‘Get away!’ Dirk swung the white box and himself onto the TDV’s flat bed. ‘Get us the hell away from here!’

  ‘Bozhe moi, you got it!’

  The vehicle spun on the spot, accelerated at a forty-five-degree angle away from the runway and control tower both, heading for the boundary and open desert.

  Moved faster.

  Kian’s first impulse was to slide down from the ship and try to get to the ground, but the TDV with Dirk aboard was two hundred metres away and still accelerating.

  And there was a faint uneasiness born not of natural senses but his interface with the ship’s long-range sensor loops.

  ‘Sweet bleeding hell.’

  Kian frowned, concentrated.

  Below the wing, the access hatch snapped back up, locked into place once more.

  ‘Move it, move it.’

  Kian pulled himself back into the cabin, not needing to see the scarlet ellipse flaring in the display to know that something big was coming. Something from the sky.

  Two ellipses.

  ‘Oh, God.’

  The overhead hatch thumped down and his chair was morphing, grasping him like a gloved fist as the brakes came free and the great bronze ship began to roll.

  At the boundary the TDV braked, its thermoacoustic motor whining to a halt. Dirk stood on the flat bed with one foot on either side of the white box, squatted down to grab it, back straight.

  ‘You all right up there, pal?’

  Dirk braced himself...

  ‘If you want, I could—’

  ... lifted and swung, and the box made a short arcing drop, thudded into the ground.

  In Dirk’s obsidian eyes, the yellow lights shifted, formed complex patterns.

  ‘Take us back,’ he called down to the driver. ‘Don’t hang around.’

  ‘Bozhe moi!’

  The sudden lurch toppled Dirk so he fell on his side, but the glow remained in his eyes, and his gaze stayed fixed on the white box receding in the TDV’s wake.

  In the control tower, Deirdre and the crew were frozen, staring at the events taking place below, only half-understanding them.

  Then something - a rustle of cloth, the scent of fear - caused her to turn and see Solly backing away towards the exit, jowls trembling, mouth open like a landed fish, his face layered with shining sweat.

  ‘I... I d-d-didn’t w-w—’

  Deirdre took two long silent strides forward.

  And swung her foot into Solly’s groin.

  In the rattling TDV, Dirk judged the distance was great enough.

  He lowered his head.

  BANG!

  The flat hard sound smacked the air. Screeching, the TDV curved to a halt.

  Black, stinking smoke belched from the twisted white remains: the bomb.

  But Dirk was staring up into the sky, to the small dark point high above the horizon that grew visibly larger as he watched its diving trajectory towards the runway.

  He snapped around to see Kian’s bronze ship begin to move.

  Get out of here.

  The strange vessel was more than a point now. Its configuration was alien, growing larger.

  A Zajinet?

  Come on, Kian. Get out of here.

  The younger controllers sat on top of Solly’s squirming bulk until security officers came and fastened his wrists and ankles with smart-rubber bindings, while Bratko gave Solly’s ribs a kick which everyone pretended not to see.

  But the alarms that sounded next indicated a new ship coming in high and fast, and there was no reason to expect an UNSA vessel. Sabotage had failed, and someone or something was shifting to the direct approach.

  Deirdre stumbled back towards the tinted window.

  The bronze ship with Kian inside was moving faster on the runway, gathering speed for take-off.

  Too late.

  Growing huge in the sky, the intruder let rip a beam of energy in front of Kian’s vessel. Kian reacted fast, spinning the great bronze bird off to one side as the alien hurtled overhead.

  The strange vessel had blasted a smoking trench across the yellow tarmac.

  ‘Oh, Christ. Kian!’

  But the bronze vessel was stuck in sand, unable to back up or reach a clear length of runway.

  While in the sky, the intruder was arcing around.

  Ready for a second strafing run on a big heavy target that could not move.

  ‘Shit shit shit.’

  Kian fought through the interface, knowing there was no time to leave the ship and run, desperate to use those immense engines, feeling the whole vessel lurch as sand enveloped half the undercarriage.

  ‘No.’

  The display whirled in urgent primary colours, and both intruders rendered as blood-red ellipses arced in for the final approach.

  Two of them.

  From the halted truck, Dirk could only watch the Zajinet fighting vessel dive towards Kian’s halted ship.

  No. Please God, no.

  Then a silver delta-winged vessel burst out of the sun, and its graser gatlings split the air with a hundred sun-bright beams and swung towards the intruder.

  At the last moment the Zajinet tried to evade, in a daring sideways dive.

  But the silver vessel tracked the move and the blazing beams struck and everything was over. The Zajinet intruder blew apart in a cacophony of fire and light that no observer that day would ever forget.

  The silver ship arced upwards into the blue sky, glowing with brilliant light.

  Was gone.

  Only emptiness, the desert, and smoking wreckage remained.

  The TDV driver helped Dirk down onto the tarmac, kept hold of his upper arm. Dirk wavered a moment, then pulled himself upright.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Huh.’ The driver wiped grease from his forehead, turned to stare at blackened debris strewn beyond the runway. ‘Who was that?’ And, looking up to the empty sky: ‘And what the Devil was that silver ship?’

  Dirk’s laugh was weak but proud.

  ‘That was my mother.’

  ‘Oh. Bozhe moi.’

  ‘And it’s a good job she didn’t get really mad.’

  <>

  ~ * ~

  41

  NULAPEIRON AD 3426

  Warlord Primus Tom Corcorigan began his war of retribution.

  You will not have my world, Anomaly.

  For the first phase, nothing would be different. Avernon’s whereabouts were unknown (except possibly to Trevalkin, who was out of contact) and Tom’s researchers had gone as far as they could without extra guidance. They needed the spacetime-manipulating technology that existed only in the Collegium Perpetuum Delphinorum. The weaponry available to the freedom forces - whether launched from terraformer spheres in Nulapeiron’s skies or fighting on the surface or in the occupied strata - was conventional.

  The Anomaly retained all the advantages: able to materialize forces (both human and alien) without warning, subject only to geometric restrictions impossible to determine; Absorbing human components into itself in a process no-one could get close enough to observe without falling prey to it (and some two dozen volunteers had tried); and its mentality was so far beyond its minuscule opponents that its purposes remained unknown and unpredictable, the power of its advance overwhelming wherever it chose to concentrate its forces.

  And yet, perhaps one thing had changed.

  For now the human freedom fighters had a single commander: coordinating through many layers of delegation and imperfect communication, but still with a single mind and a single purpose.

  Humanity had a Warlord Primus.

  You will not take my world!

  A Warlord who could See.

  Slowly, communication webs strengthened, extruded finer tendrils into the world. Tightened.

  In the command centre of Axolon Array, tactical displays now shone constantly, attended by teams of planners and advisers relaying advice and instructions to those who fought the war below.

  Most of the senior officers put their emotions to one side as they disposed forces in fraught situations, measured gain and loss strategically and expressed them as numbers: topographically vital tunnels and broadways held, percentages fallen and wounded. At night, they could only imagine as they tried to sleep what the human cost of their decisions might be: the screaming of a wounded resistance fighter with her leg shorn off as graser beams spat overhead; the courier’s terrified run through dank tunnels as the Enemy closed in; the dark insidious rape as a force beyond humanity entered a soldier’s mind and turned a man into a component.

  But Tom did not need to imagine these things.

  Blood glistens on the stump. Above, her thigh is creamy and unblemished, her garments burned away, the skin untouched. The graser has half-cauterized the severed arteries and she scratches at the stump, far beyond pain, praying she can squirt her life-blood onto rubble before the Anomaly comes to take her.

  Tom could See them.

  Splash as his boot goes into a puddle. Echoes up ahead where shadows fill the tunnel but there is an opening to his left and he ducks through. Crawls, rolls, is on his feet once more.

  Cold and shivering. The soldiers are closer now.

  Run.

  Gathering new insight.

  The air crackles as the man’s eyes roll up and there is a lick of darkness which is symptomatic of tunnelling through spacetime, neural links conjoined through the rat-infested crawlspace which lies below normal reality as he becomes one microscopic cell in the great Anomaly and his mouth lolls open then stretches in a madman’s smile.

  Tom could See them all.

  Tom grew confident in his ability to control and direct the visualizations which so directly reflected the abilities of his Enemy. Once, when he established contact with research labs deep within the Collegium Perpetuum Delphinorum, he watched (from his terraformer base, thousands of kilometres away) the painstaking work they performed, the complex logosophical model built using intricate holodisplays ...

  Pain, and the Dark Fire shimmering.

  ... and then saw the alien incursion, heard the screams, regarded the bravery of Collegiate researchers who contrived to release the zero-point vacuum energy from their spacetime manipulators. Normally they used it to drive their hypergeometric transformations, their bending of the universe, in the same way that a water mill might draw power from a river’s flow; but now, the devices erupted in a cascading tidal wave of blazing light and sound that split air and rock, creating a sequence of flash-explosions that ripped the heart out of the Collegium, killing every human (and former human) and metallic being within the inner boundaries.

  ‘Chaos, no ...’ Tom withdrew whimpering from the trance. ‘The Collegium ...’

  The Collegium was gone. The researchers had destroyed it, and themselves.

  But we needed them.

  He was on a couch in their family chamber, and Jissie was looking scared. Then the membrane door softened and Elva stepped inside.

  ‘Jissie, why did you call—? Tom, are you all right?’

  ‘The Collegium. I just Saw it ... They killed themselves. Took the Anomaly’s people and ... things ... with them.’

  ‘But we need their tech.’ Elva looked pale. ‘You said yourself, we can’t drop a shield in place without their techniques.’

  Jissie spoke up. ‘Which one was it?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Jissie, dear, we don’t have time for—’

  ‘Was it the Collegiate site near Realm Buchanan,’ said Jissie, ‘or the one in Rigay Larn, or the one in Strehling Suhltone? Just wondering.’

  Tom and Elva stared at each other.

  ‘Near Realm Buchanan.’ Tom sat up on the couch. Sweat trickled either side of his nose, and his eyes stung. ‘The one where—’

  The one where Elva had served undercover, as Commander Herla Hilsdottir in a Blight-controlled death camp, for far too long. Where she and Tom had broken free.

  Where on the surface, the great glass edifice used by the Blight to contact the Anomalous hellworlds had exploded, undergone a heatless phase transition to produce the Lake of Glass that encased two hundred and fifty thousand people whose minds had formed a small yet significant component of the Blight.

  And where Jissie’s parents lay entombed.

  So many dead.

  Elva knelt down at Tom’s side and took hold of his hand.

  ‘We will get through this.’ Then she turned to Jissie. ‘And how were you aware, young woman, that the Collegium spans - spanned - three sites? That’s not common knowledge.’

  ‘Renata told me. She’s nice. We chat a lot.’

  Elva clapped Tom’s thigh and stood. ‘Looks like we need to recruit two new strategic command officers.’

  ‘Two?’ said Tom.

  ‘Well, Jissie, obviously. Maybe Lady Renata will make the grade as well.’

  Jissie’s smile was the first good thing Tom had seen for days.

  In a translucent hologlobe representing Nulapeiron, dark sectors continued to expand like spilled ink. Only at high magnification did the small bright lines of the freedom fighters’ flying columns grow visible.

  It took local-scale diagrams to denote the acts of sabotage and assassination of a desperate resistance movement fighting against a power that would not stop growing.

  Spreading darkness.

  And, where three specific locations had been picked out in blue, one had been blackened from existence. Crescents of Anomaly-controlled territory curled and tightened around the remaining two.

  Tom Saw:

  A raiding party creeps through a ruined banquet hall, clambering over fallen blocks of shattered marble, into the heart of a former Palace. Some of them stop to admire the marble-and-jade, platinum-inlaid bedchambers of the fled nobility. They grin or shake their heads.

  And stop dead.

  There is a whisper of sound.

  Blindmoths explode in a flurry from a crack in the wall, flutter near the diamond-mirrored ceiling, and fingers tighten on firing-studs before someone breathes out, mutters a profanity, and the fighters’ shoulders relax.

  Then something scrapes against broken stone. The fighters whirl, unable to raise their weapons as the air shivers and darkness manifests itself.

  His vision shifted:

  A lone courier runs across the surface, silver grasses clinging at his ankles while the cold wind buffets him, whips up waves on the Argent Sea, where a tiny three-person aquabug awaits.

  Muttering, he reviews the specific command sequence that will activate his thanatotrope should the Enemy capture him. It is almost as if he wants to commit suicide.

  Tears track unnoticed down his cheeks as he runs.

  Shifted:

  Angular grey blocks of stone, thrust up by geological upheaval over ages, form a cluttered slope. Pink and crimson algae coat their tips. Nearby, in the air, near-invisible glassmoths slip and slide. While below, linked together by smartrope, the commandos continue their dangerous climb.

  Again:

  Circular pools of light dot the grey stone plain. Here and there stand worn columns: statues of Founding Lords whose features have been scoured to smoothness by the harsh atmosphere of early times, and the corrosive oxygen-rich winds of recent centuries. The circles shimmer like water but are membranes, covering vertical shafts which lead down into the federated demesnes known collectively as Strehling Suhltone.

  A membrane parts as pulse engines fling a big orbital shuttle vertically towards the clouds. Then, like a fast-healing wound, the membrane grows whole once more.

  And on the plain, immobile beneath her grey camouflage blanket, the observer mutters into her comm-ring, then thumbs it off. Only a ceramic knife is sticky-tagged to her uniform: otherwise, she is unarmed. A graser would only tempt her into fighting, and that is not her purpose.

  She settles down to wait and watch.

  Some part of Tom raised a question: was it possible to See too much?

  A deserted galleria, where broken statues lie, and only ciliates move, rustling. Small orange beetles feast upon a dead girl’s eyes.