He passed time by playing back the decrypted video fragments or else browsing through a selection of the hundreds of classified documents that accompanied them, hoping they might help make some sense of what he had witnessed so far, but the more he read, the more an almost physical dread overwhelmed him. Some of the documents focused solely on the growths, including speculations on their origin, while the majority detailed the exploration of something called the Founder Network. Saul read on, numbed by what he now learned. No wonder Donohue had worked so hard to suppress it all.

One report detailed an incident on a world so far in the future that – assuming he interpreted what he read correctly, although he was far from sure he did – the last remaining stars had long since burned to cinders. The main part of the report explicitly referenced Mitchell, appearing to suggest that he had somehow died and then come back to life – a claim no less extraordinary than any other Saul had so far encountered.

He closed his eyes and leaned forward to rest his head on his folded arms, inhaling deeply just to counteract a sudden rush of nausea. He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Jeff Cairns to know so much and never be able to talk about it. If it had been Saul himself, he’d have cracked up long ago. And, if some of the personnel psych-eval reports he’d glanced through were anything to go by, a lot of people had done precisely that.

No wonder Narendra had been so eager to show him this footage. That hadn’t just been because he wanted Saul to explain it; he’d been unable to sustain the horror of knowing everything – on Earth, at any rate – was shortly coming to an end.

Saul stretched out on the bench and dozed for a few hours amidst the roar and whirr of machinery being assembled. He woke up to find that the last of the Dogs had departed, his UP flashing a message to inform him that he could now board a shuttle-car.

As he disembarked in the Lunar Array, twenty minutes later, he saw several hundred troopers in chameleon armour preparing to head the other way, their outlines blurring as they jostled like some nightmare assemblage of ghosts. Saul made his way directly to the Copernicus–Florida gly till trying to process all the information he had absorbed, not least the destruction of everything he had ever known.

He boarded an elevator and slumped back against cool steel, closing his eyes as it whisked him twenty floors up to the Florida ASI’s command centre. The air was full of a distant rumble, like static; the massed voices of however many millions of refugees that had by now arrived at the perimeter. He thought of the crowds he’d already passed through, and wondered with a chill how many of them had since died.