Gavriela glanced at her notebook.

‘They’ve invited us over,’ Rupert went on. ‘To talk to Ursula’s watch team and find out what went wrong.’

‘I had a sense of the darkness yesterday,’ she said. ‘Not exactly the kind of information I can share with them.’

‘No, I suppose not. Maybe we need protection.’

Gavriela thought about it.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘But it can’t do any harm.’

Rupert would act on his own suggestion, faking a story that suggested the KGB might know his private address and have reason to perpetrate personal vengeance, so that he obtained a permanent watch team to safeguard him and incidentally Gavriela. Whether that was unnecessary, or whether it was the presence of the watch team that prevented the enemy from making a run at Rupert, they would never find out.

Not for as long as Rupert lived, at any rate.

FORTY-TWO

MU-SPACE, 2607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

Roger was promoted to captain, with a hint of fast-track advancement to come, on the basis of his intelligence report concerning the dark matter star (to use the newly revived archaic term) that sat at the heart of the realspace galaxy. Roger’s ultra-hellflight had become an unofficial legend; and unlike his father, he had not needed to die in order to achieve success. It felt undeserved.

But it was the entire squadron’s analysis of the renegades’ base, not just Roger’s report, that was of immediate interest to the battle planners. Linguistically, the base was again labelled Target Shadow, which gave more than a hint of how they saw it. The combined telemetric data of thirty-eight ships produced a reasonable model not just of defensive resources and their disposition, but also the residential deep-space modules and the massive devices under construction, whose purpose and mode of operation remained conjecture.

This was war, officially so, which meant that personal secrets could not be kept private if germane – hence Roger providing a sealed addendum to his report, the heart of it related as a personal reminiscence of his father’s memories: ‘After using my tu-ring to defeat the locking mechanism, I opened Greybeard’s case to reveal a fist-sized device, purpose unknown. All this while, Greybeard remained in delta-coma, but he wasn’t going to stay that way, because his closed eyes were flicking from side to side.

‘But when I tried to pick up the device, small though it was, I failed. It was so massive I could not shift it. Yet when Greybeard awoke, he was able to lift the thing easily.’

There were more details, but that was the salient portion, as he pointed out in the covering metadata, in which he also explained the addendum’s provenance: ‘These are my father’s memories, that is Carl Blackstone, from a covert operation conducted nearly twenty standard years before I was born – memories inherited from his ship by mine, but inaccessible to my father due to targeted amnesia applied during debriefing.’

Such treatment prevented memory retrieval during conjunction trance, effectively repressing the ship’s memory also . . . unless that ship gave parthenogenetic birth to a daughter, in which case the daughter’s Pilot might uncover those buried memories, as Roger and his ship had done.

In the final comments, he added his own analysis of the reported memory, highlighting its importance as he saw it: ‘Since my father underwent amnesia induction, and since his original report remains archived beyond my clearance level, I cannot tell which details are on record and which were lost. It might be that certain facts which are obviously relevant today, in the light of actions taken by former Admiral Schenck and the other renegade Pilots, would not have seemed significant at the time.

‘I note that the human criminals coerced Zajinets into taking them to the galactic core, probably in order to deliver the device to fellow humans living there. That seems to have been their main objective. However, it is the device itself, although I have no insight into its purpose, that I would urge our analysts to consider.

‘In particular, I would note that the device appeared alternately massive and light, depending on who touched it. The device was clearly constructed of ordinary baryonic matter. My conjecture is that it was able to interact with non-baryonic matter or non-gauge forces under controlled circumstances, a scientific achievement normally considered impossible.

‘Could the renegades be using this technology to affect the galactic jet emanating from the core? Or could they be preparing the locale in some other way – perhaps the jet is a side effect – in either case to construct a bridgehead for the enemy we know is coming eventually?

‘My recommendation is covert research into the device’s origins. However, Greybeard indicated he had covered his traces by murder, so there may be no trail to follow.

‘Infiltrating the renegades’ base would be highly dangerous, and in any case the base should be considered a primary target for overt, massive assault, with an objective of obliteration rather than capture.

‘End of report. Captain Blackstone out.’

The report was professional and he was proud of it; but he had just suggested the violent extinction of probably two thousand people – one in four being Pilots, renegades like Schenck – which under other circumstances would be termed an atrocity. When exactly had he become capable of thinking this way?

It bothered him, too, that his fellow Pilots thought so highly of him, because his ultra-hellflight had been hard but not heroic, more like desperate; and again it was all about ideas more than reality, because it seemed to him that what he had broken was a psychological barrier.

Perhaps it had been physically possible for the last few generations of ships to survive a flight through the mu-space turbulence that matched to the realspace galactic core. Perhaps the real barrier had been sociolinguistic hypnosis, due either to the real limitations of earlier ships or deliberate thought-sabotage by some previous member of the Aeternum language institute.

If this were true, Roger’s example would have broken the inhibition, and other Pilots would match the feat soon. Except that there was a war to concentrate upon, fought on two fronts or three, depending on whether you separated the Anomaly from the darkness. While Roger and the rest of his SRS squadron obsessed on the renegade base they had seen, the Admiralty planners had a different view of things, since the Zajinet numbers were far greater than that of the renegades, and their attacks were growing in frequency and ferocity.

Or so Roger deduced after attending the highest-powered meeting of his career so far.

Admiral Whitwell said: ‘Thank you for coming, Captain. I wanted you to see the battle plans, so that you understand why we’re asking you to take such a risk.’

A vast array of holos filled the war chamber. Some thirty people, most outranking Roger by far, stood among them.

‘Understood, sir,’ said Roger.

Commodore Max Gould highlighted a holovolume. What it showed was a simulation, not a recorded image, of something like the renegades’ realspace base, but nowhere near the galactic core: it was floating in a region where stars were sparse and space appeared black.

‘The segments are under separate construction,’ he said. ‘In mu-space. Transfer and assembly will be fast, and the location will be here.’

Another holo gleamed. The dummy base would lie on a familiar line, heading outwards from the galactic centre to a distant void: a line on which Earth also lay, at least on a map of this scale.

‘Why would Admiral Schenck . . .’ Roger’s voice trailed off. ‘Zajinets?’

‘Exactly, Captain. They’re the enemy we plan to break first.’

Roger examined the dummy base.