Alison could not have pointed to any one feature that, seen in isolation, would have marked the woman as something other. Each element of her face was within tolerance for human, but perhaps there were too many differences in aggregate not to notice if you passed her in the street. Or maybe essential British reserve would have kicked in; you don’t stare at a stranger, after all, no matter how odd they look. This Plug-ugly had wild, bushy eyebrows and long red hair streaked with dirty grey. She looked fifty, perhaps. Her face sagged from her huge brow down to an almost absent chin, her eyes bird-bright and quick.

“Julian, Alison.” Hind was perhaps overdoing the aura of icy calmness. “This is Musmursumbrer. Or something like that. She’s come to us because her people are trying to retrieve Kay Amal Khan from…where she’s gone. They are offering to work with us to accomplish this.” And nothing was said about who would end up with Khan after all that, of course. Diplomacy, as the saying went, was the art of shaking someone’s hand with your right until your left found the knife.

There was a proper internal briefing later. They weren’t quite getting into bed with the Plug-uglies, after all. However, even if the bid to spring Khan failed, this was an invaluable intelligence-gathering exercise. They were still playing catch-up in a game they had only just realized existed. Hind was plainly willing to take all manner of off-the-books liberties right now.

The Plug-ugly had done her best to explain, but between her accent, her tendency to mumble and the fact that she was talking extremely high-level physics, Alison thought she’d lost almost all of her audience very quickly. Alison herself had…

Not understood, exactly. Probably you’d have had to be on Dr. Khan’s level for that. But she’d found archives opening before her, within her. When she’d repeated some mystifying phrase of the Plug-ugly, something had unfolded in her mind’s eye. Images and models had danced there like the cold fire of deep-water fish. She had been skating over the abyss, constantly in danger of being drowned by data, but a tenuous comprehension had glittered into being in her mind.