‘So are they Nazis?’

‘I don’t think … I think the darkness is something real, and the thousand-year Reich would suit its purpose, but it’s not the goal. It … I just don’t know.’

Rupert said, ‘You do make it sound like demonic possession.’

‘The only real demons are people in uniform with sick dreams.’

‘Fair enough. Bri?’

‘She believes it,’ said Brian. ‘I’m not sure I do, but Gabby isn’t lying.’

For the first time it occurred to her that the encrypted message might have been left for her to find, that Clive had decrypted it already – hardly difficult, once you realized it was not a misread transmission – and someone had known about the darkness, and the sound associated with it.

‘You said the German guest got away.’ The analysis could wait, because she was concerned about the remaining prisoner. ‘Therefore the other man isn’t German – I’m guessing English – and you’ve still got him.’

‘And we have him in a chair, blindfolded and gagged.’ Rupert made a half-fist, then flicked his fingernails against the desktop. ‘Let’s see him use hypnosis like that.’

It felt like hands around her throat, the panic.

‘You’ve got to knock him out,’ she said. ‘It’s the only way.’

‘There’s no way he—’

Now to find out what they really thought of her.

‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘I’ll come down with you.’

‘To see the prisoner?’ said Rupert.

Brian shook his head.

‘In the circumstances—’

‘Then go down there yourself, make sure you’ve got dull, level-headed, suspicious men surrounding him. A lot of them, preferably deaf.’ She needed Rupert to be clear. ‘You like bright people, I know that, but the more intelligent and imaginative someone is, the easier it is for them to go into trance. Only cretins and morons, in the absolute technical sense of the terms, can’t be hypnotized.’

Rupert thrust himself up from the chair.

‘Time to prove yourself, Dr Wolf.’

A blindfolded man sat in a chair in shirtsleeves, his upper arms bound to the chair’s back, his wrists tied to the rear legs. In each corner of the blank room a soldier stood, rifle at port arms.

Gavriela stopped in the doorway, Rupert and Brian behind her. Then the prisoner turned to face her, and smiled a sightless smile.

No!

Four rifle barrels swivelled towards the doorway, aiming at her and Rupert and Brian—

‘Ulfr!’

—but Gavriela flung herself low and spinning, hands on the nearest rifle, twisting, leverage and rage her weapons as she hugged the rifle close—

‘Ver nær mér, berserkrinn!’

—with maximum torque continuing the spin, whipping out through the target, hardwood and steel against nothing much, a distant crunch as rotation carried her past—

He’s down.

—and the chair had toppled, while bound to it was a thing with a smashed egg attached to a crooked neck: an egg spilling copious yolk, pure red.

‘My God,’ said Rupert: whether appalled at her violence, or because he realized how close he had come to dying, there was no way to tell.

Three soldiers lowered their weapons; the fourth stared at his empty hands. Did he even remember the dream that had caused him to aim a rifle at his own superior officers? Did any of them?

‘Go to your darkness,’ Gavriela told the corpse.

She was holding the rifle like a hockey-stick. Slick fluid glistened on the butt.

TWENTY-TWO

FULGOR, 2603 AD

Piet Gunnarsson did not deserve realspace sentry duty, not because it was beneath him, but because he was unworthy. Nine subjective day-cycles earlier, he-and-ship had been gliding in the direction of distant Labyrinth, just as the tail end of a massive fleet passed out of sight behind a blood-coloured nebula. He had flown on, ignoring the fleet because of his own travails – including wounds sustained on Sivlix III when a flash riot started around a group of Zajinet traders, during what should have been a simple commercial mission. Allegedly the Zajinets had flared up with strange energies in what someone had thought presaged an attack; in retrospect, the Zajinets fired on no one, evincing panic if anything.

With comms off, Piet had taken a long-duration geodesic, giving himself time to heal from injuries he now considered trivial, in light of the Fulgor Catastrophe. Had he been more alert, more of a true Pilot, he would have flung his ship into a hard curve, thrown all sensors open on maximum gain, and hailed the departing fleet to find out what was going on.

Saving one Fulgidus life would have been worth it. But he might have been able to evacuate hundreds, and he could not forgive himself for missing that.

If there’s war, I’ll be here.

Fulgor floated before him, no different to the archive holos in her memory – his beautiful ship, surrounding him and holding him, trying to comfort him now.

We are here, doing our part.

Yes.

Her sensors were fully trained on that hellworld, because however unchanged the planetary chemistry might appear from this distance, the global Anomaly would surely be continuing to grow in strength. Theorists, working from sparse data, speculated on the gestalt mind linking to the nervous systems of other species, perhaps even those native to Fulgor: though ZNA-based, there had been ZNA-DNA hybrids created by human scientists in attempts to blend ecosystems. Subverting the hybrids would enable a transition to full absorption, combining the global web of life into some dark, perverted distortion of what others might call Gaia, but which Piet thought of as Jorth, both planetary goddess and mother of Thórr, himself a duality: war-god yet protector of freemen.

Forget the old myths. Concentrate on the science.

At some point, the new global organism would begin altering the atmospheric composition, so that even archaic spectroscopy might reveal the transformed nature of this once-beautiful world.

**You awake, Piet, sweetheart?**

That would be Alice, her own ship some three hundred kilometres further out than he was. He smiled as he sent his reply:

**All OK. Pass it on.**

**Will do. Kiss, kiss. Keep alert.**

**You too, gorgeous.**

So there was another reason to forget about boredom and just keep watch, however unchanging the planet before him might appear. If it reached out and got him, then Alice was next in line, and she deserved to live. So he would observe with all his senses – like Heimdall, Watcher of the Gods, from the legends of his ancestors – and report the slightest activity. Even if he-and-ship did not manage to escape, the others might live.

By now, Alice would have passed the still-OK message back along the chain of observing ships. Piet, as the closest, was outside the theoretical range of Calabi-Yau resonance transmitted by the Anomaly; but he had learned early on that the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference; and everyone knew how that went.

An hour later, nothing had happened, except that Piet had thought of something.

No one’s talking about attacking the thing.

All efforts were focused on watching the enemy whose intentions and thoughts – if such concepts were even valid – could not be foretold, arising as emergent properties of a massively complex system unlike any other in existence, at least among the worlds known to humanity.

We’re afraid of it.

He had known it all along, but codifying the thought made a difference.

It’s the unknown.

Except that there was one aspect everyone knew exactly: from the Anomaly’s point of view, humans were less than food, simply microscopic components; while from humanity’s position, it was effectively mindless – paradoxically, since its nature was unbelievably transcendent compared to any individual – and therefore a dangerous force of nature, with one added feature.