How could he ask anyone else to take a deadly risk arising from his own screw-up? It was his problem to deal with if he could, but not in a stupid way. In case he failed, he would make sure that others possessed the same knowledge, so that they could find better ways to utilise it.

Whether Rickson ever guessed Kian’s intentions, he did not discover. But when the results of the investigations among Rickson’s extended network of contacts came through – where physical meetings were rare, and never involved more than three Pilots in one place – it was like a military briefing, or what Kian imagined a military briefing to be, a holo session reporting positive results in programming the tiny implant-seeds according to Kian’s specifications.

The news regarding Siganthian lifeforms was better than expected, considerably better, and might with luck provide a means of infecting the hellworld without risk to any Pilots who might venture to Siganth system in person, whether or not that Pilot was Kian McNamara.

Seventeen modest-sized planetoids in that system were home to Siganthian colonies or hive-ecologies, while being outside the thousand-kilometre range of Zajinet-style manipulation of the hyperdimensions from the Anomaly dominating their homeworld. How the colonies had been founded was not known for certain – spaceships were not in evidence, now or previously – but the leading guess was this: thousands of individuals re-engineered each other, locked themselves in place to form a composite of deliberate design, forming themselves en masse into spacegoing vessels. Once at their destinations, they had disassembled and dispersed.

And more pertinently, because this had clearly happened a long time ago, those colonies were not part of the Anomaly. Willingly or not, Siganthian individuals bearing smart-virus-spreading implants might be carried to the hellworld via unmanned drones, there to begin a process of counter-infection that might with luck become endemic and lead to the freeing of the Siganthians from a condition that might once have seemed to be god-like transcendence, but would in retrospect feel like slavery.

‘We’ve added meme-vectors to seed that idea,’ said one of the speakers in the holo session. ‘Regardless of whether it’s naturally true, they’ll be glad to have broken free of their absorbed condition.’

It was perhaps the least ethical aspect of the whole venture. But from another perspective, this was an act of war that might lead to overwhelming victory with not a single death or even injury. For Kian, it was the least evil, if not best possible, means of ending a conflict and the enslavement of an entire world.

But he was aware that this was the justification for every imperialist venture in history, forcing ‘enlightened’ change on cultures unaware of their own ‘wrongness’; and he would not have proceeded with the plan were it not for the awful threat that Siganth, along with Fulgor and Molsin, presented to humanity.

So I’m no better than anyone else.

Which he had known all along, of course.

His poor ship paid the price for his hubris.

She was no longer the dumb vessel she had been in the early days. Though a second-generation vessel – among the first to bear a natural-born Pilot – her earlier crude AIs had grown and evolved through the care and nourishment of Labyrinth’s Ascension Annexe (flying there without Kian aboard, but with his blessing), a place whose name meant what it said. All ships were entangled with their Pilot, and she was no exception, but she had developed the awareness and increased the entanglement over time, and was aware that there was something about Kian that was different from every other Pilot.

A difference that triggered an unexpected reaction among the Siganthians he tried to communicate with.

Floating a hundred metres above a hive settlement on the farthest colony from Siganth proper, she waited with weapons fully armed while Kian conducted his initial meetings with the metallic, half-organic lifeforms that seemed odd and alien even to her, a spacegoing vessel originally constructed as a mere machine.

They worried her, those Siganthians.

She had deployed eye-seeds for surveillance, stayed ready to act immediately at the first precursor of a threat to Kian, and watched as he stood in the centre of a concave hall decorated with moving metallic flanges, patiently establishing communication with the Siganthians, who allowed him to spray implant-seeds into the air, which they carefully took into themselves through filters and capillaries, and allowed to begin functioning.

‘Thank you,’ Kian said, when the initial tests and vocabulary-matching sessions were over, and the seven metallic individuals before him – variously like beetles, dragons or tanks, but only in grossest outline – indicated their readiness to begin a first serious negotiation. ‘Indicate if you are willing to allow me to transport you to Siganth’s surface.’

The hard part of translation was at the deepest neuro-electronic level, and the Pilot researchers had not bothered to add semantic sugar, as it was known, to the system. There remained a level of necessary literalness in speaking to the Siganthians, one aspect of which was this: their language did not allow for questions, only imperative directions to provide information.

To Kian’s ship, this was simply one more sign that the venture was inherently flawed and overwhelmingly dangerous. But neither her fears nor her tactical readiness prepared her for what happened next.

The tallest Siganthian’s first response was a question, or what passed for it:

{Describe the properties of the brightness in your skull-case.}

From her position overhead, Kian’s ship felt a cognitive interrupt akin to a human gasp, because that was exactly how she perceived the other entanglement inside Kian’s brain, the strange, tiny seed of something that no other Pilot carried, and whose nature, for all the years they had spent in closer partnership than non-Pilots could imagine, she had only just begun to analyse properly.

Kian himself could not have answered the Siganthian’s question, even if he had understood it. For she, his ship, had never told him of the thing that glowed inside his head. Perhaps if he had gone to Labyrinth in person, the city-world might have been able to—

‘I do not understand,’ Kian told the Siganthian. ‘My non-compliance is not refusal.’

{Irrelevant.}

And then it happened.

Sapphire blue light blazed everywhere, and Kian’s ship understood the true depth of the Pilots’ misunderstanding and miscalculation: they were in fact within range of hyperdimensional manipulation from Siganth’s Anomaly, and while the colony here was not part of that gestalt, it appeared to have been in constant communication with it, although that might be a misreading of the situation.

Whether the colony willed it or not, Kian disappeared from eye-seed surveillance, while from overhead, his ship yelled inside her mind, knowing he was gone, and where he was, and what was happening to him.

It was the most awful of tortures.

Kian, my Kian—

And it hurt her more, and for immeasurably longer, than it did him.

FORTY-FIVE

NULAPEIRON, 3426 AD

According to legend as well as Kenna’s memory, the first of the hellworlds, the former paradise known as Fulgor, a shining beacon of culture as its name suggested, fell to the Anomaly within days, while some of its major battles (as in the fight for control of the global virtual environment called the Skein) were fought on a timescale of milliseconds.

Other dark names from history, like Siganth and Molsin, were less clear in the specifics, but the implication always was that in each case civilisation collapsed fast, soon after the first appearance of the Anomaly. Even less was known about the more recent hellworlds: fourteen in total.