What she saw changed everything.

The terraformer was a floating stone sphere under attack by flying Siganthians; but dart-shaped flyers belonging to the Strontium Dragons were fighting them off, along with Corcorigan’s commandos, battling hand-to-hand on the terraformer itself against the implacable metallic warriors.

Meanwhile, Corcorigan himself was crucified on the sphere’s exterior – so like a one-eyed wanderer out of legend, Kenna thought, forcing himself into the most extreme of mental states – and assisted by two beings: a cyborg embedded in the sphere – a feeling of kinship welled inside Kenna – and the flensed head of Eemur, the Seer, who was searching through the hyperdimensions, trying to find the help that Corcorigan needed.

Trying to find a Pilot.

He needs deVries.

So much for Kenna’s escape; but Corcorigan’s headquarters was about to fall unless he gained the help he needed.

Very well.

She directed her motes closer and closer to glistening, blood-red flesh.

And whispered coordinates inside the Seer’s ear.

Kenna was not privy to what happened next. Whatever response the Seer made, spillover energy destroyed the surveillance motes in the terraformer, and when Kenna tried to re-establish contact with her motes in the field hospital where deVries was working, a similar massive distortion had broken every link.

She linked to her surveillance motes in orbit.

And waited.

FIFTY-FOUR

MU-SPACE, 3427 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

For the first time in centuries, the First Admiral was back, openly standing in the Admiralty’s Great Hall, waiting for the rescue team to return. The greater fleet – moving out of Labyrinth’s docking halls and taking up formation immediately, under Admiralty Council authorisation, as soon as Ro McNamara appeared and made her wishes clear – was standing by, ready to carry out a mission involving immense precision, intended to disrupt the Anomaly’s current attempt to add another hellworld to its collection.

Whether it was feasible, Ro did not know for sure. Already, strategy analysts had indicated that even if worked to free Nulapeiron, it was not a technique they could extend to other hellworlds. There was no point in even trying to free them: whatever had happened to the once-human Anomalous components over the generations, nothing of humanity could remain. The best that could be done was the same as always: to quarantine every known hellworld and stay as far away as possible.

The most recently created hellworlds, apart from the yet-to-be-freed Nulapeiron – and if it worked, it would only be by interrupting an incomplete process – were not even human originally. Saving xeno ecologies was far beyond anyone’s remit.

These thoughts were Ro’s attempt to distract herself, since the current crop of admirals seemed too awed to speak to her, while all she could think about deep down was her poor, tortured son, and what the Siganthians had done to him – all this time, so very, very long – and the suspended comms session featuring a strange, one-armed bare-chested man who had appeared to hang in space before her, riding a mu-space comms-beam all the way from realspace Nulapeiron, to beg for her help in saving his world from the Anomaly, and offering a very special gift in return.

The location of her son Kian.

And the description of ongoing vivisection-torture inflicted on him by his captors. How Corcorigan had been teleported to Siganth, to witness what he related, was a mystery for Admiralty analysts to unravel later. What mattered now was—

=They are here.=

Ro looked up.

‘Is . . .?’

=Kian is aboard the squadron leader’s ship.=

She had always been a fighter. For the first time, a sudden loss of stress was threatening to make her faint.

=And his own ship is flying alongside.=

Ro turned away.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

It would not do for her fellow admirals to see her cry.

After a minute, she spread her hands apart, manipulating reality, restarting the comms-session she had frozen, though to the disembodied Corcorigan the delay might have been only seconds.

He hung there, a bizarre image, desperate for her help.

‘They’re back,’ she told him, meaning the special-forces squadron despatched to Siganth, taking Corcorigan at his word. ‘My . . . Kian is safe.’

The expression in Corcorigan’s eyes did not change. He had been confident in the gift he had offered. Clearly what he needed was her response to his plea.

‘We will help,’ she said.

At her command, ten thousand ships commenced a hell-flight for Nulapeiron.

*

At the same time, aboard a fast special-forces vessel, a claw-handed, scar-faced Pilot, lying exhausted on a passenger couch at the rear of the control cabin, smiled despite his trauma.

I love you.

She was flying in parallel with this vessel, his own ship, having arrived with beautiful precision alongside the rescue squadron, fighting alongside them, though she was no combat vessel. They laid down covering fire while the Pilots descended in drop-bubbles direct to Kian’s location, wreaking destruction everywhere, killing every Siganthian in sight as they fought through to the hive-cell where he had been left, a forgotten, tortured captive, and destroyed the hyperdimensional field that held him.

And I love you.

It was all that mattered.

We’re flying to Labyrinth.

Perhaps it’s time.

To go home?

Yes. Home.

To be among their own kind, at least for a while. Outsiders no more.

An end to isolation.

FIFTY-FIVE

NULAPEIRON, 3427 AD

From the shuttle that had carried Avernon into orbit, Kenna’s surveillance motes drifted into a wide array allowing her remotely to see perhaps the most beautiful sight of her life.

Ten thousand mu-space ships, every one of them shining silver and bronze, materialised together.

Brutal warfare might be unfolding on the world below, but here in orbit what happened next was a stately, elegant dance. Avernon’s drones dispersed, to be taken on board – with exquisite, gentle control – by the Pilots’ fleet. Then the shining ships dispersed, and pulsed like a single spherical wave around Nulapeiron, resonating as they harnessed the shell of spinpoints that burst into life, forming an unbroken, shining, spherical shield.

Severing the Anomaly’s links.

Labyrinth had responded to Corcorigan’s call for help, and that was that: victory.

In the aftermath, it took Kenna some time to realise what Corcorigan almost certainly deduced straight away, or perhaps knew in advance, back when he set Avernon on the path to creating the planetary shield out of spinpoints that were already there, harvested in order to create Oracles . . . but had not existed when Kenna, as Rhianna Chiang, first approached this world.

It was not the finite duration of the spinpoints’ lives so much as the direction that held significance. When Avernon’s drones appeared to destroy those distributed seeds of negentropic timeflow, he was of course creating them – almost as a sideeffect – their deaths having already occurred, centuries before.

In a real sense, Corcorigan, whose identity had been built upon hatred of Oracles and the political system they empowered, had in fact created them.

It was Kenna’s first true lesson in paradox.

FIFTY-SIX

NULAPEIRON, 3498 AD

Alexa Corcorigan deVries, her obsidian eyes glistening with grief, stares down at her aged grandfather’s death-bed. They are on a tall, open-topped tower formed of quickglass, overlooking rolling heathland. A peach-coloured sunrise hovers above distant purple mountains.