‘Right.’ Lester sniffed, staring out towards the horizon for a moment. ‘You know, a couple of generations back, a girl in my family went off to live on a mountain for a year with some people who all reckoned the end of the world was coming. Shaved her head, got herself pregnant, then a solar eclipse came and went, and she returned back down the mountain and found the world was still there. Everyone pretended it never happened, so she went on and got a regular job and never did anything crazy ever again. I can’t imagine how foolish she must have felt, but there’s a tiny part of me thinks maybe this is all the same kind of situation, and we’re all going to fly up there and find the world isn’t going away, and we’re all going to come home again feeling foolish. Do you know what I mean?’

‘If I thought shaving my head and going to live on a mountain might help things to come out any other way,’ said Saul, ‘I’d be reaching for the razor right now.’

Lester nodded with a look of inexpressible sadness. ‘Come on,’ he said, and led them through the hangar towards a side-office. ‘I’ll introduce you to Amy.’

Amy Rose proved to be an equally leather-skinned old person in her eighties, who had once worked on the early construction of Kepler’s biomes, and even helped carry out course adjustments on board one of the CTC-gate-carrying starships. When she wasn’t reminding Saul and Mitchell that she was too busy to retire, she was airing her political convictions.

‘We fucked ’em over every which way for no good reason,’ she said, when Saul described the invasion of Sophia he’d witnessed. ‘The colonies, that is. Should’a shared the technology with the Sphere nations a long time ago.’

‘Amy,’ intervened Lester, a note of warning in his voice, but this only earned him a scowl from his wife.

‘No, Lester,’ she continued, scowling, ‘long as they could control all the gate traffic, they reckoned they could keep the colonies under their thumb. The human race could have expanded a lot further out into the galaxy by now, if it weren’t for that kind of shortsighted thinking. That’s how they’ve maintained the same historical imbalance between rich and poor, even over light-years. Enough to make you sick.’ She shook her head with evident disgust.

‘When are we going up?’ asked Saul.

‘First thing tomorrow morning,’ replied Amy.

Ice trickled through Saul’s veins. ‘That soon?’

‘That soon,’ Amy echoed. ‘In the meantime, you look like you could use a night’s sleep.’