Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (23 page)

‘Whether the whole of realspace will ever contract,' he told them, ‘is irrelevant. We aim to create tiny regions of spacetime that shrink inwards to produce negentropic timeflow, and by stabilising them within normal reality, we have conduits via which to “remember” the future.'

Those regions, naturally enough, would need to be inside a human brain: a human whose normal brain could interact with the world, while selected neural cliques and groups experienced timeflow emanating from the future, allowing memories of future perceptions to be remembered in the present.

All you needed was a temporary abeyance of humanist ethics.

And children on whose brains you could operate.

*

Now, five years later, it boiled down to this: thirteen members of the nobility standing on an internal balcony halfway up the wall of a lab chamber, twenty or so research assistants moving around, and eight drooling youngsters: the proto-Oracles.

These were aged between seven and seventeen standard years, some with left and right eyes that moved independently, all largely confined to couches from which they observed ceaseless holo footage. Three of them could speak with some coherence.

‘Steam. Pudding. Good to . . .day . . .' came from a ten-year-old girl.

‘Timeline is thirteen days in the future.' An assistant checked displays. ‘Location is right here.'

A sarcastic laugh sounded from the rear of the visiting group. At the forefront, Lord Welkin, oldest of the investors, was frowning. ‘With respect, sir,' he told Lord Alvix, ‘this is pitiful. The paltriness of your servitors' menu is hardly a worthy—'

But Alvix stopped the complaint confidently.

‘It would have been too much coincidence, sir,' he said, ‘had one of them just happened to deliver useful information as you stood here.'

‘And when, my Lord, do you actually
foresee
gaining useful information?'

At the rear of the group, another laugh: it was Archduke Colwyn.

But Alvix had a reply ready, though it might cost him Welkin's support.

‘We learned something a tenday ago,' he said to Welkin. ‘Seven years and twenty-three days from now, my Lord, which is to say Dvaday the thirty-seventh of Jyu, a Convocation in Shantzu Province will rule on the dissolution of your cousin Lord Cheung's demesne. By the end of Jyu-ni, his neighbours will have divided up his realm among themselves.'

Welkin went pale, at least in part (Kenna was almost sure,
to a probability of 96.3 per cent) because he was party to the conspiracy that would in due course break up his cousin's realm. But the other Lords and Ladies, to judge by their microexpressions and skin lividity, were rationally assessing the situation, and revealing a tentative approval.

In some metatemporal sense, the future has already happened; and that being so, they wanted to know about it, whatever details they could pick up.

But Kenna knew something else that Lord Alvix was aware of yet had not divulged. One of the more coherent proto-Oracles, the girl called Mandia, had spoken of the Collegium Delphinorum, a place that did not yet exist, and which (from interpreting Mandia's fragments of information) seemed to be some future facility – or group of facilities – for creating and managing better Oracles in the future.

In one sense, it implied success for this venture, but those scraps of report made no mention of Demesne Avernon.

Perhaps this was knowledge that Kenna herself should be acting on.

Isn't foreknowledge the reason I'm here?

Perhaps it was time she made plans to leave Demesne Avernon, and found a place for herself in one of the deep interstitial regions of Nulapeiron, far from other realms and their ambitious schemes.

Time to change herself once more.

THIRTY-THREE

MAGNUS & THE WORLD, 5575 AD

Seeker learned that the obsidian-eyed woman had a name, which he rendered as Maree Delgasso in flux-speech. She was a Pilot, one able to voyage among the stars (though Ideas regarding golden space were not yet decipherable), descendant of a line of Pilots that stretched back some one hundred and twenty generations.

Pilots had existed for longer than there had been people on the World; and yet it seemed they had common ancestry, soft-fleshed people like the folk whom the Pilots bore as passengers in their magnificent living vessels.

The Pilots lived according to a code called the Tri-Fold Way, and were amused, as they explored the World, at the three sexes and three-way symmetry of ‘native' species, such as flying tri-blades . . . and at the failure of silver-skinned people, including Seekers, to deduce that their own ancestry was different, that the legend of the Ark had necessarily contained some truth.

But the Pilots' philosophy, which impelled them towards peacefulness, apparently had a tragic origin.

**It came from healing, from the aftermath of war. Of so much death.**

The flux, though representing Maree's words, emanated from the ring on her finger, mediated by a near-invisible mist. She was fascinated by the Ideas that Seeker-once-Harij captured, snagging them from the air. It made her eager to leave Magnus, and return the nine Seekers and Zirkana to the World.

**Not just to get you home, but to investigate this wonderful air.
Some kind of airborne ferrimagnetic colloid, perhaps . . .**

Her musings had the flavour of some of those old Ideas, captured by wandering Seekers.

Other Pilots descended in bubbles to enter and commune with the old vessel that had taken the Seekers and Zirkana here. Finally, a pair of huge ships moved in overhead – Seeker was fascinated at their living forms, the way they could stretch and twist – and reached down with gentle tendrils to embrace the older vessel.

Gently, gently they lifted her from the sands, carried her up into the black star-powdered sky, and disappeared as Seeker-once-Harij watched.

**What happened to them?**

**They entered the golden ocean, my friend. A void where we can fly fast, and take her to a city where she can heal, that old ship.**

**And fly her again?**

Something shifted in Maree's black-on-black eyes.

**Her Pilot is long dead. When she is well, she will simply slip away, as all ships do when they are bereft. Where they go, we do not know, and must never ask. **

**Your people are so strange.**

Maree reached out and touched the back of his hand.

**Your silver skin is strange also. That old ship transformed you, your ancestors, when she crashed upon the World.**

**She crashed?**

**And was broken, but healed as best she could. Your world was not hospitable.**

So much to combine with other Ideas, so much for the Seekers to share with the World.

**But for now, Seeker, it is time for us to take you home. Do you trust us?**

Zirkana came walking, her skin shining purest silver, absolutely radiant.

**This is so wonderful. Wait until Starij and the rest get to meet them!**

Seeker took Zirkana's hands in his, and turned back to Maree.

**We trust you. Can you find the way?**

**The old ship gave us the location**

They called everyone together, getting ready for the return. Before they rose to her ship, Maree had a question for Seeker-once-Harij:

**You're known as Seekers. Does it ever stop? Will returning like this mean the end of your careers?**

But Seeker-once-Harij had his arm around Zirkana, and his smile was serene as he cast his reply.

**I have already found what I Sought.**

Maree looked at them both, and smiled.

Then she summoned transport bubbles to carry them aloft to her waiting ship.

THIRTY-FOUR

MU-SPACE, 2606 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

Commodore Max Gould was not a well man, in Pavel's estimation. Ever since the attack or breakdown or whatever it was – no one was forthcoming with the medical history of the intelligence service's director – Max had spent fewer hours in the Admiralty and more time by himself. The Admiralty Council had surprised Pavel by making his own position permanent, so that he was officially the deputy director; and Max had compounded that by handing over much of the running of the service, including some of the most strategically important and sensitive operations.

Now, in a gold-appointed lounge in Max's apartments, they lounged back on flowcouches, Pavel and Max, sipping daistral and looking physically relaxed. The operations they discussed were serious, however.

‘Shireen Singh worked well on her last two assignments,' Pavel told Max, ‘so I made her team leader on Coolth. There's no news on tracking down the leak, though.'

Someone had betrayed shipping routes and times to the Zajinets – two Pilots had died – and analysis suggested that one or other of their common destinations was likely to be the location of the leak, most likely Coolth, a world of ice and oceans, with only a few town-sized research stations inhabited by humans.

‘I'm sure you'll sort it out.' Max's tone suggested this was trivia, beneath his notice.

‘So I'm considering a decoy op,' said Pavel. ‘With Jed Goran as the decoy, which is why I mentioned it.'

Jed was now Clara's husband, security-vetted but not
trained, increasingly involved in Admiralty work.

‘Clara's a great asset.'

And never mind Jed's safety, Pavel noted.

‘Agreed, Max. I won't do anything to jeopardise her . . . well-being. Her concentration.'

‘Tell me more about the last Council session. I mean their attitudes and so on, not the specifics.'

‘Zajac and Whitwell' – in private with Max, Pavel did not use the men's ranks – ‘are behaving in character. Bluster and belligerence from one, cool logic from the other.'

‘No need to ask which is which.' Max gestured, ordering a fresh daistral, which his couch extruded. He broke the cup off the narrow tendril, and took a sip. ‘Not bad. And the split among the others?'

‘Fifty-fifty, if we're talking Zajac versus Whitwell. Get them to agree on a given matter, and you'll have unanimous support around the table.'

‘And have they seen this?' Max gestured a holovolume into view. ‘A sighting from mu-space, close to a sheaf of insertion points suitable for transit to Molsin.'

Pavel examined the ambiguous readings: a fast-moving ship, corkscrewing through an extreme geodesic, blurring surveillance either through desperate urgency or considered daring.

‘It's not a Zajinet.'

That was the primary purpose of such set-ups: looking for Zajinet ships approaching realspace worlds from mu-space.

‘The analysts think,' said Max, ‘that the Pilot might be Holland. Guy Holland.'

It took Pavel a second to recall the name.

‘Shit.'

‘Agreed.'

Holland was the Pilot who had carried Rick Mbuli, once Roger Blackstone's college friend and more latterly an Anomalous component, to Vachss Station in orbit around Vijaya. And had subsequently escaped to Siganth, followed by Roger,
who came back reporting that Siganth was now a hellworld with an Anomaly of its own – or an extended part of the same Anomaly as Fulgor: no one had yet decided for sure.

‘If he's doing the same on Molsin as he intended on Vachss Station—'

‘An SRS squadron is already en route,' said Max. ‘There's no time for undercover trickiness, nor an all-out invasion fleet.'

A full attack fleet would take a handful of tendays to organise at best, even with planners using time distortion layers within Labyrinth, and ships using odd geodesics to make the initial rendezvous.

‘But deploying special forces—'

‘Is under way, Colonel.'

‘Yes, sir.' After a moment, Pavel added, ‘Zajac will love it, the old gung-ho romantic. Probably tell the Council how much he wishes he were going with them.'

‘And Whitwell may well disagree,' said Max. ‘Unlike Zajac, Whitwell actually
was
special forces, back in the day. Saw hard action, too.'

‘He was? Not on his public record . . . Besides, I didn't think we had much for them to do before now, apart from play hard in their training.'

‘Not since you became a department chief. But you'd be surprised how often in the past a swift covert action, military action, was the only way to avoid long-term misery.'

Pavel nodded. Seven standard years at his current level of security clearance, and there were still things to learn.

‘You know Roger Blackstone passed selection, Max.' Aeternum allowed the explicit construction of sentences that were simultaneously question and statement. ‘His posting on Vijaya was overt, or reasonably so, compromising his ability to operate covertly. And in any case he did not want a long-term undercover realspace assignment. So he asked for the transfer.'

The selection process spanned half a subjective year, some of it spent in quicktime layers of Labyrinthine reality, for those
who made it all the way to the final trials.

‘He's turning out to be different from his father,' said Max. ‘Carl would have shunned special forces, or anything resembling their work. Young Roger's not on the Molsin mission, is he?'

Either Max was not keeping special track of the lad, or he was but did not want Pavel to know it.

‘No,' said Pavel. ‘But last time I checked, they were considering him for the other deployment.'

‘The reconnaissance op?'

This time Pavel thought he detected a hint of false surprise. Max did know what Roger Blackstone was up to, Pavel was almost sure of it.

‘That op, yes. I don't like it, Max. I hope they all come back from it alive.'

Max closed his eyes, thoughts hidden, then opened them.

‘It would make a nice change,' he said.

Twelve silver-bodied attackers lay on the floor, terminated. Roger had put them down fast, and without emotion, largely thanks to the integration of his higher cognitive self – recognising the moistness of the corridor walls for what they were, areas of permeability behind which the enemy waited to burst through – with his reptilian core, the heart of every human brain that people disconnect from at their peril. The in-between portion of his mind, the mammalian, emotional part, had not been required; later he might process his feelings, but in the moment they would only have slowed him down.

Like any well-trained attack team, they had come from simultaneous angles. And so he had responded by spinning and manoeuvring, geometry the medium of his artistry, so that only one could reach him at a time, and he prevented those single attacks by pre-emptively shutting them down: defeating a tackle by combining a half sprawl with a driving elbow to the spine; collapsing a knee with a thrust kick, a fatal neck-crank from behind to follow; another knee destroyed
with a whipping circular kick, a thumb ripping an eyeball, spinning the attacker into one of its comrades; then a blizzard of crunching, whirling, thrusting and smashing them, taking them out. Then it was done, and he could disengage.

Isolation period: 2:17:00 hrs

It was regulations: the holo indicated the length of time he was confined to barracks, prevented from mixing with other people – particularly civilians – before he could release his killing rage and act like a civilised person. But telemetric scans were clearly updating the system, because a second later the display read:

Isolation period complete

The safety precautions were standard for all personnel, but special forces were required to recover faster than that. In Roger's case – he had a brief mental image of a snarling, long-haired warrior with axes in hand, then it was gone – he could snap the rage off when he needed to, or simply experience no rage at all, as in this ambush.

His attackers' silver bodies melted into the floor.

‘Not as sloppy as I expected.' A woman's voice. ‘You've got better, darling. I mean, even better than before.'

Corinne, his on-off lover since Tangleknot days, entered the corridor.

‘Hello, sweetheart,' said Roger. ‘That lot was a present from you, was it?'

‘Sort of a welcome-on-board present, dear Roger.'

He had been heading for his quarters, with studying on his mind, when he had noticed the glistening walls and the attack erupted into whirling violence.

‘Is there something you've not been telling me?' he asked.

Corinne was supposed to be Logistics Liaison, part of the support channel between the Admiralty Quartermaster Division and the civilian Far Reach Centre. Doing genuine work while spying on her fellow Pilots, a counterespionage role designed to detect attempted infiltration by any of Schenck's
renegades or – worse, because harder to detect – dupes recruited by renegade sympathisers and controlled via cut-outs. It had been a convincing story.

Lying bitch
, he thought, and laughed.

‘I'm strategy and planning,' she said. ‘Not combat.'

‘I ran twenty kilometres in training this morning,' he told her, gesturing at the now-bare floor. ‘And did more pushups than I can remember. I didn't really need another workout.'

‘That's too bad.' She made the raised-eyebrow, dipped-chin invitation he knew so well. ‘Because I had another endurance test in mind.'

‘Oh, did you?'

‘Mmm.'

‘Well,' he said. ‘You know the Service motto:
Always up for it
.'

‘That's not the motto, Roger.'

‘It isn't? Then it should be.'

She took hold of his hand.

‘Come and show me,' she said.

Nine ‘wings' of five ships each played combat hunt-and-tag against each other during the tenday-long pre-deployment countdown, while in the barracks, the forty-five men and women spent their non-training hours clowning around, conducting ambushes with foam weapons and playing practical jokes.

Onlookers from other arms of the fleet were clearly disconcerted by the lack of serious demeanour from these legendary élite warriors, wondering just how the myths could have so distorted the embarrassing reality.

That puzzled dismay continued until an Admiral's team of aides unwittingly brought live weapons into the visitors' area: within three seconds, every one of them was face down, stripped of weaponry and petrified of the men and women kneeling on them and yelling. Several lost bladder control, which would have been hidden by modern garments, but this
was a formal visit and they were wearing traditional jumpsuit uniforms, made of simple dumb fabric.

There was ironic humour but zero clowning on the final day, when the entire squadron slipped out of Labyrinth: the commencement of Operation Periscope, commanded by Ingrid Rhames, who chose to fly near the rear of the formation. The role of squadron leader was taken by Lee Nakamura, Rhames' second-in-command; the others with experience approved of both officers, while the three newbies, Roger included, took their word for it.

It was a long and difficult geodesic, impossible for pursuers to follow and, with luck, impossible to effectively surveil as well. More direct routes were available, but none offered the chance of sneaking all the way to their destination and, if they were really lucky, making their escape the same way, with no one the wiser.

Only a tiny minority of Pilots and ships had the stamina, expertise and will to fly a trajectory like this; but no one in the squadron allowed their ego to surface. This was, in a very real sense, just another day at work. And that attitude was the reason they would win.

Though winning without losses was not guaranteed.

A femtosecond-duration blip was the only transmission as they neared the transit zone.

This is it, my love.

You're beautiful, you know that?

Roger smiled as the transition occurred, golden void replaced by realspace slamming into existence all around; except it was not blackness dotted with stars in the way one normally experienced. Everything shone, and it would have been disconcerting but they had practised, so they kept their formation and slipped into a hidden zone behind a blazing sun, just one more star amid a magnificent profusion, a billion stars pouring out their energy, as if in simple joy at their existence.

From here, Schenck's renegade base could not be seen. For the moment, that was good, because it worked both ways:
they double- and triple-checked, and confirmed the absence of lookouts or surveillance drones. So far they were unobserved.

Nakamura sent a signal blip, and the squadron moved out.

Slipped back into mu-space for the final approach.