Addis Ababa.

1965. Sene. (Gregorian: 1973. June.)

Daniel Birhane’s day was not going according to plan. Days spent tracking the British detectives’ progress across Europe and Africa, a careful transmission through to Max-Earth so that Just Enough could handle the meet-and-greet and now the quiet approach had been shot to pieces - quite literally - right in the middle of a very public street. He was lucky to have picked up the call and therefore be the first on the scene - after the uniformed officers - otherwise it could have fallen to anyone, and trust was in short supply.

The scene across the street from the portal station had been a mess. A half-disintegrated AI host, Just Enough’s shard long since gone offline, the shooter tied up and the two British cops trying to explain their presence to the beat officers without actually explaining anything. Throw in a crowd of onlookers running the spectrum from panic attack to dancing excitement and it was the diametric opposite of subtle. Plausible deniability was no longer an option.

Everything had been going so smoothly until the Brits got involved. That was the problem with empire-thinking - they were still chasing expectations of a reality that had ceased to exist two hundreds years prior, with ambitions based on the machine gun and steam engine. Victory through overwhelming colonial omnipresence. To be fair to them, by observing what had happened in the Max-Earth timeline they’d already managed to extend the British Empire by several decades and expand it to a scale it had never achieved in the neighbouring dimension.

It was still rooted in 18th century assumptions of society and politics and power, though, which one day would prove to be their undoing. Birhane wasn’t a historian but he’d read enough meta-historical books written on both sides of the portal divide to see the signs. Ethiopia, and Africa, and the rest of the free world, was taking a different path. Their aspirations weren’t limited by what might have happened centuries ago, but by the possibilities inherent in Max-Earth cooperation. They could reach that utopian human endgame without all the pain the war and famine and ecological collapse along the way.

Unless the Brits got in the way.

Everyone had been bundled into police vans and escorted back to the precinct, with the attacker confined to one interview room and the British detectives to another.

Birhane sat across the table from the detectives. He sighed and laced his fingers together. “You have made a really terrible mess,” he said.

The woman, Nisha Chakraborty, threw her arms up in the air. “Us? We were the ones shot at in the street!”

“Do you know anything about the man?” Zoltan Kaminski had a nervous twitch, his fingers reaching towards his face. A smoker, then, confined to a no-smoking interview room.

“We’re running his prints at the moment,” Birhane said. He pointed up at the small camera in the corner of the room. “Meanwhile, our recording tech is unfortunately experiencing some momentary problems.” He moved his jaw left to right, grinding his teeth. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet the both of you in the first place. I asked Justin because it seemed like the quieter approach. That doesn’t appear to have been the case.”

Kaminski shrugged. “Don’t worry, if you’d been there then at least one of us would now be dead. Justin gets to jump into another host body, right?”

“Yes and no,” Birhane said, tipping his hand one way then the other. “That shard will have gone permanently offline, along with anything stored in its memory. Just Enough will, as you say, be fine, but the memories of that particular shard will not be able to upload.”

“So you’re saying he won’t remember anything?” Chakraborty frowned and looked sideways at her partner. “Well. Shit.”

Kaminski looked up at the camera. “We can talk securely?”

“For a minute or two, yes.”

“We came to see you because we needed to track down some shipments that came through here. DI Bakker vouched for you.”

“I’m honoured. Bakker is a good man, I remember him well from when I studied in Britain.”

“Justin found something in the portal station records. We think they’ve been transporting parts to build a megaship.”

Birhane exhaled slowly. “That doesn’t sound like a good thing. It also sounds like they have more resources than we thought. Whoever ‘they’ are. OK, stick to the story that you were both here to observe how we do things here, exchange of ideas, fact-finding, that sort of thing. That you have no idea who attacked you or why.” He stood and gestured to the door. “Feel free to grab a coffee and wait for me.”

*

Bruglia.

3201. Verdant.

There was a buzzy tension in Lola’s chest, which reminded her of the first day on the SDC job. That strange mix of excitement and nausea, like the wait at the top of a roller-coaster.

“This is it, Styles,” Clarke said, his smile not quite disguising his concern. “You sure about this?”

She nodded, as much to convince herself as him. “Yep, all good. Should be a quieter time once you’ve got Goldspeth out of here.”

The portal station had that peculiar blend of cultures in its architecture and technology, making it feel very much like a bridge between worlds. There was a squad of Met officers waiting to escort Goldspeth and Clarke back through the portal, the handover from the Bruglia guards having been completed.

“Alright, then,” Clarke said, clearly not entirely happy with the situation. “Don’t get into trouble.”

“Me? I’m just pleased I don’t have to go through the portal again. Not yet, anyway.”

He growled. “See you in a couple of days.”

She watched as Clarke, Goldspeth and the officers passed into the black void of the portal, leaving her alone in a foreign dimension. Well, not exactly alone. Lola turned and smiled at Princess Daryla.

“Ready to go?” the princess asked.

Lola nodded. “On to the next thing.”

They walked back through the portal station, Daryla’s guards now keeping a discreet distance and clearly less concerned about protecting her than they had been about Goldpseth.

“I’m so pleased you were able to stay a little longer,” Daryla said. “I suggest we return to the palace, as it’s been a long day. In the morning you can visit your friend at the hospital, and then perhaps I can introduce you to some interesting people.”

“Sounds good,” Lola said. She wanted desperately to ask a million questions, starting with the incident in the market, but held her tongue. Irritating her host before they’d even left the portal station would be classic Lola. Her enthusiasm sometimes overwhelmed her professionalism. Keep it in check, Lola, at least until the next day.

She was on Palinor!

A shiver went through her, the thrill of being there without a chaperone. Clarke would deny it, of course, but he clearly felt the need to protect her, even though she’d repeatedly demonstrated her capability. It wasn’t out of disrespect or underestimating her, though - not like Frank Holland. With Yannick it was more for his own sake than hers. He needed someone to latch onto, so that he didn’t need to think about himself. At the start, when she’d first been partnered with him, he’d talked about Callihan a lot. That had gradually gone away, which at first made her optimistically think that he was coming to terms with what had happened. Now she wasn’t so sure: the more she got to understand the nuances of Yannick Clarke, the more worried she became. Also that he was now well within retirement age, but showed no sign of going. It would be the one year anniversary of Callihan’s death in a week, just after she returned back through the portal. Clarke hadn’t talked about it, but she knew it would be playing in his head.

“My father is back from his travelling,” Daryla said, interrupting her thoughts. “I’ve brought in some of the best chefs from Bruglia for tonight.” Her smile was wide, beaming, genuine. “It should prove to be a memorable evening.”

*

Detective Birhane stood in the darkened observation room, looking through the one-way glass at the suspect. He was refusing to speak, refusing even the presence of a lawyer. There was no denying what had happened, but it also seemed that they wouldn’t be getting anything useful out of the man.

It wasn’t the man’s silence that bothered Birhane, as frustrating as it was. More concerning was the smug lack of concern, his face betraying not even a flicker of worry about his predicament. Attempted murder on the streets of the capital was not a trivial matter. Destruction of a Max-Earth AI host had been regarded in law for over two decades as adjacent to murder. The man wasn’t going anywhere, yet had the relaxed posture of someone assured that this was nothing more than a minor setback. An irritation.

Even with the support of the British detectives, even with the intellect of an AI megaship on his side, there was still too much that they didn’t know. Forces were moving against them, he could feel it, but to what end?