Perhaps I should have stayed to rescue more.
But the risk had been vast, and he had made a promise to Carl Blackstone, without whom no one would have escaped the Anomaly.
‘So.’ Jed turned to Rowena. ‘Is this a big job you’ve got for us?’
‘Pretty much. I’m waiting for a few more– Ah.’
Fastpath rotations were forming all around them. Over the next few seconds, eleven more Pilots stepped through onto the platform.
‘OK, everyone.’ Having greeted each Pilot by name, Rowena looked around the group, smiling. ‘I’ve a nicely tricky schedule lined up, so I thought I’d use only the best Pilots I know for the job.’
‘But they weren’t available so you called us instead,’ said Felipe Copeland, an old rival of Jed’s. ‘Right?’
Rowena laughed. ‘Absolutely not. Follow me, children. Everybody hold hands.’
Jed held out his hand to Felipe, who gave a hooked-little-finger salute in return.
Skilfully, Rowena summoned a fastpath rotation to envelop them all, and they passed through to a promenade that ran along a vast cavernous area of docks. Jed’s ship was already there as requested by Rowena, hanging among the fifty or so ships he could see. He presumed the others also had their vessels waiting.
Scarlet light blazed at the promenade’s far end.
‘Emergency?’ said Golwyn.
A blocky, shaven-headed man came tumbling through a rotation. Two younger men in Admiralty uniforms came running after him, but he gestured and the air rippled, and his pursuers dropped.
‘I’ve seen him before.’ Jed remembered the state funeral, of Carl Blackstone along with his wife, and the man who had appeared on Borges Boulevard only to be arrested. ‘Who is he?’
Rowena had a holovolume open.
‘Guy called Gould, chief suspect in Admiral Kaltberg’s murder, according to this.’
From below, in the gleaming abyssal depths of the docking volume, a dark, powerful-looking ship with white-webbed wings was rising.
‘Call security,’ said Jed. ‘Let’s get him.’
Arms rising, he summoned a fastpath rotation to take him the short distance to where Gould was running. To curve around such a tiny spacetime interval was difficult, the geometric equivalent of minimal leverage; and the rotation did not begin to manifest until Davey Golwyn joined in, adding his manipulation to Jed’s with energetic skill.
‘Nice one,’ said Jed. ‘Come on.’
The two of them jumped through.
‘Shit.’
‘Nice try though, Pilot Golwyn.’
‘Call me Davey.’
The air was twisting where Gould had performed a short-hop rotation of his own, coming out to stand on one of those powerful wings on the rising craft. Already, a man-sized oval was melting open on the fuselage, allowing him to enter.
‘Where the hell is security?’
‘There’s no general alarm.’ Davey looked around the docks. ‘You think maybe there’s some kind of sabotage involved?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jed. ‘I think maybe I don’t want to stand around and watch while a murderer escapes from Labyrinth.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Davey grinned at him. ‘We are the best Pilots that Rowena knows, right?’
‘Allegedly.’
In unison, each looked for his own ship; in response, each ship pulled back from her berth, bobbed up, then headed for the promenade where their Pilots stood.
‘Good luck, man,’ said Davey.
‘Luck,’ said Jed.
They jogged in opposite directions, making distance between them so their ships would have no problem in coming alongside. Up on the platform where Rowena stood, columns of twisting air told of fastpath rotations being summoned; while out in the dock space, other ships rose from their berths.
Looks like the hunt is on.
But the dark powerful ship with the white-webbed wings was heading for the exit portal; and with no sign of security alerts, there was every chance she would fly straight through, bearing Gould into open mu-space where the probability of capture diminished. Jed’s silver-and-bronze ship settled level with the promenade, and he ran onto her delta wing as she opened to let him inside, while adrenalized joy washed tidally through every cell of his body.
Rowena and the last of her summoned Pilots, Justina McGowen, watched from the platform.
‘Sorry,’ said Justina. ‘Not really my business, you know?’
Besides Jed and Davey, eight of the others had transported themselves close to their ships and were rushing to board, while two had created fastpath rotations to take them to the Admiralty where they could raise the full-on alert that should already have occurred.
‘All right,’ said Rowena.
She herself was one of the Shipless, though her skill in visualizing complex geodesics raised interesting questions in the minds of those who knew her.
Justina had recently paid off a massive fine for infringing Admiralty regulations, and her body language was more pulled-in than usual. Whatever the analysis, fast aggression was not on her agenda.
‘The freight schedule is off, is it?’ she asked.
‘I think I’d better reschedule, Juss,’ said Rowena. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Right. Later, then.’
‘Yeah.’
There was a dispirited fuzziness to the fastpath’s rotation; then Justina slipped inside and it twisted from existence.
‘Shit,’ added Rowena.
Out in the docking volume, Jed’s ship was following Davey’s through the exit portal, both flying faster than allowed. Seven others followed. Another ship was tilted at an angle against the promenade, having collided in the haste of her manoeuvre, though Rowena had not heard the bang.
Because I’m too scared.
Beside her, the air shivered as another rotation manifested itself. Clara stepped out.
‘Hey, sis,’ she said.
Rowena could only swallow.
‘You’re doing the right thing,’ Clara added. ‘For Labyrinth.’
‘Are you sure they’re not in danger?’
At this, Clara’s facial muscles tightened. For all her training, and the Admiralty role she did not discuss but which Rowena had long held suspicions about, they were sisters who could not, standing this close, sustain a lie to one another.
‘Oh, no,’ said Rowena.
The last of the ships slipped through the exit portal and out of sight.
As Max-and-ship tore through the portal, Labyrinth’s farewell resonated in the control cabin.
=Good luck=
‘Thank you.’
Then ship-and-Max were out in the golden void, taking a geodesic hard enough to challenge the pursuers without losing them. Ahead was a scarlet nebula that served as a destination for now, while black fractal stars lay sprinkled against the glowing stuff of mu-space.
The rear-view holorama showed nine ships following.
Good enough.
Max slipped out of conjunction-trance.
‘They won’t catch us before transition.’
I know.
He smiled as he dropped back into unification, and whether it was Max-and-ship or ship-and-Max who took a long, banking, geodesic-shifting turn was moot as the conjoined pair flew on, so very fast, as they were born to do.
Behind them, the pursuers accelerated.
FORTY-THREE
EARTH, 1942 AD
On the second day of the return journey to New York, when they were almost alone in the railway carriage – except Americans called it a car – Gavriela asked Payne about the hand-to-hand combat session she had witnessed, and the quotation fastened to the wall of the training hut.
‘In war you cannot afford the luxury of squeamishness.
Either you kill or capture, or you will be captured or killed.
We’ve got to be tough to win, and we’ve got to be ruthless –
tougher and more ruthless than our enemies.’