Her eyes darted constantly between Saul and the fabric clutched between her knotted fingers. ‘Dad . . . Gregory wanted to come out here once the platforms declared themselves an independent republic. I was a lot younger back then, but everyone on the platforms votes on everything. We all get involved in the major decisions.’

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘about your mother.’

Her face grew red and she swallowed. ‘I . . . have trouble remembering. I was really small when it all happened. I think I just remember when you went away that last time, when we were living in Main Settlement, and I thought you weren’t going to come back.’ Her eyes glistened under the strip lights. ‘And then you didn’t . . . come back, that is. I’d almost forgotten about it, but then they told me you were the one on that ship out in orbit, and you’d been looking for me and . . .’

She did remember him, he realized.

He stood up, walked around the table and put his arms around her shoulders where she sat. She half-turned in her chair and pressed her face into his overcoat, breathing deeply. ‘There’s something you need to know about Mum,’ she said, her voice muffled.

‘It’s okay. I already know.’ Erkrnwald had already told him how the fighting had gone on for weeks following the collapse of the first wormhole – before the ASI forces trapped on Galileo by the collapse had been suppressed. A lot of people, it seemed, had got caught in the crossfire, and when they found Gwen, she’d been left all alone in their old apartment in Main Settlement for most of a week. Deanna had apparently gone out hoping to try and find food for them both, but she had never come back.

Gwen pulled back a little, her eyes darting up to hisback, tha then down again. ‘Are you . . . staying here?’

Saul fought to hold back the great swell of emotion that threatened to swallow him up. Kayes had already offered him a chance at a better life than anything Main Settlement could possibly offer him, and he had accepted the offer. Erkrnwald would wail and protest, but that would make no difference. He would be returning to the mainland alone, and damn the Revolutionary Council.

‘Yes,’ said Saul. ‘For good, this time.’

Also by Gary Gibson

Angel Stations

Against Gravity

The Shoal Sequence

Stealing Light

Nova War

Empire of Light

Acknowledgements

Inspiration for this book originally came from two sources. The first is Kip Thorne’s ‘Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy’, where he speculates that one end of a wormhole, if accelerated to relativistic speeds, might allow for a form of time travel. The second is a piece written by Ray Kurzweil for edge.org, concerning the idea of transmitting information at greater than light speed.