He bit his lip and looked at her thoughtfully, then decided there wasn’t any reason not to be honest. ‘I’ll admit that, in my more candid moments, I’ve wondered if there’d be any point in going back even if rescue did come. In a sense, this. . .’ he waved a hand around the prefab, ‘all this is my home now. And, besides, I’ve made real progress trying to decipher the records I’ve dug up. It’s . . . hard to think I could end up just walking away from it all. But I’ll have to, I realize that. I’m not some insane hermit. I don’t want to stay here for ever on my own.’ He could hear the sadness in his own tone.

Zukovsky nodded and smiled broadly, as if pleased with this answer. ‘That’s exactly why I came over to talk to you. How would you feel about staying here?’

He eyed her askance, as if she was kidding him.

‘I should maybe be more candid,’ she continued. ‘We didn’t just come out here to look for you, though that was part of it – in fact we also wanted to know exactly what happened to the Emissaries. It seemed prudent to try and assess whether they might still represent some kind of threat.’

‘And do they?’

‘What happened up there,’ she said, shifting her gaze towards the ceiling as if she could look straight through it at the Lantern Constellation, ‘wiped out most of their space-going fleets and crippled their empire, but it didn’t put them entirely out of action. They have other surviving caches, so they could regroup and come back at us – and we need to be ready for that.’

‘So what does that have to do with me being here?’

‘We’ve taken a look at the research you’ve done here, and it’s obvious you already have a better handle on the Emissaries than most of the specialists back home. That counts for a lot when it comes to making the kind of assessment I’m talking about.’

‘You want me to keep working here?’ he said. ‘Seriously?’