Roger did not believe Schenck possessed that kind of flair, instead relying on a single pre-emptive one-strike, one-kill attack – ikken hisatsu – coming out of nowhere.
For himself, Roger had spent his subjective decades in a single-minded honing of his own skills by simulation, incorporating his real combat experience, while his ship upgraded herself, using the infinitesimal-point energy of mu-space to power and feed them both; and finally they had reached their destination, a place whose pull could be felt by his beautiful ship, but only by exquisite sensitivity to her subconscious perceptions, because in her current state, that urge, that drive, had yet to be awoken.
It is in the nature of a blindspot that people remain unaware of its existence, even when logic dictates it must be there.
So Roger had wept with new knowledge, and his ship also, in her own way, when they broke through at their ultra-hell-flight’s destination after a subjective decade of straining effort in which their very real madness – for in their obsession, Roger-and-ship could no longer be counted as entirely sane – might all have been based on illusion.
Until, that is, the moment they exited their hellish geodesic and burst into violet-tinged space through which the golden void could barely be glimpsed, while all around them ships were floating, serene and linked together in permanent comms, inhabiting a collective mental state unimaginable to any Pilot, even Roger Blackstone.
Thousands upon thousands of Pilotless ships.
For this was the Graveyard Nebula.
**I greet you all, and come to ask for help.**
Every ship whose Pilot had ever died, in four centuries of Pilotkind’s existence, floated here. Senescence could not affect vessels powered by the energy of spacetime itself; only violence, accidental or intended, could kill them.
**Labyrinth is about to fall.**
They were old in their minds, most of these ships, and they had not been trained to fight. A significant number would bear no weaponry at all; few would have combat capability against latest-generation renegades raised for battle. There would be time to prepare during the return flight, but that was irrelevant.
His plan did not rely on weapons.
Only suicidal courage.
And when, a subjective decade later, they burst out in the vicinity of Labyrinth, it was clear the city-world had read Roger’s intention from the start, because this message was blaring out repeatedly to those capable of sensing it:
=I could stop them. But I would need a thousand years.=
Inside his ship, Roger smiled.
You’ll have your millennium.
There was no need to signal his fleet of dead Pilots’ ships.
They knew exactly what to do.
*
Unconstrained by the fragility of Pilots’ bodies carried within, the graveyard fleet flew hard in synchrony, tearing through mu-space, leaving what at first appeared to be a wake, a churning of vacuum; but Dirk McNamara had once wrought vengeance on a different, earlier Admiral Schenck, leaving him to die for all eternity in twisted spacetime on Borges Boulevard, and Dirk recognised straight away what Blackstone and the ships from nowhere were attempting to do.
It’s impossible.
But he broadcast the retreat to his squadrons nonetheless.
**Fall back! Get clear!**
Of course the renegade armada moved on without deviation, stately and evil, assuming sheer momentum would carry it to Labyrinth where the city-world’s destruction would follow.
But the fleet of Pilotless ships, perhaps as big as the renegade armada – it was not obvious from the way they flew in each other’s wake, not at first – was on a course that was equally inevitable. No Pilots-and-ships, Labyrinthine or renegade, could hope to fly that fast or hard, not without crushing the Pilots.
Dirk sent one last direct message in the hope that Roger Blackstone might receive it.
**Respect, my friend.**
And Roger’s mouth pulled back in a smile just as he-and-ship bent into the final geodesic along with all those dead Pilots’ ships: such a multitude of courageous vessels.
Then everything was gone.
Golden void twisted into an envelope, surrounding the renegade armada, slowing it down and capturing it within an impenetrable event horizon, topologically symmetric: no renegades could escape; neither could Labyrinth’s fleet poke inside to observe or attack.
It was a vast distortion in the continuum that drew exactly upon the techniques Dirk had used in his duel with that other Schenck, but the sheer collective mass of the renegade armada, the best part of a million vessels, along with that of the dead Pilots’ ships who had trapped themselves inside along with the enemy, meant the duration of the stasis was finite.
But it should last a thousand years, which was all that Labyrinth had asked for: the opportunity to prepare and unleash destruction in the instant time unfroze.
When the renegades and Roger and his fleet of graveyard ships would perish.
Together.
FIFTY-THREE
NULAPEIRON, 3427 AD
Watched by Kenna’s secret surveillance motes, Tom Corcorigan, otherwise Lord Corcorigan, Lord One-Arm, ex-revolutionary, in a demesne far from the conflict, enjoyed his honeymoon accompanied by his new wife, naturally, and rather unnaturally by an old friend, the severed but still-living head of a Seer (one of occasional such mistakes in the ongoing programme producing Oracles) called Eemur.
Not just alive, but flensed, that head: glistening, blood-wet facial muscles exposed to the air, life processes maintained by transfusion via spacetime distortion – hyperdimensional blood-sucking – the closest an almost-human might come to possessing the abilities once characteristic of Zajinets.
Corcorigan made odd friendships.
There was no vicarious pleasure involved in Kenna’s watching the one-armed Lord at the start of his marriage, but there was every fascination in observing as Tom disappeared from the plush chamber in which he faced Eemur: teleported in a flash of sapphire light, unnaturally far, in a way that provided evidence of the Anomaly’s true nature.
It was in fact a single extended Anomaly, Kenna deduced, extended across the hellworlds just as she had once comprised distributed components in Palace Avernon. The proof was this: the impossibly long hyperdimensional route that Corcorigan rode, tapped into by Eemur in a massive mistake – the teleportation had been intended as a playful gift – sending her Lord and only friend to a distant world.
There was nothing Kenna could do to help.
But when Corcorigan reappeared, falling to the floor and gasping, bleeding, she knew for sure that she had done the right thing in encouraging the resistance to see him as a war leader. This was an unpredictable man, and no one could fight the Anomaly by performing the obvious.
He thanked Eemur wearily for the unexpected present, and hauled himself to the bathchamber and finally to bed. There, in his sleep, he muttered in pain, fragments about flensing and vivisection that Kenna first took to be references to Eemur, then realised were a description of something he had seen: a man being stripped of flesh and then rebuilt, over and over again, using hyperdimensional manipulation as horrific torture.
From afar, she directed some of her surveillance motes into Corcorigan’s ear, there to whisper the posthypnotic trigger-words that caused him to relate what he had seen.