—It just happened, Kenna told him.
—I do not understand.
She smiled, knowing that he was fighting against the knowledge inside him.
—In your sleep, as you dreamt this dream, you—
His face showed horror.
—No!
—Yes. You died, my Loki-Óthinn, my Dmitri-Stígr.
Even as they were talking.
—That is not possible.
But of course it was and, after a moment, that familiar self-mocking, universe-mocking smile appeared.
—I appear to have made my decision, he added. And accept you as my war-queen.
She held out her hand.
—Welcome to the Council.
He took her fingers gently, and went down on one knee, head bowed. It was a graceful gesture of obeisance, a promise of fealty, performed with such feeling that a human leader might have been taken in by emotion alone. But Kenna knew that what bound him was logic and self-interest, for his resurrection was by her machinations; and only the Council and the forces they commanded were of his kind, now that he lived in this form (for not even he could live totally alone for ever); and when the darkness came, its goal would be to obliterate them. The only special treatment that the Trickster might receive would be a more agonising destruction, suitable for one who had betrayed the betrayer.
Thus would he fight hard and craftily and well, loyal to Kenna as a side effect of loyalty to self, hoping that through victory he might survive the Final Days.
The Trickster was nothing if not adaptable.
While the touch of chaos he brought to their armies might be the edge they needed against the enemy. Or it might be their ruin.
She led him in to meet the others.
FIFTY-NINE
MU-SPACE, 3607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
A thousand years had passed since The Trapping of Schenck’s Armada, and it was almost time.
The evacuation of Labyrinth was complete.
Fleets of ships, hundreds of millions of shining vessels, hung at a safe distance from the city-world, also keeping far away from that region of shining nothingness soon to collapse and reveal the massed enemy ships. All of the Labyrinthine ships were armed; but none expected to use those weapons.
This was Labyrinth’s moment.
=It has been an honour, Pilots.=
The moment of her death.
**We love you.**
Every ship conjoined in sending Labyrinth that message. Then she split apart—
**We love you!**
—becoming a thousand fragments as she died.
Giving birth.
To a thousand daughters.
Much had occurred during that millennium, including the Stochastic Schism that so divided Pilots. Many aimed for secession as the darkness had wanted, but for different reasons, seeking to divorce mu-space, which seemed cleansed, from the home universe where the darkness still manifested and would one day come in strength.
Others argued for increasing involvement, citing the success in using Haxigoji allies to root out those who were corrupted by the darkness, realspace allies who were literally incorruptible – who died if the darkness started to take hold – and in the spacetime shields that prevented several new hellworlds from forming, though the Anomaly did gain new worlds from time to time, and no existing hellworld was ever freed.
Both sides of the Schism evoked the legendary image of Dirk McNamara in their rhetoric; but there was also the mysterious, crippled figure who appeared from time to time as a moderator, and was supposed to have lived in semi-secrecy in Labyrinth for a while, before returning to his wanderings; and whether it was truth or fiction that Kian McNamara originated the Tri-Fold Way, what was certain was the success of that philosophy in eventually merging both views, both halves of Pilotkind, once more.
They had forged unity and peace, in full view of a blatant symbol showing how important and how fragile such concepts remained.
The event horizon that enclosed Schenck and his renegade armada.
Each of the thousand new city-worlds was magnificent, infinite in her complexity, able to steal as much time as required to grow and get ready . . . to become strong. Each honoured their mother, each loved the inherited memory of her, the first Labyrinth; and each knew well the circumstances that had forced her to produce another generation, and in the process, die.
Spacetime rippled.
**It’s starting.**
Signals flitted among Pilots, but the daughter-Labyrinths had no need of comms. They knew what was about to happen.
The event horizon around the renegade armada and the graveyard ships, along with Roger-and-ship frozen in the instance of their death, collapsed, revealing the ships within. There was no hesitation as, in their wrath and sorrow, the thousand new Labyrinths poured their infinitesimal-point energies upon the captive ships, obliterating spacetime within that horizon.
It blazed, so that even the shining golden void appeared momentarily in shadow.
Then they were gone, the millennium-old enemy, along with the selfless allies who had trapped them, held them in place for the kill.
Victory.
Almost a billion Pilots and ships took part in the remembrance ceremony that followed; and when it was done, they convened among their new homes, their extended realm of a thousand Labyrinths that in future would grow even greater. As the region of mu-space in which they dwelled was now vast, they recognised it was time to choose a name for their realm: a name for the ages, if not for ever.
They chose to call it Ásgarth.
SIXTY
NULAPEIRON ORBIT, 2201 AD
In realspace orbit around the cloud-creamy world, Amber Hawke’s ship drifted. Rekka was in the control cabin with her, some twenty minutes out of delta-coma. They were drinking fragrant tea, taking time over their farewells.
‘Things are coming to a head in UNSA,’ Rekka told her oldest surviving friend. ‘Too much, too soon, your people are asking for.’
‘Maybe,’ said Amber.
Her eye sockets looked scratched around the edges, but the metal was bright as ever across the contact surfaces where the cables plugged in.
‘Jared’s generation might be the last to take ships for granted.’ To Rekka, this was the urgent point. ‘I know they can survive here in realspace, but to be without ships . . .’
‘You mean’ – Amber tapped a fingernail against one of her eye sockets – I/O sockets – in a gesture that Simon, blast his memory, used to describe as scrotum-tightening – ‘they didn’t sacrifice their sight for the organisation.’
They were two old women, looking back across the years; and although both had taken time-dilated journeys, they were not that much younger than they would have been on Earth: Rekka herself was born seventy-eight years earlier, five years before the height of the Changeling Plague, eight years before her adoptive parents rescued her from the Suttee Pavilion.
‘If mu-space is as wonderful as you say, as you’ve always said,’ Rekka told Amber now, ‘then you can’t deny it to the next generation.’
‘Because we need UNSA to build ships.’
‘Well, of course you do . . . er, not. Oh, Amber!’ Rekka found herself grinning. ‘You haven’t, have you? Found a way to—?’
‘If we had,’ said Amber, smiling, ‘we wouldn’t be able to tell anyone, would we? Not even old friends.’