‘Finally,’ whispered Gavriela.

To see them rendered like this . . . It meant she had not deluded herself about the pattern in the data; and if that were true, then perhaps the strangest of her thoughts and actions were founded in reality also.

‘What do you mean, finally?’ Brody looked puzzled.

‘Never mind,’ she told him, her voice a little stronger.

Then a hard woman’s voice sounded from behind her wheelchair: ‘No, I’d like to know. What did you mean by that, Dr Wolf?’

Gavriela used the joystick, rotating her chair. The woman was a stranger, with twists and shards of darkness encircling her head

And death in her eyes.

‘I’ve led a long life,’ Gavriela told her.

But Brody must live.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s happened to the screen?’

The image was randomised, just electronic noise.

‘Not the device.’ The stranger smiled in a way that made Gavriela shiver. ‘The data’s corrupt, including the backups.’

Gavriela had wrinkled hardcopy pages of numeric data in her study at home, but this bitch could not be allowed to learn of it.

‘Too bad,’ the woman continued, ‘that you didn’t—’

But the door creaked as Ingrid stepped inside, and Ingrid’s knuckles cracked as she formed fists, something Gavriela had thought was Hollywood invention. Then Brody was at Ingrid’s side, chest swelling as he inhaled, and his newfound muscular strength was obvious.

My guardians.

The woman looked at them, then made a wide semicircle around Ingrid, avoiding her, and left through the doorway Ingrid had entered by.

‘Scheisse,’ said Ingrid.

‘What was that about?’ asked Brody.

Gavriela told him she had no idea.

When Geoffrey returned, he frowned at their description of the woman, having no idea who she might be.

‘She gave me the creeps,’ said Ingrid.

‘Because you’re a saint,’ Gavriela told her. ‘And she was the devil.’

But the informal tour ended without disaster, and at the end, when Geoffrey asked Brody what his plans were, Brody answered: ‘To do research just like you,’ and everybody smiled.

Good enough.

Whatever else spun off from today, her grandson – her first grandson, the only one she would ever know – was on the right path. She could wish for no more.

*

That night she woke to see a silhouetted figure standing by her bed.

‘I have your papers,’ the woman whispered. ‘The meson data.’

‘It does not matter,’ Gavriela said, her old-woman voice devoid of fear.

‘You know this is the end, don’t you, Dr Wolf?’

The stranger raised her hand, a shadow in the darkness.

‘Everyone dies,’ said Gavriela. ‘A hundred per cent. The question is, how much do you live?’

A pinprick accompanied the hand’s pressing against Gavriela’s neck.

Poison.

Perhaps the woman was KGB – this was their kind of technique – or perhaps she was something else. No matter.

It felt like stone inside Gavriela’s heart.

No . . .

The colour of nothingness was black . . .

FIFTY

LUNA, 697006 AD

. . . until she woke again, this time in an airless hall with shining walls, with Kenna’s crystal form bending over her.

—Greetings, brave Gavriela.

—Kenna! Am I here for good?

The answering smile was like diamond, beautiful and shining.

—You are.

—Finally!

Gavriela stretched her own living-crystal arms.

Time for real life to begin.

FIFTY-ONE

MU-SPACE, 2607-3427 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

It lasted minutes. It lasted centuries.

And it was awful.

In a metallic fastness, a Siganthian hive, this was what happened to Kian as he writhed in the suspension field where spacetime at the smallest scales could twist, distort and rip reality. First, the flaying, as his skin peeled back into nothingness. Revealed, the red glistening strips of muscle and sleek grey fat were removed and vanished in turn, leaving the disembodied web of capillaries; and then, when the blood vessels too were gone, the fine black tracery of nerves, along with the unprotected eyeballs and the suffering brain containing the mystery seed of entanglement whose nature confounded Kian’s Siganthian captors.

It was cyclic, the torture, as his body reformed and the iterative vivisection started up once more. But for Kian, it was a total quantum reset, a return to the initial state for every traversal of the analytic loop, leaving no memory of the previous cycles of agony, because pain was not the point of the procedure.

But for his poor ship, it was endless hell, endured remotely but intensely as if she herself were being dissected, over and over. What she wanted to do was dive to the planet’s surface and blast her way in, but that was impossible without triggering Kian’s death. Fleeing to Labyrinth for help would have been her other option, were it not for the thing inside Kian’s head, which was perhaps the sole reason for this predicament.

And the reason she could not flee.

Because that seed of entanglement appeared to reconfigure slowly over time, but in a shocking, negentropic way. She was reading the effects of causes that were located in the future, not the past; and that should have been impossible, but there was no other interpretation to fit the analytic data.

While the Siganthians kept the torture cycle running for centuries, presumably long after Kian had been forgotten – after the first mean-geodesic weeks, they stopped visiting his cell – his sorrowful, raging, tortured ship followed that chain of reverse causality, deducing that its origin was a profound state-change, derived from the future freeing of Kian from the vivisection field. She needed to be there when the field collapsed.

Hence the awful, ultra-relativistic geodesic that she flew, undergoing agony that was bearable only because it matched Kian’s pain. And because of hope, because whatever state Kian might be in when that future release came, he would be alive, at least initially.

And she would fight to keep him that way.

FIFTY-TWO

MU-SPACE, 2607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

Everywhere, ships were exploding and Pilots were dying. Fractal firebursts blazed across the golden void. They sold their lives dearly, those Pilots, but still they perished: in the larger picture, they were losing.

Dirk McNamara, like the legendary leader that he was, led strike after strike against the advancing wall of the enemy, all five hundred thousand renegade vessels headed for Labyrinth. As more and more vessels exited from Labyrinth, they flew to join the formations that Dirk had decreed; but their losses at the front exceeded the number joining at the rear.

Soon the invading mass of renegades would simply overwhelm the arcing lines of defenders, to fall upon the city-world itself.

=I could stop them.=

Labyrinth broadcast a message to those who could hear.

=But I would need a thousand years.=

It was a bizarre, morale-sapping litany for desperate Pilots to listen to.

Of those who could hear, while they raced for their ships in the docking-bays or cowered with their families inside Labyrinthine apartments whose wonder and luxury they had never appreciated fully until now, most kept Labyrinth’s words to themselves, rather than spread the fatalist comment.

No one expected a city-world to be anything but an armoured refuge at best, a target at worst; but why say anything at all? And even worse, why the hell did Labyrinth keep sending out the same message over and over and over again? Had some kind of computational virus affected the city-world’s mind? Was this another aspect of Schenck’s attack, even as his renegades smashed the Pilots who flew against them?