The maelstrom was upon him then, but he drove them back, strangling one cobra-like, his inner forearm striking the carotid so fast that unconsciousness was instantaneous, then a tangled mess of in-fighting until a gap appeared – there – so he broke clear with sweeping forearm blocks that shattered joints, thanks to old-school conditioning, then he drove palm heels into jaws and temples followed by long thrusting kicks to make distance and that was it: five opponents down, one limping away, the other two running.

Calm. Assess.

Before the training officers descended to sort things out – everyone’s tu-ring had received the exercise suspended signal – he reviewed the downed opposition and his own self, going through the protocol, putting his hands inside his clothes, rubbing his torso and groin and neck, and checking for blood on his palms, in case he had been stabbed and not felt it.

Nothing.

His ribs were broken on both sides and his nose was pointing off to his right, against the cheekbone. Trivial, and the only reason he noticed was that two of his attackers had fallen to similar blows, giving up the fight in psychosomatic surrender.

They had not been through the mill with Rhianna Chiang; that was the difference.

However, ‘If you damage your classmates like that again, you’re off the programme,’ the lead instructor, Eira Magnus son (who according to Corinne should have been Magnusdóttir) told Roger during their one to one afterwards, her voice flat and hard in the conference chamber.

‘Ma’am.’

He could have argued that the programme was designed to be harsh, to cause people to fail instead of incrementally building confidence; but she would know that. His response to the chewing out was just one more test, stoicism the key as always.

‘Redeploying drop-outs,’ she said, ‘is someone else’s problem. I don’t care who leaves the programme, or how. Except that’ – with a hint of softening in her voice – ‘when the most promising fighter I’ve seen in years comes along, I want him to succeed. We like strength, and so long as you can keep the aggression hidden in civilised surroundings, maintaining your cover, just keep on doing what you’re doing, and ignore the complaints from your classmates, because there will be a shedload. Understood?’

‘Er, yes, ma’am.’

Not strictly true, but he could dwell on her words later. Attitude in the moment was paramount: right now, she was looking for his determined obedience.

‘Keep the wolf controlled inside you, Roger.’ A momentary hint of a smile: ‘Except when it’s time to slip the leash.’

He nodded, knowing that she was right, that he was the wolf – at ulfr ek em – and control was entirely possible.

‘Resolve the paradox of fighters not fighting,’ she concluded, ‘and you’ll go far. Dismissed.’

‘Ma’am.’

He fastpath rotated out of there.

It could be argued that the only way to excel in the programme was to become monstrous, at least for the duration; but humanity was here as well, and of the few classmates who increasingly admired Roger, the one whose friendship-and-more he appreciated most was Corinne Delgasso. Roger knew from Jed, whom he had not seen in person since entering Tangleknot, that Leeja Rigelle, Roger’s older lover from Molsin, was to be relocated to a realspace orbital, somewhere safe, while Alisha Spalding, his earlier almost-girlfriend from Fulgor, who had forgotten him following cognitive rollback therapy, was officially among the dead; but they belonged to a closed off past.

Eating together in one corner of the refectory, after a chase-the-courier exercise through yet another simulated realspace city, he listened while Corinne criticised her own performance. ‘It’s all right for you,’ she added, ‘being a mudworlder and all, but I can’t get used to the lack of reality-shifts.’ In this morning’s scenario, that problem had led her to run into a setup from which there was no escape. Only Roger drawing off the opposition had allowed her to get away.

‘While a born Labyrinthian has the advantage,’ he told her, ‘that shifts and rotations are pure reflex. You never know where we might have to operate.’

That was true, particularly with the absence of Schenck and his renegade Pilots hanging over everything, forming a threat of unknown – therefore worrying – extent and capability. More than in previous training programmes, the classmates – other than the three who were Shipless – worked hard away from Labyrinth in their ships, addressing ship-to-ship combat as well as the more traditional Tangleknot training in stealth flying and unusual navigation.

Corinne stared down at her food.

‘I’d rather get back to my rack’ – her gaze rose – ‘to recover before the next session.’

‘You want a hand to debrief further?’

‘That’s what I’m thinking of, Blackstone.’

‘Come on, then, Delgasso. Let’s get to it.’

They summoned a fastpath together, stepped in as one, and fell out of the rotation in Corinne’s room with their garments already sloughing off, combat sensitivity serving another purpose as they wrestled each other, laughing, onto the bed.

And began the climb to temporary joy.

TEN

EARTH, 1954 AD

During her four weeks in Birmingham, the place had grown on Gavriela: the house in a leafy, genteel part of Edgbaston, and the redbrick campus court with the clock tower that would have looked at home in Florence. The buildings were different from the Munich of her childhood and the ETH in Zurich (always München and Zürich in her thoughts), yet inside, the labs brought back her youth: parquet floors, display cases filled with scientific instruments of brass and steel, textbooks old and new.

To celebrate the end of rationing, some of the faculty and postgraduate students travelled en masse to one of the new Berni Inns, where they tucked in to solid food that the haute cuisine critics disparaged but which, to poverty stricken PhD students, was worth every penny of the seven-and-six they paid for it.

‘Seven shillings and sixpence will hardly break the bank,’ Anders had said, before raising an eyebrow as he realised his faux pas, because if you were counting the ha’pennies then any expenditure at all was significant.

Gavriela’s enjoyment was spoilt only by the knowledge that her watch team were outside in the night, unable to eat, apart from the lucky team member who got to dine alone, behind a square-edged pillar, keeping her in view. But it was hard to keep her mind on Dmitri and the clandestine world, because something odd had been happening: at the age of forty-seven, she was falling in love – all over again – with physics.

The move of GCHQ from Eastcote to Cheltenham was pending, and if relocating to Gloucestershire was on the cards, then why not somewhere else? A theoretician over thirty was doomed, but age did not constrain experimentalists. Could she? What if she failed to make a change her metaphorical spirit needed?

‘—in the City?’ asked Patrick, a Jamaican post-doc with the most beautiful voice Gavriela had ever heard. ‘The archaeologists, I mean.’

Only yesterday she had passed a boarding-house in Kings Heath bearing the far-too-common sign: No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.

‘Which city? Birming-gum?’ She tried for a Brummie accent, and failed.

‘He means jolly old London,’ said Anders. ‘Threadneedle Street and bowler hats, don’t you know.’ Not that bowlers were unknown among the faculty. ‘And now a Roman temple.’

Too busy with the contents of the departmental library, Gavriela had been ignoring the newspapers; the conversation was making little sense.

‘The Temple of Mithras,’ explained Patrick. ‘Uncovered intact during building work.’

‘Next to one of the so called secret rivers, the underground Thames tributaries.’ Anders nodded to Patrick. ‘It is interesting.’ He smiled. ‘People are saying the place is haunted, a mysterious figure glimpsed at night, that kind of thing.’