The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [191]
Which was like a vast bubble bursting but instead of the expected explosion it was the opposite, an utter cessation of sound, an expanding shell of tranquillity, an all-pervasive quietus as darkness rushed in.
There was no wind and the rain had stopped. There was no light from the warpwell and in the gloom Rory noticed that all the readouts on the Brolt rifle had died. When the surviving Stonecutter and Hakon-Haer boys found him about ten minutes later they told him that every cyborg and machine within a 500-yard radius had simply keeled over or fallen out of the sky.
When Rory told them about the major, a few went over to inspect the warpwell. Excited voices came back and a couple of them carried Rory over to see what they’d found. Torch beams wavered and revealed an astonishing sight. The huge mass of grinding, compacting cyborgs Rory saw near the end was still there, only they had all been turned into some kind of dark glittering stone.
‘But are they all dead?’ Rory said, then realised that he felt nothing, got no sense of the animated mechanisms they had been.
One of the Stonecutter boys produced a hammer and chisel (‘You brought a hammer and chisel to a fight with mad cyborg aliens?’ was Rory’s comment) and struck off an outstretched pincer-tipped tentacle. Held up to the torchlight it was clearly stone all the way through.
‘Aye, clinches it, I reckon,’ he said. ‘Anything else?’
‘Oh, wait till ye see this, though,’ said one of the Stonecutters, showing Rory’s helpers the way round the massive, motionless tableau. At one point they stopped and torches were angled down to light up a lower section of the jumbled frozen imagery. When Rory saw what was there his jaw dropped open, then he began to laugh. For there, amongst the press of cyborg forms, caught from the waist up and wielding a stone cleaver was Major Theo Karlsson.
When his laughter, half sorrow and half humour, subsided he reached out and patted a cold grey shoulder.
‘Sorry, chief,’ he said. ‘Looks like yer getting that statue after all!’
CATRIONA
The dream-palace was her sanctuary, a calm place of soaring blue pillars, walls sprouting fragrant flowers, drifting veils of mist and carpets of soft, undecaying leaves. A haven for the bodiless distillation of what had once been Catriona Macreadie.
What she had become defied her every attempt at understanding. Was she just an instrument fashioned for the needs and whims of these ancient powers? It seemed that way. The Zyradin’s experiment with that immense piece of ship debris was still fresh in her mind, prompting wild speculation – surely the Zyradin wasn’t planning to use her to seize Hegemony vessels and move them to Segrana. Even stranded on the moon’s surface, such a warship would prove lethal to the surrounding forest. No explanation had thus far been presented to her and now, after all that she’d been through, she just longed for peace and seclusion. The dream-palace, however, was no longer her insulated, isolated refuge – Segrana and the Zyradin were laying siege.
It was a siege waged with images of the war that raged and roared around Nivyesta and the planet Darien. She was shown the sporadic gathering of those who came to defend Darien and its moon. She saw Greg Cameron meeting the rebel Tygrans aboard their ship, then the unexpected appearance of the Earthsphere fleet and the divisions that emerged in their ranks. And saw Greg’s encounter with the Earthsphere vice-admiral, the tussle with an assassin, and the arrival of the dauntingly huge Hegemony armada.
The Zyradin revealed in detail the sheer armed might that was ranged against the defenders. Segrana sent her image streams of Rory and Chel’s sufferings, the awful task they were set and how Chel got them both out of the terrible