Max, sleeves pushed up from his huge forearms as always, stepped on to a powerful wing of black, deepest blue and white. Off to one side, Jed was exiting in parallel; but the danger, if it came, would be focused on Max Gould, commodore, former senior intelligence officer, now enemy of Labyrinth.
=Welcome back.=
Enemy of those who claimed to represent Labyrinth, more precisely.
On the promenade, walkers stopped, looking not at Max but at their surroundings, puzzled by what they were sensing. Some of them, more perceptive or survival-oriented, began to hurry away. A few tried to summon fastpath rotations, but the nascent activity made this difficult, as if spacetime were becoming turgid and viscous, impossible to handle.
Here they come.
Hundreds of Pilots rippled into existence, all along the promenade, and upon the various floating platforms that serviced the docks, and other vantage points which had one thing in common: all provided a view of their common target, him. The full complement, once they rotated into place, numbered a thousand, give or take a handful.
Ionization rendered the air heady, pleasant unless you realized it was due to so many weapons emitting spill-over radiation, their resonant energies desperate to spurt forth.
In the centre of them all, a uniformed man rotated onto the promenade.
‘Garber,’ called out Max. ‘How loathsome to see you, Colonel.’
Even from this distance, Garber’s cold smile sent a message: fuck off. Beside him, a larger rotation spun then dissipated, leaving five more figures, including one who wore ceremonial brocade, as if he had been interrupted in official duties, or considered the capture of one renegade commodore to be a state occasion in itself.
‘Admiral Schenck,’ said Max. ‘How unusual to see you down among the working Pilots.’
Not that the innocent were here in numbers: they had cleared the promenade and most of the dock space, some to watch from what they hoped were safe positions, most to flee deeper inside Labyrinth. Only a handful tried to alert the authorities; the others already knew this was some kind of official action. Perhaps that was why they took it for granted that their ships were safe. It was not an assumption Max would have made.
Schenck looked at Garber.
‘Commodore Maximilian Gould,’ Garber recited, ‘you are being detained on a charge of treasonous homicide, the victim being Admiral Adrienne Kaltberg, with additional counts of—’
‘Never mind,’ said Schenck. ‘Do the legal niceties once this bastard’s in a cell.’
If this was being recorded, his performance would go down well. He pointed, and two Pilots made their way towards Max, careful with the spinning infinity-symbol-shaped brightness they caused to move ahead of them: a topology bracelet, unbreakable.
‘Stand right there.’ Garber gestured at the hundreds of Pilots all around. ‘You can see how many people we have. Enough to destroy your ship as well as you. I assume you’re enough of a Pilot to care about that.’
His personal staff were behind him, stone-faced to reinforce their superior officer’s intent. Of the group, Clara James stood furthest to the left.
‘Raise your hands, sir,’ said one of the Pilots controlling the restraint.
It glowed brighter, the twisted infinity that Max dared not place his hands inside.
‘You’re attempting to execute an illegal order,’ he said. ‘Hold back.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ called Garber. ‘You’ve no choice.’
Max’s barrel chest expanded with preparatory inhalation.
‘No choice,’ he said, ‘but to take you bastards down.’
He slammed his big hands together and twisted, squinting against the fluorescence in his eyes, snarling with the effort of rotating the stuff of spacetime in this fashion, but doing it. In time with his hands, the infinity symbol rotated, then snapped outwards, ripping through the Pilots who thought they controlled it. One fell sideways, with a scream that came straight from the abattoir, while the other’s head bounced on the promenade, arterial blood spraying from his collapsed body.
‘Kill—’ Garber’s voice strangled shut.
Clara James stood between Garber and Schenck, her body cruciform: one extended fist pointed at Colonel Garber’s neck, the other at Admiral Schenck’s. Both fists were glowing scarlet.
‘No,’ she said.
Schenck’s lip turned up.
‘I’ve a thousand officers here,’ he said. ‘You have precisely—’
Those Pilots had been focused on the present danger, or they might have sensed it a second earlier: the twisting and shimmering of air around their positions, wherever they were.
‘Considerably more,’ said Clara.
Some three thousand Pilots stepped out of fastpath rotations, each with aimed fists, rings shimmering with the potential for devastation.
‘You thought it was time to move openly, after all those years of planning,’ called Max. ‘You were wrong.’
He stared up at the ceiling, for want of a better place to look.
‘How many of them can hear you?’
=Not so many.=
Perhaps being in the minority who could hear the city itself meant you were less likely to fall prey to Schenck’s type of treasonous conspiracy.
‘Tell them anyway.’
He waited, then gave a start as the words came through with full intensity, directed at everyone capable of perceiving them:
=Gould is correct. Schenck is a traitor.=
Here and there among the massed Pilots, individuals flinched. After a moment, those who had been part of Schenck’s force powered down their weapons. A few looked about to snarclass="underline" whether angry with themselves for being duped, or the city for not warning them, Max could not tell.
‘Kill them!’ yelled Schenck.
Max threw himself sideways – the moron – reacting even though he had expected Schenck to surrender – it’s insane – and he dropped to one knee, looking up at Schenck, in time to see the Admiral clap his hands and implode in blackness, disappearing.
What was that?
On the promenade and all around, isolated firefights flared amid screaming, while others threw themselves flat, but that was not the strangest thing: here and there, Pilots were coming to attention and clapping their hands, each disappearing in blackness.
Then around the dock space, ships were pulling clear, heading for the portal, accelerating at dangerous levels but with no collisions: streaming for the exit.
Max craned his neck back.
‘Stop them!’
The reply – directed at him, not generally – resonated through his body.
=I will not risk the damage.=
One by one, the Pilots most deeply immersed in conspiracy were fleeing Labyrinth, heading out into mu-space.
‘How many?’ said Max.
=Hundreds. Not just from your location.=
Meaning that, from other docks inside the city, and in ships that floated outside, Schenck’s people were getting away, still powerful, with their long-term intent unknown.
But it had a positive outcome: on the promenade, most of those who had been serving Schenck’s cause – thinking it legitimate – were surrendering. There was still fighting, but in some twenty isolated pockets, not spreading.
Max looked up at Clara. Her fist still glowed at Colonel Garber’s neck. The colonel’s face had manifested a layer of slick sweat, like transparent grease.
‘I don’t …’
He stopped, clearly not knowing what to say. Max had no reply, either. He was too far away to deliver a kick to the balls.
‘We’ve stopped you bastards,’ said Clara.
Her shoulder exploded, spray spattering Max’s face and Garber’s.
They met in the Admiralty Council Chamber: Max, Pavel Karelin, and several other Pilots, male and female, whom Jed did not know. Quite why he, Jed Goran, was here, no one said. They sat around the big conference table, and Jed was not the only one to be checking out the simple yet lustrous surroundings, unchanged from the Council’s founding after the first Admiral, Ro McNamara, stepped aside centuries before. Max, Jed noted, took a seat to the left of the empty chair at the table’s head. Opposite him, the right-hand seat was also vacant, while Pavel took the next one down.