The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [38]
After the evacuation from Giant’s Shoulder, the transports had flown to the high valley encampment north of Trond. From his cage of dark numbness Kuros could only watch as Gratach and the Clarified Teshak, the engineer of his imprisonment, reorganised the encampment with the aim of keeping them safe. There were still a number of flyers and aircars capable of mounting an effective strike against the rogue droids which had occupied Giant’s Shoulder and the warpwell, despite the defence batteries still in place there. But Teshak, in his gloating declaration back on Giant’s Shoulder, had made it clear that abandonment of the facility was integral to his plans. The failure of the Hegemon’s Darien strategy would allow the Clarified and their traditionalist allies to see off the current administration and take control of the Hegemony.
However, in the last few days more details had come to Kuros’s attention. Gratach and the Clarified Teshak seemed to communicate via the neural implants, apart from when either or both were accompanied by their Brolturan subordinates. It was from those verbal exchanges that Kuros deduced hints and other fragments of knowledge, including references to ‘the Knight’, who seemed to be the one directing the droids currently occupying Giant’s Shoulder. This entity had also successfully fended off a couple of attacks by the Human resistance.
At the head of the stone steps an uneven path led along a rocky ridge bearing only sparse patches of hardy grass and the occasional low bush. On such an open prominence the breeze was stronger, its cold bite sharper. The path steepened till it reached a level stretch where a Brolturan trooper in outdoor dress saluted as he approached. Further along a small building stood against a sheer cliff of dark stone. He was halfway towards it when a one-man flyer rose into view from the seaward side and alighted gracefully next to the observer station.
Apart from strengthening the defences, their other high-priority task was to make contact with the nearest Hegemony or Brolturan outpost. Multiband scans revealed that no relay satellites had survived the destruction of the Purifier and the subsequent Spiralist invasion in which tens of thousands of half-starving religious pilgrims of various species spilled out of ramshackle transports and began looting the villages and farms of the coastal plain. Under great pressure, a group of Brolturan techs worked around the clock for three days, cannibalising flyer systems, testing modules salvaged from crashed craft, till they managed to assemble a subspace commset.
It only permitted monochrome visuals and low-quality audio, but if it worked it would suffice. Contact was established with a Hegemony listening post at the edge of Brolturan space. Kuros listened as Gratach used his own codes to identify himself as the ambassador then proceeded to spin a wild, exaggerated tale. Gratach told them that after the loss of the Purifier (which they already knew about), and the Spiral armada’s ground invasion, it had been discovered that the zealots had brought dozens of backpack nuclear devices which were now hidden in strategic places throughout the colony. At the first sign of a planetary assault they would be detonated. He then claimed that his forces had captured three Imisil spies who, after questioning, revealed that an Imisil invasion force was already on its way to the Darien system. Kuros listened to all this with barely restrained fury. Clearly, Gratach had thrown in his lot with the Clarified Teshak and the Clarified conspiracy.
The reply came two hours later. Relayed from Iseri, the Sendrukan homeworld, it came from none other than the