‘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.

‘Communicating with Siganthians,’ said Kian now, ‘was never easy, and getting started was a huge obstacle. What we settled on was a spin-off from LuxPrime tech, adaptive implants that learned to assign similar meanings to different individuals’ patterns.’

‘Implants? I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘Reverse that thought. What if we could inject a smart-virus into any Siganthian still carrying implants? Or insert new, ready-coded implants?’

Even if it was a partial success, perhaps freeing a few individuals temporarily, even a tiny victory against the Anomaly would encourage Pilot engagement with realspace, and perhaps spawn tactics other than retreat-and-quarantine to deal with the threat. Anything to maintain involvement, because the worst scenario of all was one in which Pilotkind abandoned humanity to dangers that were irrelevant to mu-space and Labyrinth.

‘You want me to do, what?’ asked Rickson. ‘Gather a research team together?’

As always, after a time-skipping flight, Kian had few personal contacts to call on. The ongoing loose-knit organisation of activists, and the long-lived comms protocols that enabled him to get in touch with each new wave of representatives, was all he had.

‘Whoever is the best,’ he told Rickson now. ‘Whoever can do the work.’

‘And then what?’

Kian had a form of low-key charisma involving deliberate psycholinguistic rhetoric, which he employed seldom, but with one hundred per cent of his being when he did so, always and without inner conflict or doubt, when he was certain that his actions were in Pilotkind’s best interests. What he said next was a lie, but its intent was to protect, and from what he could sense of Rickson’s reaction, the falsehood rang true:

‘We hand it over, via an appropriate contact’ – Kian thought of Rowena James at this point – ‘so that the Admiralty’s paramilitaries can do what they do best.’

It would be sensible for Labyrinth’s forces to receive a copy of whatever they learned and developed; but Kian would prefer to use a smartvirus in as non-violent a manner as possible – freeing the Siganthians, even if they had initially believed absorption into the Anomaly was a good idea. It was better than, say, holding them in place via virus-induced catatonia, and bombarding their world with destructive weapons, which would be the kind of plan that military minds might hatch, or so Kian believed.

Plus, however the smartvirus were eventually used, the initial incursion would need to be stealthy and low-key, in order to inject the virus into one or two individuals. However well-trained Labyrinth’s special forces might be, Kian was a master of elusive movement, and was confident – justifiably, he hoped – that he could do as good a job.