‘If we can,’ said Tannier. ‘She’s disappeared, and that’s quite a trick for an offworlder.’

‘Disappeared with an autodoc?’ Dr Keele sounded scathing. ‘How can that be?’

‘About as easy,’ said Tannier, ‘as stealing it from under your noses, Doctor.’

Roger felt his mouth twitch.

‘Take me in to headquarters, or whatever you do,’ he said. ‘And I’ll talk to you gladly.’

He looked at Helsen’s image as the video log replayed.

My enemy.

And Tannier’s reply was lost in the surf-sound of auditory exclusion, a facet of the adrenal stress response that Roger was becoming used to: his neuromuscular system reacting to the threat of lethal danger, the atavistic recognition of a nonhuman predator, because that was what Helsen had become: a conduit for the darkness, a vessel for a power that had created a mind-consuming planetary entity for unknowable purpose. Helsen was a thing that needed to be stamped out, crushed into particles that could never form a threat.

While the Anomaly and greater darkness remained hostile and aggressive, their magnitude and potential vast, their goals impossible to perceive, even in outline, their weaknesses boiled down to this: precisely none.

Was all of humanity at risk?

TWELVE

EARTH, 2147 AD

They met up at a travelling diner in New Phoenix, one of two hundred or so establishments slowly circling the city along Annular Beltway, some thirty kilometres away from DistribOne where they all theoretically worked. Rekka performed some hatha yoga breathing, needing the calmness. Beside her, Simon grinned, clearly anticipating a friendly meal and good conversation.

You’ve not been getting much from me, have you?

But Simon could not understand her grief over Sharp’s self sacrifice. A xeno behaved according to its species’ evolved behaviour patterns; that Sharp was her friend who had given up everything – in a slow, awful death – seemed not to register.

‘The girls are here already,’ said Simon. ‘Hiya!’

Rekka slid in to sit facing Amber – whose steel eye-sockets glittered with reflected faux candle-light – while Simon gave Mary a peck on the cheek before sitting opposite her.

‘I was going to wear shades,’ said Amber. ‘But Mary reckoned that would make me more conspicuous, not less.’

‘Probably right,’ said Simon. ‘People are used to seeing Pilots around here, after all.’

Amber was supposed to be far from DistribOne, on sabbatical in Australia.

‘Anyway, food.’ Simon growled at Mary: ‘Need. Food.’

‘Poor Rekka.’ Amber reached out to find Rekka’s hand, then patted it. ‘I don’t question your being straight, because I know you can’t help it. But your choice of men—’

Mary laughed.

‘Excuse me?’ Simon said to her. Then, to Amber: ‘Isn’t motherhood supposed to make you mellow?’

‘Exhausted, more to the point.’

Rekka said, ‘So how is the most beautiful baby boy in the universe?’

‘Two universes.’ Lines disappeared from Amber’s face as she smiled. ‘And Jared’s wonderful. This is the first time I’ve been out without him, and it’s actually tough.’

‘He’s with Jenna,’ said Mary. ‘Who’s being the adoring aunt, and loving it.’

They ordered the first course, took their time eating, their conversation lightly seasoned with friendly insults, then finished up. An actual human waitress took their plates away, while menus displayed on the tabletop, Amber’s with fast-audio enabled: she ran her fingertips along the icons, a high-speed gabble sounding.

Gabble to Rekka; comprehensible to Amber.

‘So the rumour mill is one hundred per cent operational,’ said Simon. ‘And looks to be correct. DistribOne’s capacity is being reduced by seventy per cent over the next two years. I’m not supposed to know, even in my exalted position, which is why I can’t possibly be telling you this right now.’

‘And the workload’s going where, exactly?’ asked Mary.

Rekka was blinking.

He didn’t say anything earlier.

Or maybe she had broadcast leave-me-alone signals by pure body language. Sharp had been on her mind – again – all afternoon.

‘Shaanxi Province, mainly. And some other centres in the region, like Singapore.’

‘They can’t do that,’ said Amber. ‘I mean, they’re UNSA and they can do what they like, but Pilots have personal lives too. And for most other personnel, it’s an even bigger change.’

Mary was staring at Simon.

‘It’s the Higashionna cousins, isn’t it? They seem to be behind every weird change at the moment.’

‘Good guess, sweetheart,’ said Simon. ‘Our charismatic senators are poking around everywhere. Especially at Pilot welfare.’

‘Welfare,’ said Amber. ‘Right.’

But Rekka remembered Sharp’s reaction at DistribOne on seeing the two Higashionnas – good-looking Japanese-Brazilians, appearing like brother and sister but actually cousins, both UN senators – and the questions he asked in private: Do you not taste their evil? and Can you not smell dark nothing?

Even the visiting Zajinets had acted perturbed at the Higashionnas’ presence.

The entrées arrived – ‘Shouldn’t it be the starters that you enter with?’ Simon asked – and Rekka, Amber and Mary tucked in. But Simon had not finished talking.

‘China’s the place to be, isn’t it? Vibrant, go-ahead. Good schooling.’

Amber paused.

‘We’re still talking about that,’ she said.

Rekka looked at Mary, who was frowning.

Is there an argument there?

‘Karyn McNamara’s school in Zürich is still supposed to be the best,’ said Rekka. ‘But sending your child away like that can’t compete with a good home life.’

What none of them was saying aloud was that Jared’s birth – although registered as a home birth in New Phoenix – had taken place aboard Luís Delgado’s ship in mu-space, an illicit act that had required Rekka’s and Simon’s complicity.

Which meant baby Jared, already nanovirally treated as an embryo, was a natural-born Pilot of the kind that Karyn McNamara specialized in rearing. Karyn’s daughter Ro, who had come as an adult to DistribOne six years earlier but was rarely seen these days, had been the first of the new kind of Pilot, with black-on-black eyes instead of the silver sockets that both Karyn and Amber wore, their natural (and newly useless) eyes removed during the nanoviral alterations they had undergone as Pilot Candidates.

‘UNSA has no right,’ said Mary, ‘to determine how a child is raised.’

Amber put down her cutlery.

‘You can’t drive me to tears,’ she said, ‘because they took out my tear ducts along with my eyes, remember?’

‘Shit, sweetheart,’ said Mary. ‘I know that, but—’

‘Which is why I’m a fucking invalid in this world, while you literally cannot imagine the beauty of mu-space, the entire universe that is Jared’s birthright. OK?’

Mary’s face clenched.

‘I’m sorry, everyone. Shouldn’t have brought up a touchy subject, right?’

‘If you can’t talk about it in front of your friends,’ said Rekka, ‘then where?’

Mary glanced at Simon, then looked down at her plate.

‘I am enjoying this, really. Why don’t we just eat?’

The meal lumbered on.

Rekka went to a meeting the next afternoon. Her infostrand had given her directions – McStuart’s office, 14:00 – but the meeting’s purpose was listed as Project composition, which could mean anything. Which project did it even refer to?

Simon was so much better at this stuff than she was. His forward planning was meticulous always; he could visualize and rattle off the minutest details of last year’s work as easily as the next quarter’s plans; and he never entered a meeting without a clear objective in mind, and at least three possible strategies for achieving it. She, on the other hand, met deadlines only because she had to, while her idea of fun was to deeply immerse herself in the moment, and that applied to coding autofact software or modelling biospaces as much as to yoga or sex.