“What? What’s going on?” He could distantly hear Rove’s querulous demands, but his boss was no longer a priority. Even when a thin hand shook him by the shoulder and Rove was shouting in his ear, all he could do was stare up at the clear night sky.

“Lucas, damn you!” Rove snapped, and slapped him across the face. Lucas barely felt it.

Above them, the stars were going out, darkness spreading across the cosmos.

The pace of extinction sped up, until he realized that it wasn’t just—just!—the stars that were being snuffed out. A whirling tide of chaos and nothingness was racing towards them, unravelling everything in its path. It hadn’t worked, and all that sacrifice had been pissed down the drain for nothing. This insane Little England was as doomed as everything else in the universe. As Rove rained threats and exhortations upon him, it all came down and there was nothing more.

17/2.

I

“So what good is she?”

“Every manner of good, Lucas.” Rove’s look had an iota too much condescension in it, and Lucas felt his blood pressure notch up another few points. “Did you never wonder how I ran rings around the rats, for all their lauded technological superiority? Charen was walking in and out of their data systems on the back of the ice-world machine. If you can access a system from elsewhere on the dimensional axis, you can circumvent any kind of security and just run rampant.” There was more, because Rove was tired, so the inner man could claw its way out more readily. And what the inner Rove really wanted was for the universe to appreciate how clever he was. So there was a Russian-sounding woman who was doing all the work, and Rove was stringing her along, same old same old. The thought made Lucas feel that he and this Volkovska bint probably had a fair amount in common. He stood there, surly, as Rove waxed smug about the plans he’d made, the resources he’d stockpiled, the people he had in readiness. All very convincing, on first blush, but Lucas reckoned that if he prodded any part of it too hard the whole thing would fall apart. Like the universe, apparently.

“All in place, Lucas, all waiting,” Rove assured him blithely. “If only Khan and her menagerie can do their damn job.” The man let out a long breath, eyes closed. For a moment he looked twenty years older, the real Daniel Rove, shorn of the youthful twinkle he saved for the cameras. “Bugs and monkeys and vermin and queers,” he said softly. “What sort of a way is that to run a universe? I’ll be glad when we’re rid of them.”