Voluminous greatcoats, designed to billow easily as if they were cloaks, seemed to be in fashion. That made it easier for Kian to walk among crowds without attracting notice, for with the burnt claw that formed his right hand and the silver scar tissue disfiguring his face, along with the trace of a limp, he clearly belonged to the minority who for one reason or another refused (or were unable to undergo) corrective and cosmetic surgery, available in any health booth in any major town.

And yet there was a warrior’s grace to his movements, and even among dense clumps of passers-by, he walked without brushing against anyone, always anticipating position and motion, never caught by surprise.

He stayed in a tall hotel overlooking central Oxford, a newish building on the site of an historic tower where Augusta ‘Gus’ Calzonni had been in residence in 2102, when at the age of one hundred and thirteen, she had instructed her lawyer to book her a shuttle flight into orbit, where she could see with her own faded eyes the success or failure of the first attempted voyage into mu-space.

A floating biographer-globe had recorded her final moments, and the cerebral stroke that occurred just after she heard the famous words of the returning captain, leaving one last legacy: the sight of someone smiling as they died.

‘Kat,’ said Kian now to the empty room. ‘My magic. My world.’

People had called them K’n’K or TwoK, for in the happy years they were inseparable, she with the brash mouth (and ready fists – they had met in Toronto, when an anti-xeno activist had attempted to attack Kian, and while Kian had used a pseudo-hypnotic verbal technique to interrupt the assault, it had been Kat’s looping punch out of nowhere that had dropped the man), massive intelligence and ready laugh.

He checked his anti-surveillance motes once more, then opened up the message-seed slipped to him by the non-Pilot courier in a float-hall over the Thames. The sender’s sigil would make no sense to anyone but him; he knew it for that of Rowena James, one of his Labyrinthine contacts with only low-level security clearance, yet in a position to deduce much from Pilots’ schedules as devised and recorded by Far Reach, along with other unwitting sources of information.

Security measures were tighter these days, but that was all right: they depended, at least partly, on checking for sympathy towards and contact with Schenck’s renegades, and neither Kian nor his occasional associates had any love for darkness-controlled Pilots.

He was what he was without need for labels, and most certainly did not require followers; but there was a need for continuity, if he was to carry out his work while continuing to lead the same kind of time-skipping life that Dirk and their mother had gravitated towards. What Kian had founded, the Tri-Fold Way, was imbued with something of Buddhist philosophy, and a dash of utopian far-sightedness mixed in with practical rhetoric and rigorously applied psycho-emergenics, while he himself was ‘a superposition of Mahatma Gandhi and the Unknown Ninja’ according to a Labyrinth-based activist back in the day.

The extremes of both secessionist Pilot politics and the let’s-control-humanity crowd were anathema to him; but while the middle path meant eschewing violence as much as possible, and he in personal life was normally the gentlest of beings, Kian McNamara was not in the strictest sense of the word a pacifist: he could be as deadly as his flamboyant brother, maybe more so.

Still, when he performed his daily tai-chi-like routines at dawn on Calzonni Meadow, once University Parks, wild-life was unafraid to watch, and this morning a sparrow had alighted on his shoulder during standing meditation, and stayed there chirping until a noisy spaniel came bounding into view.

The situation in Labyrinth was not one to inspire personal calm and oneness with either universe. While there was one disturbing detail in Rowena’s report, the bulk of it was straightforward, implying the gathering of militarised forces, and it was no act of scholarship to understand how rapidly Pilot society might change under the pressure of all-out war-fare, if things went that far. He mulled over the details as he left the hotel and went on a thoughtful walk around the old town, the sandstone buildings coated with diamond these days, which did not preserve the old look so much as create an entirely new mystique; and he wondered whether he should have come back to Earth at all.

Inside the Ashmolean Museum, a battered, wrinkled, darkened old sword caught his attention. It was displayed among the Roman artefacts, and Kian was no expert, but it seemed to him to have been wrongly dated. Yet the Runic scratches might have been his imagination – they were not mentioned in the descriptive holo – and that might have coloured his whimsical notion that he could somehow know better than the professional archaeologists and curators who stocked and managed the place.

Afterwards, he watched a performance of Henry V in the Sheldonian Theatre, a building that had been through much, including a stint as a knife-fighting venue when that was prime-time entertainment and the university was short of funds. The Crispin’s Day speech was as rousing as ever, though Kian could not help but think later, as he wandered back to his hotel, how the night-before-battle scene revealed the eternal disparity between rulers and the ordinary folk who die in conflicts they neither instigate nor fully understand, and how hollow were the warrior-king’s justifications for his martial aims.

Two days later, in a quaint underground shopping mall in Putingrad, he met up with one Rickson Ojuku, a Pilot who claimed a sort of ancestry from Kian via the Delgasso line, Rorion Delgasso having fathered two children with Maria, Kian and Kat’s adopted daughter. Rorion’s father Carlos had been a young brat, with an annoying habit of hero-worshipping both Kian and Dirk. Now they had a descendant in common.

‘I’m surprised you made contact,’ said Rickson, as they walked side by side past gleaming displays. ‘With everything that’s happening back home, I would’ve thought political reconciliation was in abeyance.’

He sounded more business-like than necessary, as if over-compensating for the weirdness of meeting his ancestor. Kian sympathised: it was strange though hardly unique among Pilotkind, as ultra-relativistic time-dilating flights continued to occur for one reason or another, mounting up across the centuries.

‘Take a look at this.’ Kian double-checked the anti-surveillance smartmiasma surrounding them, then zip-blipped a portion of the report he had received in London. ‘The silver-and-red ship belongs to Admiral Schenck.’ His tone turned the rank into an insult. ‘Remember, three years ago, when there was an attempted absorption on Vachss Station, the Vijaya orbital?’

‘One of Schenck’s people tried to plant an absorbed person there.’ Rickson blinked his smartlenses, processing the report fragment. ‘Is this surveillance footage or computed reconstruction?’

‘A mixture of both,’ said Kian. ‘It seems Schenck picked up a bunch of such people, transferred two to Holland’s ship – that’s the other vessel in the rendezvous scene, and Holland is the Pilot who went on to Vachss Station – and held on to the others.’

‘So how did Molsin fall?’ asked Rickson, watching the surroundings as they walked. ‘Because of these people, or something else?’

‘That would be worrying. The reconstruction is, the failed absorption on Vachss Station caused Schenck to commit all the remaining absorbed people – components – to the Molsin incursion.’

Kian knew only that his Labyrinthine source, Rowena James, had a close contact in the intelligence community there. For the first time, he wondered if that contact knew about the reports that Rowena passed on. Perhaps it would suit the intelligence service’s purposes if Kian’s people, too, understood the renegades’ actions with regards to the Anomaly.