So Kian’s guilt had been that obvious, had it?
‘I haven’t gone by that title for a long time, my friend.’
‘You were the Second Admiral,’ said Rickson. ‘Everyone knows it, whether they mention it to your face or not.’
Which was why Kian had seen, as his mother and brother had not – because of their first century-long hellflight – the fragility of Pilotkind. Mother and Dirk understood the necessity of providing a full, thriving culture that embraced the Shipless as well as those who flew; but it was Kian who lived through the years in which Pilots bound to Earth gradually loosened their ties to UNSA, and looked after their own kind when individuals were unsuitable for flight, and finally grew their own ships in Labyrinth and broke free from the organisation that once ruled their lives.
Part of that time, following Kat’s death, had been spent in the elusive, wandering role he still played; but his touch had been sure and all Pilots had known that one of the McNamaras was still looking out for their interests, even before Dirk and their mother reappeared.
‘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.