The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [199]
She pointed a small control remote at one of the consoles and a large holopanel winked on above it. The image was divided into eight subframes showing cycles of visual feeds from the hundreds of sensors dotted around the exterior of the Great Hub. Against the looming, striated hyperspace background, ships fought in sideslipping, glancing encounters. Some of the sensors were tracking the participants and Julia saw black curvilinear ships of the Vor lash out with bright tentacles to attack smaller vessels shaped like bulbous argopods, the shell-squids that populated the waters of the Eastern Towns. Others showed similar clashes involving the argopod ships and fast darting craft with tapered prows and bullet-shaped sterns.
‘The Construct just doesn’t know when to give in,’ said Talavera. ‘Keeps throwing ships into a lost cause, keeps wasting its forces. Even when the Godhead Himself enters the arena.’
The eight subframes merged, dissolved into a single image. It looked like a strange landscape seen from above at something like a 20-degree angle. The ground was a gleaming swirl of silver-grey and slate-blue shot through with strands of black, like something stirred or kneaded. As Julia watched she could see that the blue-grey surface was in motion, undulations passing across it. The image pulled back and the restless expanse widened, and curious solid-looking outlines appeared as if pushing up out of something glutinous and malleable. Sections of strange structures emerged, domes, triangular obelisks, then they would twist and distort into something completely different, odd creatures struggling across the grey ripples before collapsing back in, or bizarre body parts, a winged arm, a foot, a brace of tails, and a huge face that surfaced, gazed up with blank eyes for a moment before tipping over and sliding back in.
The image pulled back and the details shrank into a general dark grey amalgam. At last its upper edge came into view along with more ships, big black domelike ones and silvery diamonds around which flocks of smaller craft swooped. When the full extent of the grotesque immensity became apparent, it resembled a vast ragged island with an underside so notched, craggy and serrated it might have been wrenched whole from the bedrock of some malformed planet.
‘Meet the Godhead!’ Talavera said. ‘In all his irresistible glory!’
ROBERT
The empathic entity, the Godhead’s dislocated conscience, used its drone to attach protective frameworks to the head and foot of Robert’s couch. Essential nutrient and medication sacs were taped to the underframe and most of his monitor wires were removed. Then suspensors in the frameworks were activated and the drone steered him out of the small grey room and into a passage that sloped downwards in a straight line for quite a distance.
‘Could you summarise what we’re doing again?’ Robert said as he floated downwards. ‘Especially the part about how we defeat the Godhead with his own dreams. You see, the more you repeat it to me the more confident I’ll feel about the undertaking as a whole.’
‘Very well,’ said the empathic entity via its drone. ‘There is a specific area of the Godhead’s brain where sleep imperatives and symbolic memories continuously entwine, which over time I’ve come to call the dream gyrus. The Godhead never wholly gives itself over to sleep but it does allow selected areas of the cortex to slip into the dream state as an aid to neural repair and low-level cognitive indexing.
‘Once we reach the dream gyrus you and I shall co-interface with the localised synaptic web and force the Godhead’s awareness into the sleep/dream state. Then with your memories of the Tanenth homeworld we will compel it to accept its guilt and remorse and thereby persuade it to abandon the multi-missile launch. So – do you feel more confident now?’
‘Not especially,’ Robert said. ‘Although I can say that I’ve not been overly discouraged.’
‘Glad I could be of service.’
From a regular passageway their route turned into a twisting tunnel whose