The skin on Coulan’s pale face started to blacken. Slvasta winced and pulled the carbine away, took a couple of hasty steps back. Coulan’s head, torso and legs burst into flames. They began to burn inwards fiercely, throwing off a great heat. Bethaneve clung to Slvasta, watching aghast as the thing she had once loved charred down to a mound of ash in less than three minutes. She sank to her knees and threw up, too distraught to think straight any more. Nothing made sense. All of this was unreal. It couldn’t be happening, it just couldn’t.

‘What do we do now, captain?’ she heard Yannrith asking.

‘He said: we,’ Slvasta growled. ‘We are liberating you. There’s more of them loose on our world. And I know where their nest is. So we stop them. Then we kill them. That is liberation.’

5

‘These are in worse condition than I thought,’ Nigel said as the express train rattled its way southwards through the night. They were charging through the scheduled stations; the only stops they did make were to take on fresh coal and water for the engine.

The quantumbusters were riding in one of the passenger carriages that’d been fitted out as a basic machine shop. Kysandra had been moderately impressed by the weapons, even though she’d already seen the images from the drone in the palace cellar. The wasp-waist cylinders were over two metres long, and heavy with it, as if they were carved from solid metal. Lifting them had taken a lot of muscle and teekay. Once they were in place, a simple sweep of teekay banished the dust and grime to reveal dull grey casings in good condition. The warheads were nestled at the back of the bulbous head, which her ex-sight could just perceive through the high-density casing and thick-packed components. But she felt that the rear end with the ingrav drive’s weird warty protuberances looked more sinister.

Nigel, Fergus and Valeri were scanning the quantumbusters with ex-sight and various sensor modules. Little access hatches of malmetal were being powered up and opened, so more sophisticated tests could be run directly on the components inside.

‘We don’t need the drive systems, or any of that junk,’ Fergus said. ‘Nor the force fields. Just the warheads.’

‘Warhead,’ Valeri corrected.

‘Can you get one of them to work?’ Kysandra asked.

Nigel looked up from the quantumbuster he was examining. A crown of modules was trailing wires and fibre-optic strands into the open ports and hatches. Spherical power cells on the floor had been plugged in to various sections with heavy-duty cable.

‘I think so. There’s been secondary system component degradation, of course, but then we knew we’d have to deal with that. The systems Skylady has synthesized should be adequate to initiate the warhead. We’ll start a rebuild as soon as we get home. But the real trick is going to be modifying the effect itself. I won’t be able to determine the final program until I’m inside the Forest; once I’m there, I can run an accurate analysis on its quantum distortion field signature.’

‘And, as the old quote goes: what science can analyse, science can duplicate,’ Fergus said.

‘Let’s hope so,’ Nigel muttered. ‘Or we’re going to need a bigger boat.’

Kysandra nodded apprehensively. ‘Okay.’

Nigel looked up for a moment and winked at her. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all worked out so far, hasn’t it?’

She grinned despairingly. ‘Oh, yes. But that’s only because you know everything.’

‘One more week,’ he promised. ‘Maybe less.’

‘Really? How long to rebuild the warhead?’

‘I’m thinking a day, maybe two at the most. Some of that can be done en route.’

‘So all we really have to do is launch?’

‘Yeah. Marek should have the booster stack assembled by now.’

‘So will you land again before you detonate the quantumbuster? That’ll be safer than being in space. Won’t it?’

The two ANAdroids became very still. Nigel’s gaze remained steady. His lopsided smile was no longer teasing. ‘Kysandra,’ he began awkwardly, ‘I need to be there in case anything goes wrong.’

‘There? There where?’

‘I’ve got to see this through. I’m sorry, I thought you understood that.’

‘No! No, you can’t,’ she cried. ‘Send one of the ANAdroids. They can do it.’

‘They can, if nothing goes wrong. Possibly if something does go wrong, too. But I can’t take that chance; there’s too much at stake here. A whole world of people, Kysandra. If there’s something unexpected up there, if we have to change the mission for whatever reason, I’ll need to innovate.’

‘But . . . But, they can do that!’ She was mortified that her throat was tightening up, tears building behind her eyes. Any moment now, if this conversation continued, she might burst out crying.

‘They can do a great deal, including work through logical options. Their bioprocessor brains are the best we can make. But if we need a non-logical solution – that’s where I come in. I can’t leave it to chance, Kysandra. It has to be me in the Skylady.’

‘No!’

‘If I can remote detonate, then I will. Of course I will. But we have to be prepared, and certain.’

‘You’ll die. It’ll be permanent. If the quantumbuster rips the Void apart, there will be no Giu left to reach, no Heart to accept your soul.’ She heard what she was saying and hated it; her old ingrained belief hadn’t been eradicated by the knowledge he’d given her so freely, just suppressed. I am rational, really I am. It’s just . . .

Nigel walked over to her and put his arms round her, exactly the way he had at their wedding ceremony. This time he stroked her back instead of patting it. ‘I won’t die,’ he said quietly. ‘I haven’t told you this before, I didn’t want you upset or confused, but this body, it’s actually a clone loaded with my memories and personality. The original me is still out there, Kysandra. Right now, I’m also alive in the real universe. I’m out there. Waiting.’

‘What? You can’t be.’

‘I am. True.’

‘You mean you’re not really you?’

‘Of course I am,’ he chortled. ‘But you know my ego: I’m far too important to actually die, so I sent this me into the Void to do my own dirty work. I never expected to make it back, although I never expected the mission would be like this, either. Kysandra, I never expected to meet you. Strange, the things fate throws at us.’

She nodded, not trusting herself to say anything.

‘We’ll meet again someday, somewhere,’ Nigel said. ‘I promise you that. And it will be the happiest day I’ve had for a thousand years, because I’ll get to see you live as you deserve to. That’s what this is about, that’s why this version of me exists. Let me fulfil my destiny, so I can watch you achieve yours.’

‘I don’t want another you. I want this one.’

‘The other one is the original, the best. You’ll see. Just don’t ever tell him I said that, okay? Keep it between us.’

‘Do you always have to be right?’

‘It’s what I am.’

‘I want to be right, too, just for once.’

‘That’s my girl.’

*

They changed tracks at Fosbury, switching the branch-line train onto the main Southern City Line. Nobody challenged Slvasta’s bodyguard troops as the comrades swarmed into the signal box to pull the big iron levers which moved the points over, even though the revolution hadn’t even been acknowledged this far from Varlan. Bethaneve curled up on one of the long bench seats and fell asleep as the carriage rocked about.

Javier woke her as dawn was breaking. A pale gold light was streaming in through the windows facing east. The only nebula left in the sky was Uracus itself – a venomous russet mist, twined with topaz fronds as if the interstellar dust storms were two kinds of giant space weed writhing round each other. For some reason, the empty gulf along its centre seemed larger today. Below it, fog lay across the land, meandering through the hollows like a lake of sluggish oil, with trees and the roofs of farm buildings poking through. Hills rumpled the horizon.