The Ascendant Stars (63 page)

Talavera smiled down at her with unconcealed malice, then moved away to sit at the console directly across from Julia’s couch. She fingered some touch controls and a holopanel appeared. She gave Julia a brief glance, then studied the holo-image for a moment then tapped another board symbol.

‘Oh, dearest Julia, you really have been a monumental pain in my arse, you know that?’ She spread her vermax-wound arms, as if theatrically gesturing to the entire Great Hub station. ‘Yet here we are, at the focus of it all. I’ve foiled your sad little ploys at practically every turn, and now the countdown to the autolaunch is ticking and clicking the seconds away … ’

Julia was half-listening while the greater part of her attention was fixed on the only option left. Access to all of Talavera’s systems was blocked but the implant’s links to her brain’s neural pathways were still fully open. The implant was capable of mapping and transloading her fractalised sentience back into her organic brain, but there was neural damage somewhere among those pathways and she had no way of knowing how it would affect her.

Actual damage to the brain’s structure could affect my mind
, she thought.
Or lead to death. But if I do nothing, I’m dead at Talavera’s hands anyway
…

The attempt had to be made. She configured the implant for enhanced transloading and let it run.

Was the light being poured into her, or was she that was the light being poured into emptiness? All the sense-impressions of Talavera’s smoke-veiled HQ faded away, as if she was falling or flowing from one place to another … then they all surged back, the textures, the pressure of the restraints, the smoke-laden air rasping in her throat, tingling in her nose, the grittiness in her eyes, the hollow hunger in her gut, the sheer synergistic impact of reality rushing back in, along with Talavera’s voice going over her triumphs, her brilliant tactics, and the glories yet to come.

Julia worked a hand free, keeping her eyes on Talavera as she loosened straps across her upper chest and waist … and froze as the woman stood up, still mouthing her egoistic waffle, and started in Julia’s direction. She had barely taken two steps when a cluster of bright barbs cut through the air before her. She whirled and ducked into the gap between a couple of consoles, then held out her arms. The black vermax sinuously spiralled off them and flew along the corridor. A cry of pain came from the other end and Talavera rose from her refuge, smiling.

Julia, though, had unfastened the remaining straps and was shakily, quietly climbing out of the couch. Which was when she saw poor Arkady’s body, lying on the floor where someone had discarded it. The sight of it hit her like a body blow, and other memories broke loose, Harry, Irenya, Thorold, the hellish spectacle of the Brolturan battleship’s destruction … a terrible rage detonated in her chest and turned into a wordless howl as she lunged at Talavera from behind. She grabbed her by the hair, swung her head round and slammed it against an upright equipment rack.

With blood spurting from her nose, Talavera barely stumbled, lashing out at Julia’s midriff with her foot. Something in Julia saw it coming and she grabbed onto the foot and ankle, twisting it
even as the blow knocked her backwards. The Chaurixa terrorist spun as she fell, jackknifing her extended leg, wrenching it free of Julia’s grasp. Then she laughed, got up into a crouch, grabbed a long-handled assembly tool and lurched forward.

A pulse-beam round caught her in the shoulder. She half-spun, fell to one knee and looked back along the passageway. A second round struck her in the head and threw her onto her back amid a wide splatter of blood and gore.

Gasping for breath and with a disturbing tremble in her left hand, Julia forced herself up onto her feet. At the other end of the passageway stood Harry-Thorold, face bloody, leaning on an energy rifle, chest heaving.

‘Good shot,’ she said, limping over to the live console.

‘I was aiming for her head,’ said Harry, ‘the first time. The second time … ’

‘Aiming for her chest?’ Julia said, then grunted as a spike of pain shot down her left arm. There was a strange tingling in the fingers of her left hand and she hastened to the chair Talavera had so recently vacated. A slight dizziness rippled in and out, along with a blur in her vision.

Please
, she thought as she almost fell into the chair.
Not now! Not yet!

‘Julia, what’s wrong?’ said Harry as he shuffled over.

‘I … I think I’m having a stroke,’ she said haltingly. ‘Neural damage … ’

‘How bad is it?’

‘I can just about see out of one eye and my right hand is behaving itself.’

‘Well, whatever you have to do, do it quickly,’ Harry said. ‘Because we have a new problem.’

Back along the passage, webs of light were dancing around a figure that was unsteadily getting to its feet. The same actinic radiance that crawled over the walls and floor blazed from the ruined eye-socket of Talavera’s slack features. In response Harry raised his rifle and fired off a string of energy pulses. Julia dragged her fraying attention back to the console and the holopanel with
the autolaunch display. The manual launch was an innocuous-looking symbol at the back of the floating arrays of unlit launch-verified buttons, its atypical design at variance with the rest of the display. The dizziness was making it hard to stand, but she reached for the fingerpad …

An awful low, rasping cry made her look round. Just a few feet away Harry toppled over to lie motionless on the floor, threads of vapour rising from his head. The energy-swathed apparition that had been Corazon Talavera approached, one eye leaking jagged tendrils of hot radiance, the other rolled back and white.

‘
Poor Talavera
,’ whispered the smiling mouth. ‘
Understand, she was close to me. She understood me, knew what I am and what I must become. I felt her life, her tiny flame, go out and I knew that there had to be a threat. I came here and found all this and you. So how could one such as you be a threat to me?
’ The grotesque figure leaned in close. ‘My
questions should be answered
.’

Julia tried to move her right hand towards the fingerpad but her torso up to the neck was paralysed. The desperate frustration and raging fear twisted together and became overwhelming. She began to weep, deep wracking sobs that came up from her chest, hot tears that streaked down to her jaw, unrestrained crying made bitter by razor-sharp memories of those who had died …

A dagger of pain struck, running down her face through her neck. And somehow her right hand was mobile again. And when she looked up at the Godhead-possessed Talavera, she saw that the face now wore a mask woven from the tendrils of energy, a mask like the one she had spoken with earlier.

‘Julia,’ it said, ‘grief is toxic to the Godhead – yours has forced him to retreat, allowing us to seize the meta-quantal bridge again.’

‘I think … I think I may be dying,’ she said in a slurred voice.

‘Then make your last moments count. Act now before he returns and crushes us all … ’

Almost without hesitation, Julia reached out to the console fingerpad, moved one of the pointers over to that innocuous
button and clicked it. Alerts popped up –
Preset Override
–
Full Launch Initiated
– just as ferocious, blazing light poured from Talavera’s dead face. Julia looked up and snarled:

‘Eat that, you bitch!’

The first wave of fifty missiles launched out of the Great Hub’s docking bay, followed by the other nine waves at four-second intervals. By now the Godhead’s continental immensity was looming towards the Hegemony station from the side, its thousand-mile-wide surface an expanse of unceasing deformation, a mutable silver-grey ocean perturbed by unseen, unfathomable forces. The Vor and Shyntanil vessels had abandoned their neat formations soon after the scratch force of Aggression AI ships had arrived with orders to damage and delay.

One Aggression craft, a Talon-class destructor, was engaged in a double dogfight with two Shyntanil interceptors when the first flock of missiles arced towards the Godhead. Almost immediately the interceptors broke off and headed for the Hegemony station, as did every other Vor and Shyntanil ship. The Aggression craft (which called itself Extra-Brutal, after its denotation, EB-634) knew what had to be done even as new orders flashed in from the Construct commander-sim –
defend the Great Hub
.

The Aggression AI was about to comply when its long-range sensors spotted something rising from the heaving surface of the Godhead, a Shyntanil cryptship. Signal-bursting an alert on the command channel, the AI Extra-Brutal altered course in the direction of the Godhead. Even if the cryptship had half the usual complement of interceptors that might still be enough to shoot down the missiles.

The missiles themselves were powered to a fearsome level, each one driven by a multifield plasma engine. The Extra-Brutal computed that they could cross the intervening 600-odd miles in less than forty-eight seconds, five of which had already lapsed. Not only that, but a second wave was on its way. And a third. The Extra-Brutal didn’t know what kind of payload they were carrying but it doubted that they could inflict any serious damage on
the Godhead’s monolithic, sub-planetary tonnage. Yet who could be certain? One of them might get lucky.

The heavy thrust of the destructor’s twin plasma engines drove it downwards. Interceptors were darting away from the cryptship and the AI Extra-Brutal prepped a falling-sword pattern of homing tagger probes rigged for hull-splatter counter-measures. As soon as they were launched the Construct AI swung into a braking trajectory away from the missiles into whose collective path it had strayed. Then it loosed a spread of proximity splitters at the Shyntanil interceptors not hazed by the tagger probes, some of which were opening fire on the first wave of descending missiles. The Extra-Brutal felt a moment of satisfaction then turned its attention to the cryptship. It was pondering the best weapon combo when something went off in the locality and blitzed every external sensor for nearly an entire second.

The Extra-Brutal unit cut to backup hull cams and saw an expanding toroid of burning gases back along the path of the missiles, one of which seemed to have been intercepted. Four seconds from impact, the first wave was drawing closer together, as if to concentrate its effect. Something crept into the AI’s thought process, some heightened element of caution that prompted it to make an abrupt course change away from the target zone on the Godhead, even though it was more than eight miles off.

With every digital and hardware filter in place, it was watching when the missiles struck. A dazzling white flash lasted almost half a second while a fireball unfurled at the heart of the impact, burning and vaporising into the surface of the Godhead. A tide of searing gases raced out, charring and throwing up tons of that malleable grey exterior. Then the second wave struck, this time in a ring formation that forced the ferocious energies inwards. The AI Extra-Brutal knew that the warheads of these missiles had to be something new, something far more destructive than thermonuclear devices …

Then collision alerts butted in and the AI found that the Godhead was altering its attitude, slowly tilting its gargantuan
mass away from the missile waves. The Extra-Brutal brought the destructor round on a revised course. Then the third wave hit.

The Godhead seemed to react in pain. The AI found itself facing an expanse of convulsing grey as it rushed up. Auto-evasion piloting had already kicked in but it was too little, too late. The destructor’s forward shields ploughed into that writhing greyness, heeling to port as it carved a trough across the surface. At first it seemed that the nose was coming up but then the bows struck an unseen obstruction. A violent shock jolted through the Aggression craft as the aft swung up, its burning thrusters adding to the uncontrolled impetus. The safeties cut off the engines an instant before the stern plunged down into the glutinous, rippling surface.

The fourth wave of missiles came down. By now a storm of white fire and ash clouds was raging up and out from the widening impact zone. In truth there were successive wavefronts of energy and debris radiating outwards, each more ferocious than the preceding one. The Aggression destructor’s engines were buried deep in the sucking, clinging grey mass – triggering a burn would cause a crucible effect leading to catastrophic overheat. And because this location was roughly 700 miles from the epicentre, the AI Extra-Brutal estimated that it had about thirty-six seconds before the first wavefront arrived. The destructor’s hull could withstand the first and probably the second, but after that prospects were bleak.

The destructor Extra-Brutal unlimbered its external grapplers and began to dig and hack at the malleable yet tough substance that held the Aggression craft entrapped. But cuts resealed themselves and gouges were quickly refilled.

The fifth wave of missiles landed in a long line which flung up a dazzling wall of coruscating energy. Motion sensors detected subsurface distortions within the Godhead – which the AI noted as it reconfigured the lateral thrusters’ control parameters for short hot bursts. The hope was that the enclosing grey mass was alive, part of the Godhead’s physical form, and that it would feel the thruster heat as pain, forcing it to release or expel the
destructor. But before it was ready, the sixth wave landed and something deep within and far below gave way.

The undulations of the surrounding morphscape grew violent, casting up thick heavy waves and huge twisting ropes, great long whips which lashed at the sky, bubbles that grew to be giant orbs before bursting, sending shards flying while great fractured shells melted back into the squirming, spasming greyness. And when the seventh missile wave hit, the AI Extra-Brutal saw the great cracks off in the distance – sections rearing up like cliffs, like splinters and shards hundreds of miles long wrenching away from bedrock. The Godhead was breaking apart.