He continued to look awestruck.
‘I don’t deserve to be here.’
In her presence, he meant. She tried to form her response in an idiom natural to one whose first language was Nov’glin, the contemporary descendant of Novanglin.
—Your form belongs in this place. Then: Tell me of yourself, my fighting Lord. So he told her of his life.
There was much to tell, and as he related what he remembered, Kenna thought back to another time when she, or rather Rhianna Chiang, allowed one Roger Blackstone’s deep subconscious mind to unburden itself of secrets that his consciousness could not be allowed to share; except that in this case, Tom Corcorigan knew exactly what had happened to him, and consciously nursed the stubbornness growing inside him, enabling him to fight back.
The highlights were: aged fourteen standard, he had witnessed an undercover Pilot being hunted down and killed, but not before she had bequeathed him a crystal that told him of Pilot history; then an Oracle called Gérard d’Ovraison predicted the death of Tom’s father – who subsequently wasted away for no good medical reason – after d’Ovraison carried away Tom’s mother; later, the amputation of Tom’s arm as punishment for theft he had been caught up in, not instigated; then servitude and the driven discipline to better himself, to become a Lord in his own right; and the need to kill an Oracle, up close with a blade, even though the Oracle foresaw his own long and peaceful life, lasting well into undisturbed old age.
But Tom Corcorigan, once a boy who had dreamt of being a poet, sometime Lord One-Arm and revolutionary icon, had accomplished his vengeance, and more.
Kenna mulled over this while Corcorigan waited, standing in peaceful trance. There were two pieces of information she could give him, to remain perhaps within his subconscious yet available to his intuition. The first was a logical thing to share.
—The Grey Shadows have Pilot agents among them.
Corcorigan’s long involvement with the revolutionary movement, now part of the increasingly scattered resistance, meant that he had contacts among the disparate, loosely allied organisations that comprised the Grey Shadows. The point was that Nulapeiron’s resistance was doomed unless someone managed to get external allies, powerful allies, involved. In the past, Pilotkind’s response to nascent Anomalous incursion had been to get clear at the first sign of trouble, and quarantine the planet.
But the situation here was different, the timescale longer, and the continuing presence of undercover Pilots, however sparse their numbers, gave Kenna some hope.
The second piece of information, though . . . That was a wild thought, half rational. The Pilot history that Corcorigan had immersed himself in, the crystal that he still carried inside a stallion-shaped talisman around his neck, had focused on the McNamara clan, and was in fact a copy of a tale that Rhianna Chiang had owned as a girl in Labyrinth. It meant that Lord One-Arm knew almost as much Pilot history as Kenna did, and so this would make sense to him:
—Ro McNamara lives still, hidden within the Logos Library.
There was a question concerning the relevance of the First Admiral’s continued existence, which strictly speaking, Kenna could not be sure of: it was now eight centuries since she, as Rhianna Chiang, had been in Labyrinth.
But her own intuition had told her to share that information.
A message from my subconscious?
Because this was it: she skated on the edge of paradox, and sometimes reality appeared to shimmer, alive with the possibility of breaking causality and all that made sense, threatening dissolution and disaster; and this was one of those moments.
Call it a memory of a future dream, inaccurate though the analogy was, for the simplest of reasons.
She never slept.
After the Kobolds removed the stunned Corcorigan from the chamber, she gave further instructions to Griell, one of her Kobold lieutenants.
—Trevalkin’s people must learn that Corcorigan is a worthwhile ally. Get word to them via the usual cutouts.
‘Straight away, ma’am.’
There were others who might usefully ally themselves with Corcorigan, and support his efforts.
—The Strontium Dragons Society have a pak tsz sin called Zhao-ji among their senior ranks. He knew Corcorigan in childhood. Get word to him also.
The resistance needed heroic figures, and Lord One-Arm was a potent symbol in their mythology.
‘Ma’am.’
Alone then, she sank into meditation, considering her own life in relation to Corcorigan’s, that mix of contingency and determination, so turbulent; and her greater goal that she could never share at risk of being thought insane: to fight a war that would make this conflict seem insignificant, a battle on behalf of every baryonic-matter lifeform in the galaxy, in a final confrontation a million years from now.
Even though the world she lived in seemed doomed to fall, very soon indeed.
FORTY-SIX
DEEP SPACE (R.A. ≈ 6h, D ≈ +40°, r ≈ 247000 lyear), 2607 AD
The feints and deception were over. Five members of Roger’s squadron were dead, in four cases along with their ships as they exploded beneath Zajinet weapons fire. Now it was all about the waiting: as it had been for every soldier across history, from legionnaires trekking across dusty plains to mech-armoured grunts at the Siege of Mare Tembrum; nerves and boredom, with nothing to do but train and joke and brood on cruelty and mortality.
Shoals of shuttles moved around the pseudo-base they called the Grey Attractor, automated craft that employed random motion and delays to simulate human behaviour, as if they were crewed and engaged on construction work. However, the seventeen huge complex volumes that seemed capable of housing thousands were pure façades, constructed of thin, fragile shells in which lurked twenty squadrons of battle trained Pilots, including Roger Blackstone and his black, red-and-gold-webbed ship.
They kept their wits about them by playing strategy games, and their reflexes in place by working out with combat gymnastics in their ship’s holds or cabins, against gravity created by virtual singularities induced by their ship’s drive cores. Meanwhile the ships pulsed in their equivalent of isometric training, flexing their weapon systems and honing their focus.
Corinne, Roger’s on-off lover since Tangleknot, was number two in command of Scimitar Squadron. He was a wingman in Sabre Three. All five Sabres were SRS squadrons, not just harder and more ruthless than the others, but trained to fight effectively as individuals as well as in coordination, able to switch modes in a way no other Pilots could.
Sabre Three Leader was Roland Havelock, one of the trio who had quizzed Roger on his first arrival at Tangleknot, and a veteran of one of SRS’s intelligence detachments that were now rolled back into the main regiment. In training manoeuvres, he had shown a practical lateral-thinking approach to taking out enemy vessels that had changed Roger’s entire way of thinking about military engagements.
It was interesting that none of Schenck’s renegades had come from special forces. Admiralty psych specialists had determined that being subverted by the darkness ruled out a Pilot from passing the cognitive-behavioural tests during selection; unfortunately there was no obvious way to use this knowledge against renegades in battle. For now, it was the Zajinet main fleet they were hoping to draw out and engage; but soon enough, it would be time to take the war to former Admiral Schenck and the Pilots who followed him – assuming he was still in charge.
On the ninth day standard, they came: an attack fleet of Zajinet vessels, mean and angular and armoured, reconfigured for war. And their attack mode was even more daring than Roger had expected: bursting in and out of realspace like a storm of stones skipping across black waves, the vacuum blazing as weapon fire cracked it open, magnificent in its violent beauty, if only you were not scared for your life and your comrades, Pilots and ships alike.
Then it was time.
A thousand hidden ships trembled with the need to release their built-up power.