With a sour expression, Albright ground out his cigarette under the heel of one boot. ‘Now, we’ve analysed, frame by frame, the A/V footage from when you and Vogel disappeared into that pit,’ he continued. ‘Both of your suits dissolved and, the instant the black oil touched your flesh, you both lost consciousness and collapsed. Those suits are made from extremely tough materials designed to withstand an enormous range of lethal environments, and yet they came apart like wet tissue paper in a hurricane.’

Albright lit another cigarette and drew on it, stepping away to lean against a nearby workbench. ‘The liquid in those pits clearly acts like a universal solvent. Some of your colleagues tried to bring back samples, but it dissolved everything they tried to put it in. Which all rather begs the question: are you, in fact, the real Mitchell Stone, or are you something else altogether?’

Mitchell shook his head and laughed. ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’

‘Okay, here’s what we’ve been thinking. Maybe the answer we need is inside you, in some way we can’t decipher just by running non-invasive scans or occasionally bouncing you off the walls. Maybe,’ Albright took another draw, ‘we’re going to have to go a little deeper.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mitchell.

‘Dissection,’ said Albright. ‘Peel back your skin and see what it is that makes you tick. Put your organs in steel trays and pick them apart to see if you’re really human.’

Mitchell felt his insides twist in horror. ‘How the hell is doing that going to tell you anything?’

‘We won’t know until we look, will we?’ said Albright, an unpleasant glint in his eyes. ‘We’ve tried persuasion and reasoning, and look where it got us. But now we’re staring a holocaust in the face and, in the absence of any willing response on your part, do you really think we’d hesitate one Goddamn moment to get the answers we need, by any means necessary?’

No, thought Mitchell, not for one second. ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop what’s coming,’ he insisted, regardless. ‘Don’t you understand that? From where I’m standing, you’ve all been dead for years. You’re a ghost, Albright.’

Albright’s jaw worked like he’d just swallowed something nasty. ‘Let’s be clear on one thing: I’m not interested in this predetermination shit. The future isn’t fixed.’

‘You brought this on yourselves. I saw how the science teams at Tau Ceti were forced to take chances. They were bringing technologies that nobody understood back to Earth without any idea what the consequences might be. The sci-eval staff all fled protests, but nobody listened.’ Mitchell cleared his throat. ‘But I did listen, and I saw how anything that looked like it could turn a profit or win a war was packed into a crate and hauled straight back home.’