++Scatter right high. Plan 7 alpha.++
Roger and ship sent the ack signal – acknowledgement – along with everyone else as forty-five vessels split into nine soaring threads that curved around to avoid the energy beams tearing along the geodesic they had been following, and allowed them within seconds to target the Zajinets.
The first ship to explode was a heavy Zajinet vessel, raked by fire from Rhames and the four Pilots forming her wing. But the chase was on through layers of self-similar spacetime contours, fractal fire forking and branching, like living lightning, and in the next few subjective seconds Roger counted thirteen ships exploding, seven of them Pilots including an entire five ship wing.
But the Zajinets were tricky, and several vessels broke away and disappeared into mu-space depths. Seeing that, Nakamura sent the break-off signal, and the thirty-eight surviving Pilots disengaged from the fight and tore off onto a near-hell-flight geodesic that the Zajinets would find it hard to follow, starting as it did from a hugely non-linear volume of turbulence: only continuous inter-vessel comms allowed the Pilots to keep their ships aligned together and following the same trajectory.
++They might call for reinforcements. Bug-out count-down is now 100 hours from insertion, repeat 100. Copy all?++
Ship and Roger were straining with the effort of flight, but they spared the attention to send an ack blip, and presumably the rest of the squadron did likewise because they kept formation and flew harder than ever until Nakamura finally gave the signal to disengage and slip into an easier glide mode, ready for the final insertion.
But this was one of the things that made them special forces: the ability to fly hard, beyond the point where most Pilots and ships would break down, and then without recovery to move into a battle zone and operate better there than ordinary com bat trained ships and Pilots could when fresh.
Insertion.
And the exit into blazing space, filled with a profusion of starlight from the massive population making up the galactic core.
Quiescent and watching, in a warrior’s state of not-thought, of mushin, they floated, using passive sensors only – no transmission waves to ping against whatever they observed – for their job was reconnaissance, not assault, with the proviso that if they had to fight to get clear, they would bring shock and awe to the renegades, spreading death and confusion as they escaped.
Ordinary Pilots might have seen nothing, but the thirty-eight SRS Pilots and their highly trained ships were able, through stillness and hyper acuity, to observe shapes and movement against the blazing background, to make out patterns that others would not perceive, to piece together the nature of the installation existing here, and the vessels that attended it.
In briefing sessions they had referred to it hypothetically as Target Shadow, and here it was, not just a figment of the planners’ imagination but real and still growing, from what they could see.
The extended construction was vast: a sprawling free-floating militarised base, around which a flock of vessels moved, both realspace shuttles and mu-space ships Piloted by renegades. It was that mixture of Pilot and non-Pilot forces that meant the base had to be situated in realspace – that and the fact that the darkness was of this universe, perhaps more so than humanity, with goals that had nothing to do with mu-space and everything to do with the galactic core, and the thousand lightyear jet that spurted from it, perhaps from the legendary black hole at the exact centre of—
Maybe not.
What do you mean?
Drifting.
No one’s been to the very centre, have they?
Not alive. Maybe fragments of wreckage have drifted in.
I wouldn’t risk your safety, my love.
Quiet. No signals chatter among the ships.
We’re already in danger together, aren’t we?
True.
But the countdown continued, one hundred hours steadily diminishing to zero, the bug out time set by Nakamura acting as squadron leader, while Rhames as commander kept to the rear, relinquishing her right to lead – not the way Roger had envisioned combat squadrons operating, not until he joined one – and made no comment, indicating confidence in Nakamura’s decision.
Zero.
Stealth meant exiting to mu-space at such a precise angle and energy that spillover radiation was close to nothing, detectible only to someone who knew where to look and what to look for, with the most sensitive of equipment. One by one, the Pilots’ ships slipped out of realspace existence and were gone . . .
Ready?
. . .until Roger-and-ship alone remained.
Ready now.
They blasted into mu-space, creating a transition signature that would have lit up the realspace environment like an explosion, even amid the shining light of a billion suns.
Because they were heading into the true core, and it would take force as well as finesse to prevent them breaking apart in the jagged mu-space reefs corresponding to the titanic gravitational swirls of the black hole at the centre, except, except—
I love you.
Yes.
—they burst out into realspace for a fraction of a second, right at the threshold of obliteration, enough to see what they knew they were going to see, and then they ripped away into mu-space once more, turbulence and chaos as they had never experienced – so hard to fly – as they twisted around obstacles like coral reefs formed of folded spacetime, hurtled down through spirals of reality – very hard, but we can do it – and finally, finally pulled onto a geodesic that with luck would take them clear – yes – and they screamed along a trajectory more extreme than a hellflight, a reality-shearing, self-immolating, agonising way to fly for which there was no word, not even in Aeternum; and then they were through, tumbling into a clear golden void which by the standards they had grown used to was simple mu-space, easy to traverse, though its currents were strong.
They coursed into a crimson nebula.
What year will it be when we return to Labyrinth?
I don’t know, I really don’t.
Even their superlative ability to track distortions had failed during the ultra-hellflight episode that challenged most of what they had learned in Labyrinth about theoretical limits to ship-and-Pilot performance.
But we’ll still be able to find Labyrinth.
That will never change.
Their flight was easier now.
And was it worth it?
The Admiralty will think so.
As of this moment, only Roger-and-ship knew that a theory long held by humanity was wrong, in a way that must be linked to the aeons-long engagement with the darkness that, from the point of view of Pilots and non-Pilots alike, could only be considered an extended act of invasion, of cosmic war.
What lay at the galaxy’s heart was not a black hole, and perhaps never had been.
How is it that nobody knew?
Good question.
It was not formed of matter at all.
THIRTY-NINE
EARTH, 793 AD
Morning mist failed to cloak the stench of the dead. Slaughtered villagers and holy men, here and there a whimpering survivor – which meant only that their entrance to Hel’s realm was delayed for a while – and soon there would be the buzzing of flies and rustling of beetles, unless more people came to burn or bury the folk of the Holy Isle, whose beliefs and sanctity had so clearly failed to save them.