Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (38 page)

FIFTY-THREE

NULAPEIRON, 3427 AD

Watched by Kenna's secret surveillance motes, Tom Corcorigan, otherwise Lord Corcorigan, Lord One-Arm, ex-revolutionary, in a demesne far from the conflict, enjoyed his honeymoon accompanied by his new wife, naturally, and rather unnaturally by an old friend, the severed but still-living head of a Seer (one of occasional such mistakes in the ongoing programme producing Oracles) called Eemur.

Not just alive, but flensed, that head: glistening, blood-wet facial muscles exposed to the air, life processes maintained by transfusion via spacetime distortion – hyperdimensional blood-sucking – the closest an almost-human might come to possessing the abilities once characteristic of Zajinets.

Corcorigan made odd friendships.

There was no vicarious pleasure involved in Kenna's watching the one-armed Lord at the start of his marriage, but there was every fascination in observing as Tom disappeared from the plush chamber in which he faced Eemur: teleported in a flash of sapphire light, unnaturally far, in a way that provided evidence of the Anomaly's true nature.

It was in fact a single extended Anomaly, Kenna deduced, extended across the hellworlds just as she had once comprised distributed components in Palace Avernon. The proof was this: the impossibly long hyperdimensional route that Corcorigan rode, tapped into by Eemur in a massive mistake – the teleportation had been intended as a playful gift – sending her Lord and only friend to a distant world.

There was nothing Kenna could do to help.

But when Corcorigan reappeared, falling to the floor and
gasping, bleeding, she knew for sure that she had done the right thing in encouraging the resistance to see him as a war leader. This was an unpredictable man, and no one could fight the Anomaly by performing the obvious.

He thanked Eemur wearily for the unexpected present, and hauled himself to the bathchamber and finally to bed. There, in his sleep, he muttered in pain, fragments about flensing and vivisection that Kenna first took to be references to Eemur, then realised were a description of something he had seen: a man being stripped of flesh and then rebuilt, over and over again, using hyperdimensional manipulation as horrific torture.

From afar, she directed some of her surveillance motes into Corcorigan's ear, there to whisper the posthypnotic trigger-words that caused him to relate what he had seen.

Subvocalising, he talked of the prisoner who, in the brief seconds when he was physically whole, was nevertheless claw-handed, facially disfigured and obsidian-eyed, a Pilot. And from Corcorigan's description of the metallic beings who chased him when he appeared on the world, and the mechanical architecture in which they lived, the location was Siganth: it had to be.

All of which made it more urgent to do something here in Nulapeiron. For the first time, Kenna had a notion of tracking down one of the undercover Pilots inside the Grey Shadows and getting them to take her offworld, simply fleeing; then she quelled the idea.

Dropping the surveillance link, she sank inside her thoughts.

The war against the Anomaly's forces progressed incrementally towards defeat. Corcorigan became Warlord Primus and directed his forces from a floating terraformer, the same stone sphere that once was home to Oracle d'Ovraison, dead at Corcorigan's hand. Closer to home, in the subterranean ocean above Kenna's headquarters, her Kobold warriors crewed armoured mantargoi and fought metallic intruders
out of nightmare: Siganthians, transported here along the hyperdimensions.

Only her surveillance of Corcorigan's secret efforts gave Kenna hope, in particular his use of the current Lord Avernon, who – as Kenna watched from deep inside Nulapeiron – flew with Corcorigan's personal guard, his fierce carls, to the orbital shell where the spinpoints were normally harvested for the Collegium Delphinorum, whose logosophers and technicians continued to create new Oracles for the nobility's use, although predictions from the future were now absent.

Aboard his skyborne terraformer, Corcorigan opened comms with the shuttle. ‘Avernon. Are you there?'

‘Oh, Tom.' The voice was high, shaking. ‘Yes.'

‘What happened? What went wrong?'

‘Those orders of magnitude . . . I misjudged a single factor in the equation, approximated it as a constant when I should have known . . . Should have.'

‘How do we fix it?'

‘We can't. We just . . . can't.'

(Kenna thought:
If this effort fails, it is the end
.)

Neither the shuttle crew nor the equipment could work with the precision Avernon needed to translate his ideas into practicality, to turn a shell of singularity seeds into a shield that would cut through the hyperdimensional links and with luck sever all of the Anomaly's influence.

‘Send me the equations,' ordered Corcorigan. ‘Send it now.'

This was desperate.

From deep within her magma-shielded chambers, Kenna searched through her distant surveillance nets among the Grey Shadows resistance forces, looking for a Pilot, realising she had been wrong: wherever the Anomaly was to be defeated, it was not here.

Escape, now, was all that was left.

Her search was a tour de force of surveillance analysis that she could never share: using her own no-longer-human brain in lieu of pattern-recognition engines, scouring through image
after image after image, looking for what she—

There.

They were in stone chambers among heavy, dumb-fabric hangings, surrounded by cots filled with wounded and dying fighters. Two men: one shaven-headed, Brino by name, an asset of Labyrinth's intelligence service but not a Pilot; and one Janis deVries, his obsidian eyes disguised by smartlenses, either highly skilled or desperate, because his ship was in a cavern nearby, ready to transit directly to mu-space.

Kenna had the escape route she needed, provided she could find a location for this deVries, whose presumed forebear had played such a role in her genesis, to materialise his ship close to her current location.

She would be sorry to abandon Nulapeiron, her home for eight centuries: as Kenna rather than Rhianna Chiang, the only home she had known.

Regret caused her to take one last look, via remote surveillance, at what was happening inside the headquarters of Warlord Primus Corcorigan, the last war leader of humanity before the Anomaly engulfed this world, like the others, and turned it into hell.

What she saw changed everything.

The terraformer was a floating stone sphere under attack by flying Siganthians; but dart-shaped flyers belonging to the Strontium Dragons were fighting them off, along with Corcorigan's commandos, battling hand-to-hand on the terraformer itself against the implacable metallic warriors.

Meanwhile, Corcorigan himself was crucified on the sphere's exterior – so like a one-eyed wanderer out of legend, Kenna thought, forcing himself into the most extreme of mental states – and assisted by two beings: a cyborg embedded in the sphere – a feeling of kinship welled inside Kenna – and the flensed head of Eemur, the Seer, who was searching through the hyperdimensions, trying to find the help that Corcorigan needed.

Trying to find a Pilot.

He needs deVries.

So much for Kenna's escape; but Corcorigan's headquarters was about to fall unless he gained the help he needed.

Very well.

She directed her motes closer and closer to glistening, blood-red flesh.

And whispered coordinates inside the Seer's ear.

Kenna was not privy to what happened next. Whatever response the Seer made, spillover energy destroyed the surveillance motes in the terraformer, and when Kenna tried to re-establish contact with her motes in the field hospital where deVries was working, a similar massive distortion had broken every link.

She linked to her surveillance motes in orbit.

And waited.

FIFTY-FOUR

MU-SPACE, 3427 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

For the first time in centuries, the First Admiral was back, openly standing in the Admiralty's Great Hall, waiting for the rescue team to return. The greater fleet – moving out of Labyrinth's docking halls and taking up formation immediately, under Admiralty Council authorisation, as soon as Ro McNamara appeared and made her wishes clear – was standing by, ready to carry out a mission involving immense precision, intended to disrupt the Anomaly's current attempt to add another hellworld to its collection.

Whether it was feasible, Ro did not know for sure. Already, strategy analysts had indicated that even if worked to free Nulapeiron, it was not a technique they could extend to other hellworlds. There was no point in even trying to free them: whatever had happened to the once-human Anomalous components over the generations, nothing of humanity could remain. The best that could be done was the same as always: to quarantine every known hellworld and stay as far away as possible.

The most recently created hellworlds, apart from the yet-to-be-freed Nulapeiron – and if it worked, it would only be by interrupting an incomplete process – were not even human originally. Saving xeno ecologies was far beyond anyone's remit.

These thoughts were Ro's attempt to distract herself, since the current crop of admirals seemed too awed to speak to her, while all she could think about deep down was her poor, tortured son, and what the Siganthians had done to him – all this time, so very, very long – and the suspended comms
session featuring a strange, one-armed bare-chested man who had appeared to hang in space before her, riding a mu-space comms-beam all the way from realspace Nulapeiron, to beg for her help in saving his world from the Anomaly, and offering a very special gift in return.

The location of her son Kian.

And the description of ongoing vivisection-torture inflicted on him by his captors. How Corcorigan had been teleported to Siganth, to witness what he related, was a mystery for Admiralty analysts to unravel later. What mattered now was—

=They are here.=

Ro looked up.

‘Is . . .?'

=Kian is aboard the squadron leader's ship.=

She had always been a fighter. For the first time, a sudden loss of stress was threatening to make her faint.

=And his own ship is flying alongside.=

Ro turned away.

‘Thank you,' she whispered.

It would not do for her fellow admirals to see her cry.

After a minute, she spread her hands apart, manipulating reality, restarting the comms-session she had frozen, though to the disembodied Corcorigan the delay might have been only seconds.

He hung there, a bizarre image, desperate for her help.

‘They're back,' she told him, meaning the special-forces squadron despatched to Siganth, taking Corcorigan at his word. ‘My . . . Kian is safe.'

The expression in Corcorigan's eyes did not change. He had been confident in the gift he had offered. Clearly what he needed was her response to his plea.

‘We will help,' she said.

At her command, ten thousand ships commenced a hell-flight for Nulapeiron.

*

At the same time, aboard a fast special-forces vessel, a claw-handed, scar-faced Pilot, lying exhausted on a passenger couch at the rear of the control cabin, smiled despite his trauma.

I love you.

She was flying in parallel with this vessel, his own ship, having arrived with beautiful precision alongside the rescue squadron, fighting alongside them, though she was no combat vessel. They laid down covering fire while the Pilots descended in drop-bubbles direct to Kian's location, wreaking destruction everywhere, killing every Siganthian in sight as they fought through to the hive-cell where he had been left, a forgotten, tortured captive, and destroyed the hyperdimensional field that held him.

And I love you.

It was all that mattered.

We're flying to Labyrinth.

Perhaps it's time.

To go home?

Yes. Home.

To be among their own kind, at least for a while. Outsiders no more.

An end to isolation.

FIFTY-FIVE

NULAPEIRON, 3427 AD

From the shuttle that had carried Avernon into orbit, Kenna's surveillance motes drifted into a wide array allowing her remotely to see perhaps the most beautiful sight of her life.

Ten thousand mu-space ships, every one of them shining silver and bronze, materialised together.

Brutal warfare might be unfolding on the world below, but here in orbit what happened next was a stately, elegant dance. Avernon's drones dispersed, to be taken on board – with exquisite, gentle control – by the Pilots' fleet. Then the shining ships dispersed, and pulsed like a single spherical wave around Nulapeiron, resonating as they harnessed the shell of spinpoints that burst into life, forming an unbroken, shining, spherical shield.

Severing the Anomaly's links.

Labyrinth had responded to Corcorigan's call for help, and that was that: victory.

In the aftermath, it took Kenna some time to realise what Corcorigan almost certainly deduced straight away, or perhaps knew in advance, back when he set Avernon on the path to creating the planetary shield out of spinpoints that were already there, harvested in order to create Oracles . . . but had not existed when Kenna, as Rhianna Chiang, first approached this world.

It was not the finite duration of the spinpoints' lives so much as the
direction
that held significance. When Avernon's drones appeared to destroy those distributed seeds of negentropic timeflow, he was of course creating them – almost as
a sideeffect – their deaths having already occurred, centuries before.

In a real sense, Corcorigan, whose identity had been built upon hatred of Oracles and the political system they empowered, had in fact created them.

It was Kenna's first true lesson in paradox.

FIFTY-SIX

NULAPEIRON, 3498 AD

Alexa Corcorigan deVries, her obsidian eyes glistening with grief, stares down at her aged grandfather's death-bed. They are on a tall, open-topped tower formed of quickglass, overlooking rolling heathland. A peach-coloured sunrise hovers above distant purple mountains.

Her grandfather, Tom Corcorigan, loves the open air, so different from the tunnels of his youth. This is where he has said he wants to die.

Beside Alexa, her grey-eyed half-brother, Samson Gervicort, is as distraught as she is: they equally adore Grandfather Tom, who may be legendary to others, but to them is the most warm-hearted of real people, always gentle, and missing Elva dreadfully: Alexa and Samson's grandmother, dead for almost a decade.

On Grandfather's rug-covered lap, a neko-kitten with soft amber fur lies curled up, sleeping.

‘Grandfather,' asks Samson. ‘Do we have things right?'

The old man is nearly gone, unable to open his eyes; but he raises a single finger slightly.

‘He means yes,' says Alexa. ‘It is as it should be. This' – blinking away tears – ‘is his moment.'

She takes his fragile hand—

You've done so much
.

—and, as Samson turns away for a moment to blink away tears, she places her hand upon his forehead, and her tu-ring gleams. A virtual holo, her-eyes-only, shows the winking-out of a tiny point of light, deep inside Grandfather's brain.

A spinpoint has just ceased to exist, from the viewpoint of ordinary time.

Or been created, to live all the way back to Tom Corcorigan's conception, from a different way of considering things.

‘I love you, Grandfather,' she says, and it is the truth.

‘I love you, Grandfather,' says Samson, placing his hand on the dying man's shoulder.

There is no mistaking the final breath, the last release of pressure, as life leaves the body.

Grandfather.

He is gone.

From a distant chamber, well appointed in smartmarble, two figures watched a giant holo of Corcorigan's final moments, respectful and solemn, while approving of the finesse with which Alexa carried out her task.

‘It had to work out all right,' said the claw-handed Pilot, his face half-covered in scar tissue. ‘It's predestined, isn't it?'

‘Careful,' said Kenna beside him. ‘We skirt on the edge of paradox, and it's so very, very dangerous.'

‘I know. It's strange, to think of Tom Corcorigan and me, entangled in that way.' He looked up at the holo. ‘We never talked, yet he was in a sense more a brother to me than Dirk.'

‘Never that, Kian.' Kenna placed her crystalline hand upon his burnt one. ‘Your real family love you, even if they don't understand.'

After the rescue from Siganth, thanks to Tom Corcorigan's signal to Labyrinth, direct to Kian's mother, Kian and his ship had remained in Labyrinth for several contiguous years, getting to know Dirk and Mother once more. But Kian's political-philosophical effectiveness had depended on his time-skipping nomadic ways, while all three of them were infected by that same need to skip relativistically across the decades and centuries, to see how Pilotkind turned out. They were getting restless. With luck, they would see out the next three or four hundred years, until the Aeternal language,
along with technology and culture, had changed so much that not even they could adapt to it.

As for Kenna, Kian had met her some seven decades earlier, two years after the Anomaly's defeat on Nulapeiron, when official celebrations had declared the rescued planet part of the allied realspace worlds of humanity. Kian had hovered at the edge of a celebration that Tom Corcorigan had declined to take a starring role in, when ambassadors had gathered, and
Ode to Victory
had been played, and so on: the usual mix of solemnity and parade. When Kian, hooded and cloaked, had sneaked away, another hooded figure followed and she introduced herself to him.

Of course he had paid attention. ‘It's not every day you get to meet a woman of living crystal,' he told her later.

For all that, he was the only non-Kobold not to fall into awed trance in her presence, and she treasured his friendship, and the infrequent visits that followed.

Plus, there was a mystery that no one had resolved, and had been only deepened when Labyrinth herself had given Kian a piece of information that he understood was confidential, not to be shared, no matter how little information he extracted from the words.

=There is a bright seed in your brain.=

It was Kenna who deduced the implant's nature: a spinpoint entangled with one other, an identical counterpart. And that partner was in Tom Corcorigan's brain.

How else could Corcorigan's journey along the hyperdimensions have deposited him precisely in the location where Kian was being held? Unexpected events had crowded upon everyone, and the Seer-mediated teleportation was known to have been directed to Siganth along the hyperdimensional channel used by the Anomaly, joining Siganth to Nulapeiron. Bizarre as the events might be, there was no mystery in Corcorigan's destination being the hellworld; but no one had questioned the deeper coincidence, that he had ended up near the one hive-cell containing Kian.

The hidden entangled spinpoints had played a role in the fine details of hyperdimensional navigation, drawing one towards the other.

Now, a realtime holo showed the interior of Kian's brain. As he and Kenna watched, smartbeams projected from the walls – like the ones generated by Alexa's tu-ring – caused the shining white point inside his head, the other half of the entangled pair, to wink out of existence.

It was gone.

Except of course it was not extinction – it was the moment of the spinpoint's birth, beginning its life backwards in time, all the way to Kian's conception, when it would collapse. Dirk had grown from the same initial cell in the womb, but when the growing cells divided into two separate clumps, the spinpoint would have had to go along with the proto-Kian, not Dirk.

Was this a form of gross mechanical motion induced by future goals, teleology instead of cause-and-effect? Was it a veridical paradox, one that would be resolved by looking at it from a different perspective, with new knowledge? Or was it the real thing, an antinomy?

Even with the old aristocratic system on its knees if not extinct, such logosophical questions were a natural thing to ask here on Nulapeiron. Kenna and Kian smiled at each other, aware of how odd their friendship was, and the weirdness of the events that indirectly linked them.

‘What do you think happens eventually?' asked Kian. ‘Do we win?'

In so many ways, they were both outsiders, with very different viewpoints. Though he was not trapped in hypnotic awe of Kenna, the way most people were, he thought she might be wisest being alive right now.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I hope so.'

There was nothing more to say then, as they watched the realtime holo showing a former Warlord's grieving grandchildren, Alexa with the neko-kitten in her arms, and the flyers
arriving at the quickglass tower, where soon enough the funeral would be held.

A good death, then.

If there could ever be such a thing.