‘Unlikely.’ This was Luculentus Harvey Bashir. ‘It’s a rather noticeable way of maintaining a low profile.’

‘The deaths are almost unreported in Skein’ - Weissmann nodded towards Sunadomari - ‘thanks to Keinosuke here.’

‘Agreed,’ said Bashir. ‘But the killers could not have counted on that.’

‘You still think it’s a group?’ asked Sunadomari.

‘Eight of the victims died at the same instant, pretty much,’ said Colonel Keller. ‘Think how much more capability that implies, taking them down at the same time, compared to eight or more killers working in coordination.’

‘The thought of eight people able to strike through Skein is pretty awful.’

‘We don’t ignore a scenario just because we don’t like it.’

‘True. So what happens next?’

Bashir’s image turned towards Sunadomari’s.

‘You’ve got full surveillance on the boy?’

‘SatScan, building systems, and watch teams on the whole family.’

‘And this Rafaella Stargonier?’ asked Weissmann.

Commander Maria Petrova was frowning.

‘We don’t know where she is.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘She’s dropped out of surveillance entirely.’

‘How can she do that?’

‘If we knew, maybe we could find her.’

‘Damn it. So, everyone, presumably we’re done for now. When do we hook up again?’

All eyes, real and holo, turned towards Colonel Keller’s image.

‘Oh-nine-hundred, or when something significant happens. Agreed ?’

There were four nods.

‘Then out.’

Stella Weissmann was alone in her office. She lowered her chin, closed her eyes, and relaxed into trance, letting herself go deep, allowing the submerged parts of her extended mind to integrate all her perceptions, to allow new insights to arise.

Five minutes later, she looked up.

‘Hello, Stella Weissmann. Or should I say—’

A tall Luculenta with black hair was standing on the threshold.

‘—Luculenta Stella Weissmann?’

The stranger was Rafaella Stargonier.

No!

Weissmann tried to form the trigger thought activating defenceware inside her plexweb and the room’s inbuilt weaponry. But it was too late, as vampire code burst through her interfaces, ravened through her nervous system, and heisenberged her mind to destruction.

Her universe was set to null.

Rafaella knelt down beside the corpse and turned the head. No trace remained of studs or wires, the normal signs of upraise. Either someone had performed excellent surgery, or Weissmann had been upraised with this appearance all along, meaning she had planned a career in the intelligence services even then, with the collusion of the Via Lucis Institute.

The woman’s torn, fragmented memories would tell everything; but for now, Rafaella needed to keep them brimming inside her internal cache, sandboxed from the rest of her mind, because for several seconds during integration with another persona, she was vulnerable to attack.

Soon, even that limitation would be gone.

But at least she had newness waiting to suck into her. She had been so hungry, after relinquishing her opportunity in Parallaville, knowing her current configuration was almost full. She needed more plexnodes, to increase her capacity to absorb new minds.

Preferably without the limitations that had led to her predecessor’s demise.

‘Stella Weissmann, you were a bad girl. Keeping secrets.’

During the transfer, she had picked up that much.

‘Let’s see where you’ve kept it, the poor thing.’

She went out to the corridor, looked at the flagstones one by one, then formed a command. The floor swirled like a whirlpool, and she stepped into the disturbance.

‘Clever.’

Closing her eyes, she let the quickstone take her down - three metres, five, an estimated ten metres before it lowered her into clear space. The material sucked back into the ceiling.

She was in a subterranean chamber, far larger than she had expected. But then half of it was walled off, divided by a massive transparent barrier. And beyond it—

‘Well, look at you.’

—floated a lattice of crimson light, darkened here and there by two decades of torture, interrogation that had failed to yield anything about the matter she was interested in.

‘Weissmann and her little pals understood enough to cripple you, didn’t they? To keep you from teleporting out?’

The Zajinet prisoner twisted and roiled, backing away in its cell.

‘That’s right. I’m interested in Calabi-Yau dimensions, and how to send energy along them.’

Now, the Zajinet was blazing with desperate light.

‘Twenty years of torture, and they got nothing from you.’

The alien’s spilled light turned Rafaella’s face the colour of blood.

‘Amateurs,’ she said.

THIRTY-ONE

EARTH, 1927-1930 A.D.

Gavriela immersed herself in studying. By the time she graduated, her brother Erik had married Ilse and moved to Amsterdam; but Father and Mother resisted her cajoling, and remained in Berlin. She could stare at the complex dots and smears of an X-ray diffraction image, and from it deduce a crystal’s structure without working through the maths. But deciphering her parents’ thoughts and motivation were of another order of difficulty, and far beyond her.

You would think that the older a person was, the more they would recognize that the world could change, and sometimes very fast.

She began to teach students privately, as she worked for her doctorate. The atomic theory that owed so much to Einstein - who remained her hero - was one of the great intellectual achievements of humanity. What she wanted was to learn the secrets of the universe.

It was something to remember when she shopped carefully, counting every centime, and wondered what it would be like to have a career that brought in steady earnings. Still, she found enough funds, leading up to the summer break, to buy a railway ticket for Amsterdam, so she could visit Erik and Ilse.

Finally, it was the end of July, and she rode in a warm train carriage whose rocking motion lulled her, despite the jagged white Alpine magnificence on view outside; and she drifted, remembering last week. Professor Hartmann was her supervisor now, and she was glad for his support.

‘I would like you to deliver a few lectures next year,’ Professor Hartmann had told her, a big smile on his leonine face, his mane of white hair glistening. ‘And once you are Frau Doktor Wolf, we can make it more regular.’

‘Why, yes, Herr Professor!’

‘There is only one thing. My name will have to appear on the lecture notices, and you will be announced as the assistant.’

‘Oh. Well, I understand.’

‘Without Herr Professor Möller’s support, the faculty board would not have agreed at all, but there is one good thing.’

‘Herr Professor?’

‘This is the start of the 1930s, telegraph lines run beneath the Atlantic, aeroplanes fly the skies, and more books are being published than ever before. German culture - I don’t just mean within that country’s borders - remains unparalleled, from philosophy to music, and now in science.’

‘Perhaps the twentieth century is when we finally become civilized. Have you read Korzybski, Herr Professor?’

‘Ah, Manhood of Humanity, and his dedication to Gantt and scientific management of commerce. The Great War taught us that rational thinking is the only way to maintain peace, so Korzybski has that much right, at least.’

Moments like that made her realize how lucky she was, to be in a place where human understanding advanced, where learning was taken seriously.

But now, as the train carriage rattled over a junction, she recalled some different stories coming from Bavaria, from the pretty gingerbread town of Munich that she had lived in as a girl, taking ice-cream in a café on the cobbled Marienplatz and staring up at the mediaeval town hall, walking to the river, stopping on the way to giggle at the stern statue of Maximilian on his horse.