Roger smiled, and took hold of Gavriela’s hand.

—We’re thinking of travelling.

They looked along the ruined jet, in the direction of Shadow Gate where so many fell. And Gavriela smiled.

—It will be an adventure, if nothing else.

Kenna looked at Rathulfr, then back at Roger and Gavriela.

—That much is certain.

—You mean, said Roger, it’s predestined?

The four of them laughed, floating in vacuum.

And Roger and Gavriela turned away, still holding hands, as spacetime whirled around them, lighting up with a brilliant sapphire glow.

—Go well.

—And you.

They flew towards the void.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

& FINAL NOTE

When it comes to using recent historical figures in fiction, I agree with Barbara Kingsolver: an author does not have free rein. My depiction of Alan Turing, in this and the previous volume, relied heavily on the superlative biography by Andrew Hodges. It is my interpretation, a fictional rendering and not the real person, transformed to serve the needs of the narrative. The world owes the real Turing an immense debt, not to mention an apology.

Peter Hennessy’s analysis of 1950s Britain, Having It So Good, was particularly helpful. The savagery of continental Europe following World War II, as hinted at in Chapter 2, was too brutal for me to detail here. A conversation with historian Keith Lowe prior to the publication of his Savage Continent, followed by the book itself, formed a shocking eye-opener.

In Chapter 30, the descriptions of termites and weaver ants (including the phrase, ‘sending their old women to war’) come directly from E.O. Wilson’s essay In The Company Of Ants. The Chapter 12 quotation regarding gastrulation comes from the biologist Lewis Wolpert.

The Bach piece mentioned in Chapter 41 is Badinerie from his Orchestral Suite No.2 in B Minor.

My depiction of the galactic centre as something other than a black hole comes from a speculation by Nobel laureate Robert B. Laughlin. Not from the Laughlin book cited below, however – that belongs here because of its emergent-properties perspective on fundamental physics.

In the previous volumes, the Absorption scene in Berchtesgaden contains a nod to Roald Dahl, and Gavriela’s homecoming after the US trip in Transmission, though it came into my head fully formed, is homage to Nicholas Monsarrat for The Cruel Sea.

The fictional SRS’s pre-deployment antics are inspired by a description in Robin Horsfall’s book, Fighting Scared.

For long-lived academic supervision, encouragement and friendship, infinite thanks to Professor Jim Davies. And thanks to everyone else at Oxford’s Department of Computer Science, previously the Computing Laboratory.

Thank you to physicist/writer Dave Clements for organising the Science for Writers conferences at Imperial College, and giving me Imperial as a setting.

Many, many thanks to Fluffy Mark for reminding me about Kian.

At my redoubtable publishers, enormous gratitude goes to the magnificent Marcus Gipps (thank you for the insights, which made this and the previous book so much stronger), the stupendous Simon Spanton, and jolly Jon Weir.

Thank you to Bonbon and Nutmeg, for putting in an appearance in Labyrinth, and being wonderful.

As always and ever, love and gratitude to Yvonne, who puts up with it and gets me through it all.

While I was writing this, the third and final volume of Ragnarok, researchers reported definitive evidence that in the eighth century, during the year 775 or 776, Earth experienced a blast of gamma radiation. (Note that Stígr was corrupted over a year before Ulfr encountered him.)

Several days before I submitted the completed book, news from the Fermi Space Telescope came to my attention: patterns in the data suggest some of the gamma-rays emitted from the galactic core are produced by dark-matter interactions.

It seems the darkness is on the move . . .

Mid Glamorgan, Wales, January 2013

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Also by John Meaney from Gollancz:

Bone Song

Dark Blood

Ragnarok Trilogy

Absorption

Transmission