The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [83]
As they watched, the Seer’s form brightened, the details of his face blurring, merging then fading into the flowing radiance which itself then grew faint, a tenuous tracery of glimmer hanging over the patterns of the stone platform. Till there was only a silver shimmer which melted away to nothing.
Listener Weynl sighed, a weary sound, and sat on the flagstones before the raised circular platform.
‘We’ll need to put together lists of volunteers, weapons and supplies,’ Gideon said.
‘I’ll have Alexei Firmanov help you with that,’ Theo said. ‘While I’m away.’
The Tygran frowned. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To persuade Varstrand to fly me north to the daughter-forest,’ he said. ‘A good friend is going to need a ride home.’
GREG
In the blackness of space the ship spun, helpless and crippled. It was turning end over end with a certain grace while also rotating about its longitudinal axis. External lights and landing indicators flickered erratically and vapour leaks left strange, fading spirals of frozen crystals in the vessel’s wake.
A Hegemony ship, a heavy assault implementer called the Ivwa-Kagoy, was tracking it on its course away from the Human colony world. The pursuit was also leading away from the fighting but the Hegemony captain was confident that the mighty carrier, Baqrith-Zo, was quite capable of obliterating a pair of Imisil scouts. This Human vessel, however, was a different matter. It matched the configuration of an Ezgara ship yet it had been fighting alongside the Imisil when the Hegemony carrier group exited hyperspace near the system’s periphery. There had been rumours of an Ezgara regiment turning renegade and the Father-Admiral urgently needed to know if there were any other similar rogue vessels in the stellar vicinity. His orders were clear – capture and interrogate.
Standing at his elevated command console, the Sendrukan captain surveyed projected screens full of scan data on the Human vessel. The sensors had detected some forty-seven lifesigns, whereas the Ivwa-Kagoy’s complement came to twenty-five.
But Humans are like children next to us, the captain thought. My crew should be able to overcome them without difficulty. However, Ezgara prisoners may present a problem. A degree of caution and subterfuge is required.
He was consulting with the ship’s machine intelligence and his own mind-companion when visual updates streamed across his command screens. Minor explosions aboard the Ezgara vessel had expelled some lesser debris, hull armour, outer bulkhead fragments, components, cabling, and white clouds of escape gases. There was also a larger object that looked to have been partially dislodged from its fastenings – one of the screens showed it swinging out from a shallow recess on the Ezgara vessel’s underside, still attached. Then something gave way and the object, now visible as a small shuttle pod, was flung outwards by the still-spinning ship. One sensor cluster tracked its slow tumbling progress for a moment or two; the expert system observed the erratic misfiring of its attitude thrusters, noted the absence of lifeforms aboard and demoted its monitoring priority.
So when one of the shuttle pod’s port thrusters fired in longer bursts, sending it into a tighter, faster spin, the sensors’ expert system failed to register it as a problem. Until it came out of its spin on a fast intercept trajectory, all thrusters on full burn, driving it towards the Hegemony ship. Collision alarms started yammering on the bridge and the machine mind advised the captain and his officers to retreat to the midsection.
But with only a few seconds to react, they had only begun moving to the exits when the shuttle crashed nose first into the viewport. Armoured glass barriers shattered under the impact, layers of hull around it bent and split, and the shuttle’s blunt prow