London

1973. January.

The concourse of the civilian floor of the portal station was about as different to the industrial shipping port below as Clarke could imagine. Gone was the cavernous space filled with floor-to-ceiling containers and massive cranes and cargo loaders, replaced instead by a gleaming, translucent-white space covered by a gently arching curve of glass, held up by a geometric pattern of steel.

At one end was the portal to Palinor, the flags of Bruglia flying proudly to either side. The area immediately around the portal was designed to look and feel like what was naturally on the other side: red-orange rocks, non-native plants that were twice the size of anything normally found in England, a travel bar serving Palinese cuisine and spirits. Have enough disposable income and you could enjoy an enchanted drink brought through the portal that very morning. That wasn’t where Clarke and Chakraborty were headed.

Instead, they’d been taken down the other corridor, which steered in the opposite direction towards the Max-Earth portal. In the centre of the concourse was a rapid customs processing facility, enabling travellers to go from one portal to the next without having to exit into London proper. It was a slick operation, though through-traffic was light compared to a train or airship station; portal transit was expensive and a luxury of the super-rich, the super-powerful or the well-connected.

The Max-Earth end of the concourse was similarly dressed to replicate what was on the other side of the portal. The smooth white surfaces segued into a mixture of complex architectural statements, built with materials Clarke couldn’t name and seeming to serve both functional and artistic intent. There was a restaurant, a small cinema, a pod showcasing some of the Max-Earth tech which had been converted to run locally. Only the low-power devices.

“Ever feel like they’re just rubbing our noses in it?” Chakraborty said quietly. She still looked tired, but the nervous tics that had manifested during Kaminski’s disappearance had abated. She’d reminded Clarke of how he’d felt after Callihan had died. At least this time Kaminski was alive. He was coming back to them. A second chance.

Clarke harrumphed. “They like to wave their shiny things at us, but not let us actually have any of them.”

“I heard Addis has got a whole network of this stuff. They can talk to each other from any distance, like on a telephone, but without being wired in, and without needing a radio car.”

“Yeah, well,” Clarke said, grimacing, “we’ll be the ones laughing when it fries their brains or gives them all cancer.”

Chakraborty looked askance at him, as if unsure whether he was joking or not. Clarke decided to let her keep wondering. “You know much about what to expect on the other side?”

“Nope. Haven’t studied Max-Earth since school. It’s not like we get a huge amount of criminal activity from that side, anyway. It’s all Palinor trouble these days.”

“Hmm, you say that. Maybe Max-Earthers are just more clever at hiding what they’re up to.”

They reached the entry queue, separated from those exiting the portal by a metal barricade. Clarke stepped forward onto a gently rolling conveyor belt. There was a white mark on it indicating where he should stand; Chakraborty stood on another a metre away.

She shuffled about on the marker. He couldn’t tell if she was nervous or excited. “I hear they do it this way because everyone reacts differently to portal transit,” she said. “For most it’s like going through a doorway. Other people get instant nausea and throw up everywhere. Some people just freak the fuck out and can’t handle the entire concept when they’re faced with it.”

“Which one you planning on doing?”

“Hoping not to shit myself.”

Clarke suppressed a burst of laughter. He could never quite get a handle on Chakraborty. She was a great detective, that he knew. But it always felt like her personality was shifting about under the surface, so that he never knew if he was talking to the real Nisha or a constructed persona. Most of the time it didn’t matter, as it was Kaminski’s job to handle her. But this time it was just him and Chakraborty, on a mission to retrieve Kaminski from whatever he’d got himself into. The AI, Justin, had requested them specifically: Clarke for the prior connection from their brief time aboard the Pluma, and Chakraborty due to her being Kaminski’s partner. Styles had been evidently disappointed. “At least you’re not going to Palinor,” she’d said, with a shrug and a smile.

Being invited to visit Max-Earth for the first time by a sentient computer wasn’t the oddest thing that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Even discovering that Kaminski was alive and on the other side of the portal was not the main event. The real shocker had been when Chakraborty had waved at him from across the room to join her in Bakker’s office. Clarke hadn’t taken the offered seat, not until after they’d filled him in on the off-the-books investigation Kaminski had been running. The one involving Callihan’s death, invalid search warrants and hints of something ugly running beneath the surface. It was alarming that he’d had no clue, not even a hint of it; it was frankly terrifying that Chakraborty and Bakker seemed almost as in the dark. It was just the three of them - four, once they got Kaminski back - up against…something.

Callihan had been onto it, but had been doing it alone. Had he not trusted Clarke? But, then, he hadn’t shared it with anyone. That he’d had his head in this, whatever it was, right up until the end, and had never asked for help. After his death, Clarke had felt that he’d failed the man; this was that same feeling, all over again. Perhaps if they carried on whatever Callihan had started they might be able to give his death - and his life - some meaning.

First, though, they had to get Kaminski, without triggering a diplomatic incident.

They were carried towards the portal. For all the dressing up around the concourse and the videos playing at the side of the travelator about how effortless and comfortable it would be, they had never been able to do anything about the huge black void that hovered in space, its top half visible on this floor, the curve of its uneven oval high above. The portal intersected with the floor, and Clarke knew that the oval continued below ground to the shipping yard below. The portal was a black that shouldn’t exist in real life, an absence of light so total that Clarke felt it would at any moment begin to suck in the room itself and everyone in it. There was something eternally horrific about its presence in London, and that there was a second one just like it half a mile behind him. In the few seconds he had left on his home planet, Clarke had the sudden sensation that something awful was coming, that the portals were a herald of a terror so vast it would consume them all—

*

—and then they were through, the wall of black vanishing in an instant, on the other side of the portal and staring at a concourse not dissimilar to the one back home. He was on Max-Earth. Not just a different planet, but another dimension entirely. His job meant that he was always acutely aware of the neighbouring worlds, but until that moment he had never truly grasped what it meant, beyond some unusual arrests and cases.

He was in a new universe. And, glancing to the side, he saw that they’d perfectly recreated the stereotype of a London pub, complete with a swinging sign on a false brick façade, tables and benches out the front and a lightly cobbled path. It was as if a part of his London had leaked through the portal. Somehow it made everything worse.

There was no nausea. All he felt was a bitter anger, simmering away in his gut. A sense that whatever had happened two centuries ago had ruined everything.