Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (37 page)

FIFTY

LUNA, 697006 AD

. . . until she woke again, this time in an airless hall with shining walls, with Kenna's crystal form bending over her.

—Greetings, brave Gavriela.

—Kenna! Am I here for good?

The answering smile was like diamond, beautiful and shining.

—You are.

—Finally!

Gavriela stretched her own living-crystal arms.

Time for real life to begin.

FIFTY-ONE

MU-SPACE, 2607-3427 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

It lasted minutes. It lasted centuries.

And it was awful.

In a metallic fastness, a Siganthian hive, this was what happened to Kian as he writhed in the suspension field where spacetime at the smallest scales could twist, distort and rip reality. First, the flaying, as his skin peeled back into nothingness. Revealed, the red glistening strips of muscle and sleek grey fat were removed and vanished in turn, leaving the disembodied web of capillaries; and then, when the blood vessels too were gone, the fine black tracery of nerves, along with the unprotected eyeballs and the suffering brain containing the mystery seed of entanglement whose nature confounded Kian's Siganthian captors.

It was cyclic, the torture, as his body reformed and the iterative vivisection started up once more. But for Kian, it was a total quantum reset, a return to the initial state for every traversal of the analytic loop, leaving no memory of the previous cycles of agony, because pain was not the point of the procedure.

But for his poor ship, it was endless hell, endured remotely but intensely as if she herself were being dissected, over and over. What she wanted to do was dive to the planet's surface and blast her way in, but that was impossible without triggering Kian's death. Fleeing to Labyrinth for help would have been her other option, were it not for the thing inside Kian's head, which was perhaps the sole reason for this predicament.

And the reason she could not flee.

Because that seed of entanglement appeared to reconfigure
slowly over time, but in a shocking, negentropic way. She was reading the effects of causes that were located in the future, not the past; and that should have been impossible, but there was no other interpretation to fit the analytic data.

While the Siganthians kept the torture cycle running for centuries, presumably long after Kian had been forgotten – after the first mean-geodesic weeks, they stopped visiting his cell – his sorrowful, raging, tortured ship followed that chain of reverse causality, deducing that its origin was a profound state-change, derived from the future freeing of Kian from the vivisection field. She needed to be there when the field collapsed.

Hence the awful, ultra-relativistic geodesic that she flew, undergoing agony that was bearable only because it matched Kian's pain. And because of hope, because whatever state Kian might be in when that future release came, he would be alive, at least initially.

And she would fight to keep him that way.

FIFTY-TWO

MU-SPACE, 2607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

Everywhere, ships were exploding and Pilots were dying. Fractal firebursts blazed across the golden void. They sold their lives dearly, those Pilots, but still they perished: in the larger picture, they were losing.

Dirk McNamara, like the legendary leader that he was, led strike after strike against the advancing wall of the enemy, all five hundred thousand renegade vessels headed for Labyrinth. As more and more vessels exited from Labyrinth, they flew to join the formations that Dirk had decreed; but their losses at the front exceeded the number joining at the rear.

Soon the invading mass of renegades would simply overwhelm the arcing lines of defenders, to fall upon the city-world itself.

=I could stop them.=

Labyrinth broadcast a message to those who could hear.

=But I would need a thousand years.=

It was a bizarre, morale-sapping litany for desperate Pilots to listen to.

Of those who could hear, while they raced for their ships in the docking-bays or cowered with their families inside Labyrinthine apartments whose wonder and luxury they had never appreciated fully until now, most kept Labyrinth's words to themselves, rather than spread the fatalist comment.

No one expected a city-world to be anything but an armoured refuge at best, a target at worst; but why say anything at all? And even worse, why the hell did Labyrinth keep sending out the same message over and over and over again? Had
some kind of computational virus affected the city-world's mind? Was this another aspect of Schenck's attack, even as his renegades smashed the Pilots who flew against them?

Dirk's personal squadron tore through renegade ships with practised accuracy, but they were tiny against an enemy fleet that was even stronger than they—

Incoming message:

**A second wave approaches.**

—had expected, while in the absence of effective resistance, Schenck threw his remaining vessels into the attack, their numbers hard to estimate, but at
least
two hundred thousand more, with the total armada now numbering anything up to a million renegades heading implacably for Labyrinth.

We defeated the Zajinets.

But Dirk-and-ship knew they had outplayed the Zajinets through superior preparation: long planning and prior calculation in addition to aggression and daring in the moment of battle. This time it was bastard Schenck who had performed the strategic planning and, unlike the Zajinets, neither Labyrinth's Pilots nor Labyrinth herself possessed a secret escape route.

An entire line of Pilots-and-ships blew up.

Renegades cut at the defenders from all directions, using finite-range weapons that meant they could fire even when one of their own was in the line of sight, provided it was far enough away.

Smart. Very smart.

But you didn't ask for our surrender, you fuckers.

As ship-and-Dirk raked fire across another renegade, they knew that Labyrinth's Pilots had only one advantage: Schenck had left them no way out, leaving a binary choice.

Fight or die.

Or both, of course, because there was always a third choice: it was axiomatic. Dirk yelled with rage and pain as something cut across their dorsal hull, but his squadron took the bastard out –
die, you fucker
– making him or her pay for shooting at
their commanding admiral, fighting hard in order to avoid examining the truth.

Labyrinth and her Pilots were lost.

They were about to die in a single act of genocide no real-space human would ever get to hear about. Behind Dirk, three of his squadron went up in flames, and beyond them arcs of fire swept across the other makeshift squadrons of defenders, and he wept to see them die because this was it, the end.

If only he knew which one was Schenck, he could at least—

**Admiral. Admiral!**

He pulled back from his suicide run into the heart of the renegade armada, straining hard to swing into clear golden space so that he could process the priority signal, because he could always die later, but if there was any chance to be taken, he would seize it.

**It's Roger Blackstone, sir!**

Dirk blasted back an immediate reply.

**Who? What are you talking about?**

But then he saw it: a black ship powering out of nowhere, webbed with red the colour of blood and gold the colour of mu-space; and in recognising the ship, he took a moment extra to realise what else was coming into view.

**Reform!**

Dirk's order was desperate, sent to every squadron.

**Attack the armada! Now! Everyone, with everything you've got!**

Anything to divert the renegades' attention from the new force on the scene.

Brevet-Admiral Roger Blackstone was back.

And those ships—?

Dead ships.

Leading thousands of reinforcements. Hundreds of thousands. Perhaps more.

No. He can't have . . .

Clearly, he did.

Inside his ship, Dirk laughed his buccaneer laugh.

Well done, lad.

Ship-and-Dirk turned back to the fight.

Had anyone chosen to and been able to measure Roger Blackstone's biological age inside his powerful ship, they would have found he was forty-three standard years old, aged decades since beginning his more-than-hellflight less than two hours ago by mean-geodesic Labyrinth time.

Time of course had lain at the heart of his desperate calculation, because if Schenck's force had grown in strength by three orders of magnitude beyond expectations, there was only one way he could have achieved it: by taking some or all of his renegades into some slowtime layer of mu-space, there to live and propagate, increasing their numbers and leading their darkness corrupted lives, building an attack force as Genghis Khan had once created a marauding army that swept across a continent without effective opposition, for they were fierce and trained to a single purpose, led by a very particular kind of genius.

Roger did not believe Schenck possessed that kind of flair, instead relying on a single pre-emptive one-strike, one-kill attack –
ikken hisatsu
– coming out of nowhere.

For himself, Roger had spent his subjective decades in a single-minded honing of his own skills by simulation, incorporating his real combat experience, while his ship upgraded herself, using the infinitesimal-point energy of mu-space to power and feed them both; and finally they had reached their destination, a place whose pull could be felt by his beautiful ship, but only by exquisite sensitivity to her subconscious perceptions, because in her current state, that urge, that drive, had yet to be awoken.

It is in the nature of a blindspot that people remain unaware of its existence, even when logic dictates it must be there.

So Roger had wept with new knowledge, and his ship also, in her own way, when they broke through at their ultra-hell-flight's destination after a subjective decade of straining effort
in which their very real madness – for in their obsession, Roger-and-ship could no longer be counted as entirely sane – might all have been based on illusion.

Until, that is, the moment they exited their hellish geodesic and burst into violet-tinged space through which the golden void could barely be glimpsed, while all around them ships were floating, serene and linked together in permanent comms, inhabiting a collective mental state unimaginable to any Pilot, even Roger Blackstone.

Thousands upon thousands of Pilotless ships.

For this was the Graveyard Nebula.

**I greet you all, and come to ask for help.**

Every ship whose Pilot had ever died, in four centuries of Pilotkind's existence, floated here. Senescence could not affect vessels powered by the energy of spacetime itself; only violence, accidental or intended, could kill them.

**Labyrinth is about to fall.**

They were old in their minds, most of these ships, and they had not been trained to fight. A significant number would bear no weaponry at all; few would have combat capability against latest-generation renegades raised for battle. There would be time to prepare during the return flight, but that was irrelevant.

His plan did not rely on weapons.

Only suicidal courage.

And when, a subjective decade later, they burst out in the vicinity of Labyrinth, it was clear the city-world had read Roger's intention from the start, because this message was blaring out repeatedly to those capable of sensing it:

=I could stop them. But I would need a thousand years.=

Inside his ship, Roger smiled.

You'll have your millennium.

There was no need to signal his fleet of dead Pilots' ships.

They knew exactly what to do.

*

Unconstrained by the fragility of Pilots' bodies carried within, the graveyard fleet flew hard in synchrony, tearing through mu-space, leaving what at first appeared to be a wake, a churning of vacuum; but Dirk McNamara had once wrought vengeance on a different, earlier Admiral Schenck, leaving him to die for all eternity in twisted spacetime on Borges Boulevard, and Dirk recognised straight away what Blackstone and the ships from nowhere were attempting to do.

It's impossible.

But he broadcast the retreat to his squadrons nonetheless.

**Fall back! Get clear!**

Of course the renegade armada moved on without deviation, stately and evil, assuming sheer momentum would carry it to Labyrinth where the city-world's destruction would follow.

But the fleet of Pilotless ships, perhaps as big as the renegade armada – it was not obvious from the way they flew in each other's wake, not at first – was on a course that was equally inevitable. No Pilots-and-ships, Labyrinthine or renegade, could hope to fly that fast or hard, not without crushing the Pilots.

Dirk sent one last direct message in the hope that Roger Blackstone might receive it.

**Respect, my friend.**

And Roger's mouth pulled back in a smile just as he-and-ship bent into the final geodesic along with all those dead Pilots' ships: such a multitude of courageous vessels.

Then everything was gone.

Golden void twisted into an envelope, surrounding the renegade armada, slowing it down and capturing it within an impenetrable event horizon, topologically symmetric: no renegades could escape; neither could Labyrinth's fleet poke inside to observe or attack.

It was a vast distortion in the continuum that drew exactly upon the techniques Dirk had used in his duel with that other Schenck, but the sheer collective mass of the renegade armada,
the best part of a million vessels, along with that of the dead Pilots' ships who had trapped themselves inside along with the enemy, meant the duration of the stasis was finite.

But it should last a thousand years, which was all that Labyrinth had asked for: the opportunity to prepare and unleash destruction in the instant time unfroze.

When the renegades and Roger and his fleet of graveyard ships would perish.

Together.