The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [23]
‘Mandator, did you … ’
‘Yes, Admiral, we traced and blocked their message wave.’ Reen paused. ‘They have now gone to Tier 3 and are increasing their transit kinesis. To evade them we must go deeper, Admiral.’
Zhylinsky looked daunted for a moment, then a stubbornness came into his features.
‘Then deeper we must go,’ he said hoarsely.
As the next in a series of hyperdrive jumps rippled through Kao Chih’s senses, stronger again than the last, he found himself remembering the last words of the dead Va-Zla leader back on Pyre:
‘The Lords of Suneye never abandon their property!’
THE CONSTRUCT
The armoured hatch slid open and the P-Construct stepped out onto one of the hubcraft’s observation cupolas. As a combat-partial of the real Construct it was impervious to hard vacuum and equipped with a range of sensors tasked to scan the vicinity for hostile incursions. Standing there, it surveyed the starry vaults of Reginthojal, the largest, most continual stretch of space on Tier 51. It was nearly a thousand light years across at its widest, and ninety at its deepest. Ancient stars burned red and gold here, stellar anchors around which the worlds of the Ixak swung, worlds whose inhabitants slept, for the most part. The Ixak had already entered the twilight of their society, their population numbers at a low ebb and still falling, their naturally long lifetimes lengthened still further by coldsleep technologies. When not in hibernation, the Ixak were more inclined to devote their waking hours to virtual experiences evoking the glories of a distant past rather than to the world of harsh reality.
And there, spread out in thousand-strong formations, was the Aggression, the Construct’s armada of warships, each one home to a controlling AI. Construct operatives deep in the tiers of hyperspace had been tracking the progress of the Vor and the Shyntanil as their battlefleets had climbed from level to level, crushing any opposition, demolishing worlds, planetoids, artificial habitats, anything that might present a shred of resistance. And now they were poised to cross into Tier 51.
After repeated messages and warnings, the P-Construct had managed to provoke the Ixak elders into a semblance of urgency, pressing them to acknowledge the imminent threat. Long-dormant planetary defences were reactivated, councils were formed to deal with civil coordination, even some elaborate combat vessels were brought out of storage. Yet the Ixak’s response still seemed half-hearted, as if the supposed menace coming from below lacked credibility. The P-Construct wondered briefly if the real Construct would have achieved more in a shorter period.
But in the end the battlefleets of the Vor and the Shyntanil were very real and the news of their advances was unavoidable, undeniable. Just eight hours ago, an observer subsim of the Construct had been aboard one of the Aggression’s spy-scouts, secretly watching as a Shyntanil siege force, complete with their formidable cryptships, extinguished the last embers of resistance on the planet Faskelon just two levels below, on Tier 53. As the bombardment continued, Shyntanil outriders had somehow detected the Aggression vessel; the Aggression ship immediately went into high-kinetic retreat while the subsim, as a precaution, withdrew via the continual transfer link, merging with the P-Construct as it oversaw the Reginjothal theatre, contributing the intelligence accrued.
The fall of Faskelon was one of several similar front-line reports that the P-Construct had gathered. Now, as it went back inside the hubcraft, it knew it was time to convey it all to the prime Construct. Within, the darkness was speckled with infrared ports, the meagre glow of ready lights flickering from within banks of datawebs, the glimmer of holoplanes providing update bursts. The P-Construct found its multiflow recess and eased back into it. Sensors autotracked its cognitive core and a few minutes later a snapshot of its mindmap-state