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.

FIFTY-THREE

NULAPEIRON, 3427 AD

Watched by Kenna’s secret surveillance motes, Tom Corcorigan, otherwise Lord Corcorigan, Lord One-Arm, ex-revolutionary, in a demesne far from the conflict, enjoyed his honeymoon accompanied by his new wife, naturally, and rather unnaturally by an old friend, the severed but still-living head of a Seer (one of occasional such mistakes in the ongoing programme producing Oracles) called Eemur.

Not just alive, but flensed, that head: glistening, blood-wet facial muscles exposed to the air, life processes maintained by transfusion via spacetime distortion – hyperdimensional blood-sucking – the closest an almost-human might come to possessing the abilities once characteristic of Zajinets.

Corcorigan made odd friendships.

There was no vicarious pleasure involved in Kenna’s watching the one-armed Lord at the start of his marriage, but there was every fascination in observing as Tom disappeared from the plush chamber in which he faced Eemur: teleported in a flash of sapphire light, unnaturally far, in a way that provided evidence of the Anomaly’s true nature.

It was in fact a single extended Anomaly, Kenna deduced, extended across the hellworlds just as she had once comprised distributed components in Palace Avernon. The proof was this: the impossibly long hyperdimensional route that Corcorigan rode, tapped into by Eemur in a massive mistake – the teleportation had been intended as a playful gift – sending her Lord and only friend to a distant world.

There was nothing Kenna could do to help.

But when Corcorigan reappeared, falling to the floor and gasping, bleeding, she knew for sure that she had done the right thing in encouraging the resistance to see him as a war leader. This was an unpredictable man, and no one could fight the Anomaly by performing the obvious.

He thanked Eemur wearily for the unexpected present, and hauled himself to the bathchamber and finally to bed. There, in his sleep, he muttered in pain, fragments about flensing and vivisection that Kenna first took to be references to Eemur, then realised were a description of something he had seen: a man being stripped of flesh and then rebuilt, over and over again, using hyperdimensional manipulation as horrific torture.

From afar, she directed some of her surveillance motes into Corcorigan’s ear, there to whisper the posthypnotic trigger-words that caused him to relate what he had seen.

Subvocalising, he talked of the prisoner who, in the brief seconds when he was physically whole, was nevertheless claw-handed, facially disfigured and obsidian-eyed, a Pilot. And from Corcorigan’s description of the metallic beings who chased him when he appeared on the world, and the mechanical architecture in which they lived, the location was Siganth: it had to be.

All of which made it more urgent to do something here in Nulapeiron. For the first time, Kenna had a notion of tracking down one of the undercover Pilots inside the Grey Shadows and getting them to take her offworld, simply fleeing; then she quelled the idea.

Dropping the surveillance link, she sank inside her thoughts.

The war against the Anomaly’s forces progressed incrementally towards defeat. Corcorigan became Warlord Primus and directed his forces from a floating terraformer, the same stone sphere that once was home to Oracle d’Ovraison, dead at Corcorigan’s hand. Closer to home, in the subterranean ocean above Kenna’s headquarters, her Kobold warriors crewed armoured mantargoi and fought metallic intruders out of nightmare: Siganthians, transported here along the hyperdimensions.

Only her surveillance of Corcorigan’s secret efforts gave Kenna hope, in particular his use of the current Lord Avernon, who – as Kenna watched from deep inside Nulapeiron – flew with Corcorigan’s personal guard, his fierce carls, to the orbital shell where the spinpoints were normally harvested for the Collegium Delphinorum, whose logosophers and technicians continued to create new Oracles for the nobility’s use, although predictions from the future were now absent.

Aboard his skyborne terraformer, Corcorigan opened comms with the shuttle. ‘Avernon. Are you there?’

‘Oh, Tom.’ The voice was high, shaking. ‘Yes.’

‘What happened? What went wrong?’

‘Those orders of magnitude . . . I misjudged a single factor in the equation, approximated it as a constant when I should have known . . . Should have.’

‘How do we fix it?’

‘We can’t. We just . . . can’t.’

(Kenna thought: If this effort fails, it is the end.)

Neither the shuttle crew nor the equipment could work with the precision Avernon needed to translate his ideas into practicality, to turn a shell of singularity seeds into a shield that would cut through the hyperdimensional links and with luck sever all of the Anomaly’s influence.

‘Send me the equations,’ ordered Corcorigan. ‘Send it now.’

This was desperate.

From deep within her magma-shielded chambers, Kenna searched through her distant surveillance nets among the Grey Shadows resistance forces, looking for a Pilot, realising she had been wrong: wherever the Anomaly was to be defeated, it was not here.

Escape, now, was all that was left.

Her search was a tour de force of surveillance analysis that she could never share: using her own no-longer-human brain in lieu of pattern-recognition engines, scouring through image after image after image, looking for what she—

There.

They were in stone chambers among heavy, dumb-fabric hangings, surrounded by cots filled with wounded and dying fighters. Two men: one shaven-headed, Brino by name, an asset of Labyrinth’s intelligence service but not a Pilot; and one Janis deVries, his obsidian eyes disguised by smartlenses, either highly skilled or desperate, because his ship was in a cavern nearby, ready to transit directly to mu-space.

Kenna had the escape route she needed, provided she could find a location for this deVries, whose presumed forebear had played such a role in her genesis, to materialise his ship close to her current location.

She would be sorry to abandon Nulapeiron, her home for eight centuries: as Kenna rather than Rhianna Chiang, the only home she had known.

Regret caused her to take one last look, via remote surveillance, at what was happening inside the headquarters of Warlord Primus Corcorigan, the last war leader of humanity before the Anomaly engulfed this world, like the others, and turned it into hell.