Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (32 page)

‘Communicating with Siganthians,' said Kian now, ‘was never easy, and getting started was a huge obstacle. What we settled on was a spin-off from LuxPrime tech, adaptive implants that learned to assign similar meanings to different individuals' patterns.'

‘Implants? I don't like the sound of that.'

‘Reverse that thought. What if we could inject a smart-virus into any Siganthian still carrying implants? Or insert new, ready-coded implants?'

Even if it was a partial success, perhaps freeing a few individuals temporarily, even a tiny victory against the Anomaly would encourage Pilot engagement with realspace, and perhaps spawn tactics other than retreat-and-quarantine to deal with the threat. Anything to maintain involvement, because the worst scenario of all was one in which Pilotkind abandoned humanity to dangers that were irrelevant to mu-space and Labyrinth.

‘You want me to do, what?' asked Rickson. ‘Gather a research team together?'

As always, after a time-skipping flight, Kian had few personal contacts to call on. The ongoing loose-knit organisation of activists, and the long-lived comms protocols that enabled him to get in touch with each new wave of representatives, was all he had.

‘Whoever is the best,' he told Rickson now. ‘Whoever can do the work.'

‘And then what?'

Kian had a form of low-key charisma involving deliberate psycholinguistic rhetoric, which he employed seldom, but with one hundred per cent of his being when he did so, always and without inner conflict or doubt, when he was certain that his actions were in Pilotkind's best interests. What he said next was a lie, but its intent was to protect, and from what he could sense of Rickson's reaction, the falsehood rang true:

‘We hand it over, via an appropriate contact' – Kian thought of Rowena James at this point – ‘so that the Admiralty's paramilitaries can do what they do best.'

It would be sensible for Labyrinth's forces to receive a copy of whatever they learned and developed; but Kian would prefer to use a smartvirus in as non-violent a manner as possible – freeing the Siganthians, even if they had initially believed absorption into the Anomaly was a good idea. It was better than, say, holding them in place via virus-induced catatonia, and bombarding their world with destructive weapons, which would be the kind of plan that military minds might hatch, or so Kian believed.

Plus, however the smartvirus were eventually used, the initial incursion would need to be stealthy and low-key, in order to inject the virus into one or two individuals. However well-trained Labyrinth's special forces might be, Kian was a master of elusive movement, and was confident – justifiably, he hoped – that he could do as good a job.

How could he ask anyone else to take a deadly risk arising from his own screw-up? It was his problem to deal with if he could, but not in a stupid way. In case he failed, he would make sure that others possessed the same knowledge, so that they could find better ways to utilise it.

Whether Rickson ever guessed Kian's intentions, he did not discover. But when the results of the investigations among Rickson's extended network of contacts came through – where physical meetings were rare, and never involved more than three Pilots in one place – it was like a military briefing, or what Kian imagined a military briefing to be, a holo session reporting positive results in programming the tiny implant-seeds according to Kian's specifications.

The news regarding Siganthian lifeforms was better than expected, considerably better, and might with luck provide a means of infecting the hellworld without risk to any Pilots who might venture to Siganth system in person, whether or not that Pilot was Kian McNamara.

Seventeen modest-sized planetoids in that system were home to Siganthian colonies or hive-ecologies, while being outside the thousand-kilometre range of Zajinet-style manipulation of the hyperdimensions from the Anomaly dominating their homeworld. How the colonies had been founded was not known for certain – spaceships were not in evidence, now or previously – but the leading guess was this: thousands of individuals re-engineered each other, locked themselves in place to form a composite of deliberate design, forming themselves en masse into spacegoing vessels. Once at their destinations, they had disassembled and dispersed.

And more pertinently, because this had clearly happened a long time ago, those colonies were not part of the Anomaly. Willingly or not, Siganthian individuals bearing smart-virus-spreading implants might be carried to the hellworld via unmanned drones, there to begin a process of counter-infection that might with luck become endemic and lead to the freeing of the Siganthians from a condition that might
once have seemed to be god-like transcendence, but would in retrospect feel like slavery.

‘We've added meme-vectors to seed that idea,' said one of the speakers in the holo session. ‘Regardless of whether it's naturally true, they'll be glad to have broken free of their absorbed condition.'

It was perhaps the least ethical aspect of the whole venture. But from another perspective, this was an act of war that might lead to overwhelming victory with not a single death or even injury. For Kian, it was the least evil, if not best possible, means of ending a conflict and the enslavement of an entire world.

But he was aware that this was the justification for every imperialist venture in history, forcing ‘enlightened' change on cultures unaware of their own ‘wrongness'; and he would not have proceeded with the plan were it not for the awful threat that Siganth, along with Fulgor and Molsin, presented to humanity.

So I'm no better than anyone else.

Which he had known all along, of course.

His poor ship paid the price for his hubris.

She was no longer the dumb vessel she had been in the early days. Though a second-generation vessel – among the first to bear a natural-born Pilot – her earlier crude AIs had grown and evolved through the care and nourishment of Labyrinth's Ascension Annexe (flying there without Kian aboard, but with his blessing), a place whose name meant what it said. All ships were entangled with their Pilot, and she was no exception, but she had developed the awareness and increased the entanglement over time, and was aware that there was something about Kian that was different from every other Pilot.

A difference that triggered an unexpected reaction among the Siganthians he tried to communicate with.

Floating a hundred metres above a hive settlement on the
farthest colony from Siganth proper, she waited with weapons fully armed while Kian conducted his initial meetings with the metallic, half-organic lifeforms that seemed odd and alien even to her, a spacegoing vessel originally constructed as a mere machine.

They worried her, those Siganthians.

She had deployed eye-seeds for surveillance, stayed ready to act immediately at the first precursor of a threat to Kian, and watched as he stood in the centre of a concave hall decorated with moving metallic flanges, patiently establishing communication with the Siganthians, who allowed him to spray implant-seeds into the air, which they carefully took into themselves through filters and capillaries, and allowed to begin functioning.

‘Thank you,' Kian said, when the initial tests and vocabulary-matching sessions were over, and the seven metallic individuals before him – variously like beetles, dragons or tanks, but only in grossest outline – indicated their readiness to begin a first serious negotiation. ‘Indicate if you are willing to allow me to transport you to Siganth's surface.'

The hard part of translation was at the deepest neuro-electronic level, and the Pilot researchers had not bothered to add semantic sugar, as it was known, to the system. There remained a level of necessary literalness in speaking to the Siganthians, one aspect of which was this: their language did not allow for questions, only imperative directions to provide information.

To Kian's ship, this was simply one more sign that the venture was inherently flawed and overwhelmingly dangerous. But neither her fears nor her tactical readiness prepared her for what happened next.

The tallest Siganthian's first response was a question, or what passed for it:

{Describe the properties of the brightness in your skull-case.}

From her position overhead, Kian's ship felt a cognitive interrupt akin to a human gasp, because that was exactly how
she perceived the
other
entanglement inside Kian's brain, the strange, tiny seed of something that no other Pilot carried, and whose nature, for all the years they had spent in closer partnership than non-Pilots could imagine, she had only just begun to analyse properly.

Kian himself could not have answered the Siganthian's question, even if he had understood it. For she, his ship, had never told him of the thing that glowed inside his head. Perhaps if he had gone to Labyrinth in person, the city-world might have been able to—

‘I do not understand,' Kian told the Siganthian. ‘My non-compliance is not refusal.'

{Irrelevant.}

And then it happened.

Sapphire blue light blazed everywhere, and Kian's ship understood the true depth of the Pilots' misunderstanding and miscalculation: they were in fact within range of hyperdimensional manipulation from Siganth's Anomaly, and while the colony here was not part of that gestalt, it appeared to have been in constant communication with it, although that might be a misreading of the situation.

Whether the colony willed it or not, Kian disappeared from eye-seed surveillance, while from overhead, his ship yelled inside her mind, knowing he was gone, and where he was, and what was happening to him.

It was the most awful of tortures.

Kian, my Kian—

And it hurt her more, and for immeasurably longer, than it did him.

FORTY-FIVE

NULAPEIRON, 3426 AD

According to legend as well as Kenna's memory, the first of the hellworlds, the former paradise known as Fulgor, a shining beacon of culture as its name suggested, fell to the Anomaly within days, while some of its major battles (as in the fight for control of the global virtual environment called the Skein) were fought on a timescale of milliseconds.

Other dark names from history, like Siganth and Molsin, were less clear in the specifics, but the implication always was that in each case civilisation collapsed fast, soon after the first appearance of the Anomaly. Even less was known about the more recent hellworlds: fourteen in total.

Nulapeiron, the fifteenth world, was different.

Eight centuries after Fulgor fell, the Anomaly manifested in one realm of Nulapeiron after another, taking control of rulers and soldiers, absorbing key humans into its gestalt, but not every human, not yet. Perhaps it was the logotropes in the Lords' and Ladies' brains that made absorption so challenging; or the differences in cognition throughout the populace that arose due to logosophical training; or perhaps it was the greater scale and environment of that population, with billions living in subterranean demesnes, not a few million (or less) on the surface or in the skies.

The final possibility – perhaps with the greater likelihood – was that the far greater distance from Fulgor made the difference. Perhaps it was true that there was only a single Anomaly, increasingly extended each time a new hellworld was born.

Because of the Oracles, well established as tools of the ruling Lords and Ladies, ‘Fate' and ‘Chaos' had become curse words; yet the undenied truth of every Oracular report had failed to help against the Anomalous invasion. Worse: the lack of reports from further in the future formed a
de facto
prediction of defeat.

For all of those past eight centuries Kenna had been living here: the last seven hundred years in her crystalline form, whose capabilities continued to grow and yet were nowhere near their final development. If she were right in her estimates, every century that passed was like a single day in a human life. She would be entering full maturity – approximately equivalent to a human's thirtieth birthday – a million years from now.

Such a long time in which to keep herself unharmed.

For nearly a century now, in her deep stronghold beneath a subterranean sea, she had been alternately priestess – the word
volva
came from hidden memory – and chieftain to some of the Kobolds who lived in this unofficial realm. They were not the only line of once humans merged cyborg-like with one or other variant of technology; as a crystalline being herself, Kenna had been instrumental in these blue skinned part quickstone beings creating a culture of their own.

The Kobolds had long been allied with the Grey Shadow movement, whose antecedents stretched all the way back to the dissidents first organised by the undercover Pilot, Linda Gunnarsson. Long dedicated to quiet subversion of the status quo, they now – for the first time – began to regard their Crystal Lady as a war ruler. And when they took a special prisoner whose name had featured heavily in the revolutionary movement before such things became irrelevant, it was to Kenna that they brought the man.

He was a commoner turned Lord (for the first time in a century in the region controlled by the Congressio-Interstata Beth-Gamma) who had turned his back on both the
incumbent system and the rebels' self serving alternative; but he was remembered as a figurehead in the revolution.

To many, he was simply Lord One-Arm.

His name was Tom Corcorigan.

Kenna waited in the great hall that was kept cool despite the magma that surrounded it, and watched as they brought him in: a one-armed man in his mid-thirties, with the ascetic look of an endurance athlete. There were fragments of holo footage within the revolutionary movement that showed Corcorigan fighting hand-to-hand, and the significance to Kenna was this: Lord One-Arm was fully human, but he fought like a Pilot.

Clearly there was much to be discovered beyond his reputation. Like most people entering her presence, he stood as if hypnotised, in awe. It would be easy to explore his mind.

The question was, how much should she assist the man?

Around Nulapeiron, armies were fighting back against invading forces which in many cases were almost entirely human, but under the control of Anomaly-absorbed officers. The defenders included fully armed battalions led by General Lord Ygran, a fierce and experienced strategist. His forces boasted fully armoured arachnargoi – near-living vehicles able to carry sometimes hundreds of troops, their forms like huge spiders with strong tendrils, perfectly adapted to both the natural deep caverns of Nulapeiron and the halls and tunnels of human demesnes.

And there were the fringe tribes: wild-riding nomads who practically lived in the saddles of their speeding arachnasprites. Their hard, fierce existence made them cunning, pitiless guerrilla fighters. But however hard the various defenders fought, it could only be a delaying action.

It was not as if the Anomaly cared about any of its components dying.

What Nulapeiron's defence required was something
different
,
and every possibility needed to be investigated, including the one-armed man before her now.

—
You are most welcome in this place, Thomas Corcorigan.

He continued to look awestruck.

‘I don't deserve to be here.'

In her presence, he meant. She tried to form her response in an idiom natural to one whose first language was Nov'glin, the contemporary descendant of Novanglin.

—
Your form belongs in this place
. Then:
Tell me of yourself, my fighting Lord
. So he told her of his life.

There was much to tell, and as he related what he remembered, Kenna thought back to another time when she, or rather Rhianna Chiang, allowed one Roger Blackstone's deep subconscious mind to unburden itself of secrets that his consciousness could not be allowed to share; except that in this case, Tom Corcorigan knew exactly what had happened to him, and consciously nursed the stubbornness growing inside him, enabling him to fight back.

The highlights were: aged fourteen standard, he had witnessed an undercover Pilot being hunted down and killed, but not before she had bequeathed him a crystal that told him of Pilot history; then an Oracle called Gérard d'Ovraison predicted the death of Tom's father – who subsequently wasted away for no good medical reason – after d'Ovraison carried away Tom's mother; later, the amputation of Tom's arm as punishment for theft he had been caught up in, not instigated; then servitude and the driven discipline to better himself, to become a Lord in his own right; and the need to kill an Oracle, up close with a blade, even though the Oracle foresaw his own long and peaceful life, lasting well into undisturbed old age.

But Tom Corcorigan, once a boy who had dreamt of being a poet, sometime Lord One-Arm and revolutionary icon, had accomplished his vengeance, and more.

Kenna mulled over this while Corcorigan waited, standing in peaceful trance. There were two pieces of information she
could give him, to remain perhaps within his subconscious yet available to his intuition. The first was a logical thing to share.

—
The Grey Shadows have Pilot agents among them.

Corcorigan's long involvement with the revolutionary movement, now part of the increasingly scattered resistance, meant that he had contacts among the disparate, loosely allied organisations that comprised the Grey Shadows. The point was that Nulapeiron's resistance was doomed unless someone managed to get external allies, powerful allies, involved. In the past, Pilotkind's response to nascent Anomalous incursion had been to get clear at the first sign of trouble, and quarantine the planet.

But the situation here was different, the timescale longer, and the continuing presence of undercover Pilots, however sparse their numbers, gave Kenna some hope.

The second piece of information, though . . . That was a wild thought, half rational. The Pilot history that Corcorigan had immersed himself in, the crystal that he still carried inside a stallion-shaped talisman around his neck, had focused on the McNamara clan, and was in fact a copy of a tale that Rhianna Chiang had owned as a girl in Labyrinth. It meant that Lord One-Arm knew almost as much Pilot history as Kenna did, and so this would make sense to him:

—
Ro McNamara lives still, hidden within the Logos Library.

There was a question concerning the relevance of the First Admiral's continued existence, which strictly speaking, Kenna could not be sure of: it was now eight centuries since she, as Rhianna Chiang, had been in Labyrinth.

But her own intuition had told her to share that information.

A message from
my
subconscious?

Because this was it: she skated on the edge of paradox, and sometimes reality appeared to shimmer, alive with the possibility of breaking causality and all that made sense, threatening dissolution and disaster; and this was one of those moments.

Call it a memory of a future dream, inaccurate though the analogy was, for the simplest of reasons.

She never slept.

After the Kobolds removed the stunned Corcorigan from the chamber, she gave further instructions to Griell, one of her Kobold lieutenants.

—
Trevalkin's people must learn that Corcorigan is a worthwhile ally. Get word to them via the usual cutouts.

‘Straight away, ma'am.'

There were others who might usefully ally themselves with Corcorigan, and support his efforts.

—
The Strontium Dragons Society have a
pak tsz sin
called Zhao-ji among their senior ranks. He knew Corcorigan in childhood. Get word to him also.

The resistance needed heroic figures, and Lord One-Arm was a potent symbol in their mythology.

‘Ma'am.'

Alone then, she sank into meditation, considering her own life in relation to Corcorigan's, that mix of contingency and determination, so turbulent; and her greater goal that she could never share at risk of being thought insane: to fight a war that would make this conflict seem insignificant, a battle on behalf of every baryonic-matter lifeform in the galaxy, in a final confrontation a million years from now.

Even though the world she lived in seemed doomed to fall, very soon indeed.