He shifted to point his gun at Kay, and Lee saw his finger tighten on the trigger. Then Stig straightened up with a bestial roar. One meaty forearm knocked Rove’s gun arm aside as he squeezed his throat. Rove squeaked, sounding more animal than human. Then Stig’s broad fingers clenched. The resulting crack was almost as loud as the gunshot that followed.

Lee looked around frantically, in case Rove had posthumously killed Dr. Khan after all. Instead, the bullet had gone into Cam’s avatar, blasting away a chunk of its head. Fragments of disarticulated limbs trickled from the hole. Even as she watched, more legs were winding through the mass, weaving its cranium back into shape.

Stig dropped Rove’s limp body and sat down heavily. There was a lot of blood across his midriff, and Lee hoped that the small calibre of the gun and the dense Neanderthal musculature would preserve him. Auruthmer, Julian and Mal rushed over, peeling back his gory poncho to look at the damage. Lee sagged against the wall, awash with sheer panicky adrenaline—and Kay slumped down beside her, her face bleak.

Before she could say anything, Lee said, “Not your fault.”

“My idea,” Kay said hoarsely. “Fuck me, you don’t get this kind of heckling from the Royal Society.”

“Not your fault,” Lee repeated, and then they were both in Murther’s shadow, the Cousin prodding Kay with one foot.

“Time to do the hard sums, I guess,” she said, letting Murther help her up.

Postscript

I

“We are facing a period of unparalleled disruption,” Dr. Khan said gravely, staring at the camera. She had dressed up for the occasion, immaculate suit, hair neatly styled, every inch the serious scientist. There wasn’t a half-finished cigarette in sight. They’d even found a desk for her to sit at, positioned before shelves of leather-bound books. The memes of the academic at work, reinforcing this message to the world. “The word ‘catastrophe’ may not be out of place,” she went on. “Thankfully, all calculations show that we have a little time to prepare, perhaps a decade, perhaps less. Certainly no more. The timeline integration that I’ve described is inevitable. It is going to happen. The governments of the world can either prepare or ignore it and suffer the consequences. I’d hope that there is an obvious choice out of those two.”

She glanced to her left, where Ertil was sitting. The rat-creature’s double-thumbed hands were resting on the desk, and he glanced towards Khan and nodded periodically. Watching as Cam recorded her speech, Julian had felt the monster possessed the solemn poise of a newsreader. But watching it now, played back, the effect was far more of a glove puppet. It added a horribly inappropriate air of farce to Khan’s statement.