"Hmm. If you must put it that way, no. But remember, in the endgame, we are all expendable."

"I'm so glad to hear it."

"As for you, would you like to make yourself useful?"

"How?"

"This little interruption has, as you reminded me, disrupted certain plans. But not, I hope, irretrievably. On your way to hook up with Alan's boys and girls, I'd like you to go and have a glass of wine with a friend of mine, and convey a proposition to him. It'll put me in his debt if he takes it, I'm afraid, but I think it's necessary. I'll email you the details."

"Who are you talking about?"

"Nikolai Panin."

(End of call log.)

I'M DREAMING.

I'm looking out across a wasteland of rolling ground, gray and crumbly as lunar regolith, beneath a starry sky. There's no vegetation, not even stunted cacti or lichen crawling across the rocks that dot the ground. In the distance I see a low wall, writhing across the landscape like a dead snake: it's as gray as the ground, too. The stars—

I can see at a glance that this is not Earth's sky.

A lurid band of orange and green swirls across half the void, bisecting it with a smoky knife a million times brighter than the Milky Way. The stars sprinkled across it are eye-stabbingly visible, several of them as bright and red as Mars. They cast a harsh and pale radiance across the sloping desert floor. This is not the skyscape of a planet quietly orbiting a star in the suburban spiral arms of a regular galaxy—I'm looking at the view from a world much closer to the active core of a galaxy or globular cluster. And it's an ugly, elderly galactic core, deep in the throes of senescence, a blaze of dust and gas spewing across the heavens from the dying exhalations of supernovae.

I try to turn my head, but my neck doesn't want to work. It's very strange—I can't feel my body. I don't seem to be breathing, or blinking, and I can't feel my heartbeat—but I'm not afraid. Maybe I'm dead?

In the distance, so far away that I can barely see it, low down and close to the horizon, the landscape takes a rectilinear turn. A shallow pyramid or volcanic mound as symmetrical as Mount Fuji reaches for the sky. I've got no way of telling how high it is, but instinct tells me it's vast, rising kilometers from the center of the flatlands. Something about it creeps me out, almost as much as the murdered sky. I've got a feeling about it, a sense of dreadful immanence. There's something inside the pyramid, something that has no right to exist in this or any other universe. I shouldn't be here, but the thing in the pyramid is even more out of its place and time. It's contained, that I know, but why it might need to be contained—