Subvocalising, he talked of the prisoner who, in the brief seconds when he was physically whole, was nevertheless claw-handed, facially disfigured and obsidian-eyed, a Pilot. And from Corcorigan’s description of the metallic beings who chased him when he appeared on the world, and the mechanical architecture in which they lived, the location was Siganth: it had to be.
All of which made it more urgent to do something here in Nulapeiron. For the first time, Kenna had a notion of tracking down one of the undercover Pilots inside the Grey Shadows and getting them to take her offworld, simply fleeing; then she quelled the idea.
Dropping the surveillance link, she sank inside her thoughts.
The war against the Anomaly’s forces progressed incrementally towards defeat. Corcorigan became Warlord Primus and directed his forces from a floating terraformer, the same stone sphere that once was home to Oracle d’Ovraison, dead at Corcorigan’s hand. Closer to home, in the subterranean ocean above Kenna’s headquarters, her Kobold warriors crewed armoured mantargoi and fought metallic intruders out of nightmare: Siganthians, transported here along the hyperdimensions.
Only her surveillance of Corcorigan’s secret efforts gave Kenna hope, in particular his use of the current Lord Avernon, who – as Kenna watched from deep inside Nulapeiron – flew with Corcorigan’s personal guard, his fierce carls, to the orbital shell where the spinpoints were normally harvested for the Collegium Delphinorum, whose logosophers and technicians continued to create new Oracles for the nobility’s use, although predictions from the future were now absent.
Aboard his skyborne terraformer, Corcorigan opened comms with the shuttle. ‘Avernon. Are you there?’
‘Oh, Tom.’ The voice was high, shaking. ‘Yes.’
‘What happened? What went wrong?’
‘Those orders of magnitude . . . I misjudged a single factor in the equation, approximated it as a constant when I should have known . . . Should have.’
‘How do we fix it?’
‘We can’t. We just . . . can’t.’
(Kenna thought: If this effort fails, it is the end.)
Neither the shuttle crew nor the equipment could work with the precision Avernon needed to translate his ideas into practicality, to turn a shell of singularity seeds into a shield that would cut through the hyperdimensional links and with luck sever all of the Anomaly’s influence.
‘Send me the equations,’ ordered Corcorigan. ‘Send it now.’
This was desperate.
From deep within her magma-shielded chambers, Kenna searched through her distant surveillance nets among the Grey Shadows resistance forces, looking for a Pilot, realising she had been wrong: wherever the Anomaly was to be defeated, it was not here.
Escape, now, was all that was left.
Her search was a tour de force of surveillance analysis that she could never share: using her own no-longer-human brain in lieu of pattern-recognition engines, scouring through image after image after image, looking for what she—
There.
They were in stone chambers among heavy, dumb-fabric hangings, surrounded by cots filled with wounded and dying fighters. Two men: one shaven-headed, Brino by name, an asset of Labyrinth’s intelligence service but not a Pilot; and one Janis deVries, his obsidian eyes disguised by smartlenses, either highly skilled or desperate, because his ship was in a cavern nearby, ready to transit directly to mu-space.
Kenna had the escape route she needed, provided she could find a location for this deVries, whose presumed forebear had played such a role in her genesis, to materialise his ship close to her current location.
She would be sorry to abandon Nulapeiron, her home for eight centuries: as Kenna rather than Rhianna Chiang, the only home she had known.
Regret caused her to take one last look, via remote surveillance, at what was happening inside the headquarters of Warlord Primus Corcorigan, the last war leader of humanity before the Anomaly engulfed this world, like the others, and turned it into hell.
What she saw changed everything.
The terraformer was a floating stone sphere under attack by flying Siganthians; but dart-shaped flyers belonging to the Strontium Dragons were fighting them off, along with Corcorigan’s commandos, battling hand-to-hand on the terraformer itself against the implacable metallic warriors.
Meanwhile, Corcorigan himself was crucified on the sphere’s exterior – so like a one-eyed wanderer out of legend, Kenna thought, forcing himself into the most extreme of mental states – and assisted by two beings: a cyborg embedded in the sphere – a feeling of kinship welled inside Kenna – and the flensed head of Eemur, the Seer, who was searching through the hyperdimensions, trying to find the help that Corcorigan needed.
Trying to find a Pilot.
He needs deVries.
So much for Kenna’s escape; but Corcorigan’s headquarters was about to fall unless he gained the help he needed.
Very well.
She directed her motes closer and closer to glistening, blood-red flesh.
And whispered coordinates inside the Seer’s ear.
Kenna was not privy to what happened next. Whatever response the Seer made, spillover energy destroyed the surveillance motes in the terraformer, and when Kenna tried to re-establish contact with her motes in the field hospital where deVries was working, a similar massive distortion had broken every link.
She linked to her surveillance motes in orbit.
And waited.
FIFTY-FOUR
MU-SPACE, 3427 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
For the first time in centuries, the First Admiral was back, openly standing in the Admiralty’s Great Hall, waiting for the rescue team to return. The greater fleet – moving out of Labyrinth’s docking halls and taking up formation immediately, under Admiralty Council authorisation, as soon as Ro McNamara appeared and made her wishes clear – was standing by, ready to carry out a mission involving immense precision, intended to disrupt the Anomaly’s current attempt to add another hellworld to its collection.
Whether it was feasible, Ro did not know for sure. Already, strategy analysts had indicated that even if worked to free Nulapeiron, it was not a technique they could extend to other hellworlds. There was no point in even trying to free them: whatever had happened to the once-human Anomalous components over the generations, nothing of humanity could remain. The best that could be done was the same as always: to quarantine every known hellworld and stay as far away as possible.
The most recently created hellworlds, apart from the yet-to-be-freed Nulapeiron – and if it worked, it would only be by interrupting an incomplete process – were not even human originally. Saving xeno ecologies was far beyond anyone’s remit.
These thoughts were Ro’s attempt to distract herself, since the current crop of admirals seemed too awed to speak to her, while all she could think about deep down was her poor, tortured son, and what the Siganthians had done to him – all this time, so very, very long – and the suspended comms session featuring a strange, one-armed bare-chested man who had appeared to hang in space before her, riding a mu-space comms-beam all the way from realspace Nulapeiron, to beg for her help in saving his world from the Anomaly, and offering a very special gift in return.
The location of her son Kian.
And the description of ongoing vivisection-torture inflicted on him by his captors. How Corcorigan had been teleported to Siganth, to witness what he related, was a mystery for Admiralty analysts to unravel later. What mattered now was—
=They are here.=
Ro looked up.
‘Is . . .?’
=Kian is aboard the squadron leader’s ship.=
She had always been a fighter. For the first time, a sudden loss of stress was threatening to make her faint.
=And his own ship is flying alongside.=
Ro turned away.