##Hang on!##

  ‘No. Shit…’

  Ro enabled ship-to-ship transmission.

  ++Dirk? What the hell is going on? Get out of here!++

  Desperate, she glanced at the Zajinet fleet. Impossible to fight.

  ##Bastards had a trace on you. But I was tracing them. Ha!##

  Up ahead, the tree-like pattern scintillated. Dirk’s ship was glowing.

  ##Stand by for grappling.##

  ++No! I’ve got a ...++

  Impact.

  I’ve got a passenger on board.

  The shock hammered into her.

  No...

  An awful choking sound rose from Chalou’s throat. Darkness pressed in on Ro, and she struggled, as her vision tunnelled, to retain consciousness. Dirk’s ship, locked to hers, was using its momentum to carry them both along a fast geodesic, confounding the enemy fleet but not for long. Heading for the glowing pattern.

  ‘Damn ...’

  It was too late to fight it.

  Claude, my friend.

  Too late for him.

  Ro concentrated, joining her ship’s energies to those of her son, as they screamed through extreme trajectories neither vessel had been designed for. Then they struck the pattern. Their ships twisted and turned, were hurled aside by unseen vortices within a maze of turbulence, and fell endlessly through a trajectory no sane being could hope to follow.

  Hang on.

  Automated systems screamed warnings neither Ro nor Dirk paid attention to.

  Hang on ...

  They burst into a region of open space.

  ‘All right

  Began the insertion sequence.

  ‘At last.’

  Slid into black realspace, and floated among the stars.

  No-one, no Zajinet, followed from mu-space.

  They waited some hours just in case, but not even a suicidal Zajinet could have followed every twist and turn of the madcap geodesic they had followed.

  There was no sound inside Ro’s vessel.

  She welcomed the delay, giving her time to process her vessel’s flight log, to assess and calculate and see just where and when they were. Finally, she sent a question to Dirk:

  ++Have you worked out the date?++

  ##Sorry, Mom, but no. I’ve been plotting geodesies to a certain mu-space locus.##

  ++You mean Labyrinth.++

  ##Right. You thought I wouldn’t find out about it? ##

  Ro let the question ride. Floating here in darkness, there seemed little point in arguing.

  ++Try plotting a least-action geodesic, Dirk. Back to Terra. And check the arrival date.++

  ##All right, I can ... Oh, shit. ##

  ++Oh yes. ++

  Everything in realspace as well as mu-space is relative. But, by the most sensible method of performing the calculation, their ships’ processors could nail the date back on Terra precisely, the earliest date they could possibly arrive there: July 11, 2301.

  Their hell-flight had lasted one hundred and thirty-five years.

  When the two vessels approached Labyrinth, the place was far greater than before: an immense spreading construct whose infinite architecture was spellbinding. Two Pilots - physically older than Ro, yet with eyes as obsidian as hers - entered her ship’s cabin and bowed, and greeted her in Anglic that sounded well-rehearsed more than fluent.

  ‘Welcome, Admiral. This is a signal day for us all.’

  In a daze, Ro followed them to an antechamber where perspectives slid and curved, and where Dirk was already waiting. He gave her an uncertain smile.

  ‘Hey, Mom. Looks like you created an entire world.’

  Maybe even more than that.

  ‘Could be.’

  One of Ro’s escorts gestured in the direction of wide doors that revolved out of existence, revealing Hilbert Hall ... but not as she had left it a few subjective hours before. Then, it had been infinitely complex. Now, it seemed also to stretch for ever in all directions, even - as Ro and Dirk stepped from the antechamber - back the way they had come.

  Before them stood a massed gathering - parade was too small a word - a huge ordered crowd of ten thousand people or more standing in straight ranks. Every man and woman wore a black jumpsuit and black cape trimmed with gold. Each one watched with glittering black eyes.

  My God.

  While behind Ro, as she had promised, Claude Chalou returned to the magnificence that was Labyrinth, his coffin borne by six solemn Pilots.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  49

  NULAPEIRON AD 3426

  Under the chameleoflage sheet, Tom came out of sleep slit-eyed, and realized first that he was hot. Sweat layered his face, and he was breathing open-mouthed, taking shallow breaths.

  Everything reduces to basics.

  Perhaps it was some kind of paradox, that to fight for humanity meant relinquishing the civilized mind which made the battle worthwhile.

  It was the second day ‘in-country’, as the clone-warriors termed it, and the ground was hard beneath a baking mid-morning sun. But Tom told himself to remain still, ignoring discomfort until he knew why he was awake. Was it natural, or had a rasp of sound dragged him from his fading dream?

  Swirl of dark-blue cloaks and shining copper helms. The screams of dying men ...

  In his fist Tom held the story crystal. Yet it was not the old tale, but something else, that he had dreamed of.

  He moved minutely, took a peek with one eye from beneath his draped chameleoflage. Some fifty metres away on the ground, a membranous circle, ten metres in diameter, looked pale and sticky. All around, the surface was broken, with uneven bumps and depressions in the hard clay. Some of those bumps concealed clone-warriors, as unmoving as statues or preying reptiles.

  Morphblade singing through the air ...

  In that moment Tom remembered the contents of his dream, and knew that it was more than random electrical waves sweeping through his brain. He had Seen while he was dreaming; and every man who screamed inside his mind had perished in reality.

  ‘Yours is a deep penetration mission, Warlord.’ That was what Ygran had said during final briefing. ‘The territory is occupied but not Absorbed, not a pure hive mind. Ideally, you‘ll be in and out with no enemy contact, no-one even realizing you were there.’

  Then Ygran had pointed to a different location in the holomap.

  ‘Volksurd’s carls, however, will be conducting an all-out commando assault, with overt advance-to-contact in the final phase, and holy bloody Chaos once the thing kicks off.’

  Now Ygran’s words returned like a fulfilled prophecy.

  Nestled amid a bowl of purple grassland (Tom remembered from his dream) something like a wide lake shone - but the sunlight glistened on glossy membrane, not water. What lay hidden underneath was not a placid marine ecosystem but a single vast cavernous space remade centuries ago by human-directed drones.

  In his dream, Tom had Seen five suborbital flyers hurtling through the yellow sky. They screamed to a halt above the wide membrane, turned and hung in formation, then their grasers stabbed downwards.

  Shining membrane bubbled and blackened. Great rents appeared. Within a minute, only burned tatters remained. Then the grasers fired onto selected targets as the lateral hatches opened and twenty smartropes snaked down from each hovering flyer. One hundred carls, bronze shields and jade morphospears slung across their backs, launched themselves downwards.

  Return fire spat upwards, knocked three carls from their ropes. The remaining ninety-seven warriors and five non-combatant specialists slid down. Some of the bigger carls fired heavy magzookas from the hip. Thirty seconds later, they touched ground. Ropes fell away, and the flyers turned towards home.

  Down in the pit, the battle began.

  There was something. Tom held his breath. Listened.

  Then a black-armoured ciliate the size of Tom’s thumb rustled past, on its random hunt for grubs buried in the clay. Nothing untoward. Tom closed his eyes, and his dream came flooding back.

  The objective was clear. Three great stubby pillars stood in the caverns: cones with the tops sheared off level. On each one perched an orbital shuttle with a bulging hold and strong, angled wings.

  The carls, laying down heavy magzooka-fire, spread in coordinated teams across the cavern’s polished floor. Many of the grey-uniformed men and women that fell back before them were unarmed. Others returned fire, untrained in countering surprise attacks but still dangerous: their response was unpredictable.

  Kraiv, leading his team, slowed down as two big hostile civilians with grapplers in hand - engineering kit as deadly as any purpose-built weapon - stepped from behind a processor block. Kraiv drew back his lips and gave his berserker roar.

  ‘Blood and Death!’

  Morphospear still slung across his back, he leaped for the two men with his big hands coming up, reaching for their throats. They died.

  Off to Kraiv’s right, Volksurd’s team was fighting. Volksurd’s morphospear moaned through the air, bit into an Absorbed man’s neck, and there was a liquid crunch. The head dropped and rolled, its eyes already growing opaque.

  ‘By Axe and by Blood, we take what is ours!’

  Deep in berserker rage, the carls howled, and threw themselves into the half-determined, half-panicked mass of fifty or more soldiers and engineers who faced them. The carls’ weapons swung and twisted, sang and altered shape from one deadly form to another, while their massive owners roared with blood-lust, white spittle-foam caking their lips as they took the battle to the Enemy.

  In minutes, it was over.

  Designated carls used magzooka-fire to collapse the entrances, while their comrades moved among the dying, dispensing coups de grâce with quick thrusts. The strongest climbers pulled on gekkomere gauntlets and began to ascend the pillars, Volksurd and Kraiv among them.

  Seventy-nine carls survived.

  The three shuttles, resting on their massive plinths, were theirs. Now, the carls had only to wait.

  As Tom lay still, sweltering beneath his chameleoflage sheet, he heard a tiny sound. Perhaps it was just another small ciliate, but he could not take the—

  A small round hole appeared in the membrane, and a human hand reached through. Then a turban-wrapped head followed, as the man hauled himself up, onto the hard ground. On hands and knees, he pulled small silver gadgets from inside his tattered robe, and set them down.

  Then he sat back on his heels and giggled, while the silver objects clawed and crawled their way across the hard clay. The man watched, slack-mouthed, and a thin line of saliva drooled from his lip.

  The gadgets were toys. Tom watched from beneath his chameleoflage, wondering who the man was, and who had looked after him before the realm below fell to the Anomaly.

  ‘Bright.’ The man mumbled incoherent words, then: ‘Bilgon like.’

  All around the nearby ground, Ankestion Raglok and his clone-brothers were as still as stones, none of them presenting an outline that might suggest a human presence. Like Tom, they waited.

  For half an hour, the man - Bilgon, presumably - watched his glittering, crawling toys. Then his attention seemed to drift, and he stared unfocused into nothingness. More time passed.

  It was not Bilgon’s lack of intelligence that rendered Tom and the clone-warriors invisible to him. More intelligent observers would have been less likely to notice the hidden warriors: people see what they expect to see.

  If Bilgon had not gone by nightfall, Tom and the clones would melt away in the darkness, then proceed to an alternative shaft ten klicks away. But that was not going to happen ... Already, Bilgon was gathering up his toys, muttering as he tucked them back inside his robe.

  Then he paused. Tom could not see if Bilgon was staring in his direction.

  I am invisible.

  For a long moment, Bilgon did not move.

  I am clay. I am natural ground.

  Then Bilgon was crawling back to the shaft. At the edge, he hunkered, murmuring. He hummed a small tune, then stopped.

  He’s missed one ...

  In that moment there was a flash of silver, then the wandering toy’s pincer took hold of Tom’s chameleoflage sheet and tugged it. Just a few centimetres, but enough. Tom stared into Bilgon’s widened eyes.

  Bilgon’s mouth dropped open.

  Then he stiffened. A dark shape launched itself through the air, hands wrapped around his chin and the crown of his skull, and twisted. The backwards hip-throw was overkill.

  A clone-warrior looked down at Bilgon’s corpse, then went down on one knee and plucked something from the body’s neck. It was a thin black needle, retrieved from between cervical vertebrae, which the warrior pushed back into place above his own eye: just part of his graphite eyebrow.

  Two more warriors took the corpse away, while Tom and the others resumed their earlier positions, hoping no more innocents would blunder into their way.

  Nightfall was not enough. Darkness on the surface was good cover; but they would need nightshirt in the realm below, and that was not in synch. They had to wait until two hours before dawn.

  Then they moved.

  Five metres from the shaft’s edge, working by the moons’ silver-white light, the clone-warriors screwed simple titanium bolts into cracks in a rocky outcrop, and wove a web formed of rope among the bolts. Tom and Ankestion Raglok tugged at the web and nodded their approval.

  They strapped on safety harnesses. Each man checked his neighbour’s harness. Then they attached fourteen separate ropes to the support web, let the ropes slide down inside the shaft, and checked the ropes hung freely. Almost ready. Ankestion Raglok took small vials from his belt pouches, and clipped them onto the supporting web.

  There was a tiny squeak of sound as Ankestion twisted each vial’s calibrated cap to a precise angle, allowing a precisely calibrated chemical reaction to begin.

  Now the team moved quickly, laying rough fabric covered with clay over the web. When they stepped back, they saw only a clump of ground from which fourteen ropes mysteriously extruded like black serpents upon the moonlit ground. In one hour, hydrofluoric acid would spill through the vials, split the casings and attack the hidden rope-web, disintegrating it in seconds.

  At that point, the fourteen attached ropes would snake down the shaft and drop from sight. On the surface, no obvious sign of interlopers would remain. Down below, it would be ‘rather a good idea,’ as General Ygran had put it, if Tom and the clone-warriors were no longer dangling from the ropes when the hour had elapsed.

  They descended in darkness, rappelling down the shaft. Their harnesses were attached to the ropes via squeeze-beeners - intricate carabiners fitted with triggers - which slid freely when gripped with medium strength, but locked when released or squeezed hard in panic.

  Tom descended in the pitch-black shaft.

  Neither he nor the clone-warriors carried smart tech: no corneal smart-gel to see into infra-red; no smartropes to lower them under control. The chameleoflage sheets were minimal tech, now buried beneath twenty centimetres of clay upon the surface.

  Something hard struck Tom’s ankle, a rocky protrusion, and he bit back an exclamation - bifurcatin’ Chaos! - as he spun away from the shaft wall, dangled helplessly in darkness - heisenberging harness - straps digging into his crotch - who the Fate designed this? - before taking control once more.

  Tom continued the descent, with his ankle sending pain signals: a little distress beacon all of his own.

  They reached a balcony inset against the shaft wall. Bright light shone from a tunnel of the Quatemium Stratum, and voices drifted from it. Tom and the clone-warriors hung in place.

  Come on. Go talk somewhere else.

  Minutes were sliding away and soon the webbed support up on the surface would tear apart under acid attack and the ropes would come snaking down.

  Come on ...

  Then the voices faded and the nearest clone-warrior slithered over the stone parapet and dropped to a low crouch. After ten seconds he gestured, and the next warrior swung in a pendulum action until he could reach balcony’s side and grab hold. As the second man went over the parapet, the third was beginning his own swing.