‘What the hell kind of people are running things around here?’ I demanded. ‘That man was stinking drunk. I wouldn’t put him in charge of a fucking merry-go-round.’

‘Believe me,’ said Rozalia, ‘he’s not the worst I’ve encountered.’

I shook my head and began to climb out of my own suit. ‘But doesn’t it make you angry that you were sent all that way down there to retrieve data left by someone trying to build a transfer stage? Why, when the Authority already have the technology? It doesn’t make any sense!’

‘Jerry.’ Rozalia said my name with a degree of firmness that shut me up. ‘There isn’t one of us that hasn’t asked the same kind of question, time and time again, and none of us got any closer to an answer. If the Authority don’t want to share information with us, there’s not much we can do.’

I shook my head, feeling helpless. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘Of course it isn’t. Seeing everything you’ve ever known and loved die and fall apart isn’t fair either. Or the fact that we survived while billions of others went to undeserved graves – and I’m betting you spent a lot of time wondering why it was you that got to live, when there were surely so many more deserving of life. But there’s not a damn thing you can do to change it, same as any of us.’

‘But if we could find out . . .’ I dropped my unzipped suit next to Nadia and Rozalia’s.

‘There isn’t,’ she said, even more firmly. ‘Don’t do anything that’d give the Authority an excuse to put you the hell right back where you came from.’

‘Sure,’ I said, and looked back at the hangar entrance. I had thought soldiers might come storming out and arrest Nadia, but all I could see was the same hustle and bustle as when we had arrived. Perhaps Barnes was as ineffectual as he was drunk.

‘About the transfer stages,’ I said. ‘Did any of you ever try to . . . ?’

‘To what?’ said Rozalia. ‘Sneak in during the middle of the night and light off for some homely little alternate where they’ll never find you?’

I reddened with embarrassment. ‘That wasn’t exactly what I was going to say.’

Rozalia gave me a knowing look. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘All right, fine,’ I said, nettled. ‘What’s stopping you?’

‘Well,’ said Rozalia, ‘disregarding the fact all the stages are guarded, you need to punch the right coordinates into the control rig, and the Authority keep those coordinates very much to themselves.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but what if you punched a random set of coordinates into the rig? Surely it would take you somewhere?’

‘Don’t ever do that,’ Nadia warned.

‘Why not?’

‘Because the overwhelming probability is that you’d end up with a null sequence.’

‘A what?’