He raised his carbine to Smith’s forehead and pulled the trigger. Smith was slammed back again, the rear of his skull exploding outwards, hints of metal glinting inside. He hit one of the double doors again and bounced away, slowly tilting forward like some kind of ancient monolith. Hannah just stared at the blood beading the air, at a piece of scalp gyrating away from him, then, abruptly and violently, she threw up.

‘This feels somehow disappointing,’ remarked Saul, still staring at Smith.

‘The EM shield?’ Hannah finally managed.

‘With the EM field up, he could not get into my head and I could not get into his,’ said Saul. ‘But most important he was blind, and that’s what enabled me to sneak in here.’

Both dried and fresh blood covered his VC suit, she noticed, the fresh blood looking the same colour as his eyes. A fuzz of white hair now covered his scalp, concealing most of the scars, but to Hannah as he turned to face her, he just didn’t look human.

‘How did you get in here, then?’ she managed.

‘I just walked in along with some of Langstrom’s men,’ Saul shrugged. ‘I knew Smith would come here directly to shut down the EM shield.’

‘What now?’

He raised his head slightly as if listening to something. ‘That’s the shield down again. Now I’m running code crackers on everything he controlled.’ A humourless smile. ‘Since I’m no longer fighting him or need to perpetually look to my defences, I can use station computing . . . there, I have the readerguns. The robots next.’

‘But again, what now?’

He looked momentarily pensive. ‘Presently I have this station set on a spiral course outwards from Earth. At the end of that course, it will swing itself around the Moon. By then, all necessary decisions will have been made.’

‘Decisions?’

‘Yes, Hannah, decisions.’

Saul revelled in the new feeling of freedom and safety as he cracked the last of Smith’s codes, whereupon the last of the functioning readerguns and station robots came under his control. Human feeling like this he now allowed himself to indulge in, since it seemed to give him a reason to continue existing – after all, what was the use of victory if it could not be enjoyed? However, despite this sudden extension of his power, and with areas he had previously been almost blind to now opening up to him, he remained merely a fragile human being in a space station filled with those who, given the chance, would kill him.

‘So that’s it. He’s gone.’ Hannah turned to gaze back at Smith, rather than query Saul’s comment about ‘decisions’.

Saul reached out and grabbed the front of Smith’s VC suit, kicked the dead man’s feet away from him to detach his soles from the floor, and lifted him higher.