I’ve made a mistake, but you have to—

  ‘Chaos, Eemur. I believe you.’

  Siganth was a distant hellworld out of legend and he could not be here, not in any rational universe. Yet Eemur’s silent words rang with truth as well as fear.

  ‘Eemur? Can you bring me b—?’

  The metallic ceiling hinged open, extended black and copper claws, and reached down.

  Run, Tom.

  He lunged to his feet.

  Run fast.

  Blades snicked behind him.

  ~ * ~

  4

  SIGANTH AD 3423

  Scrapes followed him. Clattering filled the air as Tom squeezed between thin flanges which sliced his tunic, drew a dozen scarlet creases along his torso - Chaos! - as a series of serrated blades skimmed past his ear. Tom slid through a sharp-edged slot, hauling himself into open air—

  No. It can’t be.

  —where he hung, blood dripping, fingers hooked onto a corroded flange, and stared down at the streaked metallic cliff-face plunging below. It spread many kilometres to either side, and reared high above. The sky shone purple, streaked with starless black.

  A different world.

  Or nightmare. But his cuts ached, and they were real.

  It was a vast canyon, and the distant opposite wall was chalky and bone-grey, slashed with dull bronze slanted sheets and vanes, each too big to contemplate. In the intervening air, strange, pulsing vortices whirled and broke apart. The breeze which slid across his skin was slick and cold, like frostsnail slime.

  Snick-snack sounded from the shaft behind him.

  Time to move.

  Changing his grip, crimping hard, Tom swung out onto the exposed metallic cliff-face, squatted into a climber’s frog-position, and boosted himself up.

  Movement was odd. Lighter gravity but viscous air ... perhaps. Everything was off-kilter, but there was no time to stop and analyse the differences; he had to keep going.

  Tom worked for the climbing moves, used bolt-like protuberances on the metallic cliff to spider his way up. The surface felt rough-smooth, as though covered in fine rust, and when he came to a jutting ledge he stopped, unable to climb further along the blank, sheer face.

  Below, a black stalk extended from the shaft he had used, and Tom pulled himself onto the ledge, out of sight.

  Did it see me?

  There was a steel eye at the stalk’s end. He was almost sure of it.

  Eemur. Get me out of this place.

  Primeval wails of fear sounded in his mind.

  Tom lay shivering on the hard ledge, trying to control his breathing. Inside his lungs, the air felt different from the cold gelatinous atmosphere pressing against his skin. Could he somehow be breathing Nulapeiron’s air, though his body was on a distant world? Was Eemur maintaining some kind of connection across the light-years?

  It gave Tom the tiniest hope that she was working to drag him back.

  Then he twitched as down below, inside the abyss, something dark and massive began to ascend. It was metallic, formed in overlapping armoured sections, bristling with antennae.

  A vessel? A creature?

  Tom suddenly felt that in this place there was little difference between construct and organism, between machinery and life. Either one could kill him.

  It was rising towards his hiding place.

  He pulled back close against the metal face, but that was dangerous: too much pressure would bounce him off the ledge and into the void. The vessel-thing continued to rise.

  Oh, Chaos.

  Tom pulled his legs beneath him, formed a squatting position, and got ready for the only manoeuvre he could think of. If it had eyes upon its back, he was dead.

  Still rising.

  He shut his eyes, rehearsed the jump. The muscles of his thighs began to quiver with stress and cold.

  Now.

  Tom launched himself from the ledge.

  He seemed to fall slowly.

  Slowly...

  And then it was very fast, metal surface rising towards him and he struck feet first against the hull, rolled and lashed out, grabbed for an antenna - missed - and rolled again, unable to stop with the edge of the carapace in sight, the fatal drop waiting for him and then another antenna - grab - and this time he got it.

  The vessel/creature was still rising.

  Splotched oval patches decorated the dorsal surface. Membranes, amid the metal?

  Hurry.

  Carefully, knowing it would be easy to slip and slide right off the hull, Tom crawled to the nearest patch, pressed down with his fingertips. They sank into soft, membranous material.

  Get inside.

  Tom rolled forward, and dropped through.

  He crouched on a cold metal deck, scanning the empty corridor, then chose a direction at random and took it.

  I’m still breathing.

  It was a reminder. If he was breathing his homeworld’s air then Eemur was maintaining a link and there was still some sort of chance.

  You don’t know that for sure.

  Siganth was an Anomalous world. Just as a human body is formed of trillions of cells whose individual identities are irrelevant to the whole (indeed, to avoid cancer, the body must command many of its cells to commit suicide), so did the Anomaly consist of trillions of once-human and alien beings it had subsumed. To be Absorbed was to become an unthinking component of an unimaginably greater whole: individuality no more relevant than a single cell’s or bacterium’s chemical drives.

  Tom’s skin went cold, scraped by electric tension as he crouched in the corridor. It was dread, and there were only two choices: to slink away or face it. Something lay ahead. Fate, not chance, had led him to this vessel; he could feel himself being drawn forward.

  Nerves wailing, Tom advanced.

  There was a diamond arch. Beyond it lay a great chamber in which jagged metal buttresses grew from the walls, stippled with viral crystals. Shards of black glass floated in the air, some spinning, some hanging still.

  Tom crept closer.

  Oh, sweet Fate.

  The air shone like ice, and at the chamber’s centre a figure hung suspended, writhing.

  A human figure.

  He was unclothed and screaming, though no sound reached Tom’s ears. The man’s face was half-coated with silver scar tissue and his right hand was a claw, but those were old injuries. What happened next was different.

  Invisible fingers hooked beneath the captive’s skin and peeled it back, stripping his flesh bare. The skin seemed to twist through an impossible angle, and disappeared from sight. What was left was a writhing, agonized, flensed victim. Even as he struggled, something dragged greyish fat from his body; the globules rotated, then winked out of existence. Arteries broke loose, whipped like cables cut in a storm, pulled themselves into nothingness, were gone.

  Still the man lived, and suffered.

  The vivisection continued, taking his eyeballs, then plucking out the bones one by one until only this remained: a fine tracery of thread-like nerves in the air, connecting to his floating brain. Everything was gone, save the ability to sense massive, agonizing pain.

  No...

  Something worse occurred.

  As Tom watched, the field reversed the process, pushed bones into place and layered strips of striated muscle over them and popped the eyeballs in, then draped skin across the ensemble until the captive human being was whole, entire again.

  Writhing in the energy field.

  Until invisible hooks tugged at his skin and the process began all over.

  There was an energy field, and an unaided man could not hope to break through, but as Tom watched the captive suffer he knew he had to try. He looked around the chamber for something which he could thrust inside the field, saw nothing. Perhaps if he climbed up to the ceiling - a series of angled flanges would provide holds - he could drop inside the field from above and haul the poor man free.

  But even as he thought this, a torture cycle completed and the man’s body was whole once more, for a few seconds. This time he saw Tom approaching ... and then the strangest, bravest thing occurred.

  The man raised his hand and shook his head, yelling silent words that could mean only one thing: warning Tom to stay back, not to risk himself. If Tom had been the captive, he would have been screaming for help, unable to comprehend danger to others when his own nerves were racked with agony.

  How long have you been here? Days?

  Tom crept closer, as the man’s skin began to twist, as invisible hooks inserted themselves. Tom would have to time it right, enter the field when the captive was whole.

  Or years?

  Then Tom stopped dead. In the overwhelming horror of the sight, there was something he had not noticed. The eyes, the eyeballs which the invisible field was tearing at again ... were totally black, a shining obsidian. This was no ordinary man.

  A Pilot!

  This was why Tom had been drawn to this chamber. Eemur had talked of a link, and now he felt it. Some part of Tom tasted a distant echo of the tortured pain the Pilot was undergoing; he could not understand how the man survived.

  ‘Hang on. I’m going to get you out of there.’

  Even as his flesh peeled back, the Pilot tried to wave Tom away. Tom reached up to the nearest flange, took hold—

  Then the walls seemed to come alive as white light flared - an alarm -and great encrusted metal limbs reached for Tom with talons and blades - snick - as doors slid down, shutting off the corridors - snack - and there was nowhere to go.

  Blue sparks rose in the air - sapphire blue: the hue associated with Oracles and Seers.

  Eemur?

  A low hum.

  Get me out of here!

  Something slammed him downwards.

  Then he was plunging into a slick electric-blue tunnel that blazed and shone as he fell through nebulae that were atoms with electron clouds greater than worlds, and he yelled as unstoppable forces squeezed and spat him through the gaps of reality, through the holes in a network of vibrating strings of spacetime, flung him down and down—

  I’ve got you, Tom.

  —until the path curved and he spun upwards, grew, flew in all directions and tumbled out and fell, back to normality once more.

  Tom was on his knees and retching on a soft carpet. There was a faint woody scent of boxed fluorofungus upon the air. Lambent orange of a floating glowglobe cast diffuse shadows on the floor.

  You’re all right.

  Tom looked up.

  ‘Easy for you to—’

  But her disembodied head was dry and scaly, and Tom knew he could never appreciate the effort behind her abilities.

  ‘Interesting present, Eemur ... Are you all right? Do you need anything?’

  I’ll be fine.

  Nodding, Tom dragged himself to his feet. ‘We need to talk ... in a while.’ He staggered from the lounge, through to the bath chamber. There, he gestured for the aerogel bath to activate itself in full medical mode - his cuts would need cleansing - and pulled his clothes off, dropping them into a reclamation bin.

  Tom winced as he climbed down into the bath. He held his breath, slid under, until he was completely submerged. His skin tingled; the burning in his wounds began to fade. Inside the gel, he started taking shallow breaths.

  Then incredibly - in reaction to the trauma and the knowledge that he was safe - Tom drifted into sleep.

  ~ * ~

  5

  NULAPEIRON AD 3423

  The arachnargos which took them to Realm Vilshan was long and streamlined, its upper carapace coloured a deep metallic violet, melding into chocolate-brown and grey at the sides, becoming shell-white across its underbelly. The violet-and-grey tendrils were long and strong; they whipped outwards with a speed and manoeuvrability Tom had never seen with a vehicle of this size.

  As they travelled, Elva sat up front in the control cabin, while Tom went back into the thoracic hold. There, he sat on the deck near an upended case, atop which Eemur’s Head stood on a tray. He took out his crystal, pressed it into his holopad, and flicked on the image of Ro McNamara and her sons.

  ‘A link,’ he said, ‘between me and Pilots.’

  That’s right.

  ‘Perhaps the captive was a descendant of this family.’

  It could be. When the link was forged, or will be forged, I can’t tell.

  Tom stared at her flensed head.

  ‘Will be forged? What do you mean?’

  What I said. The linking event may not have occurred yet.

  For all that he had grown up with the notion of Oracles, the idea of backward causality made Tom shudder. The future should not affect the past; that was not the way things ought to work. Even the Oracles saw only their own future memories, their own perceptions untied from the arrow of time. Yet when ruling Lords acted now on information perceived from the future, wasn’t that a form of reverse cause-and-effect?

  Tom let out a long breath.

  ‘I haven’t told Elva ... We need to equip a rescue party for Siganth.’ It was another debt of honour, though harder to explain. ‘How we’ll afford it, I don’t know. Perhaps I can persuade Corduven to mount a commando operation.’

  I don’t think so.

  ‘Why not? What’s the maximum number of people you can send through to a hellworld in one go?’

  It’s not exactly ‘sending’. In one sense, you remained in Nulapeiron the entire time.

  Tell that to my cuts, Tom thought. Elva hasn‘t seen them yet.

  Still, Tom knew that existing logosophical theories could not adequately describe a Seer’s abilities. Pilots travelled by inserting their vessels into another universe: the fractal mu-space which underlay all continua. Seers had no access to mu-space, but they could perceive and use the hidden dimensions of realspace, unknown to most human beings (who have evolved to act within three spatial dimensions, not the full complement of ten: time is the eleventh dimension).

  The Blight had been able to manifest its once-human components, tele-porting them into place using powers which were surely similar to Eemur’s.

  The way is blocked. I cannot reach Siganth again.

  ‘Fate.’ Tom stared into Eemur’s bulbous eyeballs. Blocked by the Anomaly? Because it knows I was there?

  It knows somebody traversed the Calabi-Yau geodesies.

  Fear accelerated Tom’s pulse. He had worried about the Blight, that it might have contacted the Anomaly, albeit briefly. What if he himself had compounded the disaster, by making the entity aware of Nulapeiron’s existence?

  Does it know which world I come from?

  A pause.

  I don’t know.

  Tom turned away. Ignorance could bring no comfort.

  Two days later, with a border checkpoint in sight up ahead, their hired arachnargos entered a great cavern, passing beneath a huge holobanner which read:

  *** COLLEGIUM PERPETUUM DELPHINORUM ***

  *** where Oracles are created ***

  *** not born ***

  For a motto (or a sales slogan) it seemed obscurely threatening. From the forward cabin, Tom stared at the ornate triconic symbols as they slid past overhead. Then the arachnargos was at the checkpoint, and the pilots were bringing it to rest on a vast polished platform of blue stone. Down below, guards in matched black-and-yellow capes stood to attention.

  An exit hatch puckered and opened, then fine tendrils lowered Tom and Elva to ground level. A mesodrone drifted down alongside them, containing Eemur’s Head along with all their luggage.

  Just how the authorities would react if their scanfields detected a severed Seer’s head inside the drone’s shielded carapace, none of them knew. Eemur had insisted that they not leave her behind someplace; and neither Tom nor Elva had been able to think of an adequate reason to overrule her wishes.

  Tom’s skin tingled. They were being scanned.

  Above them, the arachnargos, its commission completed, was already turning away. As Tom watched, a lead tendril whipped out with a thwap, its gekkomere pads fastening onto a broad stone pillar. Then the arachnargos was in motion, tendrils flicking out faster and faster, accelerating along the broad natural caverns until it reached the arching exit, accelerated even more ... and was gone.