‘It’s addressed to you,’ said Amy, turning to Saul. ‘And it’s marked private,’ she added, raising an eyebrow. ‘Want me to patch it through?’

‘Please,’ Saul replied, and a message received icon appeared before him a few seconds later. ‘Excuse me,’ he added, handing the empty tray back to Amy.

His heart beat wildly inside his chest as he pulled himself back through to the lander. Mitchell looked like he was genuinely asleep, eyes closed and mouth hanging half open in the dimmed light.

Olivia’s message turned out to be a pre-recorded video file. He noticed her eyes were red with fatigue, as she sat at a terminal in what looked like a busy operations room, men and women he didn’t recognize hurrying past or talking together in tight groups behind her.

‘Saul,’ she began, ‘I hope you made it okay. It took me a lot longer than I’d have liked to figure out how to route this to you, so here’s hoping you still get to see it.’

He watched her take a moment to gather herself. ‘Before anything else, I want you to know we’re all fine here. We shut down the Inuvik–Jupiter gate without any major problems, except there just wasn’t enough room for everyone wanting to come through. So we . . .’ She paused for a moment ‘. . . We drew straws, basically. And some of those who stayed behind helped to make sure the wormhole collapsed.’

Saul studied the lines in her face: she looked like she’d aged ten years since he’d last seen her. Then he wondereled himw he would look to her, if she were able to see him. Just as bad, probably.

‘You asked me to find out anything I could about Mitchell,’ she continued. ‘And I’m going to have to tell you now I don’t think it’s good news – assuming you even believe what I’m about to say.’

Here it comes, he thought. His fingers tightened around the hand-grip secured to a bulkhead.

‘You know how I already said you didn’t exactly give me much to go on, except that there’s some link between Mitchell and that shipment? I talked to the others here, Bob Esquivaz and the rest, and told them everything I know. I guess it’s no surprise that there are other people here who’ve had some knowledge of the Founder Network. Some of them have higher clearance than I ever did, which means they can get deeper inside the ASI’s security records than I could. That made things a lot easier than they would have been otherwise.’

She licked her lips, her expression nervous. ‘Assuming the records are correct, we now know the precise time Mitchell recovered consciousness after they brought him back to Earth from Tau Ceti. It’s the exact same moment the plane carrying your missing shipment fell off the radar.’