“To wake us up?” Khan sounded halfway closer to sober than she had a moment ago. “The whole thing, from the Stone Age or whenever, just in case we ended up with some kind of science that could help? You’ve heard Auruthmer on what the Neanderthals found out there, right? All those worlds, and on most of ’em they’re not exactly working up the general theory of relativity any time soon. There’s only a handful of us that are even close to that, and we humans are the junior partners.”

She looked down at her hands, and the moonlight shone across her visor. Tentatively, Lee and Mal sat down next to her.

“Only, we had a thought,” Lee tried.

“Oh, did you.” There was nothing in Kay’s voice that suggested she wanted to hear any thoughts. “I must have missed the bit—when Murther, Ertil, Cam and I were talking higher maths—where you had a contribution.”

Lee was already halfway to her feet with a “Sorry to bother you” on her lips. But Mal wasn’t having it.

“You said yourself, we’re the junior partners,” she snapped. “So what do you have to offer, Kay? Does human maths have somewhere to go that the Nissa haven’t been stomping all over since the Bronze Age, or whatever? No, it’s because you think differently to them. Same numbers, different ideas…and we had a different idea, and it’s nothing like what anyone’s been talking about. Probably it’s bollocks. But what the hell, right? I mean, we have just been very firmly told that nothing we’ve tried has worked, right?”

Kay stared at her, all manner of hostility to be read in the cant of her mask. But then she said, “You’re right. I am a fucking mean drunk, and I apologize. Sit, kids. Tell me what you’ve got. Literally cannot do any harm right now, you know?”

After ten minutes of mostly coherent explanation, Kay hauled them inside their host. They encountered Ertil first and started the ramble again, for his benefit. After that, it was time to call Murther. It was the middle of the night, but they made enough noise to ensure that nobody was sleeping. Kay had quite the audience by the time Murther clambered down into the avatar’s chamber.

“So we have a new plan,” Kay addressed them all grandly. “Maybe, possibly, a new plan. Everyone awake and ready?”

She visibly braced herself, looking at her audience. A mixture of sceptical, optimistic and hopeless faces looked back, their usual complement plus Murther.

“It’s been put to me by our two brave kiddos here,” Kay said, still sounding slightly drunk, “that the Ediacaran might be opening rifts between timelines deliberately. To get the gang together. No cracks means no meeting of minds. So either the Ediacaran is taking advantage of this symptom of collapse, or…it’s not a symptom, after all?”