Free Ragnarok 03 - Resonance by John Meaney

envious.’
    Gavriela gave a sad laugh.
    This was a lot like leaving home.
    On her first day at Imperial, walking beneath an open window of the Royal College of Music, she heard a breath-catching rendition of a Mozart piece for string quartet. Across the road reared the dome of the Royal Albert Hall, where perhaps the students would play one day, if they hadn’t already. As for her, this was like the first day of term, a new beginning – like Carl off to school in his cap and gaberdine raincoat, satchel and plimsole bag slung from one shoulder – except that she had an old friend waiting for her in the Huxley building reception: Lucas, his once-curly hair now receded and merely wavy, controlled by hair-tonic. She could smell the Silvikrin.
    â€˜Gabrielle.’ It was a good start, remembering not to call her Gavriela. ‘I’ll show you to your office.’
    They shook hands while the porter watched, though Gavriela would rather have hugged him.
    â€˜How’s your wife, er—?’
    â€˜Enjoying Nebraska,’ he said. ‘Come on, we’ll drop off your coat and you can meet everyone.’
    Upstairs, she found that her room was pokey, featuring a scarred desk maybe half the size of the one she had used in Eastcote, with cardboard folded beneath one leg for stability.
    â€˜It’s wonderful,’ she said.
    A stack of loose-leaf pages bore columns of figures with headings like Declination, Azimuth and Peak, along with pencil-drawn graphs.
    â€˜Readings from the old instrumentation,’ said Lucas. ‘You’ll have plenty of your own soon enough.’
    â€˜I’m sure.’
    â€˜Most of us really aren’t that good at stats.’ Lucas meant statistical analysis ‘Good luck on plucking meaning out of that lot, but the rest of us can’t.’
    He was not really talking about the data; it was more an oblique acknowledgment of her time spent on work she could never discuss, for most of the eight years since the war, a gap she would have to fill with fiction as far as her other colleagues were concerned.
    The strange thing was, as she fell asleep that night, she half-dreamed of deciphering a pattern in just such data, though not now, not yet: something do with meson detection and an equilateral triangle that could not be explained, yet neither could it be ignored. An insight she would keep to herself . . . A comforting thought, as she drifted further into sleep.
    Secrecy kept her safe.

ELEVEN
    LUNA, 503970 AD
    Crystalline and serene, Roger and Gavriela held hands as they stared up at the crimson-banded disc of Earth. To him it was the species’ birthplace, an ancestral home, but she had been born and lived her organic life there, half a million years ago.
    â€”What do you think is going to happen, Roger?
    â€”I’ve long given up trying to read Kenna’s mind .
    Kenna had told them, pleased that they were here at this time together, that something interesting was about to occur, and they might like to view it from one of the many balconies. And so they had come outside, watching from mid-way up the titanic, complex palace that their headquarters had become over hundreds of millennia. In the beginning, electro-magnetic distortion fields had hidden the place, but for a long time, according to Kenna, there had been no need to hide.
    No explanation embellished that item of information, and Roger and Gavriela knew better than to ask, because there were severe limits on such knowledge as could be taken into the past to their original minds, despite such thoughts being buried beneath layers of amnesia and misdirection, unavailable to their long-dead conscious selves.
    They both remembered what Kenna had told Roger a century earlier.
    â€”This is not the first Ragnarok Council .
    â€”If we’re the second, what happened to the others?
    â€”They perished in paradox . I will not allow you to fall that way .
    Silver discs were growing on the