The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [196]
‘Ah, nice to see you up and about. Managed to scrounge up some clothes for you.’
A tall, skinny woman in a tattered, patched blue jerkin and work trousers had entered with an armful of garments which she dropped onto a stool.
‘Where is this?’ Cat said. ‘How did I get here?’
‘Cradle-Veil is the Uvovo name for it, and this is our Watchtree. I’m Kirsten, by the way.’
They shook hands and Cat introduced herself. Kirsten’s eyes widened.
‘The Uvovo who brought you here last night never told us who you were,’ she said, her voice lowering. ‘Were you caught up in it? What was it like?’
‘What do you mean?’ Cat said, having a good idea of what she meant.
‘It’s better if I show you.’
Still wrapped in the blanket, she followed Kirsten out onto the platform surrounding the hut.
‘There’s an observation platform with a good southerly outlook over the ridge,’ Kirsten said. ‘Up here.’
A ramp led up to a roofed platform with a chest-high rail. From the moment Cat stepped onto it the sight of what lay to the south struck her like a blow, and as she approached the rail the view opened up.
Of the forest of Segrana, its fabulously intricate, interwoven matrix of flora and fauna, of biomass and organic life and all the towns and settlements of the Uvovo, there was nothing left. A seared, blackened desolation stretched as far as the eye could see, a wasteland of ash up from which the charred remnants of trees jutted like black spikes. It was the horror from her vision. A deathly silence seemed to emanate from it, a silence that went deep.
Tears streaming down her face, Catriona had to lean on the railing to stay upright. Staring out at it, she could also see the twisted fragments of Legion cyborgs scattered everywhere, heat-buckled carapaces, half-melted tool arms, the strewn, torched dregs of mechanistic viscera. Chel and the Zyradin had mentioned a great sacrifice. But this was too much.
Too much to look upon. Weeping, she slid down and clasped her knees in close while Kirsten said uncertain consoling words.
JULIA
It all had the unnerving semblance of improvisation. Harry told her the details of Reski Emantes’s diversion – a dozen decoy remotes emitting the energy profiles of Construct wardroids as they boarded the station via several spread-out airlocks – just a few moments before the dataform device began repatterning her for the transfer. At that moment Julia’s body was lying on a couch in one of the Great Hub’s subspace signal towers, her vacant mind’s neural pathways under the control of a task-dedicated AI, what the subservicers had called a cognition, residing in an implant embedded in her body’s brain. Once Julia’s fractalised sentience was repatterned she would be streamed into the implant, overwriting the cognition AI and taking control. She had crossed vast interplanetary distance via the tiernet, had entirely unexpected encounters, seen incredible sights and spectacles, and vied with deadly adversaries, just so she could complete the circle.
Well, it wasn’t entirely complete – there was too much neural damage to her cortex to risk an organic transferral. Overwriting the implant was safer.
She waited beneath the overarching, fabulously intricate data-form, a glowing software assembly whose bright stabbing needles were prescanning the structure of her fractalised sentience, preparatory to the full compressive transload operation. Harry gave her a sardonic wave as the last milliseconds trickled away, and she was sure that she saw a familiar look of mischief pass over his features.
Then everything smeared and slid sideways, distorting along a rainbow spiral that coiled and coiled into whiteness …
Then time sprang back into motion. There was the sense of being somewhere else but vision was a dark blur and she could hear nothing. It had to be the VR headset which all the captive Enhanced were wearing. The subservicer AIs had explained that the implant had a hardbuilt interfacing system, which would