“He’s disabled the reactor safeties,” Mercian reported. “What’s going on? Why’s he in the engine core at all?” Alarm but not outright panic, which was a good finger in the air for the mood of the crew all around.

He is in the engine core because his death will be instant and total and therefore probably painless, Kern surmised. She was already moving, to the surprise of the others. She was heading up, climbing into the access shaft that led to the slender central pylon of the station, heading away from the outer floor that remained “down” only so long as she was close to it; climbing up out of that spurious gravity well towards the long needle they all revolved around. There was a flurry of increasingly concerned messages. Voices called out at her heels. Some of them would follow her, she knew.

Sering was continuing blithely: “This is not even the beginning, Doctor Kern.” His tone was relentlessly deferential even in rebellion. “Back home it will have already started. Back home it is probably already over. In another few years, maybe, you’ll hear that Earth and our future have been taken back for the humans. No uplifted monkeys, Doctor Kern. No godlike computers. No freakshows of the human form. We’ll have the universe to ourselves, as we were intended to—as was always our destiny. On all the colonies, in the solar system and out, our agents will have made their move. We will have taken power—with the consent of the majority, you understand, Doctor Kern.”

And she was lighter and lighter, hauling herself towards an “up” that was becoming an “in.” She knew she should be cursing Sering, but what was the point if he would never hear her?

It was not such a long way to the weightlessness of the needle’s hollow interior. She had her choice then: either towards the engine core, where Sering had no doubt taken steps to ensure that he would not be disturbed; or away. Away, in a very final sense.

She could override anything Sering had done. She had full confidence in the superiority of her abilities. It would take time, though. If she cast herself that way down the needle, towards Sering and his traps and locked barriers, then time would be something she would not have the benefit of.

“And if the powers-that-be refuse us, Doctor Kern,” that hateful voice continued in her ear, “then we will fight. If we must wrest mankind’s destiny back by force, then we shall.”