The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [194]
Past mirrors future.
** Future mirrors present **
The power surged, and she felt its near-inchoate nature threaten to burst forth, uncontrolled, unfocused. But she tamed it, channelled it, formed it into something like restraint, something like a purpose, hot and destructive.
** Well done ** Are you prepared? ** To behold the mirror of the self? **
‘No,’ she said. ‘But I’m still going through with it.’
Above her, in the vast and frigid vacuum of space, the cyborgs of the Legion of Avatars swept in their darkening flocks numbering hundreds of thousands, pursuing the remnants of the Hegemony and Earthsphere fleets and those other survivors. Their lust for slaughter drove them on, engulfing vessels entire, breaking them open, obliterating all signs of life, destroying, tearing and ripping, then onward to the next and the next. Catriona could see how this insensate horde would journey from star to star, wreaking utter havoc wherever they went, even though Theo’s sacrifice had choked off the flow of more of the insane creatures. And she knew that what was going to be done had to be done. But a small corner of her heart wept.
‘So … begin.’
With herself as the fulcrum, Segrana and the Zyradin acted in synchronicity for the first time, entwining their presences through her to act upon the substructures of linear space-time. Within a domain, carefully limited by a shaping of the ancient energy, the linear mode of her own intrinsic essence was refracted and reflected over and over. In seconds she was surrounded by a growing crowd of versions of herself, each one winking into existence and all looking calm and collected. When she pushed herself up on tiptoe she could see that the crowd was growing into a throng stretching back into the cavernous spaces of the dream-palace.
** We can delay no longer ** Remember how I taught you to retrieve that ship debris ** Bring them to Segrana and we will render them unto peace **
In an eyeblink she went from that busy assembly to the yawning blackness of space, her form a translucent glow. Not far away one of her selves shot past, flying straight towards a ship that was under attack from a crawling swarm of Legion cyborgs. She stretched out her hand in that direction and immediately moved forward. Other Catrionas were converging and she saw how they lunged at the cyborgs, one- or two-handed, and grabbed some edge or protruding component, then in the next instant they were gone, vanished.
Across the ship’s hull the cyborg creatures clustered around weakened points, tearing into the plating, ripping out cabling, while not yet aware of their diminishing numbers. Until a flight of Catrionas landed in the midst of a tightly packed mob of them, and disappeared along with their captives. A spasm of anger rippled through the gleaming black machine-beasts and some even seemed to detect the avenging Catrionas as they swooped in close. Cat ducked in close enough to one to close her hand around a jutting stalk tipped with a sensor cube. There was a dazzling moment that sent splinters of iciness through her …
Then she was hanging in midair, high up in the leafy density of Segrana but beneath the canopy. Her hand still held on to the cyborg’s sensor stalk yet bizarrely there was no sensation of supporting the thing’s weight, nor did it move. Reflexively she let go and the Legion cyborg came to sudden, thrashing life as it fell away, arms and tentacles flailing, slashing and snapping at branches as it plummeted. But then it slowed and for a moment Catriona thought it would climb back up after her. Until webs of actinic energy sprang out from the nearby trees and from beneath, enfolding the cyborg in a lethal embrace. It convulsed and shuddered and sparks flowed from within its carapace while a smoky vapour leaked out here and there. Abruptly all its effectors and limbs went limp and it resumed its