‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
It would not do for her fellow admirals to see her cry.
After a minute, she spread her hands apart, manipulating reality, restarting the comms-session she had frozen, though to the disembodied Corcorigan the delay might have been only seconds.
He hung there, a bizarre image, desperate for her help.
‘They’re back,’ she told him, meaning the special-forces squadron despatched to Siganth, taking Corcorigan at his word. ‘My . . . Kian is safe.’
The expression in Corcorigan’s eyes did not change. He had been confident in the gift he had offered. Clearly what he needed was her response to his plea.
‘We will help,’ she said.
At her command, ten thousand ships commenced a hell-flight for Nulapeiron.
*
At the same time, aboard a fast special-forces vessel, a claw-handed, scar-faced Pilot, lying exhausted on a passenger couch at the rear of the control cabin, smiled despite his trauma.
I love you.
She was flying in parallel with this vessel, his own ship, having arrived with beautiful precision alongside the rescue squadron, fighting alongside them, though she was no combat vessel. They laid down covering fire while the Pilots descended in drop-bubbles direct to Kian’s location, wreaking destruction everywhere, killing every Siganthian in sight as they fought through to the hive-cell where he had been left, a forgotten, tortured captive, and destroyed the hyperdimensional field that held him.
And I love you.
It was all that mattered.
We’re flying to Labyrinth.
Perhaps it’s time.
To go home?
Yes. Home.
To be among their own kind, at least for a while. Outsiders no more.
An end to isolation.
FIFTY-FIVE
NULAPEIRON, 3427 AD
From the shuttle that had carried Avernon into orbit, Kenna’s surveillance motes drifted into a wide array allowing her remotely to see perhaps the most beautiful sight of her life.
Ten thousand mu-space ships, every one of them shining silver and bronze, materialised together.
Brutal warfare might be unfolding on the world below, but here in orbit what happened next was a stately, elegant dance. Avernon’s drones dispersed, to be taken on board – with exquisite, gentle control – by the Pilots’ fleet. Then the shining ships dispersed, and pulsed like a single spherical wave around Nulapeiron, resonating as they harnessed the shell of spinpoints that burst into life, forming an unbroken, shining, spherical shield.
Severing the Anomaly’s links.
Labyrinth had responded to Corcorigan’s call for help, and that was that: victory.
In the aftermath, it took Kenna some time to realise what Corcorigan almost certainly deduced straight away, or perhaps knew in advance, back when he set Avernon on the path to creating the planetary shield out of spinpoints that were already there, harvested in order to create Oracles . . . but had not existed when Kenna, as Rhianna Chiang, first approached this world.
It was not the finite duration of the spinpoints’ lives so much as the direction that held significance. When Avernon’s drones appeared to destroy those distributed seeds of negentropic timeflow, he was of course creating them – almost as a sideeffect – their deaths having already occurred, centuries before.
In a real sense, Corcorigan, whose identity had been built upon hatred of Oracles and the political system they empowered, had in fact created them.
It was Kenna’s first true lesson in paradox.
FIFTY-SIX
NULAPEIRON, 3498 AD
Alexa Corcorigan deVries, her obsidian eyes glistening with grief, stares down at her aged grandfather’s death-bed. They are on a tall, open-topped tower formed of quickglass, overlooking rolling heathland. A peach-coloured sunrise hovers above distant purple mountains.
Her grandfather, Tom Corcorigan, loves the open air, so different from the tunnels of his youth. This is where he has said he wants to die.
Beside Alexa, her grey-eyed half-brother, Samson Gervicort, is as distraught as she is: they equally adore Grandfather Tom, who may be legendary to others, but to them is the most warm-hearted of real people, always gentle, and missing Elva dreadfully: Alexa and Samson’s grandmother, dead for almost a decade.
On Grandfather’s rug-covered lap, a neko-kitten with soft amber fur lies curled up, sleeping.
‘Grandfather,’ asks Samson. ‘Do we have things right?’
The old man is nearly gone, unable to open his eyes; but he raises a single finger slightly.
‘He means yes,’ says Alexa. ‘It is as it should be. This’ – blinking away tears – ‘is his moment.’
She takes his fragile hand—
You’ve done so much.
—and, as Samson turns away for a moment to blink away tears, she places her hand upon his forehead, and her tu-ring gleams. A virtual holo, her-eyes-only, shows the winking-out of a tiny point of light, deep inside Grandfather’s brain.
A spinpoint has just ceased to exist, from the viewpoint of ordinary time.
Or been created, to live all the way back to Tom Corcorigan’s conception, from a different way of considering things.
‘I love you, Grandfather,’ she says, and it is the truth.
‘I love you, Grandfather,’ says Samson, placing his hand on the dying man’s shoulder.
There is no mistaking the final breath, the last release of pressure, as life leaves the body.
Grandfather.
He is gone.
From a distant chamber, well appointed in smartmarble, two figures watched a giant holo of Corcorigan’s final moments, respectful and solemn, while approving of the finesse with which Alexa carried out her task.
‘It had to work out all right,’ said the claw-handed Pilot, his face half-covered in scar tissue. ‘It’s predestined, isn’t it?’
‘Careful,’ said Kenna beside him. ‘We skirt on the edge of paradox, and it’s so very, very dangerous.’
‘I know. It’s strange, to think of Tom Corcorigan and me, entangled in that way.’ He looked up at the holo. ‘We never talked, yet he was in a sense more a brother to me than Dirk.’
‘Never that, Kian.’ Kenna placed her crystalline hand upon his burnt one. ‘Your real family love you, even if they don’t understand.’
After the rescue from Siganth, thanks to Tom Corcorigan’s signal to Labyrinth, direct to Kian’s mother, Kian and his ship had remained in Labyrinth for several contiguous years, getting to know Dirk and Mother once more. But Kian’s political-philosophical effectiveness had depended on his time-skipping nomadic ways, while all three of them were infected by that same need to skip relativistically across the decades and centuries, to see how Pilotkind turned out. They were getting restless. With luck, they would see out the next three or four hundred years, until the Aeternal language, along with technology and culture, had changed so much that not even they could adapt to it.
As for Kenna, Kian had met her some seven decades earlier, two years after the Anomaly’s defeat on Nulapeiron, when official celebrations had declared the rescued planet part of the allied realspace worlds of humanity. Kian had hovered at the edge of a celebration that Tom Corcorigan had declined to take a starring role in, when ambassadors had gathered, and Ode to Victory had been played, and so on: the usual mix of solemnity and parade. When Kian, hooded and cloaked, had sneaked away, another hooded figure followed and she introduced herself to him.
Of course he had paid attention. ‘It’s not every day you get to meet a woman of living crystal,’ he told her later.
For all that, he was the only non-Kobold not to fall into awed trance in her presence, and she treasured his friendship, and the infrequent visits that followed.
Plus, there was a mystery that no one had resolved, and had been only deepened when Labyrinth herself had given Kian a piece of information that he understood was confidential, not to be shared, no matter how little information he extracted from the words.