‘Freighter vessel Antius, confirm you are carrying the remembrancer Mersadie Oliton. I repeat, confirm you are carrying the remembrancer Mersadie Oliton.’

Faces turned towards her. The frame of the ship was still humming with the power that pushed it through the debris cloud towards the waiting guns of the Jovian defences.

Mersadie was still, frozen in place. Her limbs were numb.

‘Reply…’ she said at last.

‘Vox-channel open,’ stuttered Chi-32-Beta. The speakers buzzed again.

Mersadie swallowed.

‘This is…’ she began, and then the words stopped on her tongue. After all this time…

‘I am here,’ she said at last. ‘This is Mersadie Oliton.’

‘Cut your engines,’ said the voice that had spoken before. ‘We will bring you in.’

Mersadie closed her eyes for a second and nodded. Inside her head, she thought she could see the image of Keeler smiling at her.

‘Thank you…’ she said. ‘Thank you, old friend.’

The vox clicked, as though the speaker on the other end had paused for a second before speaking again.

‘You are safe now,’ said the voice of Garviel Loken.

Comet shrine, Inner System Gulf

The ghosts of Unification led Ahriman through the places where they had died. The transitions from one memory to another were abrupt, as sharp as the slice of a final second from a thread of life.

He walked a maze of ice beneath the Antarctic domes, watching a woman fire her last bullets into an oncoming wall of chimeric flesh and fur… He was striding in an exo-rig across the burning seas of Hattusa-B… He was looking down the side of the Truscan Hive. Fires burned at the mountain’s foot and wound up its sides, shining bright in the shadow cast by its bulk. The wind was strong and held the scent of the inferno that had flooded the mountain’s lower levels. It was not a mountain, of course. It was a city. Down at its root, far beneath the level of the land, were structures made so far back in the past that their makers had known Terra when it was green and blue and still dreamed of serenity under the gaze of its sun. The cities that had been its seeds had names that resonated in the consciousness even though their histories were forgotten: Azinc, Opolis, Riance. Now its fate would be to be torn apart and have its bones folded into a structure that would be called a palace, but was larger than the empires of mankind’s youth.

‘You died here,’ said Ahriman, ‘in the taking of the Truscan hive…’

Beside him, the mute image of a bond-warrior in the Balgran tek-tribes looked at him. The man was covered with the blood of the wounds that had killed him. He nodded to Ahriman.

‘I am sorry,’ said Ahriman. ‘I cannot remain, but I will remember.’ The bloodied man nodded again, then turned away.