Hours after the first encounter, still the hails came from the Brikanti ship, and still the crew of the Tatania failed to reply.

All on board the lightly manned Tatania, passengers, Lex McGregor, his command crew – and the three-strong engineering crew who Beth hadn’t even seen before now – were ordered up to the bridge for this extraordinary encounter. Ten people, Beth thought, if you included Earthshine as a person, ten survivors of Earth and moon and the UN-Chinese war. Ten survivors of a whole history that seemed to have been lost here, if the ship waiting to meet them was anything to judge by.

Now Penny said drily, ‘Lex, explain again the logic of why we’re just sitting here?’

He sighed. ‘Penny, the Tatania looks tough but she’s no warship, unlike that bird of prey out there. You saw the way she manoeuvred when she moved in close – swept in like a bloody Spitfire. Conversely we’re a hulk, literally, a scow for carrying garbage and passengers. We’ve nothing to fight with—’

‘Save a couple of handguns,’ said one young engineer sourly.

‘Yes, thank you, Kapur. All we can do is bluff. At least give an impression of strength by not jumping when we’re ordered to. Believe me – in many confrontations, posture is everything. Why, I remember when I was boxing champion four years in a row at the ISF academy, I could win a fight just by the way I looked at my opponent at the weigh-in—’

Penny said, ‘Perhaps we ought to stick to the point? Fascinating though your anecdotes always are, Lex.’

Earthshine turned to her, his face blank, expressionless – eerily so, Penny thought. He said, ‘But what is the point, Colonel Kalinski? Sooner or later we must all face the reality of what has happened here. But you, most of all – you should be our guide. Because it has happened to you before, hasn’t it?’

He had hinted at such secrets previously, Beth realised, but not so openly. Now every eye on the bridge was on Penny.

She scowled at Earthshine. ‘That’s my business. My personal business.’

‘Not since you and your impossible sister came to see me in Paris, all those years ago. And we visited your parents’ graves – do you remember? Of course you do. And there on the stone of your mother, was proof that your sister – no, you were the impossible one, weren’t you? It’s so easy to get confused, isn’t it? But since then, you see, since that strange day decades ago, I have been involved in your secret, in your peculiarly twisted lives—’

‘Much good it’s done any of us.’

‘At least it has given us a clue as to the nature of the transfiguration we have now endured. From a solar system riven by war, to this, this new landscape with a warrior-bird spaceship called Ukelwydd that hails us in a mixture of Norse and Gaelic …’

Lex McGregor shook his head. ‘Earthshine, as we stand in peril from an alien battleship – what the hell are you talking about?’

‘We live in strange times, Captain. Times when the fabric of reality has a tendency to come unstuck, and then to ravel itself up again, but with flaws. That battleship wouldn’t belong in our reality – as we do not belong here – as Stef Kalinski, once an only child, did not belong in a reality inhabited by her twin sister, Penny here. Everything changed, that day when the Mercury Hatch was first opened, for Stef Kalinski. Now, with the huge pounding of the UN-China war, perhaps everything has changed for the rest of us—’

Light flashed from a dozen screens all around the deck.

‘Missile fire!’

It was engineer Kapur who had shouted, pointing at the nearest screen. Beth saw fast-moving lights, an impossibly bright glare.

Golvin had to expand the field of view of the screens to give an image that made sense. The Brikanti ship still hung in space. But sparks of fire had swept out of emplacements in that battered hull, were sailing out into space – and were turning, visibly converging on the screen’s viewpoint, on the Tatania.

‘I guess they ran out of patience,’ Penny said.

‘Get to your couches!’ McGregor yelled, pushing his way to his own position. ‘Strap in! Golvin, their trajectories—’

‘The birds are heading for the lower third of the fuselage. I’m seeing kernel radiations, Captain. The missiles are kernel-tipped, kernel-driven.’

Penny and Jiang pulled each other through the air to couches side by side, back from the control positions. They strapped in hastily, then grabbed each other’s hands.

Jiang said, ‘After all we’ve been through—’

‘We’re not dead yet, Jiang Youwei.’

Beth, isolated in her couch, longed to be closer to them, closer to anybody, to have a hand to hold.

McGregor glanced over his shoulder. ‘Everybody in place? Good. Those birds are closing. Brace!’

When the missiles struck it felt as if the whole ship rang like a gong.

The roar of noise passed quickly, to be replaced by a chorus of alarm howls from the bridge instruments, and panels glared with warnings of catastrophic failures. The crew worked quickly, going over their displays, shouting complex technical data to each other. The Tatania was tumbling, Beth gathered, falling out of what must have been a spectacular explosion. She could feel the slow wheeling, as the rump of the ship turned over and over.

‘The pressure bulkheads are holding,’ Kapur called.

Golvin said, ‘Captain, the strike was surgical. They hit a circumference around the hull. The blasts were shaped, I think. They cut away our lower third.’

McGregor growled, ‘So they snipped off the kernel drive.’

Penny said, ‘These Brikanti, whoever they are, use kernel technology as routine weapons of war. Even we never went that far, not until the Nail, the last desperate throw. To fight our kernel war we had to improvise  … What kind of people are they?’

‘You might soon find out,’ McGregor said grimly. ‘A party is cutting its way through the outer airlock door. They must have come aboard before launching those stingers. Oh, put away your pop gun, Kapur. Resisting will only get us killed the quicker.’

‘We don’t belong here,’ Penny said. ‘Earthshine’s right. Any more than I belonged in Stef’s reality, after the Mercury Hatch. My God, Lex, these characters make you look like a UN diplomat—’

Now the lights started to go out all over the bridge, Beth saw. Even the screens went dark, displays fritzing to emptiness. The bridge crew hammered their touchpads and keyboards and slates, and yelled instructions into microphones, without success.

‘It’s all shutting down,’ Golvin said. ‘We’re losing everything.’

McGregor demanded, ‘Is it the Brikanti?’

Jiang said, ‘They communicate by crude radio. I would be surprised if they could hack into our sophisticated information systems to do this.’

And Beth turned to look at Earthshine. While the rest of the bridge shut down – even the main lights were flickering now – he seemed to be glowing, oddly, from within, as if transfigured. A golden light.

‘You,’ she said. ‘It’s not the Brikanti doing this – this isn’t part of their attack. It’s you, Earthshine.’

McGregor turned on him. ‘What the hell are you doing to my ship, you old monster?’

Earthshine stood up from his couch, his virtual body passing through the harness. ‘Saving you all. General, the only asset we have in this reality is the knowledge we bring from – where we came from. I have taken that knowledge into myself, for safe keeping. Even the ship’s physical systems are being destroyed, now they are drained of data. The Brikanti have captured a useless hulk. I will use the knowledge I have stored in myself to bargain for our lives.’

McGregor roared, ‘And who the hell put you in charge?’

‘I just did. And now, I think—’

The door slid open.

A party of figures floated into the bridge without ceremony, in clunky pressure suits of what looked like leather and steel ribbing, each bearing a stylised rifle with bayonet fixed. They all had their faceplates open, and they stared around at what was evidently a very unfamiliar environment. At a quiet word from a central figure, they spread out quickly into the bridge, one standing over each crew member or passenger.