‘Is there something you’ve not been telling me?’ he asked.

Corinne was supposed to be Logistics Liaison, part of the support channel between the Admiralty Quartermaster Division and the civilian Far Reach Centre. Doing genuine work while spying on her fellow Pilots, a counterespionage role designed to detect attempted infiltration by any of Schenck’s renegades or – worse, because harder to detect – dupes recruited by renegade sympathisers and controlled via cut-outs. It had been a convincing story.

Lying bitch, he thought, and laughed.

‘I’m strategy and planning,’ she said. ‘Not combat.’

‘I ran twenty kilometres in training this morning,’ he told her, gesturing at the now-bare floor. ‘And did more pushups than I can remember. I didn’t really need another workout.’

‘That’s too bad.’ She made the raised-eyebrow, dipped-chin invitation he knew so well. ‘Because I had another endurance test in mind.’

‘Oh, did you?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘You know the Service motto: Always up for it.’

‘That’s not the motto, Roger.’

‘It isn’t? Then it should be.’

She took hold of his hand.

‘Come and show me,’ she said.

Nine ‘wings’ of five ships each played combat hunt-and-tag against each other during the tenday-long pre-deployment countdown, while in the barracks, the forty-five men and women spent their non-training hours clowning around, conducting ambushes with foam weapons and playing practical jokes.

Onlookers from other arms of the fleet were clearly disconcerted by the lack of serious demeanour from these legendary élite warriors, wondering just how the myths could have so distorted the embarrassing reality.

That puzzled dismay continued until an Admiral’s team of aides unwittingly brought live weapons into the visitors’ area: within three seconds, every one of them was face down, stripped of weaponry and petrified of the men and women kneeling on them and yelling. Several lost bladder control, which would have been hidden by modern garments, but this was a formal visit and they were wearing traditional jumpsuit uniforms, made of simple dumb fabric.

There was ironic humour but zero clowning on the final day, when the entire squadron slipped out of Labyrinth: the commencement of Operation Periscope, commanded by Ingrid Rhames, who chose to fly near the rear of the formation. The role of squadron leader was taken by Lee Nakamura, Rhames’ second-in-command; the others with experience approved of both officers, while the three newbies, Roger included, took their word for it.

It was a long and difficult geodesic, impossible for pursuers to follow and, with luck, impossible to effectively surveil as well. More direct routes were available, but none offered the chance of sneaking all the way to their destination and, if they were really lucky, making their escape the same way, with no one the wiser.

Only a tiny minority of Pilots and ships had the stamina, expertise and will to fly a trajectory like this; but no one in the squadron allowed their ego to surface. This was, in a very real sense, just another day at work. And that attitude was the reason they would win.

Though winning without losses was not guaranteed.

A femtosecond-duration blip was the only transmission as they neared the transit zone.

This is it, my love.

You’re beautiful, you know that?

Roger smiled as the transition occurred, golden void replaced by realspace slamming into existence all around; except it was not blackness dotted with stars in the way one normally experienced. Everything shone, and it would have been disconcerting but they had practised, so they kept their formation and slipped into a hidden zone behind a blazing sun, just one more star amid a magnificent profusion, a billion stars pouring out their energy, as if in simple joy at their existence.

From here, Schenck’s renegade base could not be seen. For the moment, that was good, because it worked both ways: they double- and triple-checked, and confirmed the absence of lookouts or surveillance drones. So far they were unobserved.

Nakamura sent a signal blip, and the squadron moved out.

Slipped back into mu-space for the final approach.

THIRTY-FIVE

VACHSS STATION, VIJAYA ORBIT, 2166 AD

‘They hate me,’ Jared told her, ‘because I smell funny. Please help me, Aunt Rekka.’

Yoga be damned: a migraine was pulsing over Rekka’s right eye, refusing to diminish no matter how calmly she breathed. This trip was going dreadfully wrong.

The new orbital station, which would eventually be in geo-synch above Mint City, where Sharp had died – had sacrificed himself – was filled with a mixture of Haxigoji and humans. This was to have been a happy reunion, Rekka’s first meeting for nearly twenty years with Bittersweet, whom she had not seen since Singapore, and her first return to Vijaya itself. The world whose name she had chosen – first contact privilege, a practice since revoked by UNSA. It had been fully twenty years since her time with dear, courageous Sharp.

Instead, here was Jared nearly grown up – aged nineteen – and in trouble for flaring up literally, as only a Pilot could: using a bioluminescent flash to blind four Haxigoji who had grown perturbed by Jared’s presence for reasons no one had explained, not to any human’s satisfaction.

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to do,’ said Rekka. ‘I am helping you, Jared.’

Her protests to the on-board staff, that Jared had been frightened, a young Pilot away from Earth on a study trip, had caused massive debate among the Haxigoji – which they carried out with translator torcs turned off, so no humans could understand. Meantime, the senior human officials were furious with Rekka for the upset she had caused; she in turn raged back at them, because she had known Jared since he was a baby, and she was the person who had made first contact with the Haxigoji – didn’t they know? – so why the hell was tension ramping up on both sides over an incident that could only be due to cross cultural misunderstanding, and what kind of trained personnel were they if they could not sort out such a mishap, and prevent it from escalating to anywhere near the stage it had reached . . .

Except that later, with time to herself, and now face to face with Jared in the cabin he had been confined to, it grew on her that she had known Jared when he was a baby, not since he was a baby. The young Pilot in front of her was a stranger.

Of course he had lived in the Kyoto school since Rudolf and Angela had died, and his visits home to Singapore had grown ever less frequent over the years. When he made the move to ShaanxiThree, Rekka found out only by administrative accident: she was copied in on the full itinerary for the two Senators Highashionna as they made another tour of UNSA sites in Asia, and it turned out that they were spending time with select young Pilots in China – not quite protégés, but youngsters they had mentored from time to time – one of whom was listed as Jared Schenck, in training at the biggest base in Shaanxi Province. Rekka had thought he was still living in Japan.

‘I can’t believe that they think I smell,’ said Jared now.

His tone implied that the Haxigoji were beasts and he was slumming it by being here.

I really don’t know you, do I?

Rekka’s infostrand, worn as a bracelet, vibrated against her wrist. She tapped it, and a tiny holosigil representing Bitter-sweet was projected in the air.

‘I’ll try to sort something out,’ Rekka told Jared, not answering the call yet. ‘All right? So you can get off this station without fuss.’

‘Well, good.’ He made no move to step forward and hug her. ‘Good.’

She nodded, slid the door open, and stepped out into the corridor. Several male Haxigoji, bulky with muscle, guarded each end. She looked at them, then locked the door behind her.