The Ascendant Stars Read Online Free Page B

triggering explosives which brought a deck and bulkheads down on them. They had kept fighting while trying to free their trapped companions but it was nearly impossible. McAllister and Moseyev had been killed outright, while Kokorin was clubbed and hacked to death. The desperate holding action had ended when my thermite charges severed the generator core from the rest of the ship and the Command AI. Cut off from that diabolical intelligence, the cyborged crew had stopped fighting, dropping whatever weapons they had, and had started groaning or screaming.
    Even as I stood outside listening to the captain I could hear sharp cries and animal-like shrieks of agony coming from inside the ship. Olssen said that the AI’s cyborgisation process must have included some method of stimulating endorphin production to suppress or numb the pains of those freakish surgical adaptations. It was that pain, raw and unfiltered, which was now tormenting them. A couple had already died, cardiac arrests brought on by shock and seizures.
    Yet that was not the worst of it. The isolation of the generator core had initiated a shipwide lockdown of all pressure doors, at least those not damaged by the landing or the ambush explosion. This has resulted in large areas of the ship being sealed off, and made inaccessible since all manual overrides have been destroyed. It also meant that a number of the cyborged crew members are trapped in the sealed-off areas – when I went into the
Hyperion
with McBain to stretcher out one of the incapacitated ones, I could hear muffled screams and howls from the locked-down decks.
    The rest of that day and the next was devoted to burying the dead and taking the wounded back to the cave. The following morning Strogalev went with me back to the vent shaft and down to the power coupling to retrieve poor Ferguson’s body and those of the AI’s victims. Tying them up in plastic sheeting, we dragged them through the ducts and back outside, adding them to the row of the dead.
    And now I am back here in the cave, making my notes. There were great cheers when we returned. Is this victory? It scarcely feels like it. Perhaps Olssen could see that in my face on the way back here. He told me to stay and rest while he took a party back to the ship to salvage what they could and to see if there were any ways into the sealed-off decks.
    Some have been talking about moving back into the
Hyperion
and setting up living quarters. For myself, I could not contemplate doing such a thing, yet I feel that I will be spending quite some time there in the days ahead.
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    Commentary II –
As we know, from Surov’s diaries and other accounts, it took them nearly eight years to break through to the upper forward decks, from where the rest of the
Hyperion
was easily accessible. But they found that intermediary doors had been strengthened or blocked off entirely. The forward repair shop and an auxiliary medical station had been stripped of their most useful contents. There were also booby traps which claimed one life. The resulting disappointment caused a split – in eight years the survivors had certainly learned what plants, animals and sea creatures were safe to eat but the effort devoted to the ship had held back development on several fronts
.
    By the spring of Year Nine there were no more than a handful still at work in the ship, including Vasili Surov. At the end of Year Ten they gained access to the main sickbay, just in time for the birth of the colony’s fourth baby. They also finally gained access to the cryo-stored embryos. Sacrifice and resolve showed that a better future was possible. – S.H
.
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GREG
     
    Three long grey days after Catriona merged with the Zyradin, which took her from him, Greg saw her again.
    He had been sitting on a mat-cushioned, sunlit perch overlooking Berrybow, a mid-level harvester town, studying a small Uvovo statuette, when he glimpsed movement out of the corner of