“Yes, you were going to swipe Dr. Khan from under our noses, no doubt.” Sabreur was standing, tensed for a fight as though he’d last three seconds against Stig. “And now you’re kidnapping employees of Her Majesty’s Gov—”

“Spiker,” the woman, Matchell, said, and he bit down on the words “Mr.…Stig?” she went on. “Where are we travelling to?”

“To the start of it all, the only way we can,” Stig said solemnly. “With our own scientists, and Dr. Khan, and others. Great minds, many minds. We are going to mend the universe, if it can be mended. Or we will watch it die, because someone should.”

Lee felt a tremble start up inside her, a sense of incalculable awe. Not that she’d given a thought to religion in the last ten years or more, but she was still thinking, We’re going to visit God…? “Where?” she managed, plucking at Stig’s ragged tramp’s sleeve. “Where does it start?”

He eyed her sternly, and she half expected a fierce sermon, an exhortation for poor, ignorant humans to mend their ways. Instead his gaze slid off her. He mumbled something, rolled his shoulders inwards and found something of enormous interest in the substance of the wall.

“What now?” Mal pressed him, and prodded him hard in the arm when he tried to ignore her. His expression, when he turned back, was easily readable as exasperation.

“I don’t know, don’t ask me. I don’t make these decisions. I don’t talk to these things. I’m just a…”

“Soldier?” Sabreur filled in acidly.

“No. Not a soldier.” Stig glowered at him. “I am like you, Julian Sabreur. A servant. I do what I am told, and I do what must be done. There are more clever people than I who understand, and some of them are dead. Others are elsewhere, and we must go where they are—because if it is just me then we are lost. I am not the wisdom of my people. I am just me and I don’t understand any of it.” By the end of that his voice was shaking, and Lee thought he was going to burst into tears.

“I’m sorry,” she offered: inadequate, she knew.

“We have worked hard, lost much, since we began this, since we discovered that everything was collapsing,” he ground out, staring fiercely at the wall. “We had used the gaps between worlds for our study and wonder. I liked that. That was a good time. And now we discover they are not a great discovery after all, but the symptom of a sickness that all the universe has. And we go to your people”—a single jab of his big, blunt finger at Sabreur—“and to the rodent-people, and you fight us, you kill us, you do all you can do to stop us saving you.”