The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [3]
Julia Bryce and her fellow-Enhanced are on their way to Earth aboard a passenger liner when it is boarded by brigands led by the terrorist Corazon Talavera. Talavera takes them to a refugee planet, then coerces them into upgrading two thermonuclear missiles for one of the refugee leaders. Julia then finds out that the Covenant Order of the Spiral Prophecy, a fundamentalist religious faction, claims that the lost tomb of one of their ancient Father-Sages lies on Darien. A Spiralist armada is therefore gathering, and the missiles are part of a planned invasion of Darien to secure the supposedly sacred site. Julia and the Enhanced try to escape before the armada reaches Darien, but fail in the attempt. They are then forced to watch as the weapons they upgraded are used by the fanatics to destroy a Brolturan battleship and severely damage the Earthsphere vessel. Afterwards, Talavera puts the Enhanced into separate virtual reality tanks to coerce them into working on detailed course and hyperspace jump data for a large number of other missiles.
Down on Darien, Greg and Rory are engaged in delaying the advance of Brolturan forces towards the resistance’s stronghold. Greg is heading back there, when the Brolturan battleship Purifier launches a massive particle beam attack on Tusk Mountain from orbit. Greg and Rory are in the target zone of a second strike – then the Purifier is destroyed in orbit by the Spiral armada’s thermonuclear missile.
Down in hyperspace, Robert is rescued from the pocket-universe trap by the Construct, who then sends him and another Rosa-sim on their next mission. They must go to an Achorga nestworld to retrieve the Zyradin, an ancient Forerunner entity designed to bond with the Uvovo’s Segrana, thus augmenting its powers at this crucial juncture. They descend into the insectoid Achorga-dominated world, find and recover the Zyradin, and have to flee the pursuing Achorga via ancient Forerunner transfer platforms. The Rosa-sim stays back to fight off a horde of deadly silver creatures while Robert heads over to the Forerunner platform to escape. But they get to him just as the platform activates. When he arrives at the transfer platform in Tusk Mountain on Darien, still carrying the Zyradin canister, he is on the point of death.
Greg Cameron is at Tusk Mountain when a dying Robert Horst arrives with the Zyradin’s canister. The warpwell Sentinel and the Zyradin tell Greg that the Zyradin must be taken to the forest moon and given to Catriona. She is now Keeper of Segrana and through her the Zyradin can merge with the forest-wide sentience. Only the warpwell chamber inside Giant’s Shoulder can transport them to Nivyesta so, after evading an ambush during their zeplin journey, Greg and his team arrive there only to find that the Brolturans have pulled out. However, the humans now have to fight an advance squad of hostile Legion war droids, during which Greg finds himself betrayed by one of his companions. Without warning, the warpwell Sentinel transports him directly to the inner chamber and from there up to the forest moon. Greg gives the canister containing the Zyradin to Catriona and it permeates her, transforming her into a cloud of glowing motes that spread outwards and across the vast forest.
The book ends with the cyborg Legion Knight taking possession of Giant’s Shoulder and using two of its scion offshoots to unlock the Warpwell.
Chel and Rory are trapped inside the Legion Knight’s droid manufactory, under its pitiless control while the factory implants enslaving biotech within them both. They will soon be set against their own people.
Julia is trapped on a virtual beach controlled by Talavera, made to work on course data for lethal missiles, Talavera’s plans as