The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [190]
‘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