The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [93]
The image of Remosca vanished, to be replaced by a wide-angle shot of the vicinity, including Darien and the forest moon, Nivyesta. Dynamic tags floated around the image border, updates on debris density per 100 cubic kilometres. Some tags identified the locations of bodies.
‘Seven to one sounds worse than the actuality,’ Ash said. ‘Strange things happen during battle, witness our most recent encounter. And anyway, so far the space around Darien has been a graveyard for starships. I think that the Hegemony is going to learn a painful lesson here.’
‘And Earthsphere? – what will they learn?’
Ash shrugged. ‘To choose better allies, perhaps.’
As the Tygran officer went off to talk to his techs, Greg stared up at the screen, at Darien hanging in space, looking just then more beautiful than he could remember.
If I asked Ash for permission to return to Darien he would probably allow it. Yet here am I, on a captured Hegemony warship, mentally preparing myself for more fighting against insane odds.
And just then, he found himself picturing Catriona listening in on his thoughts, her face lit up with a sceptical smile.
Oh aye, Mr Cameron? And what makes you so special that these fine, brave Tygran soldiers just canna leap into the lion’s mouth without you, eh? Tell me that if you will.
And he imagined himself replying:
Well, I don’t think I could sit down there, safe and powerless, while Darien’s fate is being decided up here. I might die, but if Darien lives on then that’ll be okay. But what if I lived through it all and Darien was wiped out? I couldn’t bear that, losing you and … home.
So ye see, a leap into the lion’s mouth may not be such a bad option, if you give it something that’s really hard to chew …
ROBERT
At the edge of everything, it began as a hiss, a sough soft as a faint breeze touching long grass. Slight variations crept in, made it sound like a long whispered conversation overheard from the far end of a great hall. When at last it was loud enough to wake him properly, he had already arrived at the realisation that he was lying on something padded at the bottom of a boat. And his ears were full of the sound of rushing waters.
Carefully, Robert Horst sat up. Sheer grey cliffs loomed to either side while some distance back the way he had come was an immense arched portal, perhaps a hundred feet high and set into the rocky sides of the deep gorge. Beyond it was an inky darkness and the hazy outlines of great orbs, those eroded, hollowed-out bodies that the sim-AI was convinced had once been armed planetoids, built for an ages-gone battle against something called the Sun-Hydra …
The last moments of that terrifying chase across the inner surface of the planetoid came back to him, the console alert which showed the huge black bulk of a megavermax hurtling after the lifepod he was in, and the awful crash into oblivion just as he entered the anomaly. And yet apparently he had made it, crossed into some strange territory on the fringe of the Godhead’s mind. The Tanenth machine had impressed upon him the dangers of entering these domains, levels of hyperspace that the meta-quantal properties of the Godhead’s thoughts had refashioned in ways both conscious and subconscious. The machine had warned that intruders could also influence the characteristics of an environment rendered malleable by the pressure of those thoughts.
Well, so far my presence seems to have had little effect on the surroundings, he thought. I would be quite happy to miss out on seeing my unconscious imaginings made solid …
Mist drifted over the surface of the river and low cloud blurred the heights of the cliffs. The air was still and quiet, no insect sounds, no birds, just the murmur of the river. Behind, the immense portal paled away behind veils of mist while ahead the gorge curved to the left, the cliffs lost height and became rounder. Bushes sprouted here and there, then came reedy shallows with small trees dotted along narrow shores.