The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [206]
‘Aiming for her chest?’ Julia said, then grunted as a spike of pain shot down her left arm. There was a strange tingling in the fingers of her left hand and she hastened to the chair Talavera had so recently vacated. A slight dizziness rippled in and out, along with a blur in her vision.
Please, she thought as she almost fell into the chair. Not now! Not yet!
‘Julia, what’s wrong?’ said Harry as he shuffled over.
‘I … I think I’m having a stroke,’ she said haltingly. ‘Neural damage … ’
‘How bad is it?’
‘I can just about see out of one eye and my right hand is behaving itself.’
‘Well, whatever you have to do, do it quickly,’ Harry said. ‘Because we have a new problem.’
Back along the passage, webs of light were dancing around a figure that was unsteadily getting to its feet. The same actinic radiance that crawled over the walls and floor blazed from the ruined eye-socket of Talavera’s slack features. In response Harry raised his rifle and fired off a string of energy pulses. Julia dragged her fraying attention back to the console and the holopanel with the autolaunch display. The manual launch was an innocuous-looking symbol at the back of the floating arrays of unlit launch-verified buttons, its atypical design at variance with the rest of the display. The dizziness was making it hard to stand, but she reached for the fingerpad …
An awful low, rasping cry made her look round. Just a few feet away Harry toppled over to lie motionless on the floor, threads of vapour rising from his head. The energy-swathed apparition that had been Corazon Talavera approached, one eye leaking jagged tendrils of hot radiance, the other rolled back and white.
‘Poor Talavera,’ whispered the smiling mouth. ‘Understand, she was close to me. She understood me, knew what I am and what I must become. I felt her life, her tiny flame, go out and I knew that there had to be a threat. I came here and found all this and you. So how could one such as you be a threat to me?’ The grotesque figure leaned in close. ‘My questions should be answered.’
Julia tried to move her right hand towards the fingerpad but her torso up to the neck was paralysed. The desperate frustration and raging fear twisted together and became overwhelming. She began to weep, deep wracking sobs that came up from her chest, hot tears that streaked down to her jaw, unrestrained crying made bitter by razor-sharp memories of those who had died …
A dagger of pain struck, running down her face through her neck. And somehow her right hand was mobile again. And when she looked up at the Godhead-possessed Talavera, she saw that the face now wore a mask woven from the tendrils of energy, a mask like the one she had spoken with earlier.
‘Julia,’ it said, ‘grief is toxic to the Godhead – yours has forced him to retreat, allowing us to seize the meta-quantal bridge again.’
‘I think … I think I may be dying,’ she said in a slurred voice.
‘Then make your last moments count. Act now before he returns and crushes us all … ’
Almost without hesitation, Julia reached out to the console fingerpad, moved one of the pointers over to that innocuous button and clicked it. Alerts popped up – Preset Override – Full Launch Initiated – just as ferocious, blazing light poured from Talavera’s dead face. Julia looked up and snarled:
‘Eat that, you bitch!’
The first wave of fifty missiles launched out of the Great Hub’s docking bay, followed by the other nine waves at four-second intervals. By now the Godhead’s continental immensity was looming towards the Hegemony station from the side, its thousand-mile-wide surface an expanse of unceasing deformation, a mutable silver-grey ocean perturbed by unseen, unfathomable forces. The Vor and Shyntanil vessels had abandoned their neat formations soon after the scratch force of Aggression AI ships had arrived with orders to damage and delay.
One Aggression craft, a Talon-class destructor, was engaged in a double dogfight with two Shyntanil interceptors when the first flock of missiles arced towards the Godhead. Almost immediately the interceptors broke