Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (53 page)

Or it might be that there were spooks on Molsin, but they worked for Schenck and his mob: the ones that had been defeated in Labyrinth, but what about the realspace worlds? For all Jed knew, every Pilot spook in realspace might be acting for the enemy, knowingly or not.

Best to keep things low-key and solo, then.

‘—daistral?’ she was saying.

‘Er, no thanks, Ms Rigelle. I don’t suppose you know where Roger is now, or even better, how to contact him?’

His comms code did not function, possibly because Conjunction changed everything, nearly a thousand cities merging their comms systems while shutting out the rest. Either that, or Roger was deliberately out of contact.

‘He was on Deltaville, even before Conjunction, because he—’

Soft redness flickered through walls, floor and ceiling, then again.

‘What’s that?’ said Jed.

A deep moan began to sound: everything vibrating all around.

‘General alarm. We’re taught about it school, but I’ve never—’ She gestured a holo into being. It showed an image of people in a crowd, their eyes joined by a criss-crossed web of glowing blue light. ‘Oh, no.’

‘Fucking hell.’ Jed grabbed her. ‘With me, now. Leave everything.’

Her eyes sparkled with tears and fright.

‘All right.’

‘Fucking, fucking shit,’ said Jed.

It glowed above Max’s flowmetal desk – newly extruded in his new office – watched by Pavel, Clayton, Clara with a rebuild-cast large and clunky around her shoulder, and an addition to their inner circle: white-haired Kelvin Stanier, Head of Records and older than the cosmos, who not only remembered more than the combined memories of everyone else present, but assumed the right to criticize Max Gould as though he were a schoolboy. Right now, riding high on a wave of triumph – although the countercoup’s nature and extent were unknown to most of Labyrinth: political circles being rife with waves of disinformation planted by Max’s senior officers, while Pilots at large knew nothing – Max needed someone like Kelvin to keep him on track. Some of the service’s officers, especially the younger ones, looked at Max with new-minted awe. Kelvin would have none of that, which meant if Max made a mistake, there would be at least one adviser to tell him so.

Pavel did raise a concern which they would have to return to: what to do with the realspace intelligence networks. Between Max’s long-term counter-surveillance and Pavel’s own operations, there were some agents in place known to be compromised. But they were aware also, from the mass debriefing that was already underway, that the majority of Schenck’s people knew nothing of the darkness; if they thought anything about the internal struggle for power, it had simply been that: the extension of politics by covert means, therefore business as usual.

‘This is clearly long term.’ Pavel gestured at the holo. ‘I mean, think of the timescales we know about. It’s not like we need to solve the problem before lunch.’

Kelvin, his lined face unreadable, gave a slow headshake that could have meant anything; but they already knew his views: that semantics betrayed their collective parochialism.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘galaxy’ and ‘universe’ had been synonyms, though within decades that had changed. What remained constant for nearly six centuries afterwards was that the galaxy containing Earth remained simply ‘the galaxy’ while others gained names and M-numbers. It said something not just about realspace humanity’s perspective, but also that of the Pilots who thought they held themselves apart by living here in Labyrinth.

‘Should we have explored more?’ said Max, gesturing at the holo. ‘As a species, I mean.’

‘A matter of scale,’ answered Pavel. ‘Like I said. We’re doing all right.’

But to Max’s eyes, the image denied that proposition. The faint needle of light from the galactic centre, pointing not just to the spiral arm containing Earth, but to Earth precisely; and continuing that line, the observation – deciphered from the centuries-old memory flake dropped into their collective lap – of a mystery beyond a cosmic void, something lined up.

‘No, I want to follow this up.’ Max looked at Kelvin. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Suicide missions.’

‘What?’ Clayton looked at them both. ‘What the hell?’

‘A series of observation flights,’ said Max. ‘I want to set distance intervals of a hundred-and-fifty million lightyears. The first to appear here’ – he pointed on the notional line – ‘the next here, and so on.’

The steps were huge, equal to the galactic radius, each destination farther out from the galactic core.

‘So they’re very long observation flights,’ said Pavel. ‘What’s suicidal about that?’

‘Because’ – Max slid his finger along the line – ‘at some point, one of the observers is going to meet something nasty coming the other way.’

‘And that Pilot,’ said Kelvin, in case anyone failed to grasp the point, ‘won’t come back. So I’ll have someone else’s identity to expunge from Records.’

‘Or not.’ Max looked at him. ‘Things have changed. Any officer who falls, deserves to be honoured.’

Clara shrugged her good shoulder.

‘If the timescales are as Pavel says, then by the time … it … arrives, won’t Earth have rotated far away from your pretty line here?’

Max looked at them, one by one, as though deciding what they were up to hearing.

‘I don’t think Earth is the target,’ he said. ‘I think it formed a convenient recruiting station.’

‘Recruits?’ said Pavel.

‘For whichever force’ – Max pointed into the galactic core – ‘has established this bridgehead, ready and waiting for the main enemy to come.’

All of them stared at the holo.

‘Well,’ said Clayton finally, ‘at least there’s one good thing.’

Their stares transferred to him.

‘Irreverent humour,’ said Kelvin, ‘is hardly what we need.’

‘No, but’ – Clayton gestured – ‘it’s what we’re good at, isn’t it? Us as a species, Max.’

‘Good at what?’

‘Good at warfare. Because that’s what this is, isn’t it?’

In the holo, the spiral galaxy looked serene and eternal, destined never to change; and during any human lifetime, that illusion held true. Only on longer timescales, as Pavel had said, did the picture change, as the galaxy became a fragile-looking thing, small in the immensity of surrounding darkness, already altered at its heart, ripe perhaps for sundering apart.

They burst from the quickglass floor, erupting upwards: Rhianna and Roger both. All around were screaming people, running but bypassing them, as Rhianna gestured a thick, curved, rising barrier into place. Beyond the panicked mob, the others were simply standing, the blue web of light joining their eyes.

‘We need to get through!’ yelled Rhianna. ‘Show everyone what this is.’

Roger nodded. He jumped onto the top of the barrier, and she followed.

‘Ready?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

It threw them over the mob, pulsing and lengthening beneath their feet, propelling them high, then arcing down. They jumped clear less than two metres above the floor. Roger broke the momentum with a shoulder roll, feeling momentarily good about that; but Rhianna had been less spectacular in her landing, taking the impact by ordinary knee-bend, and she was first at the group of people: some fifty Fulgidi refugees, no more, frozen in place with the blue glow that terrified everyone.

‘It’s holo,’ she said, waving her tu-ring. ‘A simple holo illusion.’

‘Shit.’

Rhianna did something, and the blueness simply faded out of existence. The people remained standing, still in whatever trance Helsen had induced.

Roger took in a deep breath.

‘She was here,’ he said. ‘Helsen.’

‘You can
smell
her?’

‘Don’t ask me to explain. I think she went that way.’ He pointed to an exit behind Rhianna. ‘But I don’t think she’s close.’

It was faint, the spoor: the evil he could taste more than smell. The combined roar of running people would not have buried the familiar discordant nine notes, not if the sound had been present; but there was no trace of it.

Then waves of orange and black strobed across the hall’s high, neo-Baroque ceiling, its intricate walls and polished floor.

‘Bug out,’ said Rhianna. ‘Bug out now.’

Quickglass began to boom, again and again, sounding a tocsin.

‘Why?’

After all their breakneck rush to get here.

‘Seppuku bomb,’ she said. ‘They’re sacrificing the city.’

No wonder there were no police officers present. The official response to a burgeoning new Anomaly would have to be all-out, to have a chance of being effective. Had the threat here been real, it was probably the one course of action likely to succeed: stand off and take out the danger, hard.

‘But I can’t leave Alisha,’ said Roger.

‘I can.’

She stepped close, pressed her body against him, and kissed him.

What?

He heard from far away: ‘Sorry.’

Bands of something bound him to her, close as if lovers; but her lips had delivered anaesthesia, not passion. Soft and melting, then: not her, but the floor beneath them.

Dropping now.

From a distance, but only from a distance, Emergency Disjunction was a beautiful process: cities propelled outward from cities, like some globular blossom dissipating seeds in all directions. Spars dissolved as sky-cities flew, attaining velocities they had never attempted before, pulling apart before it could happen.

White, incandescent, the sphere of explosion at the centre.

But the expansion was not fast enough: four more of the inner nine were caught in the seppuku bomb’s devastation: Popper, Dalton, Gaussburg and Whitton, all damaged and already dying.

In control rooms, senior officers let out sighs or curses as the case might be: five cities lost, therefore nine hundred and twenty-two – plus babies – saved. For several minutes, the emergency proper appeared to be over, traumatic though the coming aftermath would be: the cleanup, the relocation of people in cities not their own, the re-establishment of order.

Then flame licked across the hulls of Penrose and The Big Aleph, and the news came in: more Anomalous centres were appearing, in cities where the authorities no longer had time to evacuate and order urban suicide. Only one response remained: sky-city after sky-city activated energy-weapon systems they had never used in anger, not before.

Now, they let loose.

Soon the warfare was all-out, or even worse than war: for each city fired upon every other city nearby, no longer knowing who the enemy was, therefore assuming all.

Only the baby cities, unable to fight, floated clear of the conflagration.

For a second, dropping through the toxic air, Roger had come round – Dubrovnik’s lower hull was receding overhead – and then a gold-and-cobalt-blue ship was underneath them, a dorsal opening appeared a second before they fell inside, then whatever had bound him to Rhianna was gone. But the impact against the control cabin floor was hard, knocking him into a state where he could not see though hearing remained. Perhaps for a few seconds he was out of it entirely.

And then transition.

Waking up to amber-tinted air, and the deep knowledge in every cell of his body that this was mu-space, and he and Rhianna were safe.

Friss Reejan, in her quickglass bubble, fell clear of the awfulness above. As Lady Mayor of Deltaville, she had been the officers’ first priority in the evacuation process, getting her to the city’s edge where she toppled clear, encased in quickglass. Dry-eyed because she had to be, she commanded the extrusion of glider-wings, bringing the bubble’s flight under some kind of control. Soon her trajectory flattened out, at an altitude far lower than the lowest point of Conjunction.

When she looked back, flames and dropping debris were all she could see.

‘My God. Oh, sweet God.’

She looked at her hand. How incongruous: holding a bowl of orgasmousse from the fresh consignment, so much better than any other food. The officers had snatched her clear of a banquet, and she had not even let go.

Behind her, the cities were gone.

‘Oh, God.’

Using her fingers, she spooned all of the orgasmousse into her mouth. Immediate pleasure flooded through her, more intense than she had never known, wave after wave of sheerest joy. Eyes closed, whimpering, she formed control gestures.

The wings melted back into the quickglass as it formed a vertical bullet-shape, driving straight down to the hydrofluoric acid ocean.

Tannier hit Helsen with a hooking palm-heel, smashing her sideways.

‘You think we’re all fucking amateurs, bitch?’

She was down on one knee. Most men would have been in coma.