"We don't belong here," Gabriel declared. She'd turned a complete circle, taking in the strange conflation of creaky old buildings, chaotically jumbled wreckage, and new mega-structure with a childlike expression of awe. "You and I. It's not our world." Her mind state verged on depression.

"Don't be such a Luddite," he said.

She gave him a soft, pitying smile. "You don't understand. This place, it has destiny. I can feel it, portent after portent, the weight of them pressing down, suffocating. Future history, eager to be enacted, glories waiting to be born."

Her words triggered his own instinct, a feedback reinforcing misgivings. Another reason Gabriel lived alone, even he had to take her in small doses. What she saw, rambled about, there was no escape from knowing it was all true. Suppose she was to hint the approach of his own death?

There was a work crew laying the last stretch of paving slabs between the yard and the main building. A clump of bedraggled and confused daffodils were sprouting in one of the concrete troughs beside the entrance.

"Ready?" he asked just before they went in. "Shouldn't take long."

"You're telling me this?"

He grinned at the old reliably cranky Gabriel and waved the magic card at the door pillar.

Ten minutes later Greg was standing beside the front rank of seats in a deserted ten-tier press gallery, looking out into the institute's Merlin mission control. It was the final humbling, he was a small bewildered child permitted a privileged glimpse of adults playing some marvellously intricate game, understanding nothing.

On the other side of the tinted glass, concentric semicircles of consoles faced big wall-mounted flatscreens showing pictures of alien worlds. Young shirtsleeved controllers sat behind them, studying cubes full of undulating graphics, muttering instructions into throat mikes. The central display was a map of the inner solar system, a snarl of coloured vector lines showing the disposition of the Merlin fleet.

The scene should've been generating a flood of urgency and excitement. Greg hadn't forgotten the emotion of the Sanger crew out at Listoel. Instead he received an impression of tension, his espersense confirming the mass anxiety.

Nervous knots of the controllers were forming at random amid the gear consoles, talking in low, concerned tones, breaking up to reform with different members, human Brownian motion.

"Bit of a flap on at the moment, I'm afraid," said Martin Wallace. He was an Institute security officer who'd been summoned in a hurry by the authority vested in Greg's card. A stocky Afro-Caribbean in his late thirties, uncomfortable with Greg and Gabriel's appearance and what it implied. "Trouble in orbit. One of the Merlins has packed up for no apparent reason. The flight management teams are shitting bricks," he stopped and flinched. "Sorry, ma'am."

Gabriel bit back a smile.