The place they provided for her was a strange complex of interconnected, shadowy halls where blue glowing pillars rose up into darkness, where flowers sprouted from the walls while pale gossamer mist hung in the air like great veils. It was meant to be a sanctuary for her essence, this disembodied spectre that she had become, and she came to think of it as the Dream Palace. In some ways it was an attenuated version of the forest Segrana but it left her feeling ignored and redundant. Sometimes she felt like a child at the beck and call of titanic beings with scarcely comprehensible motives and purposes. Other times she would be raised up to carry out a straightforward task, like leading Greg to the pickup point. Yet her understanding and private speculations had made it a bitter experience, knowing that any attempt to warn him would result in her summary return to these empty halls.
Ever since the Zyradin had used her to spread itself throughout Segrana’s great weave of being, Catriona had been constantly aware that she was on the fringes of a vast, multilayered dialogue, picking up a few things from the outermost ripples. Not so much actual words, more like conceptual fragments, echoes of ideas, fractured images, snatches of conversation, and the occasional swirl of heat, a sign of disagreement.
All of which her Enhanced mind could not help but gather and sort and juxtapose, while her speculative instincts tested and discarded conjecture after conjecture. To her dismay the first which made real consistent sense was about Greg. The closer she looked, the more she realised that between them the Zyradin and Segrana were trying to foresee events and planning how to influence them. For Greg this would mean plunging along a sequence of encounters and clashes that promised horrific obliteration if he failed at any point. When she was brought forth to lead Greg up through the forest she already knew that his journey back to Darien would be interrupted, that the next stage of his odyssey would lead to an epic conflict whose outcome was far from certain.
Nor was he the only actor on the stage. Segrana and the Zyradin were obsessing over several others, who at times seemed less like actors and more like threads in an immense shifting pattern. She had seen glimpses of the Chinese emissary, Kao Chih, who had helped rescue the Pyre colonists, and now they were all fleeing from warships of the Suneye Monoclan, that peculiarly successful interstellar commercial entity run by a Hegemony faction called the Clarified. They were Sendrukans whose minds had been erased, for medical or punitive reasons, leaving behind a host dominated by the implanted AI. Unsurprisingly, they provoked a certain unease in the Zyradin and Segrana.
Another strand included Theo Karlsson, Rory McGrain, the Uvovo Seer Chel, and the cyborg Legion Knight who had seized and unlocked the warpwell. But there too was the enigmatic Chaurixa terrorist Corazon Talavera who, like the Clarified, provoked dread and anxiety, except that she also seemed to imply something more pivotal and terrible.
Then there was Julia.
Back in the dark, distant and disturbing past, Julia Bryce and Catriona had been students at Zhilinsky House, a residential facility run by the New Children Programme. All the students were either orphans or signed over to the NCP’s guardianship, and all had undergone genetic engineering in the embryonic stage with the aim of creating people with superior minds and the ability to consciously direct the fullness of the intellect. By puberty, Catriona’s mind had failed to progress correctly while for Julia Bryce success followed success.
Only now Julia and several other Enhanced had been taken prisoner by the Chaurixa woman, Talavera. Coerced or otherwise, they had provided the advanced weapons that destroyed the Brolturan battleship Purifier, and forced the Earthsphere cruiser Heracles to withdraw.
Catriona, absorbed into Segrana’s great weave of being, drifting in the under-periphery of that enigmatic colloquy with the Zyradin, had recognised Julia’s image among the outer splinters and heard whispers as redolent of hope as they were of fear. She had tried piecing the fragments together with frail webs of conjecture, but it was only after she had returned from leading Greg offworld that she had gathered enough slivers to provide a halfway coherent picture.
And despite the lack of detail, the implications were staggering. Talavera held Julia’s life in the balance, yet there was some other terrible motivation binding them together. Julia was also linked to Earth, a connection that would determine the fate of both Greg and Darien. Julia’s own survival was uncertain but there was an end point, a barely discernible convergence of colossal forces, a focus shared between Segrana and somewhere else, out among the stars…
Catriona let the web of conjecture unravel and the premonition faded. So much was uncertain, so much of it consisted of gaps bridged by speculation of her own making. This was the classic researcher’s mistake, impressing one’s own expectations upon dataless voids. Indeed, it was possible that either Segrana or the Zyradin were committing the same sin, causing those hints of disagreement.
One thing was certain, however–in the space between Nivyesta and Darien, Greg was about to set out on a wild plunge into chaos and mortal danger.
And if I’d explained it to ye, I’m not sure ye wouldn’t still have got on that ship!