‘His name is Carl,’ she said. ‘Carl Woods.’
The registrar held his pen at the ready.
‘That’s a little … Teutonic, Mrs Woods.’
‘Spelt with a “c”,’ she said.
‘Hmm, well. If it’s good enough for the king’s bodyguard …’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘King Harold’s carls, don’t you know. Viking bodyguards to help him fight the Norse invasion. Then back down south to fight the Normans, of course. More Northmen, when it boils down to it.’
Stafford smiled. So did Mrs Wilson.
‘And the father?’
Thinking of Rosie’s fiancé, she said: ‘Jack Woods, deceased.’
‘Oh, I’m very sorry.’
There were a lot of widowed mothers these days, not to mention unmarried mothers assuming the guise of widowhood to avoid pariah status for themselves and their bastard children. In her case, Rupert could create a full fictitious biography, should it ever become necessary.
The registrar filled in the names, first and last, writing in a careful, clear script, making it final.
FIFTY-ONE
MU-SPACE, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
It did not begin as a hellflight, the pursuit, but that was how it ended: with Max-and-ship tearing along the most extreme of geodesics deep into golden void, while his nine pursuers pushed hard, one of them faltering at the edge of a crimson nebula, spinning away, all control lost. Max could not tell if recovery was possible. It was perhaps the first fatality.
I can’t lose them all.
The point was to keep the leaders with him, close enough so they believed his capture to be possible – so they would not give up – while ensuring he remained ahead of them and free.
Lightning spat past his hull.
Take me if you can.
Ship-and-Max screamed through a Koch cluster of black, infinitely branching stars, then twisted onto another geodesic, equally hard, the shift itself causing wrenching vibration, and another pursuer fell away.
Seven ships pursuing him.
Better.
He increased acceleration yet again.
Jed’s nerves were howling, a voice in his head screaming the question: why was he doing this? But Davey Golwyn was flying alongside even more recklessly, and the whole thing had become a challenge Jed could not set aside. Mulling things over was not an option: a lapse in concentration would mean losing the fugitive’s trace. It was a binary choice: follow or give up.
Another ship dropped out.
Six of us left.
If they caught Gould soon, it would be enough.
A discontinuity plane threw off all of their trajectories, a message flaring among the pursuers—
**I’m sorry**
—all of them suffering as they were reduced to five, their sanity as at risk as their hulls, with no time to wonder how an older Pilot could stay ahead of them, swinging through a sequence of appalling shifts and breaks, the most chaotic of hellflights—
**Transition, everybody!**
—as Davey Golwyn’s message saved them, hauling through a tight geodesic after Gould, straight into the exiting transition, all of them expecting black space sprinkled with stars because that was the usual realspace reality, and they had been too busy to figure out where Gould’s insane trajectory had led: realspace, but not as they were used to.
All five Pilots were stunned at the blazing light of a billion suns surrounding them, dangerous in its massive magnificence, impressive and immense.
The heart of the galaxy, or near enough.
Close to the core.
Gould’s ship was behind them: some last-second shift placing them at a disadvantage, but not much. The rearmost three vessels flipped around, conjoining their communications, one of the Pilots forming the words that blasted along the high-intensity signal.
**SURRENDER OR WE OPEN—**
But something moved across the shining light of all those stars. Jed saw it, but once again it was Davey Golwyn who reacted fastest, understanding the situation.
**If you want to live, break off!**
He threw his vessel into a hard, curving trajectory; and Jed did likewise, noting that Gould was doing the same: his dark, white-webbed vessel powering in a new direction at about .9c, an immense speed in realspace.
Then a tightbeam message sounded in Jed’s ears.
**This is Max Gould. I am not the enemy. Follow me, you two.**
Jed tried to work out why Gould had said two, not five; but the mirage-like twisting of starlight intensified, and Jed-and-ship threw themselves aside then hurtled along a new path, following Gould, powered by fear because three of their number were doomed.
The trio of ships blew up.
Drifting in the braided rings of a gas giant, Jed remained silent, emitting no broadcasts. Passive visual observation showed Davey’s vessel likewise hiding. Somewhere nearby, Max Gould’s ship also floated, but out of sight.
Waiting for the enemy, whatever it was, to pass.
Max had three more deaths on his hands: not just innocents, but arguably heroes, trying to apprehend someone they thought was a criminal. Perhaps it was four deaths or more, for at least one of the pursuers in mu-space had broken off the chase during dangerous manoeuvres.
I’ll get you home.
Was that her thought or his? The ship surrounding him was infinitely comforting.
I know you will.
Perhaps they were each making the same promise to the other. Then it was time to tightbeam a signal to the two survivors.
**Follow me now. Minimal acceleration, passive sensors only.**
They were smart, given that they were still here, but he made his instructions explicit all the same. Both Pilots blipped back acknowledgements.
**And now.**
Slowly, slowly, he drifted up from the concealing planetary ring.
From this place of blazing starlight, one direction shone even more brightly, with radiation from the core itself … and there, pointing radially into shining space, the long narrow-looking line of a galactic jet, blasting its away outwards. And hanging between the jet and the three mu-space vessels, a vast space station of what looked like human construction, around which a flotilla of strange ships floated.
Several of the ships turned around.
**We’ve been spotted.**
That was Gould.
All three Pilots threw their vessels into arcing escape trajectories; then Davey Golwyn changed direction again, and lightning played across his ship’s hull as all his weapon systems powered up.
**Get the hell away!**
Whether the yell was meant for the enemy or his fellow Pilots, neither Jed nor Max would ever work out. All they could focus on was the need to fly fast and smart, away from the danger behind them.
But they saw the explosion that killed Davey even as they made their transition into mu-space.
FIFTY-TWO
EARTH, 1943 AD
The war had disrupted the university’s teaching, but Oxford retained its traditions and procedures. A new year meant the start of Hilary Term, and it was in the fifth week that Gavriela gave her first physics lecture. It was a one-off, and followed from her debriefing with the local atomic bomb developers, sharing what little she had learned in Los Alamos. She had a strong sense that the English programme lagged behind the American effort; by how far, she could not tell.
At tea following that debriefing, discussions of atomic structure and strategies for producing chain reactions naturally gravitated to college politics – though the programme was removed from academia, and its personnel included graduates of the redbrick universities – and then to general matters. A large, walrus-moustached man called Braithwaite delivered his opinion that Oxford would remain free of devastation, not because Hitler wanted to hold back from bombing the venerable sandstone architecture, but because the Luftwaffe’s aeroplanes and Rommel’s tanks were built by German women rather than their menfolk.