56. Mirror Dive.

Abalunam's Pride was just three hundred thousand kilometres out from the hothouse planet when the bridle reported that she had at last acquired hard data on the location of the mirror. It was travelling west to east at about two hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, she said, tracing a wide, irregular circle around the planet's north pole.

'There's a lot of uncertainty in that track,' Tony said, after he had studied the images she threw to him.

'The resolution of the neutrino detectors will improve as we get closer. And when we get closer still, I should be able to pick it up on radar.'

'How much closer?'

'Oh, within three or four hundred kilometres.'

'So not until we are on top of it.'

'These new mirrors are smaller than the ordinary kind, and impressively transparent to radar. Also, there are many false signals,' the bridle said. 'Thunderstorms, rain, atmospheric turbulence. And the aerostats, of course. It's very interesting! Perhaps someone wanted to hide it down there. Perhaps the aerostats are not cities after all. Perhaps they are camouflage. Dazzle and distraction.'

'Try harder,' Tony said. 'We'll only get one chance at this.'

'I know! It's going to be very extreme!'

Some hours later, the pilot of the picket ship pinged Tony, sending a string of orbital vectors and telling him to follow her. They were three thousand kilometres out from the planet now, and closing fast. The picket shed velocity, preparing to enter an equatorial orbit and rendezvous with the Red Brigade's little fleet. Tony followed, chasing the picket through the glory of a vast sunset into the planet's shadow. There was a huge storm below. Cannonades of sheet lightning limning contours and layers within the dark cloudscape.

'So pretty,' the bridle said.

'Concentrate on nailing down the location of the mirror.'

The bridle displayed its latest estimate: an oval volume a little less than a hundred kilometres across at its widest point. She said, 'I have every confidence that this will work. We are supposed to be here. It was meant to be.'

Tony shared her righteous conviction. It was probably spillover from the eidolon that rode him, but he didn't care. This, he thought, was this.

The picket achieved orbital velocity and cut its drive. Abalunam's Pride continued to decelerate, descending in a long arc towards the edge of the atmosphere. The picket's pilot pinged Tony and told him to correct his course; he said that he was flying straight and true. After a short silence, someone else cut in, ordering him to follow his escort or suffer the consequences.

'Come and catch me,' Tony said, and shut off his comms.

From the hold, Unlikely Worlds asked him if he had calculated the risk of disobeying his captors.

'They are not my captors,' Tony said. 'I have not surrendered to them, and I swear I never will. Tell me: what will happen to you if the ship is destroyed?'

'That depends on how it is destroyed.'

'I heard that !Cha can teleport to the nearest mirror.'

'I have heard that too. Unfortunately it is not true.'

'But you can survive in vacuum.'

'For a while.'

'I could eject you. I am sure the Red Brigade would pick you up from orbit.'

'I have chosen to follow you.'

'Either you want children really badly, or you know that I am doing the right thing,' Tony said.

He was hoping that Unlikely Worlds was coming along for the ride because he knew that they would survive this. That this reckless gambit would pay off; that it was a chance to escape, a chance to regain some control.

Ada Morange had told him that he would be able to pilot the mad ship and use it to unlock the mirror, but he believed that the mad ship was not the only key. She had helped him to escape on Veles because he had been changed by the eidolon, but she had also been interested in how Abalunam's Pride and her bridle had been changed: that was why she had made sure that he would be reunited with his ship. He was gambling now that those changes meant that his ship could open the mirror. That he could get ahead of the Red Brigade, find the grail they were searching for, and use it to bargain with Mina Saba. A straight exchange for Ada Morange. A simple business deal that would, after he had brought her home and she had been forced to confess her every crime and betrayal, restore his standing in his family.

The bright disc of the sun rose, shooting light around the curve of the planet. A minute later, the bridle told Tony that there were pings on the proximity radar.

'Two drones. They'll intersect our course in less than ninety-two seconds. My conventional armaments have been stripped out, but I can discharge waste-water ice and other material from the stern vent. Given the difference in velocity between ourselves and those drones, it would do a lot of damage when it hits them.'

'Hold off.'

'Are you sure about that? I can take them out. I know I can.'

'And they'll send more drones. Hold off.'

Tony did not like the way the bridle was questioning his orders. It had never done that before.

He watched the two drones come in, decelerating hard, separating and veering to either side of the ship, matching its course in a neat flanking manoeuvre. Abalunam's Pride was skimming the outer edge of the planet's mesosphere now. Usually, Tony would spiral in for a couple of orbits, killing his velocity before dropping straight down through the atmosphere on distorted gravity gradients, but he didn't have time for that. He was going in fast and dirty.

The dim stars of the U-class hauler and the Red Brigade ships rose above the horizon. Tony could not resist taunting Mina Saba and Ada Morange with a quick message. I am going ahead. Follow me if you can.

Friction heated gas to a violet flare that wrapped around his ship. The force of deceleration slammed him into his couch for two long minutes. Then the flare blew away and Abalunam's Pride was falling in a steep arc through a dark blue sky towards the white cloud deck. The drones were falling alongside him, falling into streaming cloud.

The bridle was screaming with delight.

Tony remembered a diver he'd once seen in Nuevo California. A woman wearing nothing but silver bodypaint, poised at the edge of the flat roof of a five-storey hotel while Tony and a small crowd watched below. He remembered how she'd raised her arms above her head, stood on her toes, and given herself to the air. Clasping her knees to her breasts and somersaulting one and a half times and smashing into the exact centre of the tiny pool of water.

'I have radar contact!' the bridle said.

Abalunam's Pride slewed violently, entering a sunlit canyon between two banks of cloud. The drones slewed too, keeping pace. The radar began to return a faint signal; half a minute later Tony eyeballed a tiny black speck a long way ahead. The ship slewed again and the speck was suddenly dead ahead and growing rapidly. A rectangular sheet four kilometres tall, hanging vertically in clear air, presumably balanced within the same kind of gravity warp used by Ghajar ships, rushing towards him. The drones cut away on collision-avoidance trajectories. Tony glimpsed the ring of machinery embedded in the black sheet, wondered what it would be like to hit a wormhole that was closed, if anyone had ever before done such a thing, and then there was a black flash and the ship punched through into raw sunlight.

'Wow,' the bridle said. 'Wow. We did it.'

57. Dead Planet.

A couple of hours after the ship passed through the wormhole, Lisa was taken by one of her taciturn guards to the wizards' lair. They strapped her into a version of the cradle that Ada Morange's people had used to test her compass ability, stuck sensor dots on her forehead, patched her with a drug that immediately gave her a feeling of woozy detachment, and masked her with a strip of black cloth that projected sequences of geometric shapes, different colours, into her eyes, and pulses of sound into her ears. It was an intense version of the audio-visual entrainment experiments they'd tried before. The patterns changing slowly at first but gradually speeding up, smashing towards her like freeway traffic, blurring into an endless flicker that, when at last it cut off, left her dizzy and disorientated. She realised that the lodestar was somewhere beyond her feet now, and then it slowly shifted and the sequence of shapes started up again. Rinse and repeat six times, a brain cramp sharpening behind her eyes despite the cushion of the drug, spreading across the inside of her skull.

When at last the strip of cloth was removed, she was floating in a red throb of malignant pain. Looking up at the wizards, telling them that she knew what they had been doing. 'Being used as a human compass, I've done that before. So what was I pointing at this time?'

'A wormhole,' one of them said. Her face was a mask of fractal tattoos that contained a kind of AI toolkit; it looked like she was peering at Lisa through a tangled hedge.

'Right,' Lisa said. 'The one we just went through.'

The wizard shook her head. 'One we'll be able to go through if you pointed true,' she said, but wouldn't explain what she meant.

None of them would. Lisa lost it. Told them that she deserved to know what the fuck was going on. Demanded to be unstrapped from the cradle that instant and taken to Adam Nevers. Demanded to be taken to the motherfucking avatars so she could have it out with them, all her anger and frustration and fear raving out until at last one of the wizards slapped a patch on her arm and she woke up dry-mouthed and weak as a kitten back in her room.

The next day, a pair of guards escorted her to a long tubular space where, in dim red light and an atmosphere of hushed concentration, a dozen people sat at arcs and clusters of windows, swiping through columns of numbers and symbols or studying views of a wormhole mouth. It looked like an art installation or the gallery of a TV studio, with little drones like cyborg hummingbirds darting here and there on cryptic errands, The three Jackaroo avatars floated in mid-air at the far end of the gallery, as if supervising the quietly intense activity. Lisa kicked towards them, gliding past people and windows, thumping into the padded wall behind the avatars and grabbing hold of a strap before she bounced away.

The avatars smoothly spun around, aiming their sunglasses at her like synchronised Disneyland automata.

'It must be amusing,' she said. 'Watching us jumped-up monkeys bang our peanut-sized brains against this puzzle.'

She was out of breath and her hip ached from the kick. The two guards were bulling their way down the gallery towards her.

'We are here to help,' the right-hand avatar said.

'So why won't you tell me why I've ended up here, and what I'm supposed to find beyond that wormhole?' Lisa said. The guards were very close now.

'We are not your enemy, Lisa,' the middle avatar said.

It startled her, hearing the damn thing speak her name.

'We mean no harm to anyone,' the left-hand avatar said.

'Except you like to give people so-called gifts, and watch them explode in their faces. Is that what happened to the Ghajar? Is that what you hope will happen to us?'

But then the guards crowded in, grabbing her, hauling her away.

'Best not disturb our guests,' one said.

'If you cause any more trouble,' the other said, 'we'll take you back to your cabin.'

'Not unless your boss tells you to, you won't,' Lisa said, but didn't try to fight them. Resistance was useless and all that, and besides, for what it was worth, she'd got in her shot. But she still wanted answers to her questions. She had a bad feeling that Nevers and his crew were being led into a trap. And she was bound to them, the unwilling key to the wormhole's Pandora's box.

After a few minutes, Adam Nevers and Dave Clegg swam into the gallery. While technicians fussed around the pilot, fastening him into a couch, fitting him with sensor dots and a mask, Adam Nevers cautiously sculled along the gallery's padded wall to Lisa.

She supposed he knew about her brief confrontation with the avatars, but she refused to feel ashamed, saying, 'So have you found if there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?'

Nevers smiled his white toothless smile. In the dim red light he looked more than ever like a mummified skull. 'Oh, we've been very busy. We moved our ships inside the mad ship, we tapped into its nervous system, and Mr Clegg took control. He's still bedding in, but he was able to open the wormhole and take us through. Here,' he said, and opened a window.

The bland crescent of a planet tipped in sable black, a sheen of sunlight gleaming on its upper curve.

Lisa couldn't hide her astonishment. 'What is that? The Ghajar home world?'

'We don't know yet,' Adam Nevers said. 'We don't even know where it is I'm told that it takes time to locate pulsars and other landmarks. But we do know that something very bad happened to it. There are big and relatively fresh craters in its surface, made by the impacts of at least eight dinosaur-killer asteroids. One triggered a huge volcanic eruption that's still ongoing. Lava flows bigger than Australia. There's a permanent hyper-hurricane above it, storm fronts of superheated steam, huge thunderstorms. Everywhere else on the planet is freezing cold. Its oceans are frozen over, it is completely shrouded in acid rainclouds, and there are huge amounts of soot and sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere, hardly any oxygen. If this was the Ghajar home world, nothing bigger than a microbe lives there now.'

Lisa said, 'We've come quite a way from arguing about a little stone, haven't we?'

'It was always about a lot more than a little stone. It is about a principle. It is about managing exploration and exploitation of places and artefacts that we barely understand. It is about quarantine and triage. When we return home, you'll see how bad things have become thanks to unregulated expansion into the wormhole network. Tens of thousands of children have been infected by something that drives them insane, and there's no cure. And that's just the latest of a string of meme plagues. We're doing good work here, Lisa. We're on the side of the angels.'

'The side of the Jackaroo, at any rate,' Lisa said, looking down the dim busy gallery at the avatars. Impossible to tell if they were looking back at her. 'That's why your three friends have come along for the ride, isn't it? To help your crazy attempt to censor the universe.'

'They are merely interested observers. It's up to us to save ourselves.' Nevers pointed to the crescent of the dead planet. 'That's one possible future. Some are of the opinion that we are too far down the path towards it to be able to turn back. Others think that we can do better than the Ghajar and the rest of the Elder Cultures. That's what I think. That's what my boss thinks. And that is why we are here.'

The withered old son-of-a-bitch looked happy. He was exactly where he wanted to be. He was fighting the good fight. Lisa thought, with a pang of grief that opened a hole in her heart, of how Willie would have loved this, too. Weird wormholes leading to planets no human being had ever seen before. Deep history. Untold plunder.

Nevers said, 'We're at the L5 point between that planet and its moon. It's bigger than the Moon, Earth's moon. About the size of Mars, with a thin atmosphere and ice caps. The wizards say that it would have strongly motivated the Ghajar to develop space-going technology. But it's a lifeless garden of craters now, wrecked by the same cosmic bombardment that ruined the planet. So much for the moon. So much for the planet. As I'm sure you've guessed, they aren't our final destination. There are several hundred wormholes around us. Most of them are dead, but you pointed us towards one of the active ones. Mr Clegg opened it yesterday, and we sent a drone through. And found a star clad in iron, orbited by a planet made of diamond.'

He paused, clearly expecting Lisa to ask him what he meant. When she didn't take the bait, he said, 'Keep watching this window. You'll see soon enough.'

He left her there with the two guards and hauled himself back to Dave Clegg's couch, talking to the pilot while the technicians manipulated symbols in dozens of small windows. At last, Nevers and the technicians sculled back from the couch, and it slid into the wall. Chatter and activity up and down the gallery sharpened; muted chimes pulsed in the air. The guards conjured stalked chairs and sat Lisa in one; it clamped around her like a soft fist.

Gravity came back. The ship was under way again. The view in the window changed, showing now the silvery ring of a wormhole throat embedded in an irregular black sheet, steadily growing larger.

Lisa leaned forward. She was afraid, vastly and mortally afraid, but she was also amazed and excited, watching as the wormhole throat expanded with a sudden rush, filling the window. She felt it coming at her, felt it engulf her and pull at her soul. And then the ship was through, spat out the other side whole and unaltered, and the window was full of fat bright stars that hung before washes and threads of glowing gas in which yet more stars burned. Lisa saw a star cluster like a swarm of burning bees, saw flowing arcs and filaments. People were applauding all around her, and then someone cried out, a loud human shout of surprise and shock.

Lisa turned, saw that the three Jackaroo avatars were dissolving into the air. Their heads and hands thinning, fading away, their sunglasses floating free as their tracksuits collapsed. Gone.

58. Final Destination.

'Look. Look! Isn't it wonderful?' the bridle said.

'It's too early to tell. Where are we?'

Tony was flipping through the images she had thrown at him. It was difficult to focus. He was still gripped by the adrenalin rush of the crazy dive, shaky and elated and buzzing with skittish energy. He had never before felt so alive. He had escaped the Red Brigade. He was flying a ship with crazy unknown powers. Everything seemed possible.

'In a wilderness of mirrors,' the bridle said. 'It appears to be orbiting at the L5 point of that rocky planet and its moon.'

Tony saw that the other side of the mirror pair they had just used was dwindling behind them, centred on a thinning cloud of carbon dioxide and water vapour that had bled through when the wormhole mouth had opened. Many more mirrors, a couple of hundred of them, were scattered across a spherical volume roughly ten thousand kilometres across. And far beyond this compact wilderness were the tiny crescents of a planet and a big moon. It reminded Tony at once of images of Earth and its moon, but when he zoomed in he saw that the planet was wrapped in cloud from pole to pole, a dirty grey shroud punctuated by the swirl of a gigantic hurricane close to the equator.

He asked the bridle if this was where the eidolon wanted to go, or was it just a way point to somewhere else?

'I think it's a way point.'

'You think or you know?'

'I have a feeling,' the bridle said. 'A good one.'