‘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.