• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 612 0

themselves to be drawn into direct confrontation with the Hegemony. When the full might of the Legion of Avatars erupts from the warpwell and begins filling up the night with their glittering ranks, perhaps those bitter enemies will find themselves forced to band together against us, like walls of mud against a tide of steel. Defeat will follow defeat for them and soon they will realise the futility of opposing us. Convergence works with us, its rich inexorable strength is ours. We can only triumph>

Resting within the armoured autofactory, the Legion Knight felt reassured by his thoughts, even though he knew that the future was always in flux. Even though the loss of his two scions to the warpwell had diminished and eroded his cognitive/conjectural capacity, now placed under increased strain by demanding thought processes. The autofactory had repaired and enhanced the physical shell of his existence, as well as its innumerable systems, but his neural pathways bore the scars of passing time, the entropy of millennia wearing away the underpinnings of his mind, atom by atom.

A priority alert interrupted the current of his thoughts, an urgent update from the surveillance flyer feeds. Unit 8 had been scanning the forest and wooded hills north-west of Giant’s Shoulder – overlapping passes revealed the presence of an indeterminate number of Humans moving in single file northwards, tending east. Projections indicated that possible destinations included any of the Spiral zealot garrisons which were holding down the northern coastal area.

Now data was arriving from ground remotes in the vicinity, confirming that the insurgents numbered over sixty and that several were carrying sophisticated energy weapons. Their heading would take them through or past one of the Uvovo transplanted species reserves, or so-called daughter-forests. That was a good place for an ambush, the Legion Knight decided. He would immediately dispatch a force of twenty-five combat droids, and also sent the two wire-null augments, the Human and the Uvovo he had captured before the seizure of Giant’s Shoulder. For a few days their response indoctrination had failed to embed properly, although the Human had almost persuaded the pilot of one of those primitive airbag craft to descend into a trap.

Since then, however, they had shown marked improvement to the point where field trials were necessary. An ambush would be prepared and when the Humans entered its ambit the two wire-nulls would approach them, pretending to be escapees. Soon after they would use their weapons to start killing the Humans – that would be the signal for the combat mechs to close in.

The plan was satisfactory. He gave the orders and as a sudden ferment of activity stirred the shining ranks of machines he turned his attention back to the sensor clusters and their continual scanning of local airspace, as well as near-orbit and beyond. The Imisil ships seemed to have left, while the destroyed Ezgara vessel added its own portion to the clouds of debris already swinging around Darien, causing significant showers of shooting stars.

And since the Hegemony took great exception to the destruction of its and its allies’ ships, its response would be swift, decisive and very violent. Would any Imisil vessel return before then and provide him with an entertaining prelude to the arrival of the Legion of Avatars?

THEO

It was the shaking and the jolting that brought him round, along with a dull throbbing headache which, perversely, sharpened as he emerged into full wakefulness. Other sensations began making themselves known, his legs and arms which he couldn’t move, the complete inky blackness that greeted his open eyes, and the voice mumbling nearby.

Drowsy thoughts suddenly clicked together. His ankles and wrists were bound and there was a bag over his head. And the owner of the mumbling mouth also appeared to be the driver of the wheelbarrow