Resolution (76 page)

Captain Goray had chewed at his moustache during the entire briefing. His pale face and mournful eyes looked more worried than ever.

Tom leaned close to him as the others were filing out.

‘Don’t worry. There’s going to be a ruckus when we make our break from the Collegium. You’re going to have one Chaos of a fight on your hands, soon enough.’

Goray smiled, relieved.

‘Thank Fate for that, Warlord.’

‘In the meantime, come with me. There are some tac-displays you need to see.’

They took the spiral stairs down to the next level. Tom stopped before a sealed doorshimmer, which swirled in place until scanners confirmed his identity; then he and Captain Goray stepped through.

‘This,’ said Tom, ‘is forbidden tech. VLSI’

Eemur’s Head floated before a holo network which Elva was manipulating. Tom found their cooperation unsettling.

‘Never heard of it, sir.’ Goray rubbed his moustache. ‘Won’t mention it to anyone.’

‘The Oracle who lived here used it to interface with installed systems. The devices are original, left inside the terraformer at construction.’

‘Old
tech, then, Warlord.’

‘They date back to the Founding.’

Elva halted the display, and looked at them. ‘Want to know something funny? There’s a theory that this tech is what enabled the Anomaly to grow in the first place, from a mind distributed across plexcores - pre-logotrope enhancements - on the hellworld of Fulgor.’

Tom watched Eemur. She floated on her lev-tray, looking intent.

The display remained static.

‘I read Xiao Wang’s
Skein Wars
when I was a kid,’ Tom said. ‘That’s the story it told. Fulgor was a paradise, not a hellworld, when it started.’

In one corner of the chamber a translucent hologlobe rotated, stained with darkness representing the Anomaly.

Will people someday talk about the hellworld called Nulapeiron?

No they won’t. Because you’re going to succeed.

Tom smiled at Eemur, and bowed his head. Suddenly, the display swirled with random colours.

‘Well done!’ Elva checked a subsidiary holo. ‘You’ve got it, Eemur.’

The lev-tray bobbed a curtsy in the air. The interface was a glistening strip woven around the dangling remains of Eemur’s left carotid artery and disappearing into her flesh.

‘How long,’ asked Captain Goray, ‘before the Seer can establish full conscious control of the holodisplay?’

‘I
thought
you were quick on the uptake, Captain.’ Tom placed his hand on Goray’s shoulder. ‘I’d like you to work with Elva and Eemur, to liaise with General Ygran and the command staff. Relay questions and answers in both directions, between this chamber and the planners upstairs. Interpret intelligently.’

‘Sir?’ Goray clasped his hands behind his back. ‘I don’t truly understand.’

Tom looked at Elva and Eemur, took a deep breath, slowly expelled it.

‘Have you noticed, Captain, that I seem to be more aware of the Enemy’s movements than I ought to be? That the planners blindly accept what I tell them only because I’ve been proved right?’

‘Yes.’ A faint smile tugged at Goray’s lips. ‘Yes, sir. I’ve noticed that.’

‘Then...’

Don’t worry, lover. You will come back.

‘... If I don’t make it, my Lady Elva has the strategic training and Eemur has the ability to ... Let’s just say, between them, they can do as good a job as I can.’

Tom could not help looking at Elva then, seeing the depth of fear in her grey eyes before she blinked and resumed a professional expression.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Tom.

Wearing the grey jumpsuit he needed for the drop, Tom made one last stop before joining his team. In the labs situated at the terraformer’s heart, Truholm Janix oversaw teams of workers, a mixture of logosophically trained Lords and Ladies - the young Lord A’Vinsenberg showed a particular aptitude - and Academy-trained freeborn, even three of the techs that Tom and Elva had recruited years ago in the original, short-lived Corcorigan Demesne.

‘How’s it going, Truholm?’

‘Um, well, my ... Warlord. My Lady, ah, Flurella was looking for you.’

And she can fluster anyone.

Hiding a smile, Tom asked: ‘What about the work?’

‘Oh, right. We’re reviewing models. Also, some of them’ - he waved a hand; A’Vinsenberg looked up and nodded - ‘are improving the anti-agoraphobia logotropes. We have one that produces
agoraphilia,
in fact.’

‘Overcompensating,’ said A’Vinsenberg. ‘But I’m bringing it back under control.’

‘Good, good.’ Truholm wiped his desktop display. ‘It seems too strong, but the point is that this version has no side effects. Besides an excessive longing for the great outdoors.’

Tom was frowning. ‘Why are you working on logotropes at this time?’

‘Because, Warlord, it’s where femtotech reaches its apex. There’s a nicety of design when artificial atom construction meets computational theory meets biochemical pathway. We’re engineering subatomic particles in order to influence human thought.’

‘And ... ?’ said Tom, thinking:
I
know what a logotrope is, for Fate’s sake.

‘And when you bring us the Collegium’s devices, we’re going to be collapsing spacetime using attotwistors none of us here have practical knowledge of. This is the nearest we can get.’

‘Hmm. Good answer.’

‘Thank you, Warlord.’

Lady Flurella caught him in the corridor. Her crimson eyes shone like blood-filled orbs against her bone-white skin.

‘You’re attempting to penetrate Strehling Suhltone, Lord Corcorigan.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’re extracting ... what? The Collegium’s devices? Or their people?’

‘Both, if we can manage it. The equipment comes first.’

‘And Lord Avernon.’

‘Yes.’

If he’s there.

Tom had tried to See into the Collegium again, but Anomalous activity in the Calabi-Yau dimensions was blocking him. Trevalkin
had
been there, and Magister Strostiv, the last Tom had Seen. But that was days ago.

‘What about Trevalkin?’

‘He may,’ said Tom, ‘be the one person who can keep Avernon safe until we get there.’

‘And you trust him?’

‘Trevalkin? He’s extremely capable.’

‘Mmm. Be careful, Warlord. Don’t turn your back.’

Then a surprising thing happened. The albino Lady Flurella reached up on tiptoes, leaned forward, and kissed Tom on the cheek.

‘Good luck.’

She bustled away, while Tom could only watch.

‘Thank you,’ he said finally, addressing an empty corridor.

Then he checked the equipment tagged to his jumpsuit, nodded to himself.

Time to go.

Elva and Jissie were waiting outside the shuttle bay.

‘Tom...’

They hugged, kissed, and pulled Jissie into their embrace. Then Elva released him, stepped back, her hand on Jissie’s shoulder.

‘Give them Chaos, my husband.’

‘Yes, my love. I will.’

As Tom was stepping into the shuttle, silent words rang in his mind. He jumped.

Don’t lose your head, lover.

His laugh caused fourteen heads to turn and stare, fourteen pairs of horizontally slitted eyes to dilate and contract. Fourteen purple-skinned faces each raising a graphite eyebrow.