She was about to say as much when the newcomer added:

—Ancestral humans and Haxigoji. Brachiating primates. And you still use names?

Kenna felt something akin to a stab of rage, immediately deconstructed and brought under control. This New Man sneered out of fear, his superiority an illusion. The blades, she thought, made him uneasy.

—If you had a name, sir, what would it be?

The man stared at the shields and weapons decorating the hall, then back at her.

—Why, then. Call me Magni.

Kenna bowed her head. He had processed the linguistic/cultural history implied by her name very fast indeed, given how ancient that knowledge was: the tongue known as Norræna was over half a million years dead.

—Welcome, good Magni. You understand why we prepare to fight?

To his pacifist eyes, she suspected, these were disturbingly martial surroundings. Surely, though, Magni and his contemporaries knew what was coming eventually.

—I understand why, Lady Kenna, in half a million years, it would be a good idea to have fled this galaxy. You’ve achieved modern bodies. Why not travel, and see the cosmos?

—You know why. If people always flee, eventually every galaxy will fall.

Magni shrugged in a very human way.

—Everything dies finally. We’ve already left the homeworld behind.

—Yes, you have.

Magni looked surprised, correctly reading the undertones in her words.

—And you’re making use of it?

—Did you think an army could consist of four individuals? Kenna smiled. We will be billions when the time is right. And welcoming to our allies.

For nearly six hundred millennia, she had been refining logosophical models, and there were some she could have deployed now as a form of persuasive rhetoric: those that showed how evolutionary strategies based on fleeing invariably led to an impoverished state, and finally extinction. But Magni would dismiss them as relevant only to others, not to his refined self.

—I really don’t think so.

Magni raised his hand, a languid salute to Roger, Gavriela and Sharp, then spun on one heel, turning the gesture into a geometric rotation cloaked with sapphire light. For a second it glowed; then the light and Magni were gone.

Roger was the first to comment.

—If that’s how the children turned out, I’m not impressed.

—They’ve tried communicating with the darkness. Gavriela was looking where Magni had stood. You can tell they’ve tried and failed.

Sharp’s antlers swung as he shook his head: once a purely human gesture, now natural for him as well.

—Tried and died, I think.

It confirmed what they had predicted. But there was more to think about: the advances of contemporary humanity, apparently negated by fatalism, to judge by Magni’s rejection of fighting at Ragnarökkr. After a moment, Gavriela gestured towards Ulfr’s empty seat.

—Being civilised is not what’s going to save us. The further back you go, the truer the warrior.

—We can’t force his return. Kenna raised her palms. You know that.

Roger and Sharp commented together, a form of resonance occurring ever more frequently as the millennia passed:

—Our preparations are the same, regardless.

—They are indeed. Kenna inclined her head.

—So I’ll check the body halls. Roger’s face looked like diamond. It’s time to speed up the growth.

—It is that, agreed Kenna.

Roger teleported out of the hall.

TWENTY

EARTH, 2034 AD

Christmas was coming and the weather was hot. It might be the northern hemisphere, but this was California, which made its own rules. Lucas was bemused because the only snow in sight was polystyrene in window displays. Thanks-giving (which he mockingly celebrated as Bloody Ungrateful Day) had been spent at Brody’s place. Amy had cooked and Jacqui had helped, because one of the things the half-brothers had in common was culinary ineptitude.

‘I know two full sisters with thirty years difference between their birth dates,’ Amy had said, ‘so I suppose it’s not that weird for you guys. With different mothers and all.’

It was not so much the age gap as the fact of Brody’s existence that still astounded Lucas. And the way that Brody had known their grandmother in her later years, while all Lucas had experienced was strange letters from the past, from before he was born.

‘We should have a cousin, at least one,’ Brody had said. ‘But something happened, something Gran didn’t want to discuss. I’m not sure what it was.’

With three weeks to go before Christmas, Lucas had invited Brody and Amy to spend the weekend with him and Jacqui. They would go out for dinner later – the table at Laughing Benny’s was booked – while for now they loafed on soft couches in the lounge, with dishes of pretzels, nuts and chips on the coffee table, and beers in progress all round.

Half asleep, Amy called up a display on her qPad.

‘A cousin called what, surname wise?’ she said. ‘Wolf, Woods or Gould?’

‘No,’ said Brody. ‘It was Russian, or do I mean Ukrainian? Shimenko.’

A list of results came up, and Amy shook her head. ‘Too much, too vague.’

‘Yeah.’ Lucas pointed his qPad at the big wallscreen, pop-ping up a games menu. ‘What do you fancy, guys?’

‘Narrow it down by cross-links,’ Jacqui told Amy. ‘Related to Woods, then whatever else you can think of.’

A new list came up and Amy shrugged.

‘Still a bit too much. I’ll try again later, maybe.’

‘3-D go, Viking Rampage or CyberTrivia,’ prompted Lucas. ‘What do you think?’

‘Shtemenko,’ said Brody, sitting upright.

‘Do what?’

‘That was the name.’ Brody grinned at Amy. ‘I remember.’

‘There’s still quite a few—Oh, wait.’

Lucas stopped on the verge of selecting Viking Rampage. ‘What have you found?’

‘Something right up your alley.’ Amy gestured at the wallscreen. ‘Can I?’

‘Er, sure.’

What appeared on the screen was the beginning of a scientific paper, the body of its content available for a reasonable price.

AN ANALYSIS OF LEAKED GAMMA-RAY BURSTER EVENT DATA: PROVENANCE AND INTERPRETATION

Barabanshchikova, I.V., Rukovskaya, A.V., Shtemenko, L.A., Fedotova, L.L., Khudorzkina, M.G., Putyatin, A.S., Luzhkov, V.I., Wang, J., and Yagudin, I.G.

Abstract: Following the release of cosmological event observations into the public domain in Arxiv-compliant format, we present a forensic analysis of the data provenance that suggests a high probability (≈97%) of authenticity. In addition, we present Fourier analysis and distance estimating results based on known type-luminosity correlations to give a best estimate of the event’s origin, assuming the authenticity of the data. We conclude that the origin lies at a distance of 420 MLY from Earth, beyond a cosmic void located in the direction of the galactic anti-centre. The authors are aware of the importance of further verifying the observational data.

‘Holy shit,’ said Lucas.

The others looked at him. He had shared something of the events that led to his meeting Gus in the lab at night and sending a graphene memory flake into mu-space, but not everything.

‘The gamma-ray burster event.’ Brody tapped his qPad. ‘If this is our cousin, he’s got similar interests to you, Lucas.’

Amy had searched for intersections between Lucas’s work and the unknown Shtemenko’s.

‘And there she is,’ Brody added, causing a secondary window to pop up on the wallscreen. ‘How do you pronounce that?’

Lucas was about to attempt sounding out the Cyrillic – it read Людмила Артуровна Штеменко – though his Russian vocabulary was zero, but Brody tapped again, replacing the words with Ludmila Arturovna Shtemenko.