That latter seemed more likely to Roger. He was trained to continue thinking while danger or potential danger threatened, but all the while, sour regret and mourning swirled through him. He had been with these recruits for half a standard year, and liked them all no matter how tough he was with them, and Crisp had been one of the best.

Nectarblossom’s huge double-thumbed hand clasped Roger’s shoulder.

‘I’ll tell the others the test is cancelled,’ she said. ‘And explain why.’

She went off, ceremonial tabard rustling against the silk garments beneath, dressed for a different kind of eventuality to this tragedy, poor Crisp’s body lying sightless on the deck.

There’s always another way to look at things.

Dad had drilled that dictum into him. When you had good reason to mourn, you must mourn: using cognitive techniques to bypass such a process would make one inhuman. But in perspective shifts lie the possibility of future resolution: as a heuristic, there are always three ways (or more) to view a situation.

Crisp was dead, and Roger would mourn him.

You were a good person.

And if Roger could find a way to kill Morik undetected, he would do that too.

You were—

He realised what his subconscious had already noticed, the reason he had remembered Dad’s words about perspective shifts: because Crisp’s death had another implication.

The Haxigoji could not be suborned by the darkness.

Better than human.

If they could not fight it off, they reacted at a deep cellular level – the evidence was in the shifting, coloured holo images surrounding Crisp’s body – shutting down all the way into death.

Roger would have to fly to Labyrinth.

But first he summoned the most experienced of the team leaders, explained his thinking about Crisp, and told her to pass the word on to the others, because if something happened to him, this news needed to reach the Admiralty.

Then he braced himself for the painful part: rejoining Nectarblossom and the remaining recruits. For even with the strategic importance of what he had learned, these were his people and he had to mourn with them.

THIRTY

EARTH, 1956 AD

Gavriela punished Rupert by insisting they meet at Imperial, where they sat in a lecture theatre in the Huxley building listening to her friend Jane talk about warfare among ants, Jane’s words being illustrated with bizarre and gruesome colour slides. The point was that Rupert wanted Gavriela to debrief while she wanted to go to Oxford to pick up Carl – she had flown into Heathrow from Tempelhof late last night – so she compromised by agreeing to talk but refusing to go to Headquarters on Broadway.

Rupert sat with elegant legs crossed, his trousers steam-pressed with knife-edge creases, and gave every sign of enjoying Jane’s lecture, which had not been Gavriela’s intention.

Several slides showed African termites, globitermes sulfureus, squirting sticky yellow fluid from their mouths. ‘They eject the nasty stuff,’ Jane told the audience, ‘pumped from two dorsal glands, and it snags up enemy soldier termites. The termites doing the ejecting are tangled up with the enemy. Guess what they do then?’

A few grins showed among the biologists, while most of those from other disciplines looked intrigued, then half-amused, half-horrified when Jane pushed the next slide into projector. The camera had caught the termites in mid-explosion, fluid and guts everywhere.

‘They entangle themselves with the enemy, and blow themselves up,’ Jane went on. ‘Or to put it another way, there’s nothing unnatural about kamikaze behaviour. Here’ – she changed slides once more – ‘we have campanotus ants. I took this picture in Malaysia. Liquid explosive in their mandibles, and again they blow themselves up, usually taking out multiple enemy ants from other colonies. Everyone here knows that war is terrible, but compared to these chaps, human beings are amateurs.’

Then she sidetracked, perhaps to give temporary relief from pictures of insectile gore.

‘One of the interesting theoretical questions,’ she continued, ‘is whether the behaviour of an individual ant or termite can be viewed as altruism, in the same sense in which a mother bird will die to defend her chicks, or a chimpanzee will fight to defend youngsters in the same group who are not her offspring. Does self-sacrifice in war spring from the same Darwinian imperative that gives rise to family love?’

Everyone in the audience grew still, because no one had been untouched by the war that ended a decade before. For a few, it had been the making of them as determined and courageous adults; for all, the experience had involved tragedy.

And Gavriela knew better than most how war results in scientific and medical advances, because nothing concentrates the mind better than an enemy determined to kill you; although without the subsequent peace, there would be no way to capitalise on new understanding.

Jane finished with some cheerful thoughts and slides.

‘Here we see various weaver ants, genus oecophylla, who are nearly all female. Sorry chaps, but they only need a few males for the purpose of impregnating the queens. And when it’s time to go to war, they turn mature workers, not youths, into soldiers. In other words,’ she added, ‘it’s their old women they send to fight, so you young gentlemen, consider yourselves warned.’

Then she grinned at the audience, who laughed and gave louder applause than most lectures received. The subsequent questions were good-natured, and the answers informative, and Rupert paid attention until the end. Finally Gavriela and Rupert donned coats and left the building, because they could talk while walking.

Yesterday she had still been in Berlin, and Rupert needed her considered opinion on what had happened during the meeting at the café on Alt-Moabit.

‘Colonel Dmitri bloody Shtemenko,’ she told him, ‘had no intention of coming over to us, in my considered opinion. He was trying to find out where Ursula is, so to that extent she’s a leverage point. But it’s as if . . .’ She considered her words. ‘As if we’ve stolen one of his possessions, not a person who’s precious to him. Campanotus might blow themselves up out of love for their fellow termites, but Shtemenko is a bit further down the evolutionary ladder.’

Rupert gave a twist of the mouth at the comparison, and tapped the pavement with the tip of his brolly as they continued to walk, heading towards Hyde Park. A Vespa scooter burbled past, producing a farting noise from its exhaust, and Rupert surprised Gavriela with a passable Goons imitation: ‘Damn those curried eggs!’

Then he added, ‘What about the factor we can’t write in the reports?’

Gavriela knew what Rupert meant. ‘The darkness seems weaker in him, I think. But he’s as devious as ever. We should keep Ursula away from him.’

‘Do you want to look after her, your niece?’

That surprised Gavriela enough for her to stop walking.

‘I would,’ she said after a moment, ‘except that would make it easier for Shtemenko to find her. An evil stepfather isn’t funny, not when he’s a KGB colonel, and never mind the darkness.’

‘You’re right,’ said Rupert. ‘But I’ll keep you informed of her situation, perhaps minus the specifics.’

‘That might be best.’

They walked on, and Rupert asked, ‘Do you think Carl would like to be a spy when he grows up?’

‘I bloody well hope not,’ said Gavriela.

They smiled together, old frictions seeming irrelevant.

‘Fancy a spot of tea?’ asked Rupert.

‘Yes, I think I do.’

Paddington Station was a cavern of steam, the engines black and powerful-looking; and once the journey was under way, Gavriela was content to let the rattle of the carriage lull her into a doze all the way to Oxford, where the chill evening air brought her awake as she waited for a taxi that would take her to Abingdon. It took her along the old streets, among sandstone buildings she knew well, and finally out to Rose and Jack’s house, where the new gas fire was hissing, warm and orange and friendly. Rose poured tea from a pot encased in a knitted cosy, and the three adults caught up on gossip while waiting for Carl to appear.