'If it is a way point, we need to find the next mirror right away,' Tony said. 'We need to keep moving.'

The mirror pair between the hothouse planet and this wilderness was still active. The ship had woken it a bare second before they transited, and the bridle had no idea how to shut it down. Pretty soon, the Red Brigade would regroup and send those drones through, controlled by q-phone links over who knew how many light years. And then they would come through themselves . . .

Tony tasked the bridle with scanning the mirrors, fretted as an hour ticked past. Unlikely Worlds, down in the hold, was as usual no help at all.

'There was a war here,' he said, after Tony showed him images of the planet and its battered moon.

'Was it fought between two factions of the Ghajar?' Tony said, thinking of Mina Saba's theory.

'It's possible.'

'And is that the Ghajar home world?'

'I very much doubt that anyone is living there now.'

'That isn't what I asked.'

'What happened here happened before my time,' Unlikely Worlds said. 'Thousands and thousands of years ago. Perhaps you should ask your eidolon. Or the copy lodged in the ship's mind. Are they interested in it?'

But although Tony was jittery with nervous energy, his eidolon was quiet, unmoved by the transition through the wormhole and the mirrors or the planet. The bridle reported that most of the mirrors were the ordinary kind, set in the flat faces of cone-shaped rocks, and most of the rest appeared to be dead.

'Keep looking,' Tony told her.

About ten minutes later, the mirror that led to the hothouse planet blinked open and the two drones sharked out, lighting up the neighbourhood with radar and microwave scans. 'Uh-oh,' the bridle said, and a moment later the drive kicked in. The ship was heading towards one of the mirrors. And its controls had locked up.

'Give me direct-law flight,' Tony said, angry and frightened. 'At once.'

'Trust me,' the bridle sang out.

The overrides were locked up too. Tony was a helpless passenger in his own ship.

Unlikely Worlds said, 'I think your question about whether this is the final destination or just a way point has been answered.'

'Where are we going?' Tony said.

'Somewhere wonderful,' Unlikely Worlds said, and Tony realised that the fucking thing had known all along where they were supposed to go.

'Home,' the bridle said, and Tony wondered whether the eidolon had spoken.

They flashed past a mirror, past two more rotating around each other, homing in on a black rectangle only faintly visible against the black of space.

'It's awake,' the bridle said. 'I think someone has been here before us.'

Tony's comms pinged: the drones, a couple of thousand kilometres astern, had spotted him. He saw the blink of their reaction motors as they began to manouevre, and then Abalunam's Pride slammed through the mirror.

Bright stars spread across the sky. Great washes of luminous gas.

Control of the ship came back. Tony began to kill its momentum, told the bridle to find out where they were. Dazed by the transition, he was wondering if they weren't somehow back in orbit around the blue ice giant.

'We have a more immediate problem,' the bridle said, and opened two windows.

One showed a gigantic mad ship hanging about a thousand kilometres from the mirror; the other a pair of E-class raptors, both of them displaying police flags as they closed on Abalunam's Pride.

59. Synchronicity.

In the immediate aftermath of the avatars' disappearance, Lisa was dispatched to the wizards' lair for another round of tests. Her ghost was quiet, its presence as faint as music leaking from a neighbouring room, and all sense of the lodestar was gone. The wizards wouldn't tell her if this meant they had arrived at their final destination; they were their usual non-communicative selves, giving her instructions in English Hold still, Look at this, Tell me what you see but talking amongst themselves in machine-gun Spanish. As far as they were concerned, Lisa wasn't a person but a puzzle they had as yet only partly unlocked.

They were still a long way from replicating the ghost in her head, and translating the information it encoded. At the beginning of the long series of tests she had offered to help to analyse the data, but the wizards' boss, a skinny man with a shock of black hair, told her that she wouldn't understand their methods. 'We have developed many new tools since your time,' he'd said, but Lisa wasn't so sure. They didn't appear to use any kind of analytical reasoning to confirm their conjectures, employing instead a crude form of experimental Darwinism, seeding a matrix with algorithms modelling variations of their initial assumptions and letting them run to a halting state, selecting those that most resembled the observed conditions, and running and re-running everything over and again until they had derived an algorithm that reproduced reality to an agreed level of statistical confidence. The wizards didn't care that this method gave no insights into the problems it attacked, or that they didn't understand how the solutions it yielded were related to the vast edifice of Euclidean mathematical theory. They weren't interested in theory. As far as they were concerned, if an algorithm gave the right answer, then plug it in: it was good to go.

Nevers came into the wizards' lair as the latest round of tests were being wound up, bluntly asked Lisa if she knew why the Jackaroo avatars had vanished, where they had gone. The ships docked in the funnel of the mad ship's hold had been searched from stem to stern, but no trace of the avatars had been found. It was possible that they were somewhere aboard the mad ship itself, Nevers said, but so far no one had found a way inside.

Lisa said she was glad that they were gone but didn't think that she could take the credit. 'As far as I can tell, my ghost didn't ever communicate with them. But perhaps your little gang of mad scientists knows better.'

Nevers ignored her jibe. 'Maybe it's a good sign. They left because we don't need any more help from them. Because we're exactly where we are supposed to be. We've beaten Ada Morange to the prize. Everything else is merely detail.'

'Isn't that were God lives? In the details?'

Nevers ignored that too. 'I thought we should have a little celebration,' he said, producing two pouches of clear liquid from the pocket of his green uniform trousers. He offered one to Lisa, holding it by its drinking tube like a popsicle. 'Vodka martini. I had one of the wizards mix it for us.'

Lisa swallowed a little spurt of saliva, her stupid body betraying her, saw a glint of cool amusement in Nevers's gaze and knew that he knew. The empty bottle in the trash the second time he'd searched her house. Her convictions for driving under the influence . . . Oh, he knew all right, and he was using it now to belittle her, to show her who was in charge. Maybe he'd begun his campaign against Ada Morange with the best of intentions, but it had eaten him away from the inside, turned him into the kind of pitiless monster who thought that it was funny to offer a drunk a drink.

She met his gaze and said, 'Why don't you just tell me what you found?'

He wiggled the pouches. 'Are you sure you won't join me?'

She supposed that his ghastly little smile was meant to be playful. 'You didn't come here to celebrate,' she said. 'You're looking for validation. You don't have the avatars any more, so you're hoping to get a reaction from my eidolon. You want to know if this so-called prize is worth the cost of the getting.'

'Oh, it's worth it,' Nevers said, and told Lisa that the wizards had determined that the mad ship and its cargo had emerged from a wormhole mouth that was just seven hundred light years from the centre of the galaxy, orbiting an old, cool neutron star and its single Earth-sized planet. Whipping around the neutron star once every two hours, at a distance of just half a million kilometres, the planet was mostly made of diamond, and strictly speaking wasn't a planet at all, but the remnant of a massive star that had once formed a close binary with an even larger companion. That companion star had followed the usual evolutionary path, expanding into a red giant as it used up its hydrogen, fusing heavier elements until at last iron formed in its core and it could no longer produce enough energy to counter the inward pull of gravity. The resulting supernova had created a rapidly spinning neutron star a pulsar emitting intense beams of electromagnetic radiation. When the smaller star had expanded in turn soon afterwards, the pulsar had siphoned off most of its mass and angular momentum, spinning itself up into a millisecond pulsar, reducing the smaller star to a low-mass carbon-rich white dwarf and relentlessly eroding it further, until only its dense crystalline core was left. Now, eleven or twelve billion years later, the pulsar had long ago spun down. Its radio emissions had ceased and it had become a neutron star again: a quiescent hyperdense sphere of neutrons thirteen kilometres in diameter, thinly coated with a crust of iron nuclei crushed into a solid lattice, its surface temperature just a few thousand degrees Kelvin. An ancient star armoured in iron, orbited by a planet made of diamond . . .

And that wasn't all, Adam Nevers said. Another star, an M3 red dwarf, orbited the neutron star at a distance of a little under nineteen astronomical units. And the M3 dwarf possessed a tide-locked Mars-sized rocky planet. He opened windows, showed Lisa images of the M3 dwarf and its planet, images of the diamond planet's dim half-disc illuminated by a sharp blue point source. With a quick deep chill she remembered something Willie had said on his dying bed. A planet bigger than its sun . . .

Nevers was explaining that the M3 dwarf and its planet seemed to have been moved into orbit around the neutron star relatively recently, said that the diamond planet could be some kind of supercomputer or vast quantum memory store, encoding information in nitrogen vacancies in isotopically pure carbon-12. A survey drone had discovered the remnants of a Ghajar tower at the planet's south pole, near what appeared to be a deep drill site. Another drone, spiralling on a suicide trajectory into the neutron star's steep gravity well, had captured in its last moments evidence of structures on the star's surface: intricate patterns etched in lines five millimetres high across several hundred square kilometres of the otherwise mirror-smooth crust.

'I'm told that in the neutron star's extreme gravity those patterns are equivalent to mountains on Earth,' Nevers said. 'We have no idea how they were made or how to access them, but there they are. And there are odd patterns in the belt of dark matter around the black hole at galactic centre, too. Nodes at regular intervals, like beads on a string. The wizards say it's evidence of some kind of cosmic engineering, but as the nearest node is more than three hundred light years away I think we can safely ignore that for now.'

He was going to secure this side of the wormhole, he told Lisa. If the Red Brigade managed to find a way through before the Commons police caught up with them, they were going to get a warm welcome.

'Meanwhile, we'll finish our survey of the diamond planet, and then we'll head for the M3 dwarf and its planet. Perhaps we'll find something we can understand there.'

'Wise old aliens dressed in togas and inhabiting a styrofoam replica of a Greek temple, that kind of thing?' Lisa said.

Nevers smiled. 'Something that piques the interest of your eidolon, hopefully.'

Lisa hadn't felt anything when he had shown her images of his prize, and was too proud to ask if the wizards had detected some kind of activity.

'I don't think you should hope for any help from that quarter,' she said. 'Look where it got me.'

'It put you where you are supposed to be, Ms Dawes. And soon we'll find out why,' Nevers said, and offered her one of the pouches of vodka martini again. 'Are you sure you won't join me in a little celebration?'

'I think you need it more than me,' Lisa said. 'Maybe it'll help you get over the loss of your friends in black.'

She was confined to the bland egg of her cabin again. Gravity came and went several times. The ship was manoeuvring. As usual, her guards wouldn't tell her anything.

She was asleep when gravity came back again. She woke with a jolt, found herself pinned to the floor by her own weight. Sitting up was an effort; standing a heroic labour that made her heart pound and invoked fresh pain in her spine and joints. Her weight had more than doubled; she guessed that the mad ship was moving at the bias drive's maximum acceleration.

Her ghost was back, too. A vivid eager presence in the tiny space.

'You aren't going to tell me why you are so goddamned happy, are you?' she said.

Presently, two guards came for her and fastened her wrists together with plastic strip. No use pointing out that she would probably break an ankle if she tried to run, or that there was no place she could run to. They didn't take her to the wizards' lair or the control gallery. Instead, the elevator dropped three levels and she was marched around the curve of a narrow corridor to a bare brightly lit room where Adam Nevers sprawled in a kind of wheeled sling chair, his head propped in a cushioned brace. Two wizards sat behind him, watching windows tiled in the air.

'Their activity just went into synchronicity,' one of them said.

'So they're definitely in contact,' Nevers said.

'They are definitely mirroring each other,' the other wizard said.

'It is not yet clear if they are actually exchanging information,' the first wizard said. 'It could be a form of entanglement.'

'Or a behavioural response,' the second wizard said. 'A reaction to the close proximity of its twin.'

'What about you?' Nevers said, gazing at Lisa. 'Do you feel this close proximity?'

Her ghost leaning at her shoulder, fully present. She said, 'You found another eidolon? How? Where?'

'Oh, we found much more than an eidolon,' Nevers said, and lifted a hand.

The door pinched back and a !Cha tank stepped into the room on its ungainly tripod, saying in its engaging baritone, 'Ms Dawes. How nice to see you again.'

But Lisa barely noticed Unlikely Worlds, because now a slim handsome man with dark brown skin and a glossy cap of tightly woven braids was pushed forward by a guard. She felt as if she was part of a broken magnet, yearning towards its other half. She saw in the man's gaze that he felt it too.

'Who are you?' he said.

'I don't believe you've met before,' Nevers said. He was gleaming with delighted pride, like a matchmaker who had just made the perfect match. 'But you definitely know each other.'

60. Deeper Than Sex.

As he followed Unlikely Worlds into the room, propelled by an unnecessary shove from his guard, Tony felt his ghost move through him, leaning towards the woman. She was staring at him with a shock that mirrored his own. It was like that moment in serial novellas where two people meet and know at once that they share the same soul. Tony had felt something like it half a dozen years ago, back when he and Orelolu used to trawl the cafes and bars of Victory Landing together. One night, Tony had shared a look with a tall slender man in police greens, Ramesh Rao, a marine on shore leave from the frigate that had arrived ten days ago, and that was it. They'd had sex in the bar's bathroom, started up again in the spinner that took them to a hotel, spent the rest of the night and most of the next day together. There'd been a lot of sex, but it was deeper than sex. They completed each other, somehow. But then Ramesh's leave ended, his ship booted, and Tony never saw him again.

He had been young enough, back then, to believe that vital spark, that sense of being completed, would happen again soon enough. But it never had. Not even with Danilo. But now, seeing this careworn middle-aged woman with her crew-cut white hair and unflattering baggy grey sweatshirt, he felt that visceral bolt of lightning again. Bam! Exactly like love at first sight.

The first thing she said to him, after Adam Nevers had made his joke about how the two of them hadn't met but knew each other, was, 'Where did you find yours?'

Her name was Lisa Dawes. More than a century ago, she had been infected by an eidolon that had been lurking in a scrap of wreckage from a crashed Ghajar ship. She had fallen in with Ada Morange, who had basically kidnapped her, dispatching her to her eidolon's lodestar aboard the timeship before she could be arrested by Nevers and his crew of Jackaroo avatars. But Nevers had intercepted the timeship at the end of its voyage, and here she was now, his prisoner.

Tony was hustled out of the room before he could find out how her eidolon had changed her, whether she could communicate with it, if she knew what it wanted, so forth, and Nevers kept them apart after that perhaps he was scared of what might happen if their eidolons fused, merging into an unimaginable whole. As far as he was concerned, it was enough to know that they were similar. He believed that it would give him an unbeatable advantage in the coming battle with Ada Morange and the Red Brigade.

It was a topic that he returned to over and again in conversations with Tony while the mad ship carrying Adam Nevers's little fleet drove towards the neutron star's M3 dwarf companion and its red planet. It had set out soon after Tony told Adam Nevers, aka Colonel X, how he had escaped from the Red Brigade. A little over a day later, several Red Brigade ships, including Mina Saba's frigate and the U-class hauler carrying the stolen mad ship, emerged from the mirror, running the gauntlet of drones and other assets Nevers had left behind, turning towards the red planet. And four days after that, three police J-class interceptors came through.

'They're one ship down after a hard fight with the Reds at that hothouse planet,' Adam Nevers told Tony. 'But they made it, and now Ada Morange and her friends are caught in a trap. All we have to do is make a stand and hold her off until help arrives. After all these years, I've finally got the bitch bang to rights.'

Adam Nevers's English was laced with archaic colloquialisms. He had aged just six years while travelling a century into his future, but he'd been old when he'd set out; his gaze was bright and his mind was sharp, but he was bent, bone-thin and bald. Everyone was hurting in the heavy pull of the bias drive's maximum acceleration, but Nevers was suffering more than most. He reclined in a chair that scooted around on soft wheels, and he was permanently short of breath, his pigeon chest labouring when he spoke.

'The Reds don't care about me, except that I stand between them and what they want,' he said. 'Ada Morange, though, she wants to put an end to me. She wants me to pay for all the trouble I've caused her over the years. And she also wants you to pay, Tony. Because you disobeyed her. Because you came here to help me.'

Nevers wanted to convince him that, in spite of everything, he was a friend and ally, but Tony knew that the man would sacrifice him in an instant if it gave him the chance to destroy Ada Morange. The two of them were locked in a battle more than a century old. Tony and everyone else were no more than foot soldiers.

'After I tried to stop her getting hold of those first Ghajar ships, she wouldn't let it go,' Nevers had said, during an earlier conversation. 'She wanted me to suffer for the trouble I caused her. She used her wealth and her political connections to get me hounded out of the force-'

'The force?'

'The Met,' Nevers said, with waspish impatience. Like many old men, he did not like to be reminded that his world was gone. 'The Metropolitan police force. It didn't much matter to me. I was ready to make a move. I took my police pension and I joined the UN. The United Nations. Back then, they were running the emigration lottery, distributing tickets to the gift worlds. They were getting into control of the Elder Culture artefact trade, too. That was my area of expertise, and we had several run-ins over the years, Ada Morange and me. And I usually got the better of her. She could fuck with the Met, but she couldn't fuck with the UN. She pushed; I pushed back. She tried to dodge the regulations and restrictions; I made sure she was called to account.'

Nevers liked to expound on Ada Morange's criminal irresponsibility. He said that he wouldn't be surprised to discover that she had been behind some of the meme plagues, designing them, letting them loose to see what they could do. He mentioned the old idea that Elder Cultures had died out because, like Ada Morange and the Red Brigade, they had tampered with technology they did not completely understand. He talked about how humanity's development had been stunted by contact with Elder Culture tech, said that was something Ada Morange either refused to understand or did not care about.

'That's why she's so dangerous, Mr Okoye. She is blinded by her ambition. She believes that the rules and precautions meant to protect us don't apply to her.'

'Yet it seems that you have a lot of respect for her,' Tony said, trying to goad the man into revealing more than he intended.

'She is a very tricky adversary,' Nevers said. 'I think you know that too. The way she used your family as a hiding place all those years, while she was spinning her webs with the help of those robots. Hands, as you call them. The way she used you to escape . . .'

This was in the room where Nevers had introduced Tony to Lisa Dawes. A guard stood against the door and a clutch of little drones hung in the air, some recording the conversation from every angle, some monitoring the activity of the eidolon inside Tony's head, others ready to zap him if he tried anything. As if he could. They had him and they had his ship, had boarded her and disabled her comms before bringing him aboard Nevers's scow, which was garaged in the mad ship's hold with half a dozen other ships.

'You used me too,' Tony told Nevers. 'Pretending you were Colonel X. Pretending you were on my side. I had to find out from Ada Morange who you really were.'

'And I gave you back your ship, and pointed you towards the people who did you so much wrong,' Adam Nevers said. 'We're on the same side, Tony. And you've done some good work. You've exceeded my expectations, frankly. You've done me proud.'

One thing was clear. When they reached the red planet, things were going to get messy. And Tony would have only a little time to engineer his escape.

When he was not being prodded and probed by wizards or subjected to one of Adam Nevers's monologues, Tony was secured in a standard cabin. That was where he was when at last, after eight days of the crippling G-force, with only a brief respite when the ship had turned around before beginning to decelerate, free fall returned abruptly. A little later, he was escorted up to the scow's control gallery, where Nevers was waiting with Unlikely Worlds, and images of a red desert world filled most of the windows. The mad ship and its cargo had reached its destination.

'We have had some interesting chats, Mr Unlikely Worlds and I,' Nevers told Tony. 'About your adventures. And, of course, about Ada Morange.'

'It has been very enlightening to meet Colonel Nevers again,' Unlikely Worlds said.

'Look at you,' Tony said, mistrusting both of them. 'Like a couple of old shipmates.'