky when you don’t know what these strangers are capable of?’

  Wade gave a contemptuous smile.

  ‘I’ve been aboard that ship, Commodore, and I am thoroughly acquainted with its capabilities.’

  ‘Aye, but are ye sure, Commander? I’m guessing that you’ve got some long-range sensors on that scary warwagon of yours so why don’t you scan this vessel and its vicinity … okay? Found any clues?’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Greg saw Ash shake his head as a line of text appeared on the couch holopanel – That shielded weapon bluff won’t work on Wade.

  Quickly Greg keyed back – New intruders, new bluff – then resumed talking to the Tygran, who had been conferring with one of his officers.

  ‘I’ll clear up the mystery for you, Commander Wade,’ he said. ‘What you’re detecting are ionised particles from a ship drive. Not ours, although it is a vessel under my command.’

  ‘There are no other ships in this system, apart from mine and yours,’ said Wade. ‘And in less than six minutes, when you come within range of my main batteries, there shall be only mine.’

  ‘Okay, Commander, since we’re getting along so well, I feel I should warn you that you are being tracked by another two ships of the Darien Navy, concealed by cloaking technology … ’

  ‘Spare me your pathetic, desperate lies. Surrender or face destruction!’

  ‘ … specifically two Karlsson-class jump-destroyers with much greater firepower than this ship carries.’ Driven by the adrenalin of the crazed corner that he’d got himself into, Greg put on a wide, unbalanced grin. ‘I mean, ye didn’t think I was gonnae sit here on the firing line without some serious reinforcements, did ye?’

  For the first time, hesitation showed in the Tygran’s expression. Greg pushed on.

  ‘There’s no need for this to get messy,’ he said. ‘If you stand down your weapons, I’ll send my jump-destroyers out of range.’

  ‘I acknowledge your warnings, Commander,’ Wade said with a kind of stiff contempt. ‘I have my orders.’

  And the image vanished from all screens.

  ‘Ironfist’s increasing velocity,’ said the helm officer.

  ‘They’ve targeted our drive,’ said the tac officer.

  ‘Full power to the thrusters,’ Ash said. ‘Take us out of here on a spiral swerve.’

  Despite the inertial dampening, Greg felt the swinging impetus as the ship surged forward and spun savagely to port. Beyond the viewport the stars swirled and streamed past, and Greg grimly held on to his couch.

  ‘The Ironfist is just coming into their maximum range,’ said the tac officer. ‘Opening fire with pulse cannon rounds, broad zigzag sweep, nine passes … navigationals compensating … ’

  There was a sharp thud from elsewhere in the ship and Greg felt a passing tremor underfoot.

  ‘Damage report,’ said Ash.

  ‘Midsection, upper starboard,’ said the tac officer. ‘Outer hull plate damage, no inner hull breach.’

  ‘Sorry about that, Commander,’ Greg said. ‘But the Imisil are out there, watching – I thought it might tempt ’em to weigh in on our side.’

  ‘I can’t see that happening,’ Ash said. ‘Target their weapon points with our missile launcher,’ he told the tac officer. ‘Four eluders with shimmer payloads – fire when ready.’

  A moment later the tac officer said, ‘Missiles away … and they’ve launched a volley of their own, silverclaws, two waves.’

  ‘Going for our shields,’ Ash said. ‘Target the eluders with our beam projectors and fire.’

  One of the screens showed a tracking view of the intervening space. Four impact flashes appeared in rough succession, then a digital overlay revealed blotches of grey spreading at the edges. Ash saw Greg’s mystified look.

  ‘Countermeasures,’ he said. ‘Each payload spreads a cloud of refractive slivers. Inhibits directional sensors. Now we need to get closer to the shimmer clouds, use them as a shield … ’

  ‘The Ironfist is changing course,’ the tac officer said. ‘First wave of silverclaw missiles have entered the shimmer clouds … wait, they’ve … ’

  On the screen bright points of light bloomed in the intervening cloud. A magnified view showed expanding shells of energy tearing gaps in the shimmer barrier.

  ‘Second wave is through with minimal deviation,’ said the tac officer.

  ‘How long?’ said Ash.

  ‘On current course and speed … fifty seconds.’

  ‘Helm, go to maximum thrust – head for the far side of that moon.’

  ‘The Ironfist is targeting all its projector batteries on our engines,’ said the tac officer, his voice showing signs of strain.

  ‘Raise shields,’ Ash said with rock-solid composure. ‘All hands, lock down safeties against incoming enemy fire.’

  Greg sat slumped back in the command couch, witnessing the seemingly inexorable slide towards destruction with a terrible fear crawling in his guts.

  ‘Contact!’ the tac officer cried out. ‘Vessel uncloaking eight kiloms off our stern – sir, it’s the Imisil ship … and they’re picking off all the silverclaw missiles.’

  ‘Maintain course and speed,’ said Ash, who glanced at Greg. ‘The Imisil have put themselves between us and our pursuers, a high-risk tactic in this situation … ’

  ‘We’re picking up a message from the Imisil to the Ironfist,’ said the tac officer. A moment later, the audio came through.

  ‘Ezgara vessel – you have violated an exclusion zone emplaced according to the self-defence protocols of the Imisil Mergence. Cease all attacks and threats and withdraw from this system immediately.’

  ‘So the meddling Imisil are working with those brigands,’ came Wade’s voice. ‘No matter – it will be my pleasure to obliterate you before dealing with that shipful of thieves.’

  ‘You may be assured that events will transpire differently,’ was the Imisil reply before the channel cut out.

  ‘Can they hold against the Tygran ship’s weapons?’ Greg said.

  Ash shrugged but his frown said no. Then, staring at his screen, he leaned forward. ‘The Imisil are not raising their shields … ’

  ‘The Ironfist is targeting all weapons on the Imisil vessel,’ said the tac officer.

  ‘Aim everything we’ve got at the Ironfist,’ said Ash.

  ‘Contact! – second vessel uncloaking above and behind the Ironfist! It is another Imisil ship and it’s opening fire … ’

  Greg watched it all unfold in the holopanel before him. Even as the Tygran ship veered wildly to port the second Imisil kept pace and unleashed a cascade of destruction upon its stern. Beam energies tore and lashed at the shields while pulse cannon rounds and disruptor missiles pounded away. Under such intense and focused attack the Tygran’s shields began to weaken, flare and fail. Return fire had cut through the Imisil’s own slotted shields and its hull sported several gashes and breaches trailing foggy gases. But for the Tygran vessel the end was near. As its shields finally flared out from tail to prow, the second Imisil sent missiles and pulse beam rounds into the now unprotected stern.

  Something exploded, a fuel line or a generator, and Greg could see hot yellow fire spread within the hull, blowing out hatches and sections of plating. Then one of the manoeuvring thrusters began to burn, blazing at full strength for a moment before it burst apart in a brief flurry of fiery whiteness. A second later a massive explosion tore open the stern as the main drives succumbed, leaving the Tygran vessel pinwheeling through space.

  The atmosphere on the bridge of the Starfire was sombre. In a monotone voice, the tactical officer gave a running commentary while on screen the Tygran ship, rent by internal detonations, exhibited its death throes.

  ‘The Imisil are hailing us,’ said the tac officer.

  Ash gave Greg a wintry smile. ‘I believe
that’s your cue.’

  A moment later Greg was once more face to face with the Imisil commander, Presignifier Remosca. The humanoid was as composed as before while his facial spot-clusters glowed in shades of green.

  ‘Greetings to you, Captain Cameron, or should I address you as First Commodore?’

  ‘Aye, well, apologies for that wee diversionary exaggeration there, Presignifier. And our profound gratitude for intervening … ’

  ‘After you alerted the Ezgara to our presence.’

  ‘Ach, I know it was a bit presumptuous but that was a tight spot we were in. And I reckoned that you’d have to deal with them anyway, whether we were still around or not. Glad to see that you’re a reasonable people.’

  The Imisil commander gave a slight turning nod. ‘Our civilisation does aspire to certain minimum standards of conduct. I decided to aid you on the basis of the enmity which the Ezgara clearly bear towards you.’

  Right, my enemy’s enemy, Greg thought as he relaxed and sat back. ‘Once again, I am very grateful to you, Presignifier – hopefully, any future joint operations will demonstrate that we can be worthy allies. But in the meantime, we wait for the rest of your fleet to arrive, aye? Perhaps you could give me some idea about why the Imisil Mergence sent you all this way.’

  ‘It is not out of a desire to acquire territory, I assure you. But there are more pressing matters for our mutual attention – since our first exchange I received a message from the Expeditionary Fleet, saying that they encountered a hostile force of unknown designation. Fierce fighting means that they will be delayed for an indeterminate time period. I have been given command discretion as to whether we remain in this system or hasten to rejoin them.’

  ‘And yet here you are,’ Greg said.

  ‘We have been gathering data from sensor probes left in the second tier of hyperspace,’ the Imisil officer went on. ‘There is another group of vessels heading for this system, a Hegemony carrier battle group. It appears that the Sendrukans have decided to usurp the Brolturans’ ascendancy in this matter. This is in keeping with their murderous history.’

  Greg felt a sick dread in his chest. ‘Can even three of us stand up to this kind of invasion?’

  Off to the side, Ash gave a weary shake of the head.

  ‘That is highly doubtful, Captain Cameron,’ said Remosca. ‘But it may be possible to wound them badly. Our scans reveal a number of salvageable elements among the battle debris orbiting your world. But while we complete a recovery assessment there is one thing I would like to know from you.’

  ‘What would that be, Presignifier?’

  ‘How did you know that I had a second ship?’

  6

  JULIA

  Talavera let her have a beach house and a golden retriever to run along the sands with and some fishing rods and a low wooden jetty and a white rowing boat. And Julia would sit out on the veranda with a tall glass of vargr wine, enjoying the sun’s heat on her skin even though she was enveloped in cascades of information, a cloud of data in continual motion.

  And she worked on tailored heuristic navigator systems for a hundred anti-dark matter missiles to be launched from hyperspace, targeted on a hundred planets, on a hundred deadly people who had to die.

  Or so Talavera’s story went: that whole process of kidnapping Julia and the other Enhanced and making them modify thermonuclear missiles for use against the ships orbiting Darien, then confining them to full-body virtuality tanks, was only her way of testing their abilities and mettle before revealing this most vital of projects. And it was a great shame that the distrust felt by the Enhanced had required Talavera and her people to resort to a certain degree of coercion. She had told Julia all this two subjective days after the foiling of her attempt to escape from the Sacrament, the Chaurixa terrorists’ mothership. Julia had listened and nodded thoughtfully, not believing a word.

  So as a demonstration of her warm-hearted good will, Talavera allowed her the house, the dog, the boat and so forth, and when Julia asked for a Human companion the terrorist seemed to consider for a moment before giving her assent.

  Now it was the fifth s-day since her arrival at the beach, although objectively only a day had passed. Relaxing on the veranda, she teased coils and lattices of info from the raw data cloud which hung over her like an immense, slowly gyring tornado, its dense grey and slate-blue flows speckled with glittering motes, glints caught in the intertwining braids.

  Down on the beach, further along the shore, a female figure ran, laughed and played with the dog, throwing sticks and splashing in the shallows. Joyful barks drifted on the breeze.

  The imagery was representational. In drawing down data from the cloudy tornado she was actually configuring it for the computational macros she had already prepared in certain areas of her cortex, those tightly clustered webs of neural pathways that were under her conscious and practised control. But this was her metacosm so it amused her to watch those braids of information snakily float over to the brassy, bell-shaped intake of a small but fabulously archaic-looking machine that sat on the veranda’s low table. It had a sequence of bizarre sections complete with electrical sparks, wheezing bellows, flashing lights, and puffs of steam. Every hour or so a tinny fanfare would sound and a glassy sphere the size of her thumb would roll out at the other end, landing in a padded basket. Julia would transfer it to a triangular tray and over time build a gleaming pyramid which on completion would vanish when her eyes were averted.

  Yet she remained perfectly aware that despite the pleasant surroundings and the placid comforts, her body still lay stretched and motionless in one of Talavera’s virtuality tanks. With any luck they wouldn’t have disturbed or forensically examined her since her incarceration.

  More barks and the sound of footsteps climbing to the veranda heralded her companion’s return.

  ‘Och, Julia! – all work and no play is no way to stay sharp, ye know!’

  Wearing a pale blue windbreaker and flowery slacks, Catriona Macreadie pulled up a wicker stool and sat down. The golden retriever followed her in and lay down by her feet.

  ‘It’s an urgent project, Cat,’ she said. ‘And it’s my responsibility so I have to stick with it.’

  ‘Well, when it’s done, me and Benny’ll take you along to some rock pools we found – you should see the ammonite crabs … ’

  Julia smiled and nodded, inwardly puzzled as she’d neither imagined rock pools on the shore nor given the dog a name. But then this wasn’t meant to be that close a copy of the real Catriona, who had an altogether more morose demeanour. Julia was about to ask how far off these rock pools were when the tabletop contraption sounded its little fanfare and another glassy sphere was produced. Catriona chuckled and went over to pick it out of its little basket.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she said, peering into its foggy, latticed heart.

  Then the dog stood up and looked at Julia.

  ‘Template match compiled,’ it said. ‘Instructions?’

  ‘Copy yourself and overwrite.’

  Catriona froze in the act of dropping the sphere onto the triangular tray. Her form turned opaque as a bright transecting plane passed through her from head to toe. When it was over solidity returned, the sphere clinked onto the tray, and Catriona straightened, features blank, awaiting orders.

  Julia smiled. When Talavera and her goons stuck her in the virtuality tank they didn’t know that she had hidden one last polymote in her hair, next to her scalp. Days ago she had reprogrammed a batch of polymotes – nanoscale builders – and deployed them through the Chaurixa vessel, the Sacrament, to assist in their escape attempt. The escape failed and all five Enhanced were confined in solitary. Julia was still able to regain control of the handful of polymotes not yet tracked down, then broke out of her cell only to be recaptured while trying to reprogram the cargo handler system.

  It would be different this time. It had to be – Talavera had infected her with the nanodust.

  She got to her feet. ‘What is the trigger
word to suspend the sensory lockdown?’ she said to the dog. ‘And how long before it locks down again?’

  ‘The word is “continuity” and lockdown will resume after fifteen seconds.’

  The dog was now host to the polymote’s limited AI, as was the Catriona shell, and very soon hers too. All they had to do was to keep the performance going long enough for her to make good an escape. Leaving the others was a wrench but a solo breakout stood the best chance.

  ‘I have incorporated a buffer into this image shell,’ she told the dog. ‘As soon as I speak, copy yourself into it then overwrite any residual code. Then you will maintain a behaviour façade.’ She breathed in deep. ‘Continuity … ’

  She almost made it. Awaking in the tank, she crept out into a shadowy corridor. Unobserved, she got to the Sacrament’s evac capsules, hacked into the controls with a polymote-built codegen key, set them all to autolaunch in one minute, long enough to get inside one of them and bypass its survival/nav system. So while the other eleven fired their thrusters and sped away into space, Julia manually steered hers along the Sacrament’s outer hull and latched onto an aft auxiliary hatch.

  But Talavera somehow deduced that she was not aboard any of the evac capsules and nearly thirty minutes later the aft hatch’s locking clamps were activated. Then the hatch itself opened and she was dragged into the airlock, where a pair of Henkayans bound and gagged her.

  Back in the virtuality chamber they tipped her into the tank, reattached the waste and nutrient tubes and refastened the neural cutout around her head. By now she had abandoned all pretence at composure and was yelling wordlessly behind the heavy tape covering her mouth. Then the cutout was activated and her body grew heavy and numb and misty and distant as her awareness was pulled back into Talavera’s virtual prison.

  Julia opened her eyes and saw blue sky. She sat up and found she was back on the beach. Wavelets lapped at the shore, darkening the sand, but there was no beach house, no dog, no Catriona.