The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [158]
The Tygran smiled openly and shook his head.
‘You make madness sound almost sane.’
The comms officer suddenly interrupted him. ‘Sir, I’m getting a squirt transmission from … from the asteroid vessel, the Retributor!’
‘Someone’s still alive on that rock?’ Greg said.
‘How wide a cast is it?’ Ash said. ‘What channel, and who else might hear it?’
‘That’s just it, sir – it reached us by tight-beam relay, not as a widecast signal.’
Ash’s eyes widened, half-smiling. ‘So they aimed a comm laser at us!’
‘Yes, sir, exactly … nnnnyyyarrgh! … ’
With a violent motion the comms officer ripped away his headset and reared back a step before diving forward to punch controls on his console.
‘What was that?’ said Ash.
‘A … howl of something horrible … right across all bands, all channels. I’ve never heard anything like it … ’
‘Anything to do with the Retributor’s message?’
‘No, sir, it’s … coming from the planet’s surface … ’
Ash was already at work at the main sensor controls and a view of Darien appeared on the main screen. A swathe of the planet’s face was obscured by great banks of cloud gyrating around a cyclonic weather system off to the north. But what held everyone’s attention was the pale glow lighting up the clouds from below. Whatever was producing it had to be huge and bright enough to turn night into day for it to be so starkly visible. There were few hints of the landmasses and coastline below but Greg knew with an awful certainty exactly what the source of the light was.
Is this it?, he thought. Is this where the Legion of Avatars breaks out and takes over Darien? What will Uncle Theo and the others do? Will anyone survive?
Then he looked at Ash and the rest and wondered what to say to them.
THEO
An hour or so earlier, just before Greg began his angry riposte to Vashutkin’s declaration, Theo Karlsson was smoking a pipe while perched on an upended crate beneath a rickety lean-to poised near the brink of the crater in the flank of Tusk Mountain. Nearby sat Rory, who was whittling away at a wooden peg by the light of a Tygran cell-lamp. The lean-to’s waxed-hide canopy was sheltering them from the insistent downpour currently moving slowly across the mountains. It made a pattering sound overhead and filled the mountain air with an immense sighing hiss.
This is the real rain, Theo thought, drawing and puffing, savouring the fragrant woodiness of the tobacco. So the sky chooses tonight to release its bounty. Such good timing …
He glanced over at Rory, still scraping, blowing and carving.
‘I thought you gave that up a year ago,’ he said. ‘You said you were not any good at it.’
Rory paused, flashed Theo a sidelong grin and held up the piece of wood. To Theo’s surprise it looked a bit like a lizard, a snipervile.
‘No’ any more, chief!’ said Rory. ‘Guess I’ve got a natural talent for it after all.’
Theo nodded, deciding not to voice any concern. Ever since his recovery in the Uvovo daughter-forest, Rory had more and more seemed like his old self, complete with the ebullient self-assurance and handy wit. Yet there was something new, a slight hesitancy or at least a blunting of the wild rashness that had got him into so many tight corners over the years. Theo was sure it was due to the horrors Rory and the Uvovo Chel had suffered while prisoners of the Legion Knight. He had asked Rory about it in a mild, no-pressure manner, but Rory had insisted that he remembered nothing at all from when he was captured to when he awoke in the forest.
The raucous sounds of voices singing in unison came up from the crater. That great bite out of the mountain’s flank had in the space of a day gone from a charred stone bowl to a real-estate rush when some of those confined to corridor recesses within the mountain realised that here was plenty of room to build a shack or a hut. Branches were gathered from the lower-slope woods while salvaged materials