‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘maybe you’re right. Besides, I don’t have enough bullets in this gun for you as well, even if I did decide to shoot you.’

Saul frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

Hanover raised his eyes towards the ceiling. ‘My family are upstairs. Cassie and both the kids, that makes four of us. There isn’t a fifth bullet for you.’

Saul felt a hollow sensation in his gut. ‘You’re going to kill them?’

Hanover smiled bitterly. ‘They’re not allowed passage through the Array. I am, but not them. That’s my punishment, apparently. If they’d killed me, or ordered me to stay behind, I could have accepted that after everything that’s happened, but . . .’ He shook his head and began to weep. ‘But this is cruel.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Saul. Somehow the words seemed far from adequate.

‘I don’t know how long it’s going to take – if it’s going to be sudden or slow, painful or just like going to sleep. Do you understand me?’

Saul shook his head. ‘Not really.’

‘We don’t know what’s going to happen,’ Hanover rasped. ‘All we know is that everything’s going to end. The means aren’t clear.’

The Agnessa slipped from Hanover’s grasp, and clattered to the floor next to him.

‘Here,’ he said, and a moment later, Saul’s contacts flagged him regarding the arrival of a string of letters and numbers.

‘What’s this?’ he demanded.

‘An access code,’ replied Hanover. ‘You need to head straight for the ASI offices up in the Lunar Array. Soon as you’re in range of the localized security network, activate it. It’ll log you into a restricted network, and guide you to where you can get a keycard that’ll trigger the entire process.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘More or less. There’s a terminal room from where you can use the keycards to then trigger a manual shutdown. Its exact location’s kept secret from everyone but the director of the ASI, but assuming the restricted network accepts your authorization, it’ll guide you there as well.’

‘And then?’

‘And then, assuming you’re operating under normal circumstances, there’ll need to be two of you, with separate authorization and one keycard each, before the system will respond. You have to activate two separate terminals at exactly the same time, or nothing will happen.’

‘There’s no way to trigger the process remotely?’

‘Of course not. The security risk would be preposterous.’

‘Then just the one access code isn’t any use, unless I’m sure of someone being there to help me. Is there any way I can get hold of another?’

‘I said “under normal circumstances”,’ Hanover replied. ‘There are measures, however, in case only the one person is available.’

‘What kind of measures?’