‘Exercise is part of it, stuff you can do in your room.’ Thanks to his Fulgidus education, Roger was able to tailor the data via subliminal commands while continuing to speak. ‘You will need to practise fighting techniques as well.’

Some of his words were pitched as covert commands. The ware, now loaded in the boy’s tu-ring, would alter his bedroom at home, extruding partial fighting mannequins from the flowmetal walls, altering the timeflow and acoustic properties so that no one would know what he was up to. There was also the matter of inspiration – and Roger grinned as he discovered copies of Fighting Shadows episodes stored in his tu-ring’s deep memory. He had thought his youthful self’s favourite holodrama lost for ever, along with his world.

There was a storyline called Ambush that would save Roger having to tell the boy how this should play out. After months of training – preferably a standard year, mean-geodesic – it would be time to forestall a group ambush by taking them out, one by one, until the threat was done.

It was the kind of harsh truth people with no experience preferred to ignore.

‘Which means you’ll also have time to study and have fun,’ Roger concluded, ‘because there’s more to life than combat, OK?’

A part of him thought what if there isn’t? but that was for an adult in wartime. And even so, there had to be something worth fighting for.

The boy blinked at him.

‘I’ll do it.’

‘You have my respect.’ With solemnity, Roger extended his fist, and they bumped knuckles. ‘Success.’

It was a benediction. He watched as the boy summoned a rotation – with more aplomb and accuracy than his attackers – and disappeared into it. Then a female voice came from behind Roger.

‘Good for you.’

He whirled, taking in the lithe form.

‘Rhianna? What are you doing here?’

‘I thought I’d take my boy to school, what with it being his first day and all.’

‘Your b—? Shit.’

She meant him, and Tangleknot.

‘Now, now. No cursing, son.’

Rhianna Chiang was barely old enough to be his biological mother, but after their training on Molsin, you could say she had enabled the creation of Roger as he was now. He remembered their first sparring, when he had tapped out as she locked on an armbar – and Rhianna had ignored his signal of submission, continuing her leverage until the arm snapped through, because she was not teaching him a sport, or how to give up.

Because limits were there to be pushed through and destroyed.

‘You don’t want to be late,’ she added. ‘Not on your first day.’

‘No, ma’am.’ He smiled. ‘I certainly don’t.’

‘So we’ll go together.’

Rhianna raised her hands, summoning a fastpath to take them both.

To his new beginning. To Tangleknot.

Tangleknot disappointed, but only in a single regard: on his first day, Roger had hoped for advanced sabotage-and-silent-killing training. But after navigating through the twisted topological transformations that physical entry entailed, where the academy’s defences could have destroyed them at any stage, he and Rhianna separated outside an interview room. His first mission was to get through a start-of-course interview, and he knew without being told that he could be kicked out at any time.

The welcoming committee comprised two men and a woman; they gave their worknames as Havelock, Deutsch and Palmer.

‘Growing up on Fulgor,’ said Deutsch, leading the questioning, ‘how did that make you feel about the ordinary humans around you?’

‘I needed to hold on to my, um, self-image in secret.’ Roger wanted to explain his world to people who could have no conception of it. ‘They’re all impressive, especially the Luculenti and their . . .’ He noticed a twitching smile from Palmer. ‘All right, I had an unconscious bias, a part of me that thought I was superior, but my point is that I learnt metacognition via the Fulgidus education system.’

‘The people your father died attempting to save. By fetching a rescue fleet.’

‘Yes.’ Roger did not try to prevent his voice from thickening. ‘And if I achieve a fraction of what Dad did, I’ll be happy.’

‘Fame and glory, then?’ Palmer looked intense.

Mum and Dad’s funeral had been a state occasion.

I’d rather you were still alive.

But they weren’t, so he would have to carry on.

‘It’s the work that matters.’ He stated it as an assumption: that he would be an intelligence officer. ‘Seems to me, most of the time, my success will depend on people not knowing what I’ve done.’

‘And what if we had moved against Fulgor, because we had to?’

‘Like bombing the planet to pre-empt the Anomaly?’ Roger remembered the first thought that had come into his mind on seeing Labyrinth: I would die to keep you safe. But his answer was more complicated than that. ‘The person I am now is a hundred per cent loyal to Labyrinth. The events that ended Fulgor are part of the process that made me. For me, now, a conflict of interest is impossible. And’ – he turned to stare at the wall on his left, at a surface that looked like pale apricot marble – ‘you obviously know I’m telling the truth.’

The other man, Havelock, gave a narrow faced smile.

‘Very astute,’ he said. ‘And besides the deepscan array, what else do you notice?’

In this place, it was impossible to lie. At least without a level of training Roger had yet to undergo.

‘May I?’ he raised a finger to create a holo sketch.

‘Carry on,’ said Havelock.

‘You have weapons arrays here, here, here’ – he drew the room as a blue frame outline, the weaponry in red – ‘and here, not to mention whatever it is you’re carrying, ma’am.’

The woman, Palmer, gave the tiniest of smiles.

‘Do you see yourself as more of an intelligence analyst, Pilot Blackstone, or an agent in the field?’

‘I hadn’t thought it would be my decision,’ said Roger. ‘But fieldwork, definitely. I believe I can work effectively on real-space worlds for extended periods of time.’

Stating the obvious.

‘Cut and thrust among the boardrooms of commerce,’ said Deutsch. ‘Is that the milieu you’re aiming for?’

It was where Dad had spent much of his time on Fulgor, after all.

‘I’ll go where I’m needed.’ Roger would rather fight the darkness, but how could a single person without resources do that? What would it even entail? Bombing the hellworld of Fulgor, if any dared approach that close? Wasting his entire life searching the other worlds for that bitch Helsen? ‘I’m not old enough to be taken seriously in those circles. But later, when I have the experience, I can do it.’

He concluded by using the parasubjunctive definite future tense, simultaneously subtle and emphatic in a way no real space language could emulate. And there was something else, an element of faith involved in submitting oneself to Tangleknot: they would not, could not, tell him about the work they intended he should do on graduating. His words implied awareness of the paradox.

‘So you’re ready for hard work and pain?’ said Palmer.

‘I am.’

‘Then welcome to Tangleknot.’

Reality swirled, taking him to the heart of the academy, to the harsh magnificence that was Tangleknot Core: barracks and many-dimensioned landscapes and simulation halls where the threats were real enough that it was possible to die, and sometimes people did. It was a place of dog-eat-dog rivalry and also blood-brothers-until-death camaraderie; a torturous hell which could be the culmination of a driven per son’s dreams; where a strong student might, with sufficient drive, become more powerful than even the most imaginative neophyte thought possible.

A place where the price of success was everything.

FOUR

EARTH, 778 AD

The people in the village were targets, nothing else. The raid itself, however, was more than a day in the life of a reaver band: it was Fenrisulfr’s first test as battle chief. The prior training, led by him, had been subtle: drilling the fighters in slipping techniques as well as sprinting onslaughts, using individual combat as a metaphor for manoeuvring the entire band. They had taken to it only because of Fenrisulfr’s own ferocity, and the berserkergangr lying just beneath the surface of his every movement, every twitch.