The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [78]
Then abruptly he was back on the branchway, standing before the vudron in which Rory dreamed true visions.
‘When he awakes,’ Chel told the Unburdener sentry, ‘tell him that I know it was no dream.’
With that he left, heading down the main trunk’s spiral steps to a rope gantry that would take him back towards that southward ravine. To the south were the Kentigerns and Tusk Mountain within which lay the Hall of Discourse and the Sentinel. Instinct mingled with his Seer talents and said this is where you must go. Now.
THEO
It was well into the night when the first survivors of the mech ambush arrived back at Tusk Mountain. An exhausted handful of men carrying two seriously wounded, one of them a Tygran, both needing immediate attention. Solvjeg and her son Ian volunteered to help and Theo was happy to accept the offer, hoping that by keeping them busy their minds would not dwell so much on Greg’s absence.
When the three of them had returned from the stony, wooded vale where Theo’s unsuccessful assassin now lay dead, it was to a Tusk Mountain base rife with rumour and torn by argument. Earlier, the Tygran squad left behind by Gideon had picked up a brief signal from their ship, the Starfire, saying that Greg Cameron was unable to leave the ship due to enemy action. When the Tygrans also began to overhear fragmentary battle communications from near space, this provoked dark, wild speculation throughout the corridors.
Then a garbled message had been received from Gideon’s comm officer, who said they were under attack moments before he suddenly shrieked in agony and the signal went dead. This turned the prevalent uneasy speculation into a mood barely short of panic. Theo was quick to impose authority and calm, backed by his remaining Diehards. Everyone had to calm down, steady their nerves and their resolve – and to be ready for when the wounded started arriving. Despite some muttering, the personal tack seemed to work and the panic subsided.
As he watched his sister and his nephew help stretcher the injured along to the sickbay, he thought again about their tense, cheerless mood, reasoning that Ned’s death must have had a tragic element. Perhaps he should have been somewhere else when the boatyard went up, or some chance event had led him to the wrong place at the wrong time. Certainly he had witnessed enough incredible coincidences to half-believe that the machinery of the cosmos had a ‘black irony’ setting which inflicted random synchronicities on hapless thinking beings and left them to rise or fall by their consequences. Theo preferred that to the ethos of a watching, activist deity, be it Odin or the Christian God – any god that would deliberately inflict suffering didn’t deserve praise, in his view.
Less than an hour later Captain Gideon arrived with most of the raiding party survivors, of whom a third were walking wounded. But no Vashutkin.
‘I don’t know what happened to him,’ the Tygran said as they went with the injured to the sickbay. ‘He was there, quite close to me, while we were questioning the newcomers … ’
‘Newcomers?’
‘Yes, Major, your people recognised them. A Uvovo called Chel, and a colonist called McGrain, I think.’
Theo laughed. ‘Rory – so he’s still alive! Are they with you?’
‘I lost track of them after the mechs attacked,’ said Gideon. ‘But there was something not right about them. As I heard it, Cameron was almost captured aboard one of your balloon boats after being lured to a hilltop by radio contact with the one named McGrain. Well, after we fought off the ambush, and they were nowhere to be seen, they seemed likely candidates as assassins. However, Vashutkin is also missing, which arouses my suspicion.’
‘I find it hard to believe that Chel and Rory would let themselves be used as assassins,’ Theo said. ‘Vashutkin on the other hand has dark corners that make me uneasy.’ He described the reasons for his suspicions and fears that the Rus had been infected with the blue dust.