“I’ll be honest with you,” Çrom replied. “I wrecked as much of their tracking and security gear as I could on my way out, just to mask my own escape routes. The Marston really just caught it because it was in my path. I’ll happily take credit for tactical thinking, though.”
“How long would it have taken them to grab a whole new array from somewhere?”
“You think too much.”
“Someone has to.”
“Oh now hey,” Çrom said, putting a hand to his chest. “I thought I was pretty strategic with that cell grab.”
“I’ll grant you that,” Greyblade conceded. “Even if you did just admit to me that it was an accident.”
“Wouldn’t be much point having a Fhaste if she didn’t have an operational relative drive.”
“Don’t push it.”
Çrom pointed again. “I reckon the name could go up there,” he said, “in the same colour as the bits you repainted, obviously. It might even look aesthetically coordinated, to an untrained observer.”
“Aesthetically coordinated to the untrained observer is exactly the look I was aiming for,” Greyblade confided.
Çrom laughed.
OUTWARDS BOUND
The final layer of lacquer was barely dry when the Highwayman rose from the factory floor, dipped her elegant nose at the gloomy crags of machinery, and banked for the access and loading chutes.
“Next stop, the Boundary,” Çrom said happily, tapping at the controls. “Where’d you even get the crazy idea of posing as a dead shell for sale? Done it before on a mission?”
“Never actually tried it,” Greyblade admitted. “But once I found out they were collectors, I remembered something I saw on my way here that gave me the idea,” Çrom looked back over his shoulder curiously at him – Greyblade was sitting in a comfortable auxiliary command and control couch with the Highwayman’s minimal weapons at his fingertips – but he didn’t elaborate. The sight of the dead Char-bot, mounted and on display, was still raw in his memory.
Çrom shrugged it off and turned back to his controls. “I would have liked to send a final message to the Kedlams,” he admitted. “I had this vision of how I was going to steal the Highwayman back, and then fly past their compound before vanishing forever. I was going to send them a gloaty little message before jumping out of this system once and for all. Immature, I know.”
“It does sound a little immature,” Greyblade admitted, “but they were pretty awful people.”
“Right?” Çrom exclaimed. “Does your file happen to mention what their so-called unofficial family motto is?” he didn’t pause. “‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Cry, and the world laughs at you’. That’s what they told me the last time I tried to get the Highwayman back off them.”
“Maybe we can drop a gloaty little message buoy for them to find,” Greyblade suggested, and Çrom laughed again. “Where were you planning on going?” he asked. “Before Gabriel conscripted you into saving the world?”
Çrom shrugged. “I hadn’t really planned that far ahead,” he admitted. “But don’t think for a second that I’m not tempted to jettison you and fly away now that I’ve got her back. Sleep with one eye open, Sir Knight.”
Greyblade snorted in amusement. “Duly noted. Where are we going to cross over? Byron’s Hold? Crazley? The Squirrelest Hill?”
“Quickest and most pleasant way across the Boundary is the Serdios Wonder Fortress,” Çrom said with slightly suspicious immediacy and highly suspicious idleness, and tapped at his controls. The Highwayman swooped out through the chute into the softly-glowing atmoplane between Heaven and Earth, and skimmed away across the upper extremity of the Human Territory Interdict.
“That’s … not an inconspicuous route.”
“I certainly wouldn’t suggest crossing back into Corporate space there,” Çrom agreed, “but leaving the Corporation in a small private spacecraft and entering the Corporation at the head of a fleet of Dimension-killers are two very different animals.”
“Fair to say.”
“I’m leaving the latter animal in your capable hands,” Çrom concluded. “And Serdios is on our way, sort of. You know, Dimensional physics not being my strong suit, it’s not out of our way. And besides,” he looked back at Greyblade again. “You’ve always wanted to visit the Serdios Wonder Fortress. You must have.”
“How were you planning on paying for…” Greyblade started, then sighed at Çrom’s grin. “You brought the Kedlams’ million yachut with you, didn’t you?”
“You’re damn right I did,” Çrom exclaimed. “What was I supposed to do – donate it to the church?”
“Alright,” Greyblade gave up, “Serdios it is. Are we planning on stopping anywhere on the way out?”
“It’s about seven weeks of Portal-hopping,” Çrom said, “so we can take as many breaks as you feel like you might need from me.”
“And after we’re Beyond the Walls?”
“We can still take breaks but we’ll probably have to be careful because it’s a bit more dangerous out there–”
“I mean our route.”
“Well,” Çrom sat back. “There are three main ways to where we’re headed. A lot of little variations that will add or remove a week, but the route out is defined by three different … main sets of Portals, I guess you could say.”
“Okay.”
“One way will take two or three years,” Çrom said, “after we cross over at Serdios.”
“Years?”
Çrom spread his hands and looked back at him. “The Corporation is big,” he said. “Beyond the Walls is infinite. Two years of transit is still pretty amazing, and it’s mainly down to the Fhaste, and some monstrous shortcuts. Getting back will be a lot slower.”
“So what are the faster options?” Greyblade asked, without much hope. “I assume they constitute even more monstrous shortcuts, or you probably would have led with them.”
“Faster? That two-year one, in the Fhaste, that is the fastest. And you’re right, it’s hideously dangerous. I led with it because I figured you’d want them in order of time-effectiveness.”
“Fine,” Greyblade said. Two years. Two years out, almost certainly more than two years back, and however much time it takes the Godfangs to get moving. And the Drake in prison and humanity in decline and Mercy doing who-knows-what in the meantime. While Earth slowly rots. “What about the others, then?”
“The second-fastest, and the route we’re probably going to have to take home because we can’t go the short way with a fleet of Category 9 Convoy Defence Platforms, is going to take us eight. Probably more like fourteen or fifteen, since we’ll be travelling at their speed, not the Highwayman’s. I don’t know a Category 9 Convoy Defence Platform’s top cruising speed though, so I’m not about to guess. And it’ll still be dangerous. The safest way is about a sixty-year round trip–”
“You may not be aware of this, but we’re on a schedule here.”
“I’m as aware as I want to be about this whole thing,” Çrom said. “All I know is what Gabe has told me. You need to find Rosedian’s lost fleet and bring them back to the Four Realms. And yes, I gathered you’re in a big damn hurry. But I’m telling you right now, fifteen or twenty years is an optimistic timetable for this mission. Me knowing more about the mission won’t change that, except to make me feel as bad about it as you do, and I’d rather not feel bad about shit I can’t change. So if you’re in too much of a hurry–”
“Alright,” Greyblade raised his hands. “If there’s absolutely nothing faster…”
“We’re sitting in one of the fastest ships ever made,” Çrom said. “She’ll get us to the edge of Corporate space in seven weeks. After that … look, just be thankful we’re not walking. Walking took me millions of years,” Çrom returned his attention to the controls. “Or so the story goes.”
Greyblade had been trying to come to terms with this possibility, if only in a purely practical sense. There had been whole academic treatises writte
n on the Ballad of Sorry Çrom, mostly by people who probably should have abandoned higher education and found themselves something more useful to do. Greyblade had more or less stopped trying to make sense of it after reading an analysis that had concluded a human walking even a fraction of Sorry Çrom’s supposed epic journey would have taken not millions, but hundreds of billions of years. And the human species hadn’t even been around for millions.
It was safest to assume that the whole thing was a story. Or, since Nnal was an Infinite and could theoretically do anything, a story that had really happened somehow but without any real connection to reality as everyone else knew it.
Terrifying, to be sure. But not exactly the stuff a dependable guide was made of.
Still, if this was the only guide he was going to get … “And you walked to this place where–”
“Past it, actually,” Çrom interrupted. “But yes, I walked. Different Portals. A few shortcuts that … let’s just say they’re not available to us now, and might have just been fictional anyway. And like I said, my walk was before the Godfangs were even commissioned. But I … there are some things I know, that will be useful. And I know where they were headed.”
“Right,” Greyblade muttered, “the Worm Cult Enclave.”
“The Worm Cult Enclave,” Çrom agreed. “Remember, you’ve got this whole mission riding on a story–”
“I’m in no danger of forgetting that, I think,” Greyblade said dryly. “But there are nine of them there? Nine Godfangs? I know the Drake didn’t see them on the I-Spy network precisely–”
“Oh, no,” Çrom shook his head. “Not nine.”
“No?”
“No,” Çrom said calmly, “way more. I mean if I had to guess, there’d be, like, the whole twenty-six of them.”
“What?”
“Well, you know there were twenty-seven Category 9s made,” Çrom explained.
Greyblade nodded. “Rosedian belonged to the school of thought that believed twenty-seven was a mystically important number,” he said, “almost as much so as ten. I just assumed that … well, when I was told that there were nine–”
Çrom raised a hand, not looking back. “Still don’t want to know.”
“But they all left the Corporation?” Greyblade insisted. “Twenty-seven were commissioned, none were lost in the convoys, and only the Destarion was left behind?”
“Famously,” Çrom replied, “the Destarion was the only one to get severely compromised during the post-Worm relocation. And the only one to be left here to take part in other Brotherhood conflicts. The rest – yeah, they’re out there. Probably.”
Greyblade sighed and shook his head. “Well,” he said, “let’s go find them, then.”
Çrom swept his hand across the control panel with what seemed at the time to be unnecessarily flamboyant dynamism, but Greyblade soon realised was the only way to actuate the relative field generator.
The song in the Highwayman’s heart soared.
REALITY, UNREALITY, SOFT-SPACE,
THE HIGHROADS, AND THE LIMINAL
(AN INTERLUDE)
Interdimensional travel was a difficult thing to understand, because Dimensional physics was a difficult thing to understand. Sir Greyblade of the Burning Knights of Brutan the Warrior, certainly, didn’t really try. And he was commanding officer – retired – of a theocratic army larger than the citizenry of a dozen decent-sized empires. He didn’t really need to know about it, any more than he needed to know how relative field generation or Power Plant technology worked. Indeed, he needed to know about it even less than those scientific disciplines, because he might occasionally need to make repairs or replacements to a generator or an adapter, but if there was ever a situation requiring him to affect changes to Dimensional physics, things were irredeemably fucked.
Still, he knew the absolute basics. It didn’t really make him feel safe while travelling across and between Dimensions, but it helped him feel informed unsafe. Which was about the best one could reasonably expect.
For most people, including Greyblade, a single Dimension – a single universe, a single set of physical laws – was more than enough. A universe, after all, was infinite.23 Crossing one, even at the highest registers of relative speed,24 was simply impossible for any known civilisation, Corporate or Alien. Gods might be able to do it, but Gods knew better than to try. One could not fly across one Dimension, into the next, and then to the next. An eternity of eternities would not be enough time for the journey, whether you walked or travelled at a googolplex times the speed of light. And that was even if there weren’t walls in the way.25
This was where Portals, and the Highroads, came in.
When a vessel entered relative speed, the lazy explanation was that it left reality and entered unreality. This was close enough to accurate. The grey void through which a ship traversed from one part of a Dimension to another – all essentially within the reality of a single universe, by way of its flipside – was known as soft-space. This was for various reasons, but again the lazy explanation was that it was because there was no pesky matter around to obliterate a fast-moving and poorly-navigated ship. The rules were unreality-rules, Limbo-rules, rather than the familiar laws of physics. While they were equally unforgiving, the laws of unphysics were considerably more monolithic and didn’t pay much attention to a little speck of field-enclosed grit that was just passing through.
Still, that only covered travel within a single Dimension.
Portals formed a vast network26 of interconnected points that spanned the urverse. Each pair connected either two points within a single Dimension, or a point inside one Dimension to a point inside another Dimension, or a point inside one Dimension to a point outside Dimensional space altogether – a point between Dimensions.
Since the eternal white emptiness into which these latter types of Portals opened was technically not inside Dimensional reality as anyone knew it, the lazy explanation once again was that it was not reality – that it was, in fact, another aspect of Limbo, or unreality. Its similarity to soft-space, or other known regions of ‘classical unreality’, was enough to make this lazy explanation stick and to be honest it didn’t really matter anyway. The white emptiness between Dimensions was called the Liminal, but it had once sported the far more impressive name The Spaces Without.
You could live in the Liminal, at least temporarily. It wasn’t a vacuum – not as was classically understood – wasn’t deleterious to reality-based physics. You could, technically, just drift around in the empty white gulf, although you probably wouldn’t want to do so for very long. There were even settlements out there, of a sort. Strange ones.
When a vessel hit relative speed while travelling through the Liminal, however, there was an accompanying change. Because the Liminal was to extra-Dimensional unreality what normal space was to in-Dimensional reality: it was what you found when you were moving at reality-register speeds. When you actually flipped over into unreality-register speeds, the Liminal void manifested a phenomenon known as the Interdimensional Highroads – or simply the Highroads.
This was another over-simplified visualisation of something staggeringly complex, but it worked. The surreal blue ribbons of the Highroads didn’t really correspond to the precise outline of the Dimensions outside of which they supposedly existed, since such a web would be too vast to navigate. But – thanks in large part to the tireless sacrifice of generation after generation, species after species of Highroads explorers – they formed some kind of charted pattern, and could be travelled. From one Dimension, one could dive into a Portal onto the Highroads, cruise along them for a time, and then Portal back into a Dimension far from the first.
Some cultures referred to the Highroads and the Liminal as though it was a single Dimension, a universe featuring an empty white void that resolved into The Great Map when you reached a certain speed, and theoretically every Dimension was – eventually – accessible through the winding lines of The Great Map. Others still believed that the
Highroads Portals were actually Portals that worked the way they were meant to, reaching into a navigable framework, while ‘normal’ Portals were broken in some natural way so they only had two reality-facing entrances.
It didn’t really matter if either of these versions was the one you chose to believe, since the overall effect was the same.
There were rules. Flying into a Portal, whether in Dimensional space or on the Highroads, was a complex proposition at high registers of relative speed and required considerable precision. Nonetheless, it was possible. It was also dramatically easy to suffer damage or field failure and wind up lost in the Liminal for eternity, or at least that small fragment of eternity required for a mortal to die of exposure or old age or horrifying madness.
But once you started getting into the rules, and began examining the physics and unphysics of Highroads and Liminal transit, that was when the lazy explanations began to unravel.
The lazy explanations had always been just fine for Greyblade.
THE SERDIOS WONDER FORTRESS
They stopped three times on their hike out to the Boundary Dimension known as Serdios, all of them in out-of-the-way but Pinian-friendly settlements in Dimensions of more-or-less-hospitable physical laws.
They stopped only for a matter of hours in each place, usually just long enough to let the Highwayman ‘harmonise’ and for Skelliglyph to stock up on whatever local delicacies and entertainment he might require to see him through the next stretch. Greyblade’s nutritional and upkeep requirements were at once simpler and considerably more heavy-duty than the human’s, but it was a relatively easy matter for them to fill the ship’s stores with everything they both needed.
Greyblade found he was impressed at Çrom’s ability to weather the long march. He knew the seven-week jaunt from the Void Dimension to Serdios was a mere warm-up in comparison to the true march that would begin when they crossed the Boundary, but it was still an encouraging sign.
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