They had not noticed, the other UNSA personnel.

Shit?

It was a faint smell but unmistakable, gone in a second. She remembered her and Sharp’s amusement when they realized the one word that translated directly between their languages. But in his scent-speech, that odour when compounded with others denoted degrees of negation, all the way up to outright falsehood.

‘I understand,’ said Rekka.

Tiredness split off from her, like a shearing iceberg falling away.

Not all humans are friends. That’s what she meant.

Bittersweet had covered the sensor for less than a second, just long enough to prevent it from catching that momentary scent. The message was therefore secret, for Rekka’s … nostrils … only.

‘I hope,’ Rekka added, ‘we grow closer in mutual understanding.’

‘Yes.’

Bittersweet bowed again. Then she turned as the males drew apart, allowing her to walk through. They fell in behind her, and the group continued in to their private quarters. Doors slid shut.

‘That was promising,’ said one of the researchers.

‘I hope so,’ said Rekka.

As she went forward to introduce herself to her new colleagues, what replayed in her mind’s eye was the subtle swiping gesture that Bittersweet had made. It was a surprise, yet Sharp would have known to do that, wouldn’t he?

Oh, my brave, brave friend.

He had sacrificed himself so others could taste and absorb his knowledge. Rekka did not want to think how Bittersweet knew such details from the past.

‘I’m Rekka.’ She held out her hand to the nearest researcher. ‘Good to meet you.’

‘Randolf. And this is …’

But it was the memory of Sharp that dominated her attention, while her co-workers seemed insubstantial, figments that scarcely existed in her world.

Google absented herself from the technical discussions – she was management, not research – so Rekka was able to lose herself in details of xenolinguistics for the rest of the day. The others seemed awed by her rapport with Bittersweet. By the end of the afternoon, however, Rekka had made sure to introduce the researchers individually to the Haxigoji, allowing them each to have a short conversation with Bittersweet. It went down well. At the end of the working day, she was afraid that they would ask her to socialize; but either that was not the custom or they remained awed by her, or they could see that she felt wrecked, in need of food and sleep.

Travelling down in the lift, she was joined by Google, who got on at the sixteenth floor.

‘Good first day?’ asked Google.

‘Yes, for sure.’

It was just the two of them. Was it psychological, or was the lift really descending more slowly than expected?

‘Your mission to the Haxigoji world was very successful,’ said Google. ‘Everyone recognizes that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘The team leader was Mary Stelanko, is that right?’

‘You know Mary?’ said Rekka.

‘Not as such. I heard her partner’s on sabbatical. Amber, isn’t it?’

The lift was definitely going slow.

‘I’ve not been in touch with either of them.’ Rekka did not like this. ‘Not for a while.’

Google’s shrug looked almost unrehearsed.

‘It’s just that I heard about the new utilization criteria. Ships that have been idle for too long are being decommissioned or reconfigured for another Pilot. Getting with the programme is the best thing Amber could do.’

The lift stopped and the doors opened. They had only descended as far as the thirteenth floor.

‘Have a good evening.’ Google stepped out. ‘See you in the morning.’

‘And you.’

As the descent resumed, Rekka reflected that it was not only Bittersweet sending private messages; but in Google’s case it was neither friendly nor subtle. Needing comfort, Rekka tapped her infostrand, trying to call Simon; but a red icon indicated he was offline: whether to the world or to her specifically, there was no way to tell.

Sharp. No one knows how much I miss you.

The world outside was bright, hot and alien.

Shoulders drooping, chest concave with fatigue, she headed for her hotel.

THIRTY-FOUR

LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

Dr Imelda Sapherson was working in a slowtime bubble, sealed off from the rest of the room. Her experimental data was promising: a neural deepscan showing activity of the spatiotemporal grid in the subject’s entorhinal cortex, correlated with eye-muscle motor signals, precuneus activation and other distributed neural resonance. In realspace humans, mental images appear to have a real location in space, sometimes with a geometric representation of time – as in the front-to-back timeline denoting verb tenses in sign languages: formerly for the deaf, more latterly for kineme-based system-control gestures – while giving rise to spoken linguistic idioms like ‘putting the past behind me’, meaningful even to the extent that people act more charitably when standing higher than the surrounding ground level, as they take the literal moral high ground.

In Pilots, the entorhinal cortex was connected differently. What interested Sapherson was the extent to which that was driven by neural growth in mu-space, and how much was due to immersion in Aeternum. The language’s effect on brain architecture extended far beyond the neural centres called Bernicke’s and Broca’s areas. Recently, she had been reading a paper written by a Luculentus noting the correlation between alphabets and neurology – in particular, the way that old-fashioned 2-dimensional alphabets without written vowels were read right-to-left, allowing for greater right-hemisphere processing to distinguish context, while ideographic scripts ran vertically – and wished she could have talked to the man, before his world was destroyed.

It’s why I do what I do.

She pushed the words away – behind her, if she deconstructed her subjective experience deeply enough to tell – because the truth was, doubts had been with her for a long time. But the appearance of the Anomaly in realspace told her she had been right to work with the intelligence service and the Admiralty in the way she did. Civilization was clearly fragile, therefore extraordinary measures were sometimes necessary to safeguard the common good.

Sapherson was aware that outsiders, not understanding the hard necessities of her discipline, would consider her a psychopath. At least history provided her with a centuries-long chain of antecedents, all of them as cruel as she had to be.

Perhaps training Fleming and his small corps of torturers was the most questionable thing she had done. Or maybe it was the increasingly vicious – because deep – mindwipe procedures carried out on innocent witnesses and on officers of the intelligence service itself.

What would they ask her to do next?

And why do I always agree?

But her subjective analysis could not be so deeply rigorous without self-honesty to a degree few people were capable of. Lying to others was an art; lying to herself was impossible. That was why she knew about the hidden reason, the one she would never admit to.

Twisting other minds was a rush, a power trip.

When she came out of slowtime, her chief assistant, Alfredo, was waiting to talk.

‘Hey, boss,’ he said. ‘I did the check-up you asked for on Darius Boyle.’

‘Using Med-Centre cover?’

‘Well, yeah. I wouldn’t want him to associate me with his condition. He’s a bit too … physical for me to handle.’

‘And what is his condition?’ said Sapherson. ‘The same as before?’

‘The aphasia’s stopped increasing for sure, and the remedial therapy is probably pushing it back. Visits from his sister – from his viewpoint, a stranger claiming to be his sister, and with what appears to be fake evidence to prove it – remain upsetting. I observed that firsthand.’