‘No realspace culture has managed to stay peaceful throughout its existence,’ said Rhianna. ‘Why should we be any different?’

Away from the Admiralty, this might have been idle conversation; but in these surroundings, it carried import. The idea of Labyrinth going to war was frightening; the idea of Labyrinth losing was pure abomination.

Fighting is bad, but when it becomes inevitable, one thing is necessary above all else.

Winning.

There was no such thing as telepathy, not as portrayed in weak-minded realspace holodramas, but Uncle Max on occasion came frighteningly close. For a time they sat on low, soft chairs at an oblique angle to each other, the cream cat on Rhianna’s lap and the ginger-and-white on Max’s, and it was pleasant even though it felt like play-acting, because they were not a normal family – to the extent the concept made sense in Labyrinth – and as an agent, the only extra privilege she might expect was this: if he were going to throw her to the wolves, he would tell her in advance.

But the hint of mind-reading occurred when he asked, with one hand on the tomcat’s back, whether Rhianna spent much time dwelling on the nature of past, present and future, a mystery that was never resolved, merely recast as ever more intriguing questions as scientific knowledge progressed.

‘Like destiny and predestination?’ she said. ‘Why ever do you ask?’

Alert for minutiae of expression that might indicate Max knew all about Roger’s dreams – that there had been surveillance in place when she worked with Roger on Deltaville – she detected no particular subterfuge when Max answered: ‘Just natural thoughts, because of a new world that’s opening up. A very philosophical culture, although philosophy is not quite the right word. They have some interesting linguistic terms for knowledge, epistemology and research.’

‘How very . . . academic, Uncle Max.’

‘All right.’ He smiled, gently stroking the cat with one huge hand, his forearm muscles like load bearing cables. ‘I’ve a strong strategic interest in Nulapeiron, but there’s something else I want to talk through first.’

Holos blossomed in a semi-circle in front of Rhianna. On her lap, the cream-coloured cat twitched her ears. The central holo caught Rhianna’s attention: Haxigoji shuffling into place, as if to protect a Pilot from human security personnel. Other holovolumes showed the event triggering the security reaction: using tu-ring weaponry to blast a young man into oblivion. But there was no mystery in that – not to Rhianna, who had spent a long time on Molsin poring over footage from Fulgor, analysing the appearance of the Anomaly.

‘The Pilot showed initiative,’ she said. ‘By the time that bugger’s eyes started glowing blue, it would have been too late.’

‘Very astute of you. The on-board personnel took a lot longer to convince, and there are still some legal hoops to jump through before Pilot Goran gets free.’

‘Jed Goran? Roger’s friend?’

‘The very one,’ said Max. ‘Which is part of how he reacted so fast: he’d seen footage of the young man before. Someone Roger knew.’

‘A coincidence, that he should happen to be there?’

‘More like causal linkages we don’t know, but can guess. Perhaps there was even some buried fragment of awareness in Rick Mbuli’s mind – that’s the dead man – that made him volunteer to be one of the Anomalous components that travelled on Schenck’s ship.’

‘That’s two nasty thoughts right there,’ said Rhianna. ‘That the poor bastards have some human feeling left, and that Schenck transported a bunch of them from Fulgor.’

‘We know his ship went there and left again, and if Mbuli was on board, why not others?’

Rhianna did not say so you’re tightening up patrols around the realspace worlds, and infiltrating their immigration agencies and the like. Commenting on the obvious wasn’t her style; nor was it Uncle Max’s.

Speaking of which, what exactly was she missing?

‘Oh, bollocks.’ She had never needed to watch her language in front of him. ‘Now I remember why you’re the boss. People here are frightened of you because they don’t know you, Uncle Max.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, because if they understood how sharp you really are, they’d be too shit-scared to work for you at all. That footage is ambiguous, but this one off to the side is significant.’

Max smiled at her.

‘I guess I remember why you’re my favourite niece.’

The holo footage she pointed out was of Haxigoji crowding a flexible tunnel leading to a mu-space ship’s control cabin. The field of view was skewed but the Haxigoji’s purpose was clear: to prevent one Pilot Guy Holland from leaving his vessel and coming on board Vachss Station. The question was, were the Haxigoji in contact with their colleagues in the lounge where the refugees had arrived?

Or were they simply able to sense that there was something wrong about Holland?

‘Send Roger,’ she said. ‘He can check it out.’

Max looked surprised.

‘I genuinely hadn’t thought of that. Out of sight in Tangle-knot, and quite out of mind.’

‘He’s close to graduating from Phase One. I’d be surprised if he’s not acing the course.’

Not guesswork: she had contacts among the staff.

‘It’s early to put him in the field, even if he is your protégé.’

‘Go on, Uncle Max. You know you want to.’

They laughed hard then, enough for the cats to look up disgusted, and disappear into simultaneous fastpath rotations. But Max’s mood changed again, as he pointed out another option.

‘We could let the word spread, about Haxigoji possibly being able to sense the darkness. Let Schenck get wind of it, and we’ll be waiting when the renegades turn up in strength to bomb the planet.’

‘Or keep quiet, and with luck gain a huge advantage, an entire species with Roger’s ability. Instead of relying on a guess about Schenck’s strategic thinking.’

It had come to this: discussing the fate of a human-equivalent-species in terms of military advantage, and no hint of ethical considerations. They talked over the implications for a while, then Max turned back to his main objective here, the new world – and experiment in deliberate social engineering – called Nulapeiron.

He came at the subject in a roundabout linguistic way, via the historic distinction between if and when – in Neudeutsch, significantly, wenn and wann – and Novanglic’s semantic colouring of conditional logic in the sentence construction of if <condition> then <do calculation>. It was not the first time Rhianna had thought that a marginally happier upbringing might have produced Max the schoolteacher, a more contented man.

‘The point,’ said Max in Novanglic, ‘is the extent to which then is temporal. To which logic implies computation. The statement if it rains, then put on a coat, implies the ability to test whether it is raining, and afterwards – in chronological sequence – to put on a coat, because otherwise the logic is semantically ill formed. Or is it?’

Rhianna stayed with Aeternum when she answered. ‘Which means computation implies timeflow, and we could spin out nuances for ever in realspace languages.’

‘On Nulapeiron, that’s exactly the kind of game that the aristocracy like to play. They’re creating a very intellectual élite, or so the reports imply.’

‘And you want me to be an agent-in-place among people like that?’ But Max’s argument had been subtle, because the point had been to demonstrate to Rhianna that she was capable of following such thoughts, and so suited to the mission. ‘Haven’t you got some would-be intellectual who’d feel right at home there?’

‘I don’t want someone who’ll kick back and enjoy themselves,’ said Max. ‘There’s a rumour that a certain Count Avernon – they’ve already started using such titles – has an interest in some weird and speculative research, and if it were any other world I’d probably ignore it.’