Inside the Ashmolean Museum, a battered, wrinkled, darkened old sword caught his attention. It was displayed among the Roman artefacts, and Kian was no expert, but it seemed to him to have been wrongly dated. Yet the Runic scratches might have been his imagination – they were not mentioned in the descriptive holo – and that might have coloured his whimsical notion that he could somehow know better than the professional archaeologists and curators who stocked and managed the place.
Afterwards, he watched a performance of Henry V in the Sheldonian Theatre, a building that had been through much, including a stint as a knife-fighting venue when that was prime-time entertainment and the university was short of funds. The Crispin’s Day speech was as rousing as ever, though Kian could not help but think later, as he wandered back to his hotel, how the night-before-battle scene revealed the eternal disparity between rulers and the ordinary folk who die in conflicts they neither instigate nor fully understand, and how hollow were the warrior-king’s justifications for his martial aims.
Two days later, in a quaint underground shopping mall in Putingrad, he met up with one Rickson Ojuku, a Pilot who claimed a sort of ancestry from Kian via the Delgasso line, Rorion Delgasso having fathered two children with Maria, Kian and Kat’s adopted daughter. Rorion’s father Carlos had been a young brat, with an annoying habit of hero-worshipping both Kian and Dirk. Now they had a descendant in common.
‘I’m surprised you made contact,’ said Rickson, as they walked side by side past gleaming displays. ‘With everything that’s happening back home, I would’ve thought political reconciliation was in abeyance.’
He sounded more business-like than necessary, as if over-compensating for the weirdness of meeting his ancestor. Kian sympathised: it was strange though hardly unique among Pilotkind, as ultra-relativistic time-dilating flights continued to occur for one reason or another, mounting up across the centuries.
‘Take a look at this.’ Kian double-checked the anti-surveillance smartmiasma surrounding them, then zip-blipped a portion of the report he had received in London. ‘The silver-and-red ship belongs to Admiral Schenck.’ His tone turned the rank into an insult. ‘Remember, three years ago, when there was an attempted absorption on Vachss Station, the Vijaya orbital?’
‘One of Schenck’s people tried to plant an absorbed person there.’ Rickson blinked his smartlenses, processing the report fragment. ‘Is this surveillance footage or computed reconstruction?’
‘A mixture of both,’ said Kian. ‘It seems Schenck picked up a bunch of such people, transferred two to Holland’s ship – that’s the other vessel in the rendezvous scene, and Holland is the Pilot who went on to Vachss Station – and held on to the others.’
‘So how did Molsin fall?’ asked Rickson, watching the surroundings as they walked. ‘Because of these people, or something else?’
‘That would be worrying. The reconstruction is, the failed absorption on Vachss Station caused Schenck to commit all the remaining absorbed people – components – to the Molsin incursion.’
Kian knew only that his Labyrinthine source, Rowena James, had a close contact in the intelligence community there. For the first time, he wondered if that contact knew about the reports that Rowena passed on. Perhaps it would suit the intelligence service’s purposes if Kian’s people, too, understood the renegades’ actions with regards to the Anomaly.
‘Good news for the rest of us,’ said Rickson, ‘and bad news for Molsin. Except that you said two Anomalous components were transferred to Holland’s ship beforehand.’
‘Allegedly. There might have been more. But Holland flew from the Schenck rendezvous directly to Siganth. When he went on to Vachss Station afterwards, he had only a single component aboard.’
The impersonal description could not hide the fact that the Anomaly was built of humans. Among other things.
Rickson’s eyelids fluttered as he backtracked through the report’s subsidiary threads. Then he stopped, and Kian knew exactly which portion he had come to.
‘That’s it,’ Kian told him. ‘That’s what concerns me.’
And made him think that Rowena James really was being fed this information, which was irrelevant provided it was accurate.
‘Holy crap.’
‘An understatement.’
A mu-space transmission from Siganth had summoned the renegades: a signal picked up and later decoded by the surveillance stealth-sats that the intelligence service had placed around every xeno world. It was awful, and meant that Kian had played a part in enabling the creation of a hellworld.
‘The Siganthians are insane,’ said Rickson. ‘They invited the Anomaly to come to them? How could they do that?’
Kian did not consider himself a Siganth expert, except in the sense that virtually every Pilot and human alive knew even less about the place than he did.
‘For them, it must have been a kind of transcendence,’ he said to Rickson. ‘Fitted in with their notions of a hive mind, although different from Earth insects. They feel suffering when they’re torn into pieces, but those pieces are remade into other beings. It’s . . . different there.’
Rickson blinked again, this time purely from bemusement.
‘How could you know? Oh—’
‘Right. I’ve visited the place.’
‘And the mu-space comms?’
It used to be common for human worlds to rent comms relays capable of transmitting into mu-space, until historic events on Fulgor forced Labyrinth’s authorities to rethink the policy. Now it was almost unknown, except under specific, legally constrained circumstances, with constant surveillance in place.
Except—
‘It’s my fault,’ said Kian. ‘I gave it to them.’
*
His interest in the Siganthians had been philosophical and scientific, but in cultural and political terms, Kian had believed that engaging more of Pilotkind in realspace xeno research helped to combat secessionism. On a less abstract level, he had observed the growing focus on Zajinets and understood that they were a dangerous enemy only because they belonged, like Pilots, to two universes. For other species, including the wealth of fearsome-looking metallic Siganthian species (to whatever extent the concept applied there, since the organisms tore apart and rebuilt each other all the time), it was easy to avoid possible conflict simply by disengaging from realspace. That disengagement was what Kian wanted to avoid.
Hence, as he explained to Rickson Ojuku, his low-key mission to Siganth two subjective years ago, along with a small team of volunteers from among fellow activists of the Tri-Fold Way, and the comms equipment they had left in situ, for no one had been able (or willing) to remain living on Siganth for extended periods of time. But that had been several time-dilating flights ago, and Kian had little idea what might have happened to those activists or their eventual replacements. As far as he knew, no Pilots had been caught up in the Anomaly, or harmed in any way before the Anomaly’s genesis.
‘What do we need to do now?’ asked Rickson.
Kian smiled. ‘I appreciate the we. You need to make sure that people in Labyrinth know about Siganthian comms equipment.’ It was understood that he, Kian, could never go there incognito – some Pilot would recognise him. ‘Just in case. It’s too late for Siganthians to lure Pilots to their world with false messages, now that the place is known to be a hell-world. But even so—’
‘They can communicate with the renegades, except it’s a what, gestalt-thing now, so it’s a global it, not a they, which means it probably won’t. Communicate, I mean.’ Rickson’s scattergun grammar seemed to cover his thinking about two things at once, because he added, ‘Admiral? Sir? There’s nothing you can do about a hellworld.’