‘Sorry.’ She opened the call from Bittersweet. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’

‘I’ve just arrived on board.’

The words sounded flat, though the comms net was capable of transmitting the full emotional range of scent-speech as translated by the Haxigoji torcs.

‘Our shuttle had to wait,’ Bittersweet added, ‘because of the passenger container.’

‘What container?’

‘It has humans aboard, including a senator. They are waking up very angry.’

This did not make sense, apart from the obvious part about waking up: passengers coming out of delta-coma, after a Pilot had dropped them off.

‘Not a Senator Higashionna,’ said Rekka. ‘Not one of them.’

For a moment, she thought she was being stupid, expecting Bittersweet to know people’s names. But Bittersweet answered: ‘No, a Senator Margolis. Is this important, Rekka?’

‘I don’t . . . It would have been a strange coincidence, that’s all.’

‘Then please come to the docking lounge.’

‘Yes, I will.’

The comm session ended.

I’ve never been so confused.

But her questions about the Higashionnas derived from a hot Arizona day, back when Sharp was still on Earth, and they had watched Simon’s brother Gwillem doing his aikido demonstration. Senators Robert and Luisa Higashionna had been there as VIPs. Afterwards, watching them depart in a TDV, Sharp had seemed puzzled by Rekka’s lack of reaction towards them.

‘Do you not taste their evil?’ he had asked her.

‘Evil?’

‘Can you not smell dark nothing?’

She had been puzzled at the time, but had never forgotten his words.

Do you not taste their evil?

Another vessel hung near Vachss Station, maintaining a watch on the docked shuttle and eavesdropping on the in-station comms net. This vessel was shining and fast-looking, her central body pure silver, her delta wings copper and crossed with silver. Her Pilot had obsidian eyes, black-on-black, while another sat in the control cabin alongside her: an older Pilot, grey-haired, with metal sockets where his eyes had been before the surgery.

The latter was humming to himself as he listened in on the signals. Finally, he stopped and turned to the younger Pilot, Ro McNamara, who was sitting there and trying to remain calm. These were interesting days, because as the first natural-born Pilot she had not needed UNSA surgeons and bio technicians to make her what she was; but without UNSA she would have had no ship, no way to fulfil her purpose in life.

What she could not abide was the notion that all the younger Pilots living now, and generations still unborn, would face a stark binary choice between effective slavery or an unfulfilled and hollow life.

And her friend here, Claude Chalou, though he had non Pilot family on Earth, and worked as an academic – he had been Dirk’s tutor at Oxford – missed mu-space dreadfully; but he was too old to fly, as decreed by the UNSA powers-that-be, and that was it. Career over.

No one in UNSA considered mu-space as anything other than a milieu for sailing-routes along which vessels moved at their direction, for the sole purpose of shifting goods and people among the realspace colonies, research stations and Earth. The idea that mu-space was an entire universe in which Pilots might want to live . . . that had never, it seemed, occurred to them.

Until now, of course, there had been no place for a Pilot to live, no habitable location, except in realspace. But that was changing, and the stolen matter-compiler that Ro was transporting in her hold right now (and whose theft, or at least illegal export, Claude had assisted with) would be one more component in making this so.

But in order to carry out that mission – when everything she did was monitored by UNSA flight controllers, with no reason to go into mu-space except on a designated flight – she had temporarily abandoned a pod containing her VIP passengers, all deep in delta coma, leaving them to float safely in deep space. Then she had picked them up once more, and delivered them here to their destination; but they were late, and the effects of such a long time in coma, with two insertions into mu-space, were unpredictable: severe headaches at best.

‘Look . . .’ Claude’s gravelly Gallic voice took her out of her thoughts. ‘This explorer, Mam’selle Chandri, who has caused so much trouble . . . If you slip away quietly, there will be little fuss. She’s all they’re interested in.’

He was right, but as yet, Ro did not know whether her passengers were OK.

‘What if one of the passengers fails to wake up?’

‘And what if station personnel demand to scan the holds?’ Claude asked. ‘Standard procedure in an accident.’

‘They won’t find any malfunction.’

‘But’ – Claude raised a bushy eyebrow above one metallic eye socket – ‘they might find the matter compiler which MacLean and I stole for you.’

‘Goddamn it, Claude.’ She pronounced his name correctly, Claude-rhymes-with-ode, courtesy of her Zurich upbringing. ‘The passengers are my responsibility.’

He considered this, then nodded. ‘C’est ça. C’est exact, bien sûr.’

So they were in agreement. But as soon as Ro learned that the passengers had woken without medical emergencies, she was taking herself and Claude out of here. It was not just that the matter compiler in her ship’s hold was needed in mu-space – she had also made a binding promise to Claude that he would finally see, after years of blindness on Earth, the secret project-in-progress that select Pilots knew about. No one else in UNSA suspected that such a thing might be possible, never mind that such construction was already being carried out in a clandestine fashion, with volunteers working hard for the sake of the future.

Claude deserved to see the first huge constructions, the oddly growing halls and bays and courts that were already forming in ways that went beyond design parameters, with inherent systems evincing properties that excited the Pilots working there, for they exceeded anything that had been de liberately planned.

Labyrinth was going to be magnificent.

Bittersweet’s eyes changed colour from amber to honey as the light shifted. Her tabard and trews were grey, edged with silver, and there were flecks of grey in her fur. She was accompanied by a broad-antlered male who bowed deeply when Rekka said: ‘Redolent Mint. How are you doing, old friend?’

‘Well, thank you, Rekka.’

It had been a long time since Singapore, when Redolent Mint had been foremost among the bodyguards accompanying Bittersweet; except he had always been more than that, and was now clearly of senior rank.

He withdrew now, leaving Bittersweet and Rekka to talk in private, in a screened-off area of the arrivals/departures lounge. No one else was around: the centre of attention was currently the medical bay, where human passengers were being examined and awakened from delta-coma.

‘We always meet,’ said Bittersweet through her torc, ‘in surroundings your people have built.’

Rekka nodded, knowing Bittersweet understood the gesture.

‘And yet you are family to this Jared Schenck,’ Bittersweet continued. ‘Is that not true?’

‘Friend of the family.’

‘Perhaps, in any case, it is not hereditary.’

‘Excuse me?’ Rekka tried to work this out. ‘Are we talking about Jared?’

But Bittersweet was gesturing around the meeting area.

‘This is official, Rekka. We wish to constrain the relation ships between your people and ours.’

Rekka was not here as a UN ambassador: her objective had been to sort out the mess that Jared had caused, nothing more.

‘Your people that Jared attacked’ – Rekka knew that attack might imply some legal liability, but no longer cared – ‘have refused medical treatment. They insisted, or their friends insisted for them, on returning to the surface.’

‘To where they felt safe,’ said Bittersweet.