The vanguards were veterans, hardened by combat, drawing the first-timers in their wake, heading for the kill; and though they were outnumbered, the Pilots had an advantage the Zajinets could never match.
Dirk McNamara commanded them.
They tore through the Zajinets like swords leaving wounds of burning fire, lines of exploding vessels, and the quantum mentality that enabled the xeno fleet to handle spacetime ambiguity did not allow decisive reaction to the deadly geometry of the Pilots’ attack.
The enemy configuration tumbled to a relative halt, firing in confusion and hitting their own kind as much as Pilots, maybe more; and Roger grinned, somehow understanding the overall picture even as he-and-ship fought their own war – there – as Zajinet after Zajinet – again, yes – died before them; and while duration became relative neurochemically and geometrically, the whole thing seemed both slow and fast, so that the reversal was a sudden surprise.
The Zajinets turned away.
Just like that: every one of them.
++Take them all.++
Dirk wanted no survivors. But why had they made themselves so vulnerable? Hundreds, maybe thousands of the Zajinet fleet perished by the simple act of turning, but there was no way this could be a trap to draw the Pilots in because there was nowhere for the mass of Zajinets to go, not without Dirk’s ships hunting them down and destroying them all.
So why?
Doesn’t matter.
Roger-and-ship let loose with everything, killing two more Zajinets from the rear.
Then a massive comms signal resonated inside every Pilot ship.
<<We leave you to your darkness.>>
Ship and Roger continued firing because this had to be a trick, for no Zajinet had ever communicated in such a singular way before; but then hundreds of thousands of Zajinet vessels revolved inwards in a way that later no one could ever recreate, not even the Admiralty’s most prominent scientists; and the Zajinets slipped out of sight.
Every one of them.
Roger-and-ship, though it was dangerous in the outer reaches of the nebula, dipped out of mu-space, black realspace shivering into existence all around but devoid of ships, other than the few Pilots doing the same. They transited back and broadcast their news of what they hadn’t seen.
The Zajinets were gone.
To neither known universe.
Holy shit.
How could they do that?
It was a question every Pilot would ask themselves and each other, over and over in war rooms and bars and private homes of Labyrinth, for years and decades to come. The debate would be enduring and never entirely resolved, and kept secret, like so much else, from the ordinary humanity of realspace who would question, from time to time, the non-appearance of Zajinets upon their worlds.
Dirk McNamara had confirmed for ever his reputation as a war admiral par excellence, the greatest in Pilot history. If it were not for the renegades assumed to be under Schenck’s command, the populace of Labyrinth would have assumed that peace would reign in mu-space for a very long time.
The Chaos Conflict was over.
But the mystery of the Zajinets’ destination remained.
FORTY-SEVEN
EARTH, 1989 AD
Chilly sky and green grass: morning on Hampstead Heath, dogs running and playing with tongue-baring joy, and a man in a tweed overcoat walking past, shamrock in his lapel. It was the 17th of March and three years since Rupert’s death, and Gavriela missed him dreadfully. She watched the dogs and the people, hoping their lives felt fulfilled.
For herself, Carl visited seldom – she got on better with her grandson Brody, in many ways – and her friends were mostly books, in the elegant Chelsea house she had inherited with surprise from Rupert. Rupert’s collection was in many ways the greatest gift he could have given her, in lieu of his continued presence on the Earth.
She hoped Brody was revising with diligence for his O-levels.
Where did the years—?
Something ripped inside her skull.
After the stroke, learning to write again was hard. She had been one of the first to use a Compaq, however, revelling in the concept of a suitcase-shaped computer whose bottom end detached to form a keyboard and reveal a phosphor screen. Apart from the PDP11s in Imperial, she had grown used to the idea of plumbed-in mainframes with water cooling, and air conditioned atmosphere to ensure no dust-particle could ever slip between a disk and its read-write head.
It had got to the stage where ordinary consumers were buying computers, though what they intended to do with them, Gavriela had little idea. Most people did not appreciate what a universal Turing machine actually was, never mind possessing the expertise to program it. To own a computer yet be unable to code seemed like illiteracy.
But hunt-and-peck on the keyboard enabled her to write, slowly at first, and then to participate on BBSs for the first time, discovering pen-pals in this new medium, no programming involved. In real life, her speech and thought remained clear, which was a blessing; but her legs were weak, and her new best friend was the electric wheelchair she steered with a joystick, and which Brody informed her was brilliant, like a pilot flying a Spitfire: he always cheered her up.
Then there was Ingrid, her live-in nurse, on whom Gavriela depended, at first without seeing her as a friend – Ingrid’s manner could be brusque – while being grateful that Rupert continued to look after her from beyond the grave, because she could never have afforded Ingrid otherwise.
There was something liberating in accepting one’s own helplessness, in recognising that however self-focused she had been in her life, it was all right for her to depend on someone else. She would have liked to explain this to her exuberant grandson, but it was not right that Brody should know of such things: let him be optimistic and blind to his mortality, while he was young.
In the summer, when Brody’s exams were over, he came to stay for the full six weeks of the holiday. With her, he could discuss his obsessions – with physics and physical culture (as Gavriela thought of it), the former approved of by his father, the latter remaining secret. Gavriela talked to Ingrid, who told her that the old notion of muscle-bound introverts was untrue. The upshot was Gavriela’s purchase, via Ingrid, of a set of weights for her grandson: blue plastic things and a shining chrome bar that nearly gave the delivery man a hernia, or so he said.
What neither Gavriela nor Brody talked about was Carl’s impending marriage – at the age of forty-seven, for pity’s sake – and the way he had cut Anna Gould out of his life, and appeared to be doing the same to their son, Brody. No doubt Carl had his own story and justifications, but in the absence of explanation, Gavriela was treating his actions as unforgivable.
Or perhaps it was simply that Gavriela was a better grandmother than a mother, getting it right the second time around. Either way, she smiled at the huffing and puffing that came from Brody’s room every day, the occasional thump of weights on the floor, and the vast quantities of milk he drank.
More significantly, the day after Brody received his O-level results, mostly grade 1s, Gavriela despatched Ingrid to Foyle’s – at some point, Ingrid had become more than nurse, simply by setting no boundaries on what she was willing to do to help – to buy the three-volume Feynman lectures, the famous red books which she warned Brody would be too hard for him at first, but inspirational.
‘There’s, er, something else,’ he said one night in the drawing room – a term he found as amusing as she did – while the credits were rolling on the Conan movie. ‘You know those letters . . .’
Gavriela touched the joystick on her wheelchair, rotating a little to face him. Of course she had wondered about the letters arriving three times a week or more, but she had patience.