‘You mean Dirk McNamara?’ Roger tapped the tabletop, placing his order, while trying to remember something of Pilot history. Dirk and Kian had been the twin sons of the first true Pilot, Ro McNamara; that was all he knew. ‘That’s Dirk in there?’

‘No, that’s Admiral Schenck at the moment of his death which will last literally for ever, provided no one intervenes. The moral of the story is, don’t pick a duel with Dirk, unless you’ve got a really unpleasant death wish.’

‘Dirk killed him? Really?’ Roger’s food rose through the tabletop, but he ignored it. ‘I’m still trying to get to grips with this place, but wasn’t Admiral Schenck opening some official building yesterday?’

‘That’s the grandfather in there.’ Jed nodded toward the distortion. ‘The current Admiral Schenck is also supposed to be a nasty piece of work, but what would I know?’

Roger chewed a hotbean sandwich.

‘I don’t really understand what the Admiralty Council does,’ he said. ‘I mean, sometimes I think it’s the high command of a military-style fleet, but at other times it seems to be the government, and sometimes … I don’t know. A different thing entirely.’

‘That’s because,’ said Jed, ‘our culture and protocols are Byzantine.’

‘You mean Labyrinthine.’

‘There, you’re getting the hang of it.’

For a while they both ate – Jed had ordered some kind of omelette – then Jed answered more seriously. ‘People rotate in and out of different styles of service. Most of the time, the majority of us are free traders. Then there are the Shipless of course – not everyone in the Admiralty has their own vessel. The Council is all of those things you said, and none of them. They say that the regulations had to be written in Aeternum, because no other language supports the temporal and philosophical concepts that underlie the entire system.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Roger.

‘Yeah, pretentious, isn’t it? But it’s still true. It also allows for things like Pilots raised in realspace who don’t yet know their way around Labyrinth.’

Roger stopped eating. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Like, if someone has to attend a hearing, an enquiry, then they have the right to take a friend with them. Someone with a bit more experience.’

‘I thought we were here for breakfast.’

‘We are,’ said Jed. ‘And over breakfast, right now, I’m telling you about the hearing.’

‘What hearing?’

‘The one I’m accompanying you to, old mate.’

‘Is this one of those regulations you were talking about? Like, I have to attend a hearing and you’re the one who finds out about it?’

‘Pretty much. I asked proactively at the Admiralty, they confirmed the meeting, and I took responsibility for telling you.’

‘Shit.’

Roger turned away, his eyes acidic with confusion, feeling light-headed with shame. He was a child here, unable to travel by fastpath rotation, unaware of the institutions and laws surrounding him, needing a grown-up like Jed to look after him.

‘We have to get you in training,’ said Jed. ‘So you can get a handle on how things work.’

‘I’ll manage.’

‘There are programmes, and the reason no one’s suggested it yet is that you’re in mourning. Think of the word bureaucrat, and you’ll understand what I mean.’ In Aeternum, it held none of the emotionless or parasitical overtones the words conveyed in three out of the four other languages that Roger knew. The Aeternal term resonated with warmth and selflessness. ‘So come on. If you’re done, we’ll walk to the Admiralty.’

‘All right.’ Roger stared at the dishes sinking back inside the table. ‘We don’t pay for this, right?’

‘Of course n— No.’

Some meals were free; others were not.

‘On Fulgor,’ said Roger, ‘every financial transaction involved a vector in a two-hundred-dimensional phase-space. After twenty years of living there, my parents still had to concentrate when buying anything. For me it was natural.’

The concept of currency was simpler here; but it applied in fewer contexts than he was used to. The complexity lay in figuring out when payment was relevant.

‘I’ve operated on Durston IV,’ said Jed. ‘Four continents, two where bribery is everywhere, and you can’t do business without knowing how to offer payment to an official but not spelling it out, because that would be illegal.’

They stood and walked onto the Promenade.

‘I should grow up,’ said Roger, ‘because everyone learns to adapt. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Seems to me,’ said Jed, ‘you’d grown up already when I met you.’

That was after Roger had rescued Alisha from the brothel, having first committed violence on a large, thuggish bartender, forcing the man to tell what he knew. Perhaps that was the moment when the hesitant schoolboy Roger dissolved, replaced by whoever he was now. Or perhaps it happened when he turned away from his parents, letting them flee Fulgor while he stayed behind, imagining that he was the one at risk, not them.

‘So which way do we go?’

Jed indicated a spiralling route.

‘We follow Heisenberg Helix, take the Bessel Boulevard exit, follow it as far as Archimedes Avenue—’

‘Or we could just fastpath.’

‘Right.’ Jed grinned. ‘If you don’t mind me doing the business.’

‘Summon it slowly, if you can.’

Jed let out a breath, then raised his hands. Tiny sparks glittered inside his eyes of jet: fluorescent overspill from the satanase/satanin reaction inside the inductive neurons. Roger felt the air grow chill and prickling. Then reality flowed, pulled into a vortex, and a pane of nothingness rotated, just beyond the edge of what Roger could grasp.

‘Come on.’ Jed’s voice was tight, for this was hard work, slowing the rotation. ‘Step in.’

So Roger did, with Jed beside him, and the universe whirled.

I still can’t—

They stepped out into a reception chamber, vast as a cathedral, cemetery-cold.

When Max had finished screaming, the interrogator introduced himself as Fleming, his voice as pleasant as if they were meeting at a picnic. Then he added:

‘We are on the same side, you know.’

Sagging against the tendrils that held him, Max coughed, the nearest to laughter he could manage. Tears were chilling his face, while pain was washing everywhere, an ebb after furious surges.

‘Bastard. I did not kill her.’

Something in Max’s words, some rhythm, matched Fleming’s style of speech. So here was the danger: to be seduced by the torturer, to believe they cared because the entire world was here, defined by their words, their facial expression, and the pain they induced: magnificently skilled, the architecture of agony, the pulling-apart of personality.

Schenck, you bastard.

It had to be him, but there was no point in laying accusations. Stick to what he had seen and heard.

‘Admiral … Kaltberg.’ Max licked salt and blood from his mashed lip. ‘She was under … compulsion. I told you … She had a graser, set to auto-destruct.’

‘Hardly the suicidal type. A prominent admiral on the verge of well-deserved retirement?’

‘Not suicide. Murder. It was compulsion.’

‘But you escaped through your bolt-hole. Very slick.’

As a senior officer in the intelligence service, Max had years ago established a fast covert exit route. What else did Fleming expect?

‘She short-circuited … Neural induction. Burned out her corpus callosum.’

‘Lobotomized herself?’

‘Not that. Femtoviral patterning in her … her right cerebral hemisphere. The compulsion … She divided her brain. In two. Fought against … herself.’

‘That’s one hell of a story.’

‘Truth. She warned me. Get clear.’

Fleming popped some kind of sweet into his mouth and began to suck.

‘I’d like to believe you, Max.’

Max’s rank was commodore, but there was no point in insisting on etiquette, because in this place Commodore Gould did not exist: there was only a prisoner responding to whatever name Fleming chose to use.