Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (31 page)

FORTY-FOUR

EARTH & SIGANTH SYSTEM, 2607 AD

It was the first of July, and the four hundredth anniversary of his wife's death. Kian knew better than to visit the place where they had lived so happily: the body of water that he had called The Pond and Kat referred to as their lake was no longer there, and the site of their cottage, the last time he had been in Iowa, was a slow-morphing tower-town formed of slick blue-grey biocrete that looked like intestines. Instead, after his rendezvous with the courier in London, he made his way to Oxford, where back in the mid-twenty second century, his twin brother Dirk had been a student, here amid the mediaeval sandstone buildings that were so different from Caltech where he, Kian, had studied.

Voluminous greatcoats, designed to billow easily as if they were cloaks, seemed to be in fashion. That made it easier for Kian to walk among crowds without attracting notice, for with the burnt claw that formed his right hand and the silver scar tissue disfiguring his face, along with the trace of a limp, he clearly belonged to the minority who for one reason or another refused (or were unable to undergo) corrective and cosmetic surgery, available in any health booth in any major town.

And yet there was a warrior's grace to his movements, and even among dense clumps of passers-by, he walked without brushing against anyone, always anticipating position and motion, never caught by surprise.

He stayed in a tall hotel overlooking central Oxford, a newish building on the site of an historic tower where Augusta ‘Gus' Calzonni had been in residence in 2102, when at
the age of one hundred and thirteen, she had instructed her lawyer to book her a shuttle flight into orbit, where she could see with her own faded eyes the success or failure of the first attempted voyage into mu-space.

A floating biographer-globe had recorded her final moments, and the cerebral stroke that occurred just after she heard the famous words of the returning captain, leaving one last legacy: the sight of someone smiling as they died.

‘Kat,' said Kian now to the empty room. ‘My magic. My world.'

People had called them K'n'K or TwoK, for in the happy years they were inseparable, she with the brash mouth (and ready fists – they had met in Toronto, when an anti-xeno activist had attempted to attack Kian, and while Kian had used a pseudo-hypnotic verbal technique to interrupt the assault, it had been Kat's looping punch out of nowhere that had dropped the man), massive intelligence and ready laugh.

He checked his anti-surveillance motes once more, then opened up the message-seed slipped to him by the non-Pilot courier in a float-hall over the Thames. The sender's sigil would make no sense to anyone but him; he knew it for that of Rowena James, one of his Labyrinthine contacts with only low-level security clearance, yet in a position to deduce much from Pilots' schedules as devised and recorded by Far Reach, along with other unwitting sources of information.

Security measures were tighter these days, but that was all right: they depended, at least partly, on checking for sympathy towards and contact with Schenck's renegades, and neither Kian nor his occasional associates had any love for darkness-controlled Pilots.

He was what he was without need for labels, and most certainly did not require followers; but there was a need for continuity, if he was to carry out his work while continuing to lead the same kind of time-skipping life that Dirk and their mother had gravitated towards. What Kian had founded, the
Tri-Fold Way, was imbued with something of Buddhist philosophy, and a dash of utopian far-sightedness mixed in with practical rhetoric and rigorously applied psycho-emergenics, while he himself was ‘a superposition of Mahatma Gandhi and the Unknown Ninja' according to a Labyrinth-based activist back in the day.

The extremes of both secessionist Pilot politics and the let's-control-humanity crowd were anathema to him; but while the middle path meant eschewing violence as much as possible, and he in personal life was normally the gentlest of beings, Kian McNamara was not in the strictest sense of the word a pacifist: he could be as deadly as his flamboyant brother, maybe more so.

Still, when he performed his daily tai-chi-like routines at dawn on Calzonni Meadow, once University Parks, wild-life was unafraid to watch, and this morning a sparrow had alighted on his shoulder during standing meditation, and stayed there chirping until a noisy spaniel came bounding into view.

The situation in Labyrinth was not one to inspire personal calm and oneness with either universe. While there was one disturbing detail in Rowena's report, the bulk of it was straightforward, implying the gathering of militarised forces, and it was no act of scholarship to understand how rapidly Pilot society might change under the pressure of all-out war-fare, if things went that far. He mulled over the details as he left the hotel and went on a thoughtful walk around the old town, the sandstone buildings coated with diamond these days, which did not preserve the old look so much as create an entirely new mystique; and he wondered whether he should have come back to Earth at all.

Inside the Ashmolean Museum, a battered, wrinkled, darkened old sword caught his attention. It was displayed among the Roman artefacts, and Kian was no expert, but it seemed to him to have been wrongly dated. Yet the Runic scratches might have been his imagination – they were not mentioned
in the descriptive holo – and that might have coloured his whimsical notion that he could somehow know better than the professional archaeologists and curators who stocked and managed the place.

Afterwards, he watched a performance of
Henry V
in the Sheldonian Theatre, a building that had been through much, including a stint as a knife-fighting venue when that was prime-time entertainment and the university was short of funds. The Crispin's Day speech was as rousing as ever, though Kian could not help but think later, as he wandered back to his hotel, how the night-before-battle scene revealed the eternal disparity between rulers and the ordinary folk who die in conflicts they neither instigate nor fully understand, and how hollow were the warrior-king's justifications for his martial aims.

Two days later, in a quaint underground shopping mall in Putingrad, he met up with one Rickson Ojuku, a Pilot who claimed a sort of ancestry from Kian via the Delgasso line, Rorion Delgasso having fathered two children with Maria, Kian and Kat's adopted daughter. Rorion's father Carlos had been a young brat, with an annoying habit of hero-worshipping both Kian and Dirk. Now they had a descendant in common.

‘I'm surprised you made contact,' said Rickson, as they walked side by side past gleaming displays. ‘With everything that's happening back home, I would've thought political reconciliation was in abeyance.'

He sounded more business-like than necessary, as if over-compensating for the weirdness of meeting his ancestor. Kian sympathised: it was strange though hardly unique among Pilotkind, as ultra-relativistic time-dilating flights continued to occur for one reason or another, mounting up across the centuries.

‘Take a look at this.' Kian double-checked the anti-surveillance smartmiasma surrounding them, then zip-blipped a portion of the report he had received in London. ‘The
silver-and-red ship belongs to
Admiral
Schenck.' His tone turned the rank into an insult. ‘Remember, three years ago, when there was an attempted absorption on Vachss Station, the Vijaya orbital?'

‘One of Schenck's people tried to plant an absorbed person there.' Rickson blinked his smartlenses, processing the report fragment. ‘Is this surveillance footage or computed reconstruction?'

‘A mixture of both,' said Kian. ‘It seems Schenck picked up a bunch of such people, transferred two to Holland's ship – that's the other vessel in the rendezvous scene, and Holland is the Pilot who went on to Vachss Station – and held on to the others.'

‘So how did Molsin fall?' asked Rickson, watching the surroundings as they walked. ‘Because of these people, or something else?'

‘That would be worrying. The reconstruction is, the failed absorption on Vachss Station caused Schenck to commit all the remaining absorbed people – components – to the Molsin incursion.'

Kian knew only that his Labyrinthine source, Rowena James, had a close contact in the intelligence community there. For the first time, he wondered if that contact knew about the reports that Rowena passed on. Perhaps it would suit the intelligence service's purposes if Kian's people, too, understood the renegades' actions with regards to the Anomaly.

‘Good news for the rest of us,' said Rickson, ‘and bad news for Molsin. Except that you said
two
Anomalous components were transferred to Holland's ship beforehand.'

‘Allegedly. There might have been more. But Holland flew from the Schenck rendezvous directly to Siganth. When he went on to Vachss Station afterwards, he had only a single component aboard.'

The impersonal description could not hide the fact that the Anomaly was built of humans. Among other things.

Rickson's eyelids fluttered as he backtracked through the
report's subsidiary threads. Then he stopped, and Kian knew exactly which portion he had come to.

‘That's it,' Kian told him. ‘That's what concerns me.'

And made him think that Rowena James really was being fed this information, which was irrelevant provided it was accurate.

‘Holy crap.'

‘An understatement.'

A mu-space transmission from Siganth had summoned the renegades: a signal picked up and later decoded by the surveillance stealth-sats that the intelligence service had placed around every xeno world. It was awful, and meant that Kian had played a part in enabling the creation of a hellworld.

‘The Siganthians are insane,' said Rickson. ‘They
invited
the Anomaly to come to them? How could they do that?'

Kian did not consider himself a Siganth expert, except in the sense that virtually every Pilot and human alive knew even less about the place than he did.

‘For them, it must have been a kind of transcendence,' he said to Rickson. ‘Fitted in with their notions of a hive mind, although different from Earth insects. They feel suffering when they're torn into pieces, but those pieces are remade into other beings. It's . . . different there.'

Rickson blinked again, this time purely from bemusement.

‘How could you know? Oh—'

‘Right. I've visited the place.'

‘And the mu-space comms?'

It used to be common for human worlds to rent comms relays capable of transmitting into mu-space, until historic events on Fulgor forced Labyrinth's authorities to rethink the policy. Now it was almost unknown, except under specific, legally constrained circumstances, with constant surveillance in place.

Except—

‘It's my fault,' said Kian. ‘I gave it to them.'

*

His interest in the Siganthians had been philosophical and scientific, but in cultural and political terms, Kian had believed that engaging more of Pilotkind in realspace xeno research helped to combat secessionism. On a less abstract level, he had observed the growing focus on Zajinets and understood that they were a dangerous enemy only because they belonged, like Pilots, to two universes. For other species, including the wealth of fearsome-looking metallic Siganthian species (to whatever extent the concept applied there, since the organisms tore apart and rebuilt each other all the time), it was easy to avoid possible conflict simply by disengaging from realspace. That disengagement was what Kian wanted to avoid.

Hence, as he explained to Rickson Ojuku, his low-key mission to Siganth two subjective years ago, along with a small team of volunteers from among fellow activists of the Tri-Fold Way, and the comms equipment they had left in situ, for no one had been able (or willing) to remain living on Siganth for extended periods of time. But that had been several time-dilating flights ago, and Kian had little idea what might have happened to those activists or their eventual replacements. As far as he knew, no Pilots had been caught up in the Anomaly, or harmed in any way before the Anomaly's genesis.

‘What do we need to do now?' asked Rickson.

Kian smiled. ‘I appreciate the
we
. You need to make sure that people in Labyrinth know about Siganthian comms equipment.' It was understood that he, Kian, could never go there incognito – some Pilot would recognise him. ‘Just in case. It's too late for Siganthians to lure Pilots to their world with false messages, now that the place is known to be a hell-world. But even so—'

‘They can communicate with the renegades, except it's a what, gestalt-thing now, so it's a global
it
, not a
they
, which means it probably won't. Communicate, I mean.' Rickson's scattergun grammar seemed to cover his thinking about two things at once, because he added, ‘Admiral? Sir? There's nothing you can do about a hellworld.'

So Kian's guilt had been that obvious, had it?

‘I haven't gone by that title for a long time, my friend.'

‘You were the Second Admiral,' said Rickson. ‘Everyone knows it, whether they mention it to your face or not.'

Which was why Kian had seen, as his mother and brother had not – because of their first century-long hellflight – the fragility of Pilotkind. Mother and Dirk understood the necessity of providing a full, thriving culture that embraced the Shipless as well as those who flew; but it was Kian who lived through the years in which Pilots bound to Earth gradually loosened their ties to UNSA, and looked after their own kind when individuals were unsuitable for flight, and finally grew their own ships in Labyrinth and broke free from the organisation that once ruled their lives.

Part of that time, following Kat's death, had been spent in the elusive, wandering role he still played; but his touch had been sure and all Pilots had known that one of the McNamaras was still looking out for their interests, even before Dirk and their mother reappeared.