Now, in a gold-appointed lounge in Max’s apartments, they lounged back on flowcouches, Pavel and Max, sipping daistral and looking physically relaxed. The operations they discussed were serious, however.

‘Shireen Singh worked well on her last two assignments,’ Pavel told Max, ‘so I made her team leader on Coolth. There’s no news on tracking down the leak, though.’

Someone had betrayed shipping routes and times to the Zajinets – two Pilots had died – and analysis suggested that one or other of their common destinations was likely to be the location of the leak, most likely Coolth, a world of ice and oceans, with only a few town-sized research stations inhabited by humans.

‘I’m sure you’ll sort it out.’ Max’s tone suggested this was trivia, beneath his notice.

‘So I’m considering a decoy op,’ said Pavel. ‘With Jed Goran as the decoy, which is why I mentioned it.’

Jed was now Clara’s husband, security-vetted but not trained, increasingly involved in Admiralty work.

‘Clara’s a great asset.’

And never mind Jed’s safety, Pavel noted.

‘Agreed, Max. I won’t do anything to jeopardise her . . . well-being. Her concentration.’

‘Tell me more about the last Council session. I mean their attitudes and so on, not the specifics.’

‘Zajac and Whitwell’ – in private with Max, Pavel did not use the men’s ranks – ‘are behaving in character. Bluster and belligerence from one, cool logic from the other.’

‘No need to ask which is which.’ Max gestured, ordering a fresh daistral, which his couch extruded. He broke the cup off the narrow tendril, and took a sip. ‘Not bad. And the split among the others?’

‘Fifty-fifty, if we’re talking Zajac versus Whitwell. Get them to agree on a given matter, and you’ll have unanimous support around the table.’

‘And have they seen this?’ Max gestured a holovolume into view. ‘A sighting from mu-space, close to a sheaf of insertion points suitable for transit to Molsin.’

Pavel examined the ambiguous readings: a fast-moving ship, corkscrewing through an extreme geodesic, blurring surveillance either through desperate urgency or considered daring.

‘It’s not a Zajinet.’

That was the primary purpose of such set-ups: looking for Zajinet ships approaching realspace worlds from mu-space.

‘The analysts think,’ said Max, ‘that the Pilot might be Holland. Guy Holland.’

It took Pavel a second to recall the name.

‘Shit.’

‘Agreed.’

Holland was the Pilot who had carried Rick Mbuli, once Roger Blackstone’s college friend and more latterly an Anomalous component, to Vachss Station in orbit around Vijaya. And had subsequently escaped to Siganth, followed by Roger, who came back reporting that Siganth was now a hellworld with an Anomaly of its own – or an extended part of the same Anomaly as Fulgor: no one had yet decided for sure.

‘If he’s doing the same on Molsin as he intended on Vachss Station—’

‘An SRS squadron is already en route,’ said Max. ‘There’s no time for undercover trickiness, nor an all-out invasion fleet.’

A full attack fleet would take a handful of tendays to organise at best, even with planners using time distortion layers within Labyrinth, and ships using odd geodesics to make the initial rendezvous.

‘But deploying special forces—’

‘Is under way, Colonel.’

‘Yes, sir.’ After a moment, Pavel added, ‘Zajac will love it, the old gung-ho romantic. Probably tell the Council how much he wishes he were going with them.’

‘And Whitwell may well disagree,’ said Max. ‘Unlike Zajac, Whitwell actually was special forces, back in the day. Saw hard action, too.’

‘He was? Not on his public record . . . Besides, I didn’t think we had much for them to do before now, apart from play hard in their training.’

‘Not since you became a department chief. But you’d be surprised how often in the past a swift covert action, military action, was the only way to avoid long-term misery.’

Pavel nodded. Seven standard years at his current level of security clearance, and there were still things to learn.

‘You know Roger Blackstone passed selection, Max.’ Aeternum allowed the explicit construction of sentences that were simultaneously question and statement. ‘His posting on Vijaya was overt, or reasonably so, compromising his ability to operate covertly. And in any case he did not want a long-term undercover realspace assignment. So he asked for the transfer.’

The selection process spanned half a subjective year, some of it spent in quicktime layers of Labyrinthine reality, for those who made it all the way to the final trials.

‘He’s turning out to be different from his father,’ said Max. ‘Carl would have shunned special forces, or anything resembling their work. Young Roger’s not on the Molsin mission, is he?’

Either Max was not keeping special track of the lad, or he was but did not want Pavel to know it.

‘No,’ said Pavel. ‘But last time I checked, they were considering him for the other deployment.’

‘The reconnaissance op?’

This time Pavel thought he detected a hint of false surprise. Max did know what Roger Blackstone was up to, Pavel was almost sure of it.

‘That op, yes. I don’t like it, Max. I hope they all come back from it alive.’

Max closed his eyes, thoughts hidden, then opened them.

‘It would make a nice change,’ he said.

Twelve silver-bodied attackers lay on the floor, terminated. Roger had put them down fast, and without emotion, largely thanks to the integration of his higher cognitive self – recognising the moistness of the corridor walls for what they were, areas of permeability behind which the enemy waited to burst through – with his reptilian core, the heart of every human brain that people disconnect from at their peril. The in-between portion of his mind, the mammalian, emotional part, had not been required; later he might process his feelings, but in the moment they would only have slowed him down.

Like any well-trained attack team, they had come from simultaneous angles. And so he had responded by spinning and manoeuvring, geometry the medium of his artistry, so that only one could reach him at a time, and he prevented those single attacks by pre-emptively shutting them down: defeating a tackle by combining a half sprawl with a driving elbow to the spine; collapsing a knee with a thrust kick, a fatal neck-crank from behind to follow; another knee destroyed with a whipping circular kick, a thumb ripping an eyeball, spinning the attacker into one of its comrades; then a blizzard of crunching, whirling, thrusting and smashing them, taking them out. Then it was done, and he could disengage.

Isolation period: 2:17:00 hrs

It was regulations: the holo indicated the length of time he was confined to barracks, prevented from mixing with other people – particularly civilians – before he could release his killing rage and act like a civilised person. But telemetric scans were clearly updating the system, because a second later the display read:

Isolation period complete

The safety precautions were standard for all personnel, but special forces were required to recover faster than that. In Roger’s case – he had a brief mental image of a snarling, long-haired warrior with axes in hand, then it was gone – he could snap the rage off when he needed to, or simply experience no rage at all, as in this ambush.

His attackers’ silver bodies melted into the floor.

‘Not as sloppy as I expected.’ A woman’s voice. ‘You’ve got better, darling. I mean, even better than before.’

Corinne, his on-off lover since Tangleknot days, entered the corridor.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ said Roger. ‘That lot was a present from you, was it?’

‘Sort of a welcome-on-board present, dear Roger.’

He had been heading for his quarters, with studying on his mind, when he had noticed the glistening walls and the attack erupted into whirling violence.